Giving to Every Jew

After the accident, one of the family spoke about how Rav Shimshon was always traveling, from one corner of the world to another. The children once asked, "Abba, where do you find the strength?" and he could not make sense of the question. For him it was simply a matter of doing what had to be done.

He had recently been in South Africa. A Jew who had left South Africa for Gibraltar called him, and from his tone it sounded as though he needed help. Rav Shimshon promised on the spot to come, and booked a flight. There is no direct route: a plane to Spain, then another to Gibraltar. All of it was for one distant Jew. People said that he gave thirty talks in a span of fourteen days, carrying the word of Hashem to every part of the world.

Behind the wheel he was always looking for someone to take along, and any destination was automatically on his way. On the very erev Pesach the family drove to the Ofakim shopping center. Rav Shimshon met an avreich there and said, "Call me when you are done. I am staying here anyway, and I will drive you home." The family finished its errands and he sat down to learn with the boys, when his mobile phone rang with the words, "Rav, my shopping is finished." He got up without a word and went to bring the man home.

Shortly before that, an avreich from the community was in the car with him and asked him for a devar Torah. Rav Shimshon said, "I believe that a Jew who does not give to another as freely as he would to his own son is missing something in his Jewishness."

The avreich knew that whatever Rav Pincus preached, he was already practicing. Still, he could not see how a person could live up to it, and he went to one of the Rav's near neighbors to ask whether the Rav truly cared for every Jew as for his own son. The neighbor said, "Already fifteen years ago he acted this way. He barely knew a certain avreich, but a conversation made him realize that the man was in trouble and needed two thousand four hundred dollars to get out of it. The Rav wrote him a check for that sum right there."

The neighbor only heard about it later and could not understand it, since Rav Pincus's own means at the time did not allow for such a gift. He put the question to him straight out, and Rav Pincus pushed back. "Would you not do the same for your own son? A Jew who gives another Jew less than he gives his son is missing something in his Jewishness."

His bond with Hakodosh Boruch Hu was concrete and simple. He used to speak about saying one hundred brochos daily, which keeps a person connected across the whole day. His family loved to watch how he clung to Hashem when he made a brochoh, and he would laugh and ask, "Are you checking whether I practice what I preach in my talks?"

There was no end to the stories. During all of Chol Hamoed, visitors kept arriving, each of them having known him in some other place and each with his own story. The family felt that they had lost not just their own parents but parents of the whole Klal Yisroel.