Every Penny Counts

The Chofetz Chaim’s care to keep the strictest standards in his dealings with money became legendary. Many of the stories told about him are said to have first-hand witnesses.

It is told that he had his son reprint hundreds of sections of the Mishnah Berurah in which pages had been misplaced by mistake. Once, shortly before Shabbos, he hurried through the Jewish quarter of Warsaw looking for printers who had gone home early, so that he could hand them their week’s wages. When a non-Jewish railway worker loaded parcels of his books on a train free of charge, he tore up enough postage stamps to make up what the government had lost. And on his first speaking tour for the sefer Chofetz Chaim, he took orders but not deposits, because he might not be able to deliver to everyone who paid in advance, and then he would be guilty of wrongly holding their money.