Rav Dovid HaLevi Segal

A Gift of Torah for a Sick Son

Rav Chaim of Volozhin, in his commentary to Pirkei Avos 1:1, Ruach Chaim, relates that a woman once came to the Taz crying and pleading. “Woe is me, Rebbe, my son is so weak he is at death's door.”

“Am I in Hashem's place?” the Taz asked.

She answered that she was calling out to the Torah that he learns and represents, for the Holy One and His holy Torah are one. The Taz said, “I will do this for you. I will give as a gift, for your sick son, the Torah that I am learning now together with my students. Perhaps in its merit he will recover and live, for the pasuk says that through it you shall live.” At that moment the boy's fever broke.

From this, Rav Chaim of Volozhin concludes, we see that one who learns Torah with the power of dveikus, attaching himself to Hashem, has the ability and merit to bring life to the dying.

Welcome, Said the Sick Girl

The Taz was known as a wonder worker. It is told that the daughter of a wealthy householder in Lemberg once fell ill, and the Taz was asked to visit and pray for her. He agreed. When he arrived and opened the door, the girl said, “Baruch Haba, welcome,” and at once turned her face to the wall.

The Taz asked why she turned away. She answered that the wicked cannot look at the face of the righteous, and that in Heaven he is called, “Our master and Rabbi, the author of the Turei Zahav.” He told her, “If so, I decree that you should be healed at once through the merit of my Torah study. Today I studied a hard and wondrous passage in the Tur and answered the difficulty in the true way of Torah.” And she was cured. This was recorded in the community ledger of Lemberg.

Kiddush and the Town of Prozhina

It is told that when the Taz served as Rav of Prozhina he was extremely poor. He could not afford to heat his small home in the cold winter nights, and he would learn Torah all night while the bitter cold seeped into his bones. Not far away was a tavern, and sometimes he went there for a drink to warm himself and keep learning. His salary was too small for him to pay in advance, so the tavern keeper wrote down what he owed on the wall. A man who saw the Rav's name there asked what it meant, and when he heard that the Rav bought spirits on credit, he was astonished that the Rav drank at all. One person told another, and soon all the local tongues were wagging with exaggerated tales of the Rav's drinking and debts. He was voted out of office and removed from the town with great dishonor on the wagon used for refuse.

Later, when the Taz was Rav of Ostroh and began to print his Turei Zahav, the price of wine rose because grapes were scarce in the region. The Taz ruled that whiskey and brandy may also be used for kiddush, but he wrote a condition that in Prozhina this was not so, since they all dislike spirits. He wrote this in complete sincerity, because he truly believed he had been removed for drinking something the townspeople considered unbecoming for their Rav, and that spirits must taste poor to them.

When the people of Prozhina heard of the ruling, they called an urgent meeting, since it hurt them financially. They sent a distinguished delegation to Ostroh to ask the Taz's forgiveness. His home was above the beis medrash, and when heavy footsteps sounded on the stairs, the household assumed the visitors were the householders of Prozhina, who wore heavy boots.

The delegation asked forgiveness in the name of the whole town, as law and custom require. The Taz asked them to sit and had the Rebbetzin serve them cake. When he noticed they had not touched it, he asked why. The delegation saw its opening. “How can the Rav set cake before us with nothing to drink? Everyone knows the main refreshment is the drink, and the cake is only a delicacy to flavor the spirits.” They explained that this was why they had come. The Rav had written that one may make kiddush over spirits except in their town, because they dislike it, but that was not true. They liked it very much. They simply did not want their Rav to be a drinker. They asked him to change his ruling, and the Taz had the line erased from his Turei Zahav.

Can I Borrow the Sefer for One Night

Rav Dovid HaLevi Segal was poor. His salary as Rav left him nothing beyond bare necessities. He never complained of his lot, and the only thing that caused him real pain was that he could not buy new seforim to learn from.

One day a seforim salesman came to town with a wagon of new seforim, and as was the custom he laid them out on tables in the beis medrash so that people could look through them before buying. Rav Dovid was delighted. He opened them one after another, but he already knew them all. The salesman noticed that the Rav was searching for something and offered to show him a new volume of great importance that he had not yet placed on the table because of its high price.

“What is its name?” asked Rav Dovid. It was the Sefer HaAgudah, the salesman said, whose author, Rav Alexander Zuslin Katz, had sanctified Hashem's name and died as a martyr long ago. Until then the sefer had existed only in manuscript, and it had just been printed. Rav Dovid had heard of it but never seen it. He studied the volume and saw that it was full of fresh and original Torah thoughts. He asked the price, and when he heard it, nearly as much as his entire monthly salary, he set the sefer down in defeat. The salesman offered a large discount, but it was still more than the Rav could pay.

Then Rav Dovid learned that the salesman planned to spend the night in town, and he had an idea. “Would you let me borrow this sefer just for tonight, and tomorrow I will return it?” The salesman gladly agreed.

Rav Dovid took the Sefer HaAgudah home, shut himself in his room, and learned it all night without a break, finishing the whole sefer by dawn. He reviewed its main points and returned to the beis medrash to give it back. “I know you rely on selling your seforim for your livelihood,” he told the salesman, “and I do not want to have benefited from your sefer for free. Please let me pay you a small fee for having read it.”

The salesman was so moved that he wanted to give the Taz the sefer as a gift, but the Taz refused. He never saw the Sefer HaAgudah again in his life. Yet he quotes it several times in his commentary, all from memory, from that one night.

The Hidden Taz of Lvov

It is told that the Taz, who had been Rav and Rosh Yeshiva in the large city of Posen, decided after a few years that he was not suited for the rabbinate. He went to Lvov, in the east of Poland, where no one would know him, so that he could learn in peace. After a few weeks one of his former talmidim, who happened to live there, recognized him in shul and called him Rabbeinu. The Taz made him swear to keep his identity secret.

After a few months the Taz needed work to support his family and took a job at a slaughterhouse, skinning and cutting meat. When shailos came up there he was asked whether he knew the din, and he ruled on a few questions. News of this reached the Rav of the town, who was very upset. He called the Taz in and put him in cherem for ruling on shailos instead of sending them to the Rav of Lvov. After that the Taz could no longer learn in the shul but had to stay in the booth where the guard sat.

One day a young girl brought a question about a chicken to the Rav, and he ruled that it was not kosher. She ran out crying. The Taz saw her from his booth and asked why she was crying. “My mother is a widow,” she said, “and this means we will have no chicken for Shabbos.” The Taz looked at the chicken and said it was kosher. “Go and tell the Rav to look in Yoreh Deah, siman 18, in the Taz, in footnote 8, and he will see that the chicken is kosher.”

The girl went back in and told the Rav. He looked up the halacha, realized that he had erred and asked who had told her. “The man sitting in the booth outside,” she said. The Rav went outside and asked him how he knew this Taz. “Because I am the Taz,” came the answer.

The Rav at once gathered the whole town in the shul, announced that he was stepping down and handed the leadership to the Taz, who accepted. The talmid, who had known the secret all along, asked his Rebbe why he had revealed himself and why he accepted the position. The Taz answered that he had truly wanted to stay hidden, but when he saw the tears and felt the pain of the orphan, all his personal plans no longer mattered. He had to prevent such anguish for that family and for any poor family in the future.

A Merit for a Woman in Labor

Rav Yehoshua of Belz, whose yahrzeit is on the 23rd of Shevat, used to relate a story he had heard from his father, the Sar Shalom, about the Taz. A woman in very difficult labor once came crying to the Taz to save her life and her child's.

“What can I do to save you?” the Taz answered. “This is all I can offer. Today I resolved a difficulty in the Tosafos, and I give this merit to you.” As soon as he spoke, the woman delivered the baby easily and without further distress.

The Sar Shalom said that this is no wonder. The Taz had made the Tosafos easier to understand, and when he gave that merit to the woman, they eased her difficulty, and she gave birth just as easily.

Kiddush by Day When Wine Is Dear

The Taz is known for rulings that shaped customs we take for granted. In his time in Europe, kosher wine was hard to find and very costly, which raised the question whether beer, whiskey or brandy could replace wine for kiddush. The question is sharper for the daytime kiddush on Shabbos morning, which is a rabbinic enactment and not of Torah origin. On account of the hardship and poverty, the Taz ruled that where wine is available, one should certainly make kiddush over wine even by day. But where wine is expensive, as it was in his lands, one need not be strict, since the day kiddush is not a full obligation as the night kiddush is. That is why even the greatest sages in his region did not have the custom of making the berocha over wine by day. Whoever does make kiddush over wine by day, he adds, acts in a fine and worthy way.

Turei Zahav, Orach Chaim, Hilchos Shabbos, siman 272, no. 6

Rashi's Father at the Start of the Torah

On Rashi's opening comment on Bereishis 1:1, Rav Yitzchok said that the Torah need not have begun until the verse about this month being the beginning of the months, and the reason it begins with creation is to show that Hashem gave Eretz Yisroel to whomever He saw fit. In Divrei Dovid the Taz writes that in his youth he saw a very old manuscript commentary on Rashi that said this Rav Yitzchok is not found in the Midrash or the Gemara. The question itself is in the Midrash, but not in the name of Rav Yitzchok, who is none other than Rashi's father. Rashi, the Rav Shlomo son of Yitzchok, honored his father by placing him at the very start of his commentary. So there is no problem that Rashi seems to ask two questions, since the first was his father's. The Taz adds that the manuscript's claim that Rashi's father was no great scholar must be mistaken, because in his commentary on Avoda Zarah, page 75, Rashi quotes his father's explanation as the better one, saying that this is what he heard from his father and teacher and it seems correct to him.

Divrei Dovid, on Rashi, Bereishis 1:1

Making Kiddush From the Siddur

The Taz's custom was always to recite kiddush on Shabbos and Yom Tov from the siddur. He explained that besides the holiness found in the letters themselves, it spared others embarrassment. He often found himself a guest among people who did not know kiddush by heart. He looked for ways to avoid embarrassing any Jew, and he was sure that if he recited kiddush from memory, those people would be too embarrassed to read it from a siddur. So he always read it from a siddur and urged others to do the same.

Beis Rochel, Shaar HaHachanah, by Rav Naftoli Katz, no. 34