There’s a story told in Rav Chaim Kanievsky’s Sefer Orchot Yosher, ( Artscroll, page 98) which is a lesson in both Hashem’s hashgacha and the concept of Middah K’Neged Middah/ measure for measure, how a person is exactly rewarded for what they do based, on their deeds.
Hashem, in His infinite wisdom is able to reward someone for what they did, even while at the same time punishing them for what they did wrong. God does not mix the two accounts. The Tomer Devorah says that human beings can’t do this. If two people aren’t on speaking terms for whatever reason, they can’t remember the one good thing the other person did.
Rav Chaim tells the story of an irreligious woman who once died suddenly in Bnei Brak. Normally in Israel, like in other countries, when somebody suddenly dies, they do an autopsy. But when someone passes away in Bnei Brak or Yerushalayim, or from some other religious community, there’s an understanding that they don’t do autopsies. This woman was not religious, and technically she could’ve been sent to the regular morgue. But since she had died in Bnei Brak, the people (Rav Chaim and his friends) decided to consider her as a religious woman from Bnei Brak and wanted to avoid the autopsy. In order to avoid the autopsy, they arranged for all the respectable people of the city to come to her funeral, just as they would do for one of the rabbis.. So she got an extra respectable funeral, as if this woman was one of theirs, from a distinguished family, in order to avoid the autopsy.
When Rav Chaim returned home and told his mother what happened, his mother said that she had known this woman in Moscow. She had desecrated Shabbat in public and ate on Yom Kippur. The woman was obviously not religious, and Rav Chaim’s mother was surprised that she merited such a distinguished funeral.
To avoid an autopsy is one thing, but to have all the distinguished rabbis of Bnei Brak come to the funeral, as if she was distinguished Rebitzen, was another matter.
Rav Chaim explained that it was ultimately discovered that this woman had been in the concentration camps during the war. She was in charge of burying the dead, and she attended to her job with devotion.
Therefore, he said, she was given the honor and pleasure that was accorded to her, at her death. Rav Chaim explained that a dead person does sense the honor that they get at their funeral; and in this way, she received reward for what she did.
He said that we see from this, Middah kneged Middah. The lady had devoted herself to tending to the bodies of the dead, and this merited her body being safeguarded from an autopsy. So although, on one hand, this woman was an extremely irreligious person, even before the concentration camps, nonetheless she received reward that she deserved for the deed that she did.
In another story, Rav Chaim wrote about a Jewish widower who had hired a non-Jewish woman to help raise his children, and the woman took devoted care of the children.
Many years later, one of the boys whom she had cared for happened upon the funeral of an elderly non-Jewish woman. He overheard them saying that the woman had always boasted about how she took care of Jewish children. After investigating, the son realized that this had been the very woman that cared for him in his childhood. Hashem worked it out that he should be present at her funeral, in order to give her the honor she deserved.
This is fascinating. One of the fundamentals of our Emuna system is Schar VOnesh/reward and punishment. These stories illustrate that not a deed goes by unnoticed.
Rav Shach, when he was in the town of Vilna, saw a book with a record of all the events that happened in Vilna (it was later destroyed). In the book, he read of how the Gaon of Vilna’s relative ( wife, or mother possibly) used to go collecting Sedaka with her friend. They made a deal with each other that whoever passed away first would come back in a dream and describe the next world to her friend.
Then, one of them passed away and came back and explained that she could not reveal what was going on, that she was sworn to secrecy, but that she could tell her one thing. She reminded her friend of the time, way back, when they were collecting money on a Friday afternoon, and they had exhausted all of their usual sources. They then decided to go collect in the market place. The friend noticed someone across the street and picked up her finger and pointed, and said, “Hey there is so-and- so, let’s go ask him.“
The friend explained, “You followed me, and we went there. And in the next world, it says that when I picked up my finger in pointed, and you followed, I got a little more reward for that.”
From this we see how exact Hashem’s appreciation is, for all of our deeds, regardless of our misdeeds.
Every deed is vibrant, and God rewards it, as we see from these stories.
Have a wonderful day.