We continue with stories from our trip to Eretz Yisrael. One of the places we visited was a yeshiva headed by Rabbi Nissan Kaplan. For many years, he gave classes in the Mirrer Yeshiva, and then, a few years ago, he opened his own Yeshiva in Har Nof. Before he gave us a class, he told us an interesting story about the building we were in. He described it as the most beautiful Bet Midrash in the Middle East.
It has a beautiful view of Har Nof, a large campus with a dormitory, a soccer field and basketball court, marble floors, beautiful moldings…… it’s really a beautiful, ornate multimillion dollar building that he is renting. He told us how he got it:
It sat vacant for twenty years. The man that built it aspired to have a yeshiva, but his plan never panned out. As sometimes happens in Israel and in America, when a yeshiva is no longer functioning, the building is rented out. But this man was never able to rent out the building. He wanted a large sum of money and nobody could afford the price, so it just sat vacant.
When Rabbi Kaplan was shopping for a building for his yeshiva, he heard about this building but he was told he would never be able to afford it.
When he approached the owner and asked to rent it, the owner told him it was very expensive. The rabbi said he needed a building, and this one was beautiful. Then, when the owner gave him the contract, he signed it without even looking at the price. When they shook on the the deal, the Rabbi thanked him and said, “I really love this building, but there is one problem. I can’t afford it. I don’t even know what it costs, but I don’t have a lot of money.” The man told him they would make it work, after figuring out what he was able to afford, they settled on $50,000 a month, which is still a lot of money.
The owner then proceeded to explain why he acquiesced and gave it to the rabbi for a much lower price than he previously anticipated. He said that everyone that previously came to rent it couldn’t afford it, and so they started bargaining by listing all the problems with the building…They claimed it didn’t have enough windows or that the stairs were too steep… “Everybody found some kind of excuse or problem with the building,” he said,
“But I think the building is very nice, so I didn’t want to rent it to them. You are the first person that walked in and just said you loved my building, and you didn’t find anything wrong with it. You just wanted to rent it. So I decided I would rent the building to you and make it work.”
When Rabbi Kaplan told us the story, we all noted that it was eerily similar to the story of the Mirrer Yeshiva, and how Silas Hardoun had famously built a building large enough for 400 Yeshiva boys in Shanghai, when there were only 12 people praying in the synagogue at the time. Nobody could understand why he built it. They knew that his father had come to him in a dream and told him to build it, but still, why that size? Why the grandeur?
Later on, when the Mirrer Yeshiva needed a place to go when escaping from Europe, they used that building. After the war was over and they left, the communists seized the building and destroyed it. Everyone then understood that God had put into the mind of this man to have the building ready when it was necessary.
Similarly, that is what happened to this Rabbi. This Rabbi had actually been in the Mirrer Yeshiva in Jerusalem. And when he left to start his new yeshiva, he told people that he left the Mirrer Yeshiva to come to the Mirrer Yeshiva, because the same miracle had happened.
It’s the miracle that God has things prepared and ready for when we need them.
We saw this live, in this Rabbi’s Yeshiva.
Have a wonderful day.