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Please share any story or experience you had with Reb Chaim kanievsky zaztal in honor so we can get chizuk from it and his neshama shal have an Aliya.
Go to hebrewbooks.org and search under the author קניבסקי you can download his seforim.
Davened friday night in Rav Chaim’s house a few years ago and watched as he used all of his strength to keep himself standing for shemonah esrei.
I watched him listen to people with klutz kashas who just wanted to say they asked him a question and thought nothing about wasting his time
I went to see him with someone who was in the process of divorce. His grandson was trying to hurry people along, but Rav Chaim stopped everything to talk to this person, taking the man’s hand in both of his, and asking, “Is there nothing left to try? Can you maybe save the marriage?”. He talked to him for several minutes, expressing his concern. He was like a father, he cared so deeply. And he had never met the man before in his life….
I was in Israel last week for the first time in 2 1/2 years to visit my parents. My brother was also there with his soon to be Bar Mitzvah son. He met with Reb Chaim on Thursday, one week before Purim. I wish I would have gone with.
Since I did not know him personally, I will refer to someone who knew him.
I was once in his house and a woman was in his kitchen, or side room, maybe (sometimes the gabbaim allowed women in, i don’t know what it depended on, I had heard this woman asking before I went in; apparently ,permission was granted). It was the end of the night, R’ Chaim looked very worn out, anyway, he looked up a bit (seemed to me the way I might stretch my back, like being a bit worn out. I might be wrong about the exact psychology behind his looking up and slightly to the side. Anyway,) he saw her, and instantly, as though his eyes had been burnt, looked back down.
(One last parentheses: I don’t think the woman was supposed to have made herself visible to R’ Chaim.)
Rav Chaim’s stories aren’t about moifsim. They are about Torah. For the last decade of his life, knew more than (probably) any individual alive. People would come to him with shaylos about rare situations and he would immediately answer by pointing out where in poskim this was discussed before. There wasn’t a piece of Shas he couldn’t immediately recall. And he was pashut in that regard.
Everything to him was about Torah and Avodah. When people would ask for eitzas his answer was always to daven and learn. He never worried about the future because he always had full bitachon that Moshiach is just around the corner. He was simply baffled sometimes when people didn’t grasp that “Why does it matter who to vote for? Moshiach is coming!”
Once after an anti-Semitic attack in a Yeshiva, the Lakewood Rosh Yeshivos asked him what they Yeshiva can do to protect themselves. He said that they don’t need protection because everyone is learning. They were forced to admit that perhaps not everyone is learning all the time, and people sometimes take phone calls from their seats in the Batei Midrashim. This upset him greatly and he said that it made a hole in the protective barrier so the Yeshiva may need physical protection.
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