The Greatest Kindness

Somebody knocked on my door on a cold, rainy Friday night in Yerushalayim. I stood up from my seat to open the door and saw a young man standing there. I invited him and asked how I could be of assistance. He said he had a halachic question: The electric company had sent workers on Shabbos to fix the fuse in his building that had blown on Erev Shabbos. Is he allowed to benefit now from the lights in his apartment, the food in his refrigerator, and the hot food on the electric hotplate? I assured him that it was permissible for him to benefit from everything. I then remembered that the same person had called me on Erev Shabbos to ask this same question.

I was curious to know what had motivated him to walk all the way to my building and climb up multiple flights of stairs on a freezing cold night to ask the same question again.

He replied, “There’s a widow who lives alone in the same building as my family. She knocked on my door tonight and was very concerned about whether she could benefit from the refrigerator, freezer, and other electrical appliances as I asked you just now. I wanted to put her mind at ease so I told her that I would go ask a she’eilah for her and would come back to let her know the answer.”

He added, “I knew that only if I would come in person to ask the she’eilah would her mind be at rest and she would be able to relax and enjoy the rest of Shabbos properly.”

In this week’s Parshah the Torah tells us that Yaakov Avinu was named Yaakov because he held onto the heel (“עקב”) of his twin brother, Eisav, when he was born. The name יעקב comes from the word עקב, alluding to what happened when he was born.

Why, of all of the accomplishments of our great forefather Yaakov and his tremendous qualities that he bequeathed to his descendants, does the Torah want him to be remembered specifically for this seemingly insignificant event at his birth? Yaakov, who is the epitome of the quality of truth (“תתן אמת ליעקב”), Yaakov, for whom the entire Jewish nation for all of history is named after (“Beis Yaakov”) – why did the Torah want him to be called Yaakov because he grabbed onto his brother’s heel? There must be a deeper meaning to why he was called Yaakov.

The Tur, in his commentary on the Torah, writes that the greatest thing a person could be known for in his life is helping another Jew. Yaakov Avinu did not want his mother to suffer the pain of two births as she was giving birth to twins. He wanted her to endure the difficulty of only one birth. Therefore, he grabbed hold of his brother’s heel so that they would be born together and his mother would only have to go through the painful birth procedure once. What incredible thoughtfulness! For this reason, the Tur asserts, there is no more virtuous a name than יעקב itself, to remind us of the tremendous way he thought of his mother and how he could minimize her pain. The Baal Shem Tov is quoted to have said that the greatest chesed a person can do is to think of how he can help relieve the pain of another.