Dr. Louis Finkelstein was one of the greatest Judaic scholars of the 20th century
and was the Chancellor of the Jewish Theological SEminary from the 1940’s to the 1970’s.
This is a story about Dr. Finkelstein’s father, who was the rabbi of a synagogue in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn.
It happened that in that congregation, as it sometimes does, (may God protect us from it ever happening here) that the Rabbi and the Hazzan quarreled.
The congregation took sides, and the quarrel escalated until finally the congregation decided that both of them, the Rabbi and the Hazzan, had to leave.
Years later, their Dr. Finkelstein’s found himself the Rabbi of another congregation, and much to his surprise, he found that Hazzan a member of the synagogue.
For years, the rabbi would walk from his seat to the middle of the room where the speaker's stand was in order to give his sermon every week. On the way he would have to pass the seat of the former Hazzan, and the two of them would ignore each other. Not a single word of greeting passed their lips for years.
And then the Rabbi's wife died. The children worried about how their father would survive the enormous loss. During shiva, the house was full and his mind was occupied, but they worried about how he would manage after shiva. One day, soon after the completion of the shiva, they came to see him and they found him, much to their surprise, all excited.
"Do you know who came to see me today? " he said. It was the Hazzan." The children were surprised that after so many years of stony silence, the two men would have made up, and they asked their father: "What did he say?"
The father said: "He said to me, Reb Shimon, mir halten shoin baide bai neilah; lomir zich iberbeten." (We are both already at the neilah stage in our lives. We are both closer to the end than to the beginning, so let us make up.)
And they did. And from that day on till the day that the Rabbi died, the two of them played chess together every single afternoon.
Let that story be a lesson to all of us. We are all one year older than we were at this moment a year ago. We are all a year closer to the neilah stage in our lives. Let us make up.
from the writings of Rabbi Friedman z"l of Temple Hillel, Woodmere, NY as found in Dov Pertz Elkins' Moments of Transcendence
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