Rav Elyashiv The Value of Time

0:14The Rav Elyashiv, alav ha-shalom, studied Torah in a way that's beyond our imagination. Things that are hard for us to comprehend. The only thing he wanted in life was Torah. He would sleep three hours, three and a half hours a day. Wake up at 2:30 in the morning and start his first seder of learning Torah until Netz Minyan. After that, go back to learning. All day, all night, learning Torah. Now, of course, because he was one of the Gedolei HaDor, The tzibur, the community, needed him, needed him to make psak halacha, get involved in certain things. Sometimes they would invite him to events which most of the time he would not attend because it would disturb his learning. One guy came to him and begged him to come to the brit milah of his child.

1:28And he told him, no, I can't, I have obligations. What are obligations? It's obligations to learn. That's obligations. Yeah, but you can do another thing. No, no, no, I have obligations. The guy was a close student. He begged him to come. He said, okay, fine, I'll come. Why? Why does he agree to come? He says, listen, Rabbi, I understand your time is valuable. That's why we set it up that as soon as you come in, within 20 minutes, you're out of there. Meaning there's no singing, dancing, food, this, DJ, all that stuff. No, no, rabbi, we just want you to come over there, give us a blessing, hold the baby, be the sandak. 20 minutes, you're out of the whole thing. He said to him, okay, fine, I'll come. So, the day before, Rabbi Elyashiv tells his helper, his gabbai, tell him, listen, call him, tell him I can't come tomorrow. Okay, well, I won't call the rabbi. He's waiting. I can't. I have obligations. I have things I have to catch up on. I only study 20 hours instead of 21. You know, it's obligations. No, no, no, rabbi. The guy cries again. Long story short, he ends up going. They go to a place. Everything is like military. Gets there. Baby. Finished? Okay, bye-bye.

2:51Now, on the way home, the driver is happy. Why? They're out of there quickly. But then the driver, he writes in the book. It's in the book. And he says, I learned a lesson about how Rav Elyashiv looks at the world from that day. It took me to a different world. What happened? He's happy as can be. Why? They were in the party. Made the people happy, great, right? And get out of there in 20 minutes. Everything worked as planned. So he's proud that he said so; the Rabbi's gonna be happy with me. It's like, so Rabbi, Baruch Hashem, see, everything worked out great, you were out of there in 20 minutes. And Rav Elyashiv waited for a moment and looked at him and said, 22 minutes.

3:5222 minutes. He calculated every second of his day. Now you may think, wow, he's exaggerating. No, no, no. You don't understand. He looks at those two minutes as, "Now I just lost two minutes of Torah. I'm never going to be able to get back unless I make it up. I have to learn two more minutes of Torah today. I can't just let two minutes fly by. What, do you want me to be ignorant? I've been studying Torah for 90 years." Two minutes I have to make up. Where do the two minutes come from? No one knew. He already studied 20 hours a day. When are the two minutes going to come? And that's another story. A guy comes to him and says, Rabbi, we have this guy who has some halachot, things to learn, this, that, and there's a psak, and we need your help. So he wants to meet you. Okay, he's a rabbi, he's a talmid chacham.

4:54So the guy comes, he sits down with him for half an hour. Now it's not half an hour socializing, you know, just talking about baseball, basketball. He's talking about Torah. Talking about Torah, half an hour. After he finishes, the guy stops talking, finishes, okay, he leaves. Rav Yissachar says, everything he says is shtuyot. Everything he would say was mistakes. What he was saying was mistakes, the guy. He has all these things, it's all full of mistakes. Okay, but you know, the rest of us would say, "Oh, at least we learned from the mistakes, right?" Rav Yissachar says, "I have to make it up." What do you mean? It's learning. Okay, there's a mistake. You don't make mistakes once in a while? He's learning. He's telling you his mistakes, and you're correcting them. So, in essence, that's actually learning. For the rest of us humans, that's learning Torah. We thought that we're allowed to do something, and we found out through the learning that we're not allowed to do it. Or vice versa. That's learning. That wasn't learning. That wasn't learning because I have to make it up.

6:13So this talmid saw this. When does he make it up? You know, when does he make it up? The next day, there was a major event, I think it was a holiday, it was Purim or something, it was some type of holiday, there were a lot of people in the Beit Knesset, and the helper, you know, lost touch with where Rav Elyashiv was. He thought that maybe he went to learn somewhere, wherever he was, he didn't know where he was. But then eventually, after the whole thing, the whole fiasco was over, he went to the house. And he says he saw the Rebbetzin furious at him. The Rebbetzin saw him, saw this helper, furious at him. "Where were you?" he says. "Oh no, I was at the place," he goes. "How come you weren't with the Rav? How come you weren't with the Rav? You're supposed to be next to the Rav all the time. Where were you today?" He goes, "No, I looked for the Rav. I thought he left."

7:13He says she rebukes him, "How could you not pay attention to the Rav and not know where he is, especially on a day like today?" Says, what happened today? She says today, he was making up for those missing times that he made up for the last few days. There wasn't the meeting, there was the Torah that wasn't Torah, this and that. He was making it up. So he says, I believe, what does it mean? He's making it up. It means that when he makes up Torah, he takes away that time from sleeping. Instead of the normal three hours, he's sleeping, he only slept for an hour and... Why? He has to make up the 2 minutes, the 30 minutes, the 50 minutes. So he tried to make up all that Torah, 2 hours of Torah today. So he's a lot more fragile today. He's already 100 years old. How come you weren't careful to know where he is and take care of him? 100 years old. Over 100 years old. What do you think he was, 20?

8:25You have to make up his Torah. Where do you make up his Torah? Not from family time. Not from other Torah. Not from, no, where? From sleep. That's a person that understands that without Torah, there is no life.

9:31Thank you.