“These are the precepts whose fruits a person eats in this world but whose essence remains intact for the World to come, and they are:…visiting the sick, providing for a bride, accompanying the dead…”
The Steipler Gaon zt”l, a leader of religious Jewry until 1985, the year of his death, believed that performing the mitzvah of hachnasas kallah protects a terminally ill person from death. He reasoned that the order of the three precepts was selected to teach us that engaging in the mitzvah of hachnasas kallah could serve as a barricade to protect the sick from death. When the chief rabbi of Belgium, HaRav Chaim Kreisworth, zt”l, was very sick, he visited the Steipler to receive his brachot and advice. The Steipler advised him to undertake the mitzvah of hachnassas kallah and marry off needy kallas. Rav Chaim followed the advice, recovered miraculously, and lived to the age of eighty-two.
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Jerusalem, Israel
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