If you went with Rav Chaim, you were accepting that you would get an answer from Shamayim

Rosh Hashanah 2019 was approaching, and a hint of the holy day hung over the park in south Tel Aviv.

A crowd a few hundred strong sitting on plastic chairs devoutly sang along to a head-spinning mix of Sephardic classics like “Adon Haselichot” and “Ben Adam Mah Lecha Nirdam” performed by a shtreimel-clad choir.

It was deep into Israel’s repeat-elections crisis, and the unusual event was a Selichos-cum-political rally staged by the Degel HaTorah party.

Holding court on a bench on the perimeter of the event was a man called Ben Elyagon.

“We’re all Tel Avivians who’ve been chozer b’teshuvah,” he said gesturing to his track-suit-and-sneaker-clad friends. “The whole of the next neighborhood, Kfar Shalem, is like us.”

Asked what had brought the crowd of traditional Israelis to a markedly litvish political rally, Elyagon pointed to the man sitting at the dais, sunk in his thoughts. As teens took the microphone and pledged to wear tzitzis, keep Shabbos, or eat kosher, and then stooped over to kiss the gadol’s hand, the Tel Avivian said simply: “It’s Rav Kanievsky. He’s a great tzaddik!”

Three years later, echoes of those words could be heard this week at the enormous levayah, as many of those same traditional Jews joined hundreds of thousands who mourned the loss of that very tzaddik.

“Rav Chaim drew to him all of Am Yisrael,” says Rabbi Shai Graucher, a popular author who has brought Rav Chaim’s teachings to the English-speaking public and was a fixture in his home. “I brought in talmidei chachamim, airline stewards, doctors, Sephardim, Ashkenazim — everyone wanted to see the gadol, and he was there for everyone.”

Trying to understand who Rav Chaim Kanievsky really was is an exercise in creating order out of that enigma, and meaning out of cliché.

Rav Chaim’s Torah knowledge was legendary, like a supercomputer. His brachos were fulfilled again and again. Holiness was visibly etched in his face. He made life-and-death decisions for individuals, and fateful choices for the Jewish People as a whole.

But all of those different facets, and the multitude of different Jews who were drawn to him, says Rav Lipa Yisraelzon, a nephew of Rav Chaim who became very close to his uncle, all stemmed from one source.

“From when I was a child, I realized who Rav Chaim was. He was a faithful servant to Hashem, who was determined to do what every Jew should do at every given moment — and let nothing stand in his way.”