In the midst of a sea of troubles and tragedies, there is a story which I heard from the original source, a story to reinforce our emunah:
Five years ago, on the seventh day of Chanukah, Reb Mordechai Artzi, a Jew who strengthened himself greatly in Yiddishkeit and was befriended by a Ruzhiner chossid, passed away. In his last years, he lived in the Vishnitz Senior Citizens home in Bnei Brak, and in the very last months of life, his Chassidic mentor convinced him to being putting on Rabbenu Tam tefillin.
This mentor, A.K., told me the following:
"Towards the end of Chanukah this year, on the day following Reb Artzi's yahrtzeit, a man who was also close to the deceased, came to me, very excited. He told me that on the preceding night, Reb Mordechai appeared to him in a dream and said that the Rabbenu Tam tefillin which he had used were not his own. He had received them on loan and asked A.K. to return them for him to their rightful owner, but he did not provide the name of the man.
"I knew that Reb Mordechai had a son living in the Keshet settlement in Ramat HaGolan. I managed to find the phone number of this son and told him about my dream. 'Yes,' the son admitted. 'I found them among my father's belongings and a grandson is now using them.'
"He decided to contact all the people who had been connected to his late father until he reached the Ruzhiner chossid who admitted that he was the one who had convinced Reb Mordechai to begin putting them on. 'He agreed, but told me that he didn't have money to purchase such tefillin so I lent him a pair,' the chossid said. Understandably, he lost all contact with the Jew and hadn't known how to go about retrieving the tefillin that he lent him.
"On the fifth yahrtzeit, on a day when it is known that the deceased's soul rises a level in Heaven, that soul appeared to a friend, asking him to arrange the return so that he could have a tikkun. He gave him 'regards', as it were, from the Heavenly Beis Din."
And thus this episode came full circle when the tefillin reached their original owner. This is an authentic, reliable story geared to strengthen our emunah, including the knowledge of eternal life-after-death guaranteed to Jewish souls, which includes the information that when a soul needs a special merit in order to appear in a dream to someone in this world in order to make a necessary tikkun, it is enabled to do so.
