I'm often amazed by how much one can learn at a shivah house, especially if the entire discussion is not taken up with pointless talk of the medical details of the final weeks or days of a long life.

I recently went to the shivah house of a longtime friend. I had no great expectations. I had not known his mother. And this particular friend is extremely self-effacing. His sense of humor runs to the self-deprecatory, and he studiously shies away from the limelight. As a baal teshuvah, he would be the only one sitting shivah, and I could not imagine how he would handle it.

Yet once there, I found myself transfixed. My friend held the floor, as if he had been waiting his entire life for this opportunity to be heard. He described in great detail the family history going back four generations in West Virginia and other points off the beaten Jewish track.

And he brought his mother to life with great tenderness and respect: her attachment to Judaism, despite not being fully mitzvah observant; her strength of character and firm sense of right and wrong. He did so in such a way that his own decision to take on a life of Torah and mitzvos seemed like a logical continuation of his mother's principles. (That, I find, is true of many baalei teshuvah.)

When I left after almost an hour, I felt a tinge of regret that it took my friend sitting shivah for me to fully appreciate his depth. But then I consoled myself that at least now I have a grasp of who he really is.

SOMETIMES one picks up important insights from the life of the niftar. At another recent shivah house, one of the niftar's sons related that his father had been in the brutal Janowska work camp on the outskirts of Lvov, together with the Bluzhover Rebbe and Simon Wiesenthal, and had lost nearly his entire family in the Holocaust.

I remarked to this son that it was impossible to discern what his father had suffered from observing him at a distance. He appeared every bit the distinguished lawyer that he was, and his three sons, each a highly successful frum professional, seem to bear no scars.

My friend replied that his father had, as an act of will, simply closed off his mind to all that had been before the war. As a child, my friend instinctively knew not to ask his father about his life growing up or anything beyond the barest outlines of his wartime experiences. That steel barrier in his father's mind between prewar and afterward was so firm that he could not even speak languages in which he had been fluent before the war.

The Gemara (Sanhedrin 93a) asks what became of Chananyah, Azariah, and Mishael, who were miraculously saved from the fiery furnace after refusing to bow down to a statute of Nevuchadnetzar. Rabi Yochanan answers: They went up to Eretz Yisrael, married women, and fathered children.

The Gemara reminds us that these are not mundane achievements. They were purchased at a high price by the survivors, who did so much to rebuild world Jewry after the horrors they had experienced.