סיפורים נדירים על הרב הקבליסטי יצחק קדורי מתלמידו הרב בניהו שמואלי שילטה

In the company of our Rabbi the 'Ben Ish Chai'
While still a child, our Rabbi was privileged to sit in the shadow of the great rabbi of all the Diaspora, our Rabbi Yosef Chaim, the 'Ben Ish Chai'. And he was privileged to see him and hear his sermons, and to draw from his holiness.
One day, I traveled with our Rabbi to the Babylonian Jewish Heritage Center in the city of Or Yehuda. There is a synagogue there that was built in exactly the same image as the Great Synagogue in Baghdad, known as 'Tselat Lakbir', meaning the Great House of Prayer, where our Rabbi Yosef Chaim would deliver his sermons four Sabbaths a year, before a large audience of about ten thousand people. Our Rabbi entered into the image of the synagogue and was very happy to remember the past, and told me that the entire synagogue was absolutely identical in its image to the 'Tselat Lakbir' synagogue, only one bench was missing. When our Rabbi saw my great admiration for his precise memory, the Rabbi told me: The missing bench was the bench I was sitting on. When I asked those responsible for the lack of a bench, they told us that they had removed the bench for the passage...

After that, our rabbi pointed to the place where our rabbi Yosef Chaim stood during the sermon, all in a state of reverence. Our rabbi remembered that as a child he had sat on the bimah with the children, and they would kiss the hem of the son of Ish Chai's robe.

One day, they held a siyum masqat at Rabbi Sasson's house, and they summoned all the sages of Baghdad. And all the sages came adorned with turbans and robes, and our rabbi was also invited to this event. And despite our rabbi's young age, they honored him to speak words of Torah, and he would ask them about the simple part mixed with the secret Torah, and the sages rejoiced at his words and kissed him.

And while it was not yet known that he was studying the wisdom of the Han, he was afraid to buy the books of Kabbalah in Baghdad, so he ordered the books from the holy city of Jerusalem, and sent a telegram (registered mail) to bring him all the books he wanted to learn the secrets of the Torah, and he bought Etz Chaim and eight pages, Jerusalem printing, first printing.

The book 'Shaar Ma'amerei Rashbi'

He added that there were books of Kabbalah in Baghdad, except for the book 'Shaar Ma'amerei Rashbi' which no one else had. And the sage Yehuda Fathia, may God bless him, asked him to lend it to him, and they did, and the sage Yehuda Fathia studied with him for several months and corrected terrible glosses in it, and returned the book to him with his own glosses.

At that time, I asked our rabbi to lend me the book so that I could copy the glosses, and he told me that he did not have the book. And because of an incident that happened, when he immigrated to Eretz Israel with his friends, during the trip, a box of books fell out of them, and inside was the book Sha'ar Ma'ame'rei Rashbi, and despite all the pleas to the driver, he did not agree to stop.

After that, our rabbi sent a telegram to the police to help him find the lost item, and they told him that a Jew, who lived in a certain place, had found the box. Our rabbi turned to the originator and asked him to return the box to him. The originator informed our rabbi that he was willing to give the entire package in exchange for a fee, and especially wanted the aforementioned Sha'ar Ma'ame'rei Rashbi, and since he had no choice but to receive the other books, he left it with him. (When I told this incident in the introductory shiur of Maran Maor Yisrael, our rabbi Ovadia Yosef, a Jew called me and said that he had the aforementioned book, and that he would bring it to me, praises to God.)

The Foreseeing
I remember back in my youth, our rabbi had a room to receive the public on Kinneret Street across from the Porat Yosef yeshiva. After the Yom Kippur War, many were missing in action, and the parents of the missing would come to our rabbi and cry tears of joy, and would ask him where the missing were and what their condition was, and our rabbi would tell them to take an almond tree, write this and that, put it in the ground, and tell me how it grew, and did it produce flowers, etc., and when they would return to him later, he would tell them that it would return in a few days, wonder of wonders. And I would marvel at how he had achieved his holiness and purity and how he knew everything.

My teachers and masters! Do not think that it is wisdom to perform miracles and wonders, this is all vanity! The truly wise man is one who sits and studies the Torah all his days and walks in the way of God, and fulfills the commandments as God commanded, and guards his tongue, and knows how to behave with others, and to love every Jew from the people of Israel. This was our teacher and rabbi! These were his deeds! And so from heaven they gave him great power to help the people of Israel...