Farbrengen 20 Menachem-Av 5761, Kfar Chabad

02:17 You know what a catastrophe there was at the end of the war, from ’39 to ’45. Remember it, the Axis. The tiny Czech city of Žilina—that’s its name in translation. And there were fifty thousand there. I know. Even while they were [unclear], [unclear] worldwide. You know what it means to be thirsty for something? It wasn’t a city that had just sprung up. Forty million Jews. It was out in the street. They spoke more with the leading countries. We would disappear completely. Five years. In Germany. And the Germans came right up to Podohir. At night, we went out into the city—went out on bicycles.

00:05 Rabbi Maslov[?] would trace everything to where it is found in Kabbalah, and because it is found in Kabbalah, it descends and unfolds into our world. Rabbi Levi Yitzchak—[unclear]—how Reb Levik looks for it in Kabbalah and begins to work through all the details there. He explains that reality begins in Kabbalah, then unfolds until it reaches our world. That is very far from the way a student sees things. A student has the reality of the world and the reality of Torah, and for the student, the reality of the world does not necessarily line up with the reality of Torah. But here, what determines things is the reality of Torah. For example, Likkutei Levi Yitzchak brings something the Alter Rebbe says. The Alter Rebbe says: Don’t be surprised that you know snow is white. How do you know snow is white? The Alter Rebbe says: Because the Torah says, “Though your sins be like scarlet, they shall become white as snow.” The fact that snow is white does not come from looking at the world and declaring that it is white. The Torah says it is white, and once it is written in the Torah, that unfolds into the world, where snow is white as well. If the verse “they shall become white as snow” had not been written in the Torah, we would not know that white snow exists. And then the Alter Rebbe says that we know there is a world because the Torah says, “In the beginning, G-d created the heavens and the earth.” Once it is written in the Torah that “In the beginning, G-d created the heavens and the earth,” we know there is a world. And if it were not written, “In the beginning, G-d created the heavens and the earth,” then yes, a Jew could go outside and say there is a world. But that is not the point. We see that there is a world because it says, “In the beginning, G-d created the heavens and the earth.” In other words, our realities come from what is written

02:47 in the Torah. And that is the point the Rebbe would make about his father: with everything in his life, he looked for its source in the Torah, and from there it descends into the world. I think chassidim need to talk about this too, in relation to all sorts of things where the reality of the world is taken as decisive. What determines reality is