Va'eschanan: 5782 - "There were no better days for Israel than the Fifteenth of Av and Yom Kippur": a wonderful story from the Rav of Jerusalem. By Rabbi Shimon Zonnenfeld, at the conclusion of the daily Daf…

00:03 Speaker 1 It says that there were no days as joyous for the Jewish people as 15 Av and Yom Kippur. The Rebbe asks: What is special about 15 Av? The explanation is that the moon is at its fullest. But the question is: Every month has a fifteenth day, and every month the moon is at its fullest then. The Rebbe explains that the ascent is commensurate with the descent. Since we are coming after Tisha B’Av, the greatest descent there can be, the ascent is correspondingly great. There was an incident in Jerusalem. By the way, the rabbi of Jerusalem gave a very interesting gematria. We see that the haftarah of Shabbos Chazon ended, “Zion shall be redeemed through justice, and those who return to her through charity.” He said that “Zion shall be redeemed through justice” has the same numerical value as “Talmud Yerushalmi,” and “those who return to her through charity” has the same numerical value as “Talmud Bavli.” The gematria works out exactly. In any case, there was once a British High Commissioner at the time named Herbert Samuel. He was Jewish, and he received instructions from the government in England to visit the rabbi of Jerusalem and get to know all the communities. So he came to the Old City to see the rabbi of Jerusalem. He imagined that the rabbi surely lived in respectable surroundings; after all, the rabbi of Jerusalem was famous throughout the world. But he arrived in the Old City and found him living in a simple, one-room apartment in a basement. He couldn’t understand it. So he asked him, “Tell me, you live in an apartment like this? It isn’t fitting.” The rabbi took him to the window, from which they could see the site of the Beis Hamikdash, and said, “If my Father can live in a ruin like that, I can live in an apartment like this.” That put his mind at ease.

02:17 Speaker 2 Yes, so, here’s the thing.