Ki Savo: 5782 - Rabbi Shimon Zonnenfeld, ahead of the start of saying Selichos on Motza'ei Shabbos, with an explanation of the famous story about Reb Shmuel Munkes and the couple who get up in the middle of the night to ask…

00:00 Speaker 1 Please.

00:02 Speaker 2 We’re on the eve of the Shabbos of Selichos. There’s a well-known story told among chassidim about Reb Shmuel Munkes, one of the great chassidim of the Alter Rebbe. Once, while traveling, he stayed with an older couple. It was during the days of Selichos. Before dawn, they got up to say Selichos, but they saw that their guest was asleep. They couldn’t understand it. Here was an older man with a long beard, who looked like a Torah scholar, and he was sleeping instead of coming to say Selichos. So the man went to wake him. Reb Shmuel asked, “What happened? Why did you wake me?” He said, “Selichos.” Reb Shmuel asked, “What? What’s Selichos?” So he tried to explain: we have to say Selichos. “Why do we have to say Selichos?” He said, “It’s almost Rosh Hashanah, the Day of Judgment.” Reb Shmuel asked, “So what? Why do we have to say Selichos?” He said, “It’s the Day of Judgment. We need to ask Hakadosh Boruch Hu to give us a livelihood and good health, for the cow to give milk and the trees to bear fruit. We need to ask.” Reb Shmuel said to him, “I don’t understand. Grown people get up before dawn to ask for food?” It’s a chassidic story that’s often told. And Rabbi Chanan raised a question here. Reb Shmuel Munkes, one of the great chassidim of the Alter Rebbe, is making fun of a sincere Jew who got up to say Selichos. That doesn’t make sense. He got up with sincerity, said Selichos and made his requests. And what do we ask for? Don’t we ask for food, livelihood and health? So why was he making fun of them? But we can explain it this way. There’s a teaching of the Baal Shem Tov on the verse in Tehillim, “Hungry and thirsty, their soul fainted within them.” When a person is drawn to a certain food, it isn’t simply because “their soul fainted within them.” He is drawn to it—his soul, his neshamah, is drawn to that food—because in the food

01:55 Speaker 2 there is a spark that belongs to him, and he needs to refine it. That expresses itself in his feeling hungry and wanting to eat. Based on this teaching, we can explain that Reb Shmuel wanted to awaken in those simple Jews, precisely out of Ahavas Yisroel, the understanding that we ask Hakadosh Boruch Hu for a good year not just for the sake of food. There’s something more inward here, something deeper. It’s because “their soul fainted within them.” We ask so that we can make a dwelling for Him, blessed be He, in the lower realms, and so that we can crown Hakadosh Boruch Hu as King. For that, we need a livelihood, and we want all the other things. He wanted to awaken this in them, precisely out of Ahavas Yisroel. It wasn’t that he wanted to make fun of them; he wanted to wake them up and awaken a deeper awareness in them.

02:41 Speaker 1 Yes, that’s right.