How can we believe in Divine Providence and see the guiding hand of Hakadosh Boruch Hu during difficult moments in life? Late at night on 15 Nissan 5687, loud knocks sounded at the door of the Frierdiker Rebbe’s home in Lubavitch. Agents of Soviet Russia’s secret police entered the house and took the Rebbe to the notorious Shpalerka prison because of his struggle to keep the flame of Jewish life alive in the communist state. The Rebbe wrote a personal diary in which he describes the terrible fear he felt, his thoughts about his family and chassidim, and the firm resolve he made in his heart as he reflected on the Baal Shem Tov’s teachings. Later, it became clear that the very moments when he seemed to be in darkness and great distress were the ones that saved his life. The Rebbe’s words offer a ray of light in difficult moments in our lives, both as individuals and as a people.

00:00 How can we see the light in the midst of great darkness? Each of us goes through different periods in life. We all bless and wish ourselves and those around us the very best: that everyone should have a happy life in every respect and every detail—with children, livelihood, health, peace at home, everything. But there are moments in life that are not easy. There are times when we face challenges of different kinds, both as individuals and as a people. Let’s talk about the time we find ourselves in right now, one of the darkest periods in the history of the Jewish people. For months now, we have been at war, with lives in danger. We are losing precious souls, more precious than anything. Every soul we lose brings unimaginable pain. It breaks us, because the Jewish people are one family. And the question is: How can we stand, think, hold on, stay strong and steadfast? Yes, we are a people of faith. The Jewish people are called “believers, the children of believers,” and even in hard times our faith is steadfast. But sometimes our strength gives out. What can we hold on to? What thread, what word—what is the key? What can give us the strength to keep our heads above water, to hold on and see the light even in the midst of great darkness, even when all around us is pitch-black? To stay connected to something real and deep that gives us hope, faith, trust and strength. So today we’ll talk about an account the Frierdiker Rebbe gave of a period in his own life. I think that if we reflect on it, it can give us a great deal of strength. It gives us the key, the right way to look at things—a way of seeing them that can help a person stand firm even in the hardest moments. It was the night of 15 Sivan 5687. That’s nineteen twenty—

02:44 seven. The Frierdiker Rebbe was then in Soviet Russia. He lived in Leningrad, as it was called then; today it’s called St. Petersburg. It was a very difficult period in the history of the Jewish people, especially in those countries. The Communists ruled all of Russia with an iron fist and imposed terrible decrees on the Jewish people. Their goal was to eradicate Jewish faith, to wipe it out, and they fought it with extreme aggression. They shut down cheders, yeshivos, mikvaos, and so on. And the Frierdiker Rebbe stood firm. One man, together with all his students and chassidim, he waged a fierce campaign against a government that was, at the time, the most powerful in the world. It ruled ruthlessly and with absolute force. It was the very embodiment of evil. And there stood the Frierdiker Rebbe, fighting a fierce battle and standing strong: for every yeshiva closed, two yeshivos opened; for every cheder closed, two cheders opened; for every mikveh closed, two mikvaos opened. He kept going, fighting the government, knowing that his life was in real danger—mortal danger, which indeed came to pass that night, the night of 15 Sivan. Now, the Frierdiker Rebbe himself wrote an account of what happened that night. There is a wonderful account of his imprisonment that the Frierdiker Rebbe wrote, but it was never completed. It covers only a day or two of his entire imprisonment. Just imagine: the Frierdiker Rebbe was imprisoned for eighteen days. After that, there was also his journey into exile, when they sent him to a distant city, which took several more days. The whole story of his imprisonment lasted nearly a month, yet the long, remarkable account we have from the Frierdiker Rebbe covers only the first day of his imprisonment. But let’s return to our point and look at something extraordinary. There is what the Frierdiker Rebbe wrote, and there is also what he did not write—things that became known to us over the years,

05:14 different pieces that give us the full, clear picture and open our eyes. I think that if we reflect on what happened that night, the night of 15 Sivan, it can change our lives. It can bring about a shift in how we see life—from a different, deeper perspective—through all the different circumstances, times and events that each of us experiences. The story he tells is that, after midnight that night, people entered his home. They came to search it and informed him that he was under arrest. We won’t go into every detail of what followed, but they brought him to the fortress, to the harshest prison. When he arrived, the men who had escorted him there were, for some reason, in a hurry. They handed him over to a guard and said, “Take him where he needs to go.” He relates that he had to pass through a corridor. He was standing there, and the guard told him, “Go straight down this corridor”—it was a long corridor—“and at the end you’ll find an office. They’ll receive you there. You’ll have to answer a few questions, and then we’ll deal with you.” The Frierdiker Rebbe relates that he began walking, and he describes every detail. He was known to have an extraordinary, rare gift for description. He describes the place down to the smallest detail: the fear they instilled in the people there; the murderous policemen standing on all sides with their weapons; the rooms and the whole place. So he started down the corridor. For some reason, they had simply told him, “Go from here to there,” and he was supposed to walk through that corridor alone, which was strange. At a police station, when a person is brought in—I mean, you don’t just walk by yourself like that. They tell

07:41 him, “Go from here to there.” He starts walking. He passes through the corridor and is about to enter the room they had pointed out, where they would meet him and ask him the questions—the interrogation they were going to conduct. But for some reason he decides: Why should I go where they told me to go? The defiant spirit with which the Rebbe had waged his entire struggle against the government was with him even then, in that most dangerous and frightening place. He says to himself: Why should I go where they told me? No one is forcing me. So he decides to turn right. There was another room there and... another corridor as well. He enters that corridor, sees some benches and sits down on one of them. Then he describes in great detail what happened and what he thought as he sat there. He is sitting alone in an empty corridor, having suddenly gone in another direction. No one is there, and he begins to think. Suddenly, thoughts come to him: What is happening at home? What is happening with his wife? His mother was still alive then—what is she thinking? What is happening to her? What about the children he left behind? And then... what about the chassidim? The students? At a certain point, he breaks down and begins to cry. Then he says, “Suddenly, a thought flashed through my mind, and I said to myself”—the Rebbe writes all this in his account—“And what about G-d? Where is Hakadosh Boruch Hu in all these calculations? You are certain that Hakadosh Boruch Hu runs the world. He is the One who did all this and brought you to this place. So how can you allow yourself negative thoughts, destructive thoughts, thoughts that seek to break your spirit? After all, you know that Hakadosh Boruch Hu is with”

09:55 with you right now, at this very moment, and He has a Divine purpose and mission for you specifically in these moments. “Then I remembered,” the Rebbe writes, “the words of the Baal Shem Tov. The Baal Shem Tov’s well-known teaching about hashgachah pratis came to mind: nothing in the world happens by chance. Everything in the world—even a small leaf that falls from a tree and is carried by the wind to a particular place—the leaf, the tree, the wind, every last detail is guided by Hashem’s particular providence, with a particular intention and purpose.” This teaching of the Baal Shem Tov is well known. So if that is true of plants, animals, and inanimate things, how much more so of human beings—and all the more so of a Jew. When something happens, every detail must be guided by hashgachah pratis. The fact that I am here at this moment, that instead of going there I went here, entered a corridor, and sat down—every detail is wondrous hashgachah pratis from Hashem. True, the Rebbe writes to himself—these were all thoughts passing through his mind as he sat there in the corridor—true, I cannot explain hashgachah pratis right now. I do not know exactly why or how all this will work out, or how everything fits together. But knowing this puts me at ease. I am confident. I know that I am letting Divine providence lead me, and at some point I will discover what was hidden, what the secret was, what the story was, and how every detail fits into this whole puzzle—the purpose and fulfillment of creation. These thoughts, the Rebbe writes, filled him with a great deal of confidence and hope. He resolved not to let himself be shaken, not to

12:07 break. He would stand strong and remember at every moment, even in the place where he found himself—the darkest place, a place of evil in this world, a place of murder, brutality, and corruption—that “there is nothing besides Him.” Hashem is present even here, and “the whole earth is full of His glory.” That was the opening. He then goes on to describe how someone came in, and how the whole matter unfolded as his imprisonment continued. And here we come to something that is not written in this account, but became known afterward: that night, this “mistake,” if we can call it a mistake—or this defiance of the Frierdiker Rebbe in not going straight to the office but going somewhere else—saved his life, quite literally. In a place like that, going into this corridor instead of where he was supposed to go could have had grave consequences. It turned out that an order had come from the government, from its highest level, to bring in a group of prominent leaders of various religions and kill them that very night, without further deliberation. It was an act of revenge by the Russians because one of their important people had been killed. The details of that story are not important right now. The point is that several leaders were to be taken and killed that night. The instruction was to finish everything before daybreak; whatever they did not manage to do by then would be over. Now, in Russia at that time of year, the nights are very short. Everyone knows that in Russia, especially in that region, summer nights are extremely short. They had only a few hours. They brought the Rebbe to the prison. He was supposed to pass through the corridor, go down the hallway, enter that office, and very quickly

14:27 they would have brought him, G-d forbid, to his end. Instead, he went in another direction, entered a different corridor, sat down there, and stayed there. All of this prolonged the process. Meanwhile, the night passed, and that quite literally saved his life. So the thoughts the Rebbe had as he sat there, about the hashgachah pratis revealed by the Baal Shem Tov, were not mere philosophy. This was not just a teaching of Chassidus. It saved his life. In fact, the Frierdiker Rebbe himself said later, at one of the farbrengens held in honor of 12 Tammuz—the festival of liberation, as chassidim celebrate his release from prison—that earlier that year, on Rosh Hashanah, he had included the subject of hashgachah pratis according to the Baal Shem Tov’s teaching in the maamar he delivered. The Rebbeim would always deliver a maamar on Rosh Hashanah. At the time, he himself did not understand why he had spoken about it, because it did not relate to the subject of that maamar. But afterward, he said, “When I came to prison and what happened there happened, those words I had said in the Rosh Hashanah maamar about hashgachah pratis in the name of the Baal Shem Tov gave me the strength to hold on through the darkest and hardest moments of my imprisonment. If I had not spoken about it,” he said, “I do not know if I would have had the strength to hold on.” Think about it: we are speaking about a great rabbi, a great tzaddik, who knew Torah, Chassidus, Kabbalah, halachah, and both the revealed and hidden dimensions of Torah. Yet it was this message from the Baal Shem Tov’s teaching that gave him the strength to hold on in his hardest

16:38 moments. What does that tell us? We are speaking here about the imprisonment each of us experiences. There are different kinds of imprisonment. Chassidus explains that the Divine soul within each of us is imprisoned: imprisoned by the body, by the animal soul, by the yetzer hara. And if we speak about our times, we are in galus. Galus as a whole is one great imprisonment. In fact, the Rebbe once said that the Frierdiker Rebbe wrote his account of his imprisonment not just to tell us stories or leave us a record of history. He wanted to give us the message, the guidance, and the strength to face moments of spiritual imprisonment in our own lives. This knowledge, this message, this point matters when you find yourself thinking—yes, there are moments when thoughts come that can bring you down, as we discussed. What will happen to the family? What about this? How will I manage with...? Those thoughts can bring you down and break you. But when I hold on to this point, to the Baal Shem Tov’s teaching about hashgachah pratis, and ask myself, “Where is Hashem in all of this?”—Hashem embodies goodness; Hashem is the source of holiness, goodness, and light. Surely Hashem is doing only good here. At this moment I cannot understand it, but there is hashgachah pratis here. Every detail is precise. The time will come when I can see the light that was within this darkness. This is an immensely powerful point. When we manage to internalize the Baal Shem Tov’s teaching about hashgachah pratis, it gives us a way of seeing things

19:00 A healthy outlook, a proper outlook, one that lights our way through life. The darkness of galus is described in the sefarim through the idea of plowing and sowing. That is exactly the point here. When you plow a field and sow it, darkness follows. What does darkness mean? Nothing. Zero. You took seeds, put them into the ground, plowed the soil—and now, darkness. Nothing. There is nothing to see. The seeds in the ground begin to decay, and for a while, what do you see? A field with nothing in it. Zero. But this is where growth begins. Suddenly something starts to sprout, and then you discover that all that work was sowing that led to tremendous growth. Our Geulah, in fact, is compared to plowing, sowing, and growth. The well-known Gemara in Makkos tells the story of Rabbi Akiva. Rabbi Akiva was with his colleagues, and from Mount Scopus they looked toward the site of the Beis Hamikdash. They saw a fox emerging from the Holy of Holies, and they began to weep. They tore their garments, performing keriah as required by halachah. They wept at such a sight, while Rabbi Akiva began to laugh and dance. They asked him, “Rabbi Akiva, why are you laughing? Don’t you see what is happening here? A fox—in the holiest place in the world, a place no outsider may enter, where only the Kohen Gadol entered once a year—and now foxes roam there. How can you remain calm, let alone laugh?” What did Rabbi Akiva tell them? He cited a verse that gave him strength, the strength to laugh even at such a moment. Rabbi Akiva was not complacent. He was not indifferent to the situation. He did not say, “What is happening here doesn’t concern me.” G-d forbid. Rabbi Akiva knew, understood, and felt keenly exactly

21:29 what was happening. But Rabbi Akiva told them: There is a verse in Tanach. The prophet, speaking of the destruction of the Beis Hamikdash, says, “Zion shall be plowed like a field.” The verse about the destruction tells us: Know that a time will come when Zion shall be plowed like a field. Read superficially, it means that the destruction at the site of the Beis Hamikdash will be so great that the nations will come and plow it. And that is what happened, as the Gemara tells us. At one point in history, they came and not only destroyed the Beis Hamikdash, but plowed the site and turned it into a field. They wanted no trace of the Beis Hamikdash to remain. But Rabbi Akiva sees something else here. “Zion shall be plowed like a field.” That means there is sowing here, and from it will come extraordinary growth. The light of the Geulah will grow from this sowing; precisely through this plowing, something immense will emerge. And so he says: The moment I saw this prophecy fulfilled, I became certain that the prophecy “Old men and old women shall yet sit in the streets of Jerusalem, each with a staff in hand,” and so on, will also be fulfilled. Those wonderful verses describe the beauty of Jerusalem and of Eretz Yisroel in the era of the Geulah. And this must be true for each and every one of us. The message, the guiding principle of our lives, is to internalize the Baal Shem Tov’s teaching about hashgachah pratis: every detail in the world—the wind moving the trees, the leaf that fell from a tree, the worm making its way along, and the connections between every detail and the smallest details—serves a Divine purpose. Everything comes to fulfill the Divine purpose of making this world a dwelling place for Hakadosh Boruch Hu. So there must be something positive in it, something blessed, something wonderful, even though, sadly, there are parts we do not yet understand. Do we expect to understand every

23:50 detail? We are talking about Hakadosh Boruch Hu’s Divine plan, with His infinite wisdom, while we are very small people whose understanding is very, very limited. Do we expect our limited understanding to grasp the infinite wisdom of the Infinite One? There is no way. But we can be certain. Once we take hashgachah pratis to heart, we know not only that things will ultimately be good and that in the end everything will be all right. We know that, in the end, we will discover that within all this darkness there is something immense, positive, wonderful, and blessed, which we cannot yet understand. That is why the prophet Yeshayahu says that when Moshiach comes, “On that day you will say: I thank You, Hashem, for You were angry with me.” We will thank Hakadosh Boruch Hu even for the pain and suffering of galus, because only then will we understand what grew from this plowing. The Rebbe spoke about this several times. I was privileged to be at the Rebbe’s farbrengens connected with these days, when the Rebbe referred to the events of 15 Sivan. I remember that in 5748 and 5749, the Rebbe addressed this point. The Rebbe spoke about how he had been there on the night of the arrest, 15 Sivan. He saw it all. He was passing along the street just as the police entered the home of the Frierdiker Rebbe. The Rebbe was not yet married then; he was engaged. He was downstairs in the street, and he immediately sensed and understood what had happened. He did what he could—he did a great deal—to lessen the severity of the decree. But he was present that night and knew everything that happened. Years later, the Rebbe spoke about that night. He said it had been a dark night, an exceedingly dark night. It was

26:00 one of the hardest nights of his life, because everything looked as bad as it possibly could. By the laws of nature, there was no way out. And today, the Rebbe said then—I remember hearing the Rebbe speak about it—today, years later, we look back at that day, that night of 15 Sivan. The night that had seemed the darkest, the worst, and the most difficult was actually the night that led to his rescue. Because of that night, 15 Sivan, the day of Gimmel Tammuz finally came, when the Frierdiker Rebbe was able to leave prison. On 12 Tammuz he was freed from exile, and eventually he left Russia altogether. He left with his family, his sefarim, and his library, as is well known. He could then continue spreading Yiddishkeit and the wellsprings of Chassidus without restriction, ultimately coming to America, and so on. And all of that began on the night of 15 Sivan. Here, then, said the Rebbe, is a very tangible example of light’s superiority emerging from darkness. It shows us concretely that the darkness of galus is actually the sowing from which something much deeper, more wonderful, and stronger will grow. May Hakadosh Boruch Hu give us the strength to truly see that growth in our lives, so that the darkness will not conceal it from us. May we already be able to see it with our physical eyes in these days, when we face a monster, evil, darkness—doubled and redoubled darkness. Especially now, we must reflect on the Baal Shem Tov’s teaching, on hashgachah pratis, and know that Hakadosh Boruch Hu places me in the particular position where I need to be. There is the soldier fighting on the front line, and there is the Jew in his city or his country, standing strong in his Yiddishkeit, observing Torah and mitzvos, and bringing another Jew to fulfill

28:11 a mitzvah. It is all for the purpose of transforming the darkness, so that we can see the whole picture, the entire puzzle. Then we will understand all the light and its goodness, and we will truly be able to thank Hakadosh Boruch Hu: “I thank You, Hashem, for You were angry with me.” Or, as it says in that same chapter, “Give thanks to Hashem, call upon His name; make His deeds known among the nations.” May this happen and be visible to our physical eyes. May we merit to see the complete Geulah through Moshiach Tzidkeinu, speedily in our days, amen.