The Secret of Exile and Redemption Revealed by the Baal Shem Tov | Tisha B'Av in Light of Chassidus

00:00 What does exile mean? We are in the Nine Days, and we speak about exile. There is the profound exile: the exile of the Shechinah, the exile of the Jewish people from the Land of Israel, the destruction of the Beis Hamikdash. But Chassidus speaks about another kind of exile as well. In fact, the deepest aspect of exile begins with the exile of the soul. The destruction of the Beis Hamikdash, the Alter Rebbe says, is the destruction of the inner holiness within each of us. The destruction of Jerusalem is the destruction of yirah, reverence. Jerusalem is “complete reverence”: the destruction of the complete reverence within the soul. The exile of the Shechinah is the exile of the soul. The soul is literally a part of G-d above. When the soul is in exile in our service of Hashem, the Shechinah is in exile. The Gemara quotes Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai: “The Jewish people are beloved before Hakadosh Boruch Hu, for wherever they were exiled, the Shechinah went with them.” When a Jew is in exile, the Shechinah is in exile, because the soul within the Jew is literally a part of G-d above. So when the Jew is in exile, the Shechinah is in exile. Today, then, we’ll talk about the inner exile. This is the principal exile that each and every one of us needs to mourn during these days—and to leave behind, to free ourselves from it. We’ll understand what this exile is, and what we can actually do to free ourselves from it. We’ll take a verse from Megillas Eichah. Today we’ll discuss a verse in the Megillah that, through the Baal Shem Tov’s explanation and the maamarim of Chassidus, will open our eyes to its deeper meaning: what this inner exile is, what inner Geulah is, and how we can free ourselves and emerge into freedom, into complete Geulah within the soul. And may we also merit the complete Geulah for which we all wait, with the building of the third Beis Hamikdash in the holy city of Jerusalem. The verse is in the final chapter, chapter five, of Megillas Eichah, the first verse: “Remember, Hashem, what has happened to us; look and see our disgrace.” In the plain meaning, a Jew turns to Hakadosh Boruch Hu

02:31 with a cry, an outcry, and tears, and says: “Master of the Universe, remember, Hashem, what has happened to us.” May Hakadosh Boruch Hu take notice and remember what we are going through. “Look and see our disgrace”—may Hakadosh Boruch Hu see our disgrace in this terrible exile among the nations. This whole chapter, the last chapter of Eichah, is an extraordinarily powerful chapter. It describes the darkness and the exile, and the plea and the inner cry with which we conclude the Megillah: “Bring us back to You, Hashem, and we will return. Renew our days as of old.” May we finally merit to see the complete Geulah and the renewal we are all waiting for. Regarding these words, “Remember, Hashem, what has happened to us; look and see our disgrace,” let’s begin with what the Zohar says. We’ll bring a wonderful explanation from the Baal Shem Tov—actually, two explanations. If we look deeply at this verse, we’ll see that it describes the very nature of exile, while also offering the way to leave exile for inner Geulah. Both are found in the same verse. The Zohar says that the Jewish people turn to Hakadosh Boruch Hu and say, “Remember, Hashem, what has happened to us.” The obvious question is: What does it mean that we have to remind Hakadosh Boruch Hu? Has Hakadosh Boruch Hu, so to speak, forgotten us? Is there forgetfulness Above? “There is no forgetfulness before Your Throne of Glory.” What does it mean for a Jew to say to Hakadosh Boruch Hu, “Remember, Hashem,” as though we need to remind Him? Especially since later in that same chapter we say, “Why do You forget us forever, abandon us for so long?” What does “forget us” mean? “Abandon us”? Does Hakadosh Boruch Hu truly forget us? Does Hakadosh Boruch Hu need us to remind Him? The Zohar says: Hakadosh Boruch Hu says to the Jewish people, “I, too, spoke to you in terms of remembrance.” It cites a verse from Tanach: “My people, please remember what Balak king of Moav plotted, and what

04:47 Bilaam son of Beor answered him.” In other words, Hakadosh Boruch Hu reminds the Jewish people: I, too, spoke to you in terms of remembrance—“My people, please remember.” Remember what? All the miracles and wonders that took place in the wilderness. Balak king of Moav sent Bilaam, wanting to wipe out the Jewish people, and the curses turned into blessings. “And what Bilaam son of Beor answered him.” Remember those miracles and wonders. Remember how I turned the curse into a blessing: “Hashem your G-d refused to listen to Bilaam, and Hashem your G-d turned the curse into a blessing for you, because Hashem your G-d loves you.” And the verse in Koheles says, “Remember your Creator in the days of your youth.” The Midrash says of “Remember your Creator in the days of your youth”: Hakadosh Boruch Hu says to the Jewish people, You were meant to remember Hakadosh Boruch Hu in the days when you had the Beis Hamikdash—to serve Hashem then, to remember Hashem. But we forgot, and because we forgot, He, so to speak, acts as though He has forgotten us. That brought us to a point where we suddenly have to cry out, “Remember, Hashem, what has happened to us.” What is the meaning of the Zohar’s words? What is this remembrance that Hakadosh Boruch Hu speaks of when He tells the Jewish people, “Remember your Creator,” “My people, please remember”? What is our forgetfulness, and how did it lead, measure for measure, to a state of seeming forgetfulness Above instead of remembrance? If we look within the soul, at a person’s power of memory—forgetting and remembering—Chassidus explains something remarkable about the difference between what a person remembers and what a person forgets. We can see it ourselves. What does a person remember, and what does he forget? We don’t forget things that truly matter to us, things that touch an inner part of the soul. When something truly, truly grips a person

07:01 in a deep place, an emotional place, an inner place, I feel it. Things like that I’ll remember for a long time. If something happened to me—someone showed me kindness, someone did me a favor, or I did something myself—if it truly touched me, if it was something deep that reached my soul, I’ll remember it forever. The things we forget are things we weren’t really present for. In other words, even when we were there, we weren’t there. We did them in a state Chassidus calls “backwardness”: I wasn’t truly there. I did it halfheartedly; I did it without enthusiasm. In the language of Chassidus, this is the distinction between inwardness and outwardness. Something a person is inwardly present for, he will remember. Something a person does only outwardly, he won’t remember. This is what the verse says: “For they turned their backs to Me and not their faces.” Our service of Hashem needs to be face-to-face. Our inner selves need to be connected with the inner dimension Above, with Hakadosh Boruch Hu. But when a person is in a state of “turning the back”—“they turned their backs to Me”—he does serve Hashem, observes mitzvos, studies Torah, and davens, but it is done with his back turned, as it were. He does these things, but he isn’t living them. He doesn’t do them with vitality. That is what causes forgetfulness. So a person suddenly forgets to daven, forgets to study, forgets the time for reciting Shema. He might forget a halachah here or a ruling there. Why? Because I’m not living it from a deep, inner place. And this, essentially, is the prophet’s claim here: “Remember your Creator.” If our service of Hashem is a matter of remembrance—meaning that a person is truly wholly immersed in it and lives his service of Hashem,

09:01 He lives more with a sense of inner renewal. He approaches it as our Sages say: “They should be new in your eyes every day.” For someone who wants that, every day is new. And then, from Heaven, Hakadosh Boruch Hu also relates to us with remembrance. He does not forget the Jewish people. He remembers us and bestows every kind of good upon us—children, health, livelihood, and whatever each person needs. But when a person turns away—“they turned their backs to Me”—and serves Hashem in an outward way, that causes Hakadosh Boruch Hu, so to speak, to bestow upon the Jewish people in an outward way as well. The blessing comes externally, without inwardness, without vitality, without eagerness. Over time, this can also lead to darkness growing stronger, impurity growing stronger, and the sitra achra growing stronger. That is what brought about exile. And that is really what we say—no, what do we say here? “Remember, Hashem, what has happened to us.” We ask Hakadosh Boruch Hu to remember, to awaken that aspect of remembrance. “Look and see our disgrace”—see the disgrace of the Jewish people in exile. By awakening in teshuvah, we ask Hakadosh Boruch Hu to remember as well, to awaken His inner desire, His inner love for the Jewish people. And so: “Why would You forget us forever, abandon us for so long? Bring us back to You, Hashem, and we will return. Renew our days as of old.” May we merit a renewal of Hashem’s countenance, a renewal of His inwardness. “Renew our days as of old.” This is really the request for the Geulah. That is the straightforward meaning of these verses. But what are we really asking for here in Megillas Eichah? Here we come to a wonderful interpretation from the Baal Shem Tov. As we said, everything has an application in serving Hashem. The Baal Shem Tov taught his students the deeper meaning of “Remember, Hashem, what has happened to us.” There are two sides to the verse: its painful side, the side of exile, and its other side, the side of Geulah. These are two stories about the Baal Shem Tov that the Frierdiker Rebbe recorded in one of his maamarim of Chassidus.

11:13 During the Second World War, the Frierdiker Rebbe would print a maamar of Chassidus in Yiddish every month. Yiddish was the language spoken then by the Jews in America, and the purpose was to awaken them to teshuvah and prepare them for the Geulah. Each month he would write and publish one of his maamarim of Chassidus. In one of them, he explains the verse “Remember, Hashem, what has happened to us; look and see our disgrace,” and brings two stories about the holy Baal Shem Tov. In the first, he says that the Baal Shem Tov once visited a beis midrash, a yeshivah. A gathering of great Torah scholars was taking place there. They were discussing Torah in depth, analyzing and debating its finer points. The Baal Shem Tov was present at that gathering. He watched the Torah scholars learning and debating halachah with one another. Their Torah study was very beautiful to see, but the Baal Shem Tov also noticed a trace of pride, an air of arrogance. There was a feeling of pride in their greatness in Torah: “I am greater than you; I can defeat your argument.” He sensed something in their Torah study that did not sit well with him. It lacked self-effacement and humility, and something was lacking in their attitude toward the ordinary Jew as well. The Baal Shem Tov stood up and spoke in praise of the Jewish people. At that gathering, he explained: “Every Jew has a soul. A Jew’s soul is literally a part of G-d Above. In the language of Kabbalah, this aspect of a Jew’s soul is called the name Mah.” Why Mah? There is a verse in which Moshe Rabbeinu says of himself and Aharon the Kohen, “And what are we?” And Aharon—

13:35 What is he? The verse in the Torah says several times, “And what are we, that you should complain against us?” What does “what are we” mean? It is an expression of humility, of self-effacement. Kabbalah and the Zohar explain that the word mah—“what”—means “Who am I? What am I?” It expresses self-effacement and humility. The word mah has the same numerical value as the Divine Name Yud-Hei-Vav-Hei when each letter is spelled out in a particular way. We write not just the four letters themselves, but each letter in full: yud-vav-dalet, hei-alef, vav-alef-vav, hei-alef. The numerical value of all those letters is forty-five, the value of mah. This is the mah within the soul. The soul’s capacity for self-effacement is the essence of a Jew. Every Jew has a part of G-d Above, literally. It makes no difference whether he is a Torah scholar or an ordinary person, whether he is this sort of person or that sort of person. Every Jew, whoever he may be, has this mah within his soul from the moment he is born to Jewish parents. But sometimes that mah is in exile. The soul is in exile. When a Jew studies Torah, but instead of studying with self-effacement, he studies with pride and arrogance, feels full of himself as he learns, and looks down on someone else, then that Torah study is in exile. This is what the verse is speaking about. It is, in effect, the complaint of the prophet Yirmiyahu over the exile of the Jewish people: “Remember, Hashem, what has happened to us.” The mah, that self-effacement, is in exile. Instead of finding expression in the service of Hashem, the mah is caught up in the exile of the Shechinah. What is in the darkness of exile? “What has happened to us? Look and see our disgrace.” What a disgrace it is for the soul to be in such a state, when the powers of the soul are found in places that are not

15:41 desirable. But here too, the Baal Shem Tov said—and this is the second story he explained to his students—there is also a positive, wonderful side, which is found in the very same verse: the capacity for self-effacement that every Jew possesses, the capacity for self-sacrifice. He then tells the second story. The Baal Shem Tov took his students to a village where Jews lived—ordinary people who worked the land and labored hard for their livelihood. He showed his students these Jews in the village: simple people who worked very hard to earn a living. One member of the community had been imprisoned because he had not paid what he owed, and the landowner had taken him into custody. All the Jews then came together, collected money, took out loans, and helped that Jew gain his release. The Baal Shem Tov said, “Look at the Ahavas Yisroel of these ordinary Jews.” Then he told them: Let us take that same verse, “Remember, Hashem, what has happened to us.” We are, as it were, saying to Hakadosh Boruch Hu: We are in exile, in the darkness of exile, when Divine light does not shine. But look at this. Look at the mah. Look at the Jewish people’s capacity for self-effacement. See how one Jew sets aside his pride and his own desires, putting himself to one side. They left everything they had and gave everything they had to help another Jew, to save him. “Look and see our disgrace,” said the Baal Shem Tov: we ask Hakadosh Boruch Hu to look and see how we put ourselves at risk. See how Jews can risk their lives, with self-sacrifice, to help another Jew, to do another Jew a favor. Ahavas Yisroel expressed through self-sacrifice. So here we can

17:58 We can see how that same verse has a double meaning. It tells us the depth of exile, and it also tells us the depth of Geulah. On one hand, the verse says, “What has happened to us?” The “what” within the soul is in the darkness of exile, of our inner exile, when we “turn our backs to Me.” Instead of living and serving Hashem with self-nullification, dedication, renewal, and fresh vitality, a Jew forgets. He serves Hakadosh Boruch Hu outwardly, as though turning his back. He is not immersed in serving Hashem; he has no desire, no vitality. “They turned their backs to Me and not their faces”—and that brings about the exile of the Shechinah. But at the same time, the secret of Geulah is here too. Here is the extraordinary strength a Jew has, with which he can overcome every trial. As Chassidus explains, the immense power of self-sacrifice, the “what” within the soul, the power of self-nullification, shines most wondrously precisely in the darkness of exile and in the hardest times. The Rebbe Rashab explains the verse, “And the man Moshe was exceedingly humble, more than any person on the face of the earth.” What was Moshe Rabbeinu’s humility? What does “more than any person on the face of the earth” mean? Who is that person? The Rebbe Rashab gives a wonderful explanation: it is our generation, the last generation of exile, ikvesa d’Meshicha—the “heels of Moshiach,” as the Gemara in tractate Sotah calls it. The heels are at the very end, the very lowest part. The Jewish people are at the end of exile, in its deepest darkness. And here we see self-sacrifice of a kind never before seen in the history of the Jewish people. Precisely in these last generations, we are eyewitnesses to the extraordinary dedication

20:07 of Jews who serve Hashem even to the point of actual self-sacrifice. This is found in the later generations more than in the earlier ones, and it is what made Moshe Rabbeinu so humble. Hakadosh Boruch Hu showed Moshe Rabbeinu all the generations, as the Midrash says. “Ascend to the summit of Pisgah,” in this week’s parsha, Parshas Va’eschanan, “and look westward, northward, and southward.” Hakadosh Boruch Hu showed Moshe Rabbeinu every generation until the end of all generations—to the very last day, the Midrash says. He saw everything. He saw our generation. He saw the last generations: terrible darkness, the greatest trials. And despite it all, a Jew stands firm. A Jew stands with self-sacrifice. He is not shaken by any of it. He is ready to risk his life to do a favor for another Jew, to save another Jew, to fulfill a mitzvah, to serve Hakadosh Boruch Hu. This is what Moshe Rabbeinu saw in “any person on the face of the earth”: the end of days, the last generation of all the generations on earth. And that made him humble. Moshe Rabbeinu said: We lived in a generation of knowledge, a generation of miracles and wonders. If we were there, who knows what we would have been like? That brought Moshe to the most profound humility and self-nullification. Our generation is called ikvesa d’Meshicha—the heels. Chassidus explains that it is easier to put your heels into boiling water than to put your head in. It is harder for the head, easier for the heels. The generations of the “head” were the earlier generations, when there was a Beis Hamikdash—wonderful generations. But self-sacrifice, standing firm through trials, is found especially in the last generation, when the trials are hardest. The Frierdiker Rebbe speaks at length in his maamarim about the hardest trial of our generation: “Do not be ashamed before those who mock” your service of Hashem. We

22:18 live in a generation of mockers, of every kind. They interfere, mock, laugh, dismiss, and belittle. A Jew has to stand strong—not be shaken, not be intimidated, not bend. He must stand firm and serve Hakadosh Boruch Hu with Jewish pride and joy. That is the greatest and hardest trial: putting the heels into boiling water. It is from this that Moshe Rabbeinu drew his humility, and this is the strength of our generation. This is what we say in the Megillah of Eichah: “Remember, Hashem, what has happened to us.” We ask Hakadosh Boruch Hu to take notice and see the “what” that is within us: the strength, the self-nullification, the power of self-sacrifice—the “what” within the soul that shines especially now, in the darkness of exile. “Look and see our disgrace”: see how a Jew risks his life for the sanctification of Hashem’s name to save another Jew and help him, materially or spiritually. This is what will break the darkness of exile and bring the light of Geulah. May Hakadosh Boruch Hu help us. We have already gone through enough of exile’s trials. We have also gone through enough of the final trial of not being ashamed before those who mock. May we soon, in our days, see the fulfillment of the words, “Remember, Hashem, what has happened to us; look and see our disgrace. Why do You forget us forever, abandon us for so long?” And may the words be fulfilled: “Bring us back to You, Hashem, and we will return; renew our days as of old.” May we see the renewal of the great light, the new light. “Shine a new light upon Zion, and may we soon merit its light”—the light of the complete Geulah through our righteous Moshiach. May these days be transformed into joy, gladness, and festivals.