What to Do If I Have No Strength to Learn? - Rabbi Levi Yitzchok Hillel shlita

00:02 Speaker 1 You’re listening to “Lema’an Yishme’u,” a podcast of Machon Halacha Chabad.

00:09 Speaker 2 All right, so until the l’chaim reaches you, my students, virtually, as they say. There’s a familiar phenomenon, especially among us Chabad chassidim: whenever a holiday comes around, we see in the Rebbe’s sichos, maamarim, remarks, farbrengens, and so on that the Rebbe speaks about that holiday’s theme. If it’s Sukkos, for example, the Rebbe speaks about joy: the whole theme is joy and the ushpizin, with entire talks devoted to it. Then Chanukah arrives, and the Rebbe begins speaking about “making them forget Your Torah,” the oil of Torah, and so on and so forth. So the question arises—and someone once asked the Rebbe this too—what, then, is the main thing? What should we focus on? Every time a holiday comes around, suddenly that becomes the central theme. So what is the main thing we should focus on all the time? Joy? The luminary within the Torah? This or that? At Pesach, freedom, and so on? What should we focus on? The Rebbe addressed this and said that since the Torah is a Torah of life—and Torah is related to the word hora’ah, “instruction,” as everyone knows—it is all true. It’s just that with each holiday, we emphasize that holiday’s central theme. We make a big fuss and a lot of noise about it. But in truth, all these themes are true, and each is central. It’s just that on each holiday we emphasize the theme it reflects. So on Chanukah, the theme really is the oil of Torah, the luminary within the Torah, and we emphasize that. On Sukkos, it’s joy. And for our purposes, when we come to the fifteenth of Shvat—as the Rebbe would say; the Rebbe never used the term “Tu BiShvat,” which is so common today, but always said “the fifteenth of Shvat”—when we’re at the fifteenth of Shvat, we need to speak about its central theme. And by Divine Providence, that is relevant to you, especially to yeshiva students. Why? Quite apart from the fifteenth of Shvat itself being the New Year for trees, as stated in the Mishnah,

02:11 Speaker 2 in 5730 something significant happened among the Jewish people. I don’t know if you all know this, but perhaps the first mivtza—though it wasn’t really the first. Just a moment, let me have a little [unclear]. Yes: “Blessed are You, Hashem our G-d, King of the universe, Who creates the fruit of the vine.” So the first mivtza the Rebbe launched was in what year? Well? When did the Rebbe launch the first mivtza? ’27? What was it? Mivtza Tefillin, after the Six-Day War, when everyone saw that the land... Sorry, yes, the Six-Day War. In 5730, the Rebbe launched a mivtza that, for some reason, you might say has been somewhat “pushed aside”: Mivtza Torah. The Rebbe began it on the fifteenth of Shvat 5730. The Rebbe spoke about this mivtza in very remarkable and special terms, with tremendous emphasis, as they say. Now, thank G-d, you are Temimim. You have the privilege of sitting and learning in yeshiva. I remember this zal from—yes, seventeen years ago. Seventeen or eighteen years ago I came in here, and I was here fifteen years ago too. Yes, we were here in this zal; not much has changed. And I remember they used to tell us that because we were Temimim at that point, we had a problem: we couldn’t understand the maamarim. What does that mean? I don’t know what they give you to learn in Chassidus now, but at least in the first year, there were the maamarim and the collected volumes of the Frierdiker Rebbe, those brown ones.

03:51 Speaker 1 Second and third years.

03:52 Speaker 2 Second and third years, the brown ones, the...

03:53 Speaker 1 It’s marked here.

03:55 Speaker 2 Oh, okay, so the second and third years are here. In the Frierdiker Rebbe’s maamarim and those brown collected volumes, volumes one, two, and three, they often speak about “many waters” and the burdens of earning a living—about whether a person is immersed in it or not, immersed in Torah or immersed in worldly matters. They used to say we had a problem: we couldn’t understand those maamarim. Why? Because we were learning about “many waters,” but we had no idea what “many waters” meant. And why didn’t we know? Because we went home, ate, drank, came back to yeshiva, and learned. You had no burdens or worries at all. You learned about “many waters,” and so on—yes, about earning a living, and a person needing this or that and not giving up. And I can tell you emphatically: you don’t understand these things. Why am I saying that? Because when they said it to me, I didn’t understand why I didn’t understand either. You have to grow up a bit, get married, and so on. As the Alter Rebbe says, “a millstone around his neck,” after two or three years. But I’m saying this because you are at a time of life when nothing could be better. I can tell you, nothing is better than sitting and learning in peace, with your mind completely clear. You don’t have to pay a mortgage bill, or for gas or electricity—you don’t have to pay for anything. Your mind is completely free for Torah over the next six years, from the first year of the junior yeshiva through the third year of the senior yeshiva, and also during your year in 770 and beyond. Your mind is completely free of worldly worries. So those who are obligated, and privileged, to be at the forefront of Mivtza Torah, at the very tip of the spear, are our young people—you. And I want to tell you something. I gave a great deal of thought to whether to read this letter. I have

05:37 Speaker 2 here a letter from the Frierdiker Rebbe. As you know, the Frierdiker Rebbe had a very sharp style. The Frierdiker Rebbe did not go easy on people. Someone told me that the Rebbe speaks to our generation very gently, because the Rebbe inherited what you might call a weakened generation, after the Holocaust. Most of the serious chassidim, at least, were killed in the Holocaust or scattered to all sorts of places. But the Frierdiker Rebbe was still speaking to a generation of mesirus nefesh, and he had to give it to them straight. So the Frierdiker Rebbe speaks a little more sharply than usual. I hesitated over whether to bring this letter here, because it is very sharp. But I said to myself: since we are close to Yud Shvat—as the Rebbe says, “close by and within sight”—the Frierdiker Rebbe’s theme is still in the air, so perhaps we can read it. But you need to approach it with a mature mind. Without that, it could be a little crushing; with it, you can take it in. It’s a very special letter, and I’ll read it to you. Again, your primary occupation is Torah. That’s not something I said. I wouldn’t presume to say it on my own; the Rebbe says it in countless places. A yeshiva student’s primary occupation is learning Torah. It’s the obvious thing. I assume your mashpi’im and teachers already tell you this often enough, but I’ll read you an excerpt from a letter of the Frierdiker Rebbe. You learn a great deal of Chassidus, thank G-d, so you can approach it with a mature mind. You know how to understand what he means. The Frierdiker Rebbe writes in a letter to a certain chossid—it’s in volume 7, page 404. It’s a letter from [unclear]. The Frierdiker Rebbe writes to that chossid as follows. He doesn’t give the chossid’s name, of course, because what

07:17 Speaker 2 What he writes here is not exactly gentle—he doesn’t handle him with kid gloves—so they didn’t want his name known. He writes: “I am surprised that you do not write to me which of the classes taught by my dear friend, the distinguished Rabbi, my beloved student, who does his Creator’s will by spreading proper Jewish education and strengthening Yiddishkeit, etc.”—a long list of titles—“our esteemed Rabbi Sholom Zalman, may he live, of Anash in Lubavitch, you attend.” I read that a bit quickly; let me explain. The Frierdiker Rebbe is telling him: I’m surprised you don’t write to me which classes you attend. The Frierdiker Rebbe gives Rabbi Sholom Zalman a whole string of titles here. He used to give classes in a shul called Lubavitch. I’m surprised you don’t tell me which of Rabbi Sholom Zalman’s classes you attend. I want you to write me about that. “For you know,” says the Frierdiker Rebbe, “you know that Anash setting fixed times to study Torah, both nigleh and Chassidus, touches my very soul.” He’s saying: You know that this matter of the householders—and here we’re talking about householders, not Temimim—the householders, that Anash should sit down and study Torah, nigleh and Chassidus, touches the very essence of my soul. “And this is the thread that binds us together.” The Frierdiker Rebbe is telling him: What connects me to you? Your Torah study. Now look at the next passage. It’s very sharp, and also very unusual. The Frierdiker Rebbe says: “For without this”—meaning, without studying nigleh and Chassidus—“for without this, what do you have to do with me? Keep what is yours, and I will have nothing to do with you, neither in material matters nor in arousing mercy.” You see what the Frierdiker Rebbe writes to him here. I’ll read it again: “And this is the thread that binds us together.” Meaning, Torah study is what connects us to one another—nigleh and Chassidus. That’s what

09:14 Speaker 2 connects us to one another. “For without this”—meaning, without Torah study—“what do you have to do with me? Keep what is yours, and I will have nothing to do with you, neither in material matters nor in arousing mercy.” I don’t know if there is anything sharper than this in the writings: the Frierdiker Rebbe makes the bond between a Rebbe and a chossid depend on learning. And the Frierdiker Rebbe continues. What does that mean—am I punishing you? If you don’t learn, I punish you? If you don’t learn, I won’t help you or bless you? No. The Frierdiker Rebbe says: I’ll explain why. If you don’t learn, I can’t—I have no connection with you. Why? So to speak. “For how can I face my holy fathers, our holy Rebbeim, whose souls are in Gan Eden, and ask on behalf of those who pay no attention to their instructions to set fixed times for Torah study and to daven with concentration?” The Frierdiker Rebbe is telling him: I come to ask for abundant mercy for you. What is the Frierdiker Rebbe saying? If you don’t study Torah, I can’t. You don’t... What is the wording? I’ll read it: “And I will have nothing to do with you, neither in material matters nor in arousing mercy.” What does that mean? The Frierdiker Rebbe says: I want to daven for you, to arouse abundant mercy for you. And how does the Frierdiker Rebbe do that? He goes to daven at the resting places of our Rebbeim to arouse mercy. But how can I come before them? What will I say? Arouse mercy for so-and-so, son of so-and-so—who does what? Who doesn’t do what you tell him, who doesn’t sit down to learn. The Frierdiker Rebbe says: That’s impossible. And here he continues to rebuke him a little, telling him that all the apologies and excuses for not learning are foolish and empty excuses. And he concludes with these words. The Frierdiker Rebbe also gives him—how should I put it—gives him... You know,

10:56 Speaker 2 it’s like this: there’s a concept called a support group. May you never need one. A support group is for people going through some kind of crisis or things like that. You can encourage them once, but you can also create an ongoing group that meets once a week, where they talk about it and work through it more and more, supporting them week after week, because once isn’t enough. The Frierdiker Rebbe says: I want you to make yourself a one-person support group. Look at this. The Frierdiker Rebbe says: “Read these words of mine two or three times.” Don’t be satisfied with reading the letter once. Read it twice or three times, until the words become fixed in your heart and you remember them. He goes on to discuss various things here; they aren’t relevant right now. We see from this just how... I’m bringing this letter because it’s from the Frierdiker Rebbe. We’re learning close to 19 Kislev, and we understand the essence of Torah study, of nigleh, of Chassidus. What is it? It’s a connection to the Rebbe, nothing less. And there’s the well-known maamar the Rebbe cites, about someone who asks how his connection to me is expressed. There are maamarim and sichos about this. There’s no need to elaborate on things that are clear and obvious. So someone might come along and say: Fine. Studying Torah is important, and nigleh and Chassidus are very important, even. But what does the Gemara say? “The Torah was given only to those who ate the manna.” Apparently, that’s not for me. Some people belong to the generation of knowledge; they ate the manna. Some people, well, Hakadosh Boruch Hu blessed them with talents, and that’s why they succeed. But me—what do I have to do with, in quotation marks, “this trouble”? It’s not for me. I want to, but I don’t... I just can’t manage it. I want to tell you a story that happened in a yeshiva, and I won’t say which yeshiva. This is what happened: There was

12:46 Speaker 2 a young bochur who just couldn’t learn. For some reason, his mind was blocked; he couldn’t learn. He tried and tried, but couldn’t. A chavrusa wasn’t helping him; he didn’t have any chavrusas. So what do you do when you don’t have a chavrusa? What’s your solution? You go to the mashgiach, you go to the mashpia: Find me a chavrusa. That’s how it works. They start arranging things... But this young fellow was a little more creative. He said: We’ll do this differently and find a chavrusa on our own—one who’ll go along with anything, no problem. What did he do? He went out of the yeshiva and came back with a wooden scarecrow. The rabbi asked him: What’s that? He said: This is my chavrusa from now on. It’s a true story; I’m not making anything up here. He seated the scarecrow on a chair opposite him. He sat on a chair, the scarecrow sat across from him, and he began to learn. And of course, he had to explain what they were learning to his chavrusa. He tried to explain it, tried again, though he himself could barely understand what he was learning. He tried again and again, and at a certain point, his explanation wasn’t going well. So he shouted at the scarecrow, because as far as he was concerned, he understood it. It was only the other one, supposedly—the scarecrow—who didn’t understand. So he said to him—and he said it in Yiddish; I’ll give you the original Yiddish, because it sounds more vivid in Yiddish—he said: “Holtzene kop, holtzene kop.” Not a block of wood—a wooden head. Because this scarecrow was made of wood, right? A wooden head. “Farshteyst nisht?” You didn’t understand? All right, we’ll go over it again. And so, every time he explained some point and he himself couldn’t understand it, he would shout: Wooden head! Holtzene kop! You didn’t understand? Then we’ll explain it again. And that’s how he

14:37 Speaker 2 He went and came back, and came back, and came back, and in the end, somehow, he went at it with all his strength. And indeed, the Gemara says, “The Torah I learned through hardship is what has stood by me.” When a person learns through hardship, through difficulty, that is what stays with him. So he grew into an enormous Torah scholar, someone with tremendous knowledge of Gemara, Bava—what was it—Tosafos. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but his knowledge was extraordinary. Huh? Apparently, if a scarecrow can do that, it can produce results in the end, too. Now, I’m not encouraging anyone here to show up tomorrow morning with scarecrows for morning Chassidus, or to bring scarecrows into the zal. I’m trying to explain the scarecrow. But let’s take the idea. We need to understand that when a Jew truly learns, when a bochur sits and truly learns—but what does “truly” mean? As a certain Jew once said—I think it was the Chofetz Chaim; I don’t remember exactly who said it. Someone told him, “I want to learn Torah. I want to, but I can’t manage.” So he said, “Are you sure you want to?” He answered, “Yes, I want to.” He told him, “You don’t want to. Because to really want it means to want it so much that even the hairs on your head want it.” What does that mean? You have to be completely in it. It isn’t easy. Sometimes it brings you to a place of distress, of pain, of feeling, “Well, this isn’t for me. We’ll do the seventeen; we’ll do, what’s it called, I’ll learn the Gemara, make it an obligation, pass the exam.” And every time an exam comes around, or something else comes up, you say, “Oh, another pointless blessing, or something else. We’ll drag ourselves through it.” No. That’s not the way at all, and I’ll explain. When a bochur sits and learns, besides what we saw here—which is, you know, I’m

16:19 Speaker 2 going to digress for a moment, perhaps. Besides that, when a bochur learns, he needs to know what he’s learning for, because his purpose is Torah study. That comes first. That’s your purpose. What do you do all day? What do you do all day? You get up in the morning, and from morning until evening you learn for more than twelve hours, more or less, if I’m not mistaken. Right? When does morning Chassidus begin? Seven ten?

16:39 Speaker 10 Seven thirty.

16:39 Speaker 2 Seven thirty. They’ve made it easier for you than it was for us. Nice. We had seven ten. You need to be here after mikveh. So there you go. You start learning at seven thirty, and when do you finish? At nine fifteen, nine thirty. You sit and learn for the overwhelming majority of the day. And it’s not just sitting and learning. The Rebbe says in a sicha from 5754, I think, that a woman sees one of her neighbors bring a tank home from the war. What does it mean to bring home a tank? He went off to be a soldier and became this and became that... And she scolds her husband: “Well, what are you doing? You’re learning Gemara from two thousand years ago, and what? Look at the neighbor—he brought a whole tank home.” That’s how the Rebbe puts it. And the Rebbe speaks about how she didn’t understand—and I’m saying this in light of the situation we’re in today, with the war—that her husband’s sitting here and learning was what provided the fighter with his spiritual backing. Of course, we’re not belittling the fighters, right? They deserve every honor. But we need to know that there’s a heavy responsibility on our shoulders. I remember that during one of the military operations when I was a bochur—I’ll expand on this a little—there was an arrangement where they circulated the names of soldiers around Israel: so-and-so son of so-and-so, so-and-so son of so-and-so. You would call a certain number, take the name of a soldier, and learn in his merit. So we’d be sitting in the zal learning—we were studying for semichah. There would be ten bochurim in the zal, fifteen bochurim, learning. And naturally, someone would suddenly make a joke, then he’d talk to the person next to him, and so on. Then one of the guys spoke up. He said, “Guys, this is serious. Who are you sitting and learning for? For another Jew who is on the battlefield right now, and the merit of your Torah is standing by him.” Right? So if you immediately

18:30 Speaker 2 start telling jokes and stop learning and so on, then if, G-d forbid, something happens, that’s on your head. Now I’ll tell you the truth: after he said that, for the two or three weeks that this initiative lasted, there was almost no talking in the zal. Almost none. That’s what happens when you suddenly understand the responsibility involved. Now, you don’t have soldiers’ names, but the responsibility is on you. I didn’t come to frighten anyone, but you need to know that if, G-d forbid, this had been four hundred or three hundred years ago, who knows how things like this would have ended. But today, boruch Hashem, Hakadosh Boruch Hu has provided ways to protect Jews. So we need to know that we are the rear guard, as it’s called. But it isn’t the rear guard; it’s the spiritual front line. In any case, when a bochur sits and learns, why does he learn? What are you learning for? To become a rabbi? To become a halachic authority? You’re not learning Tur here, or Shulchan Aruch. I doubt you even know who the Tur was. Who was the Tur? Who was the Tur’s father?

19:20 Speaker 10 The Rosh.

19:21 Speaker 2 And who was the Tur himself?

19:22 Speaker 10 His son.

19:23 Speaker 2 Huh?

19:24 Speaker 10 Rabbi Yaakov.

19:25 Speaker 2 Rabbi Yaakov. Where did he live?

19:27 Speaker 10 Spain.

19:29 Speaker 2 Spain? You slipped up a little there, but good. So you’re not learning halachah here. You’re learning—how should I put it?—let’s call it Torah in its pure form right now. In its pure form. You learn because it is Hashem’s Torah. You learn because that’s who you are. There was a proposal once—I don’t remember what year—to the Rebbe: when bochurim went on kevutzah, to get the army to release them, they would undergo three weeks of training at a military camp before leaving, and then go on kevutzah with proper authorization. Today, when you go on kevutzah, you essentially go without authorization, so to speak, and then you come back and it becomes a mess. There’s an agreement, you sign an agreement, you don’t sign—you’re still too young for all that. But they proposed to the Rebbe: let’s give all the bochurim permission to go, on condition that they spend three weeks in a military training camp. The Rebbe rejected it outright. The Rebbe did not agree. On a simple level, you can explain it. It’s straightforward: when you take a bochur—at what age do they draft young men into the army? At eighteen. Why? Because by then he has enough sense, but he also has enough heart. If you draft him at twenty-two, he’ll already be too much of a thinker. You need to take him at eighteen, when his blood is hot and he’s at the height of his strength. That’s the idea. Then, as they say in quotation marks, you get him fired up and immerse him in army life. Apply that to kedushah. You are bochurim, and the Rebbe speaks countless times about the special quality of youth. That’s the Rebbe’s expression, “the special quality of youth”: a young person does everything with vitality and enthusiasm, doesn’t care who stands in his way, and gives it everything he’s got. Rabbi Lishansky [unclear] once said, “Never start up with bochurim. Don’t bother bochurim.” Why? I’m not saying this, G-d forbid, about you. Because a bochur has twenty-four

21:16 Speaker 2 hours to think about how to bother you. He has time. You have commitments, a mortgage, children, things to take care of—that’s married men. A bochur has free time; he can think. Now, putting that in a positive light, you as bochurim certainly have that fire and passion within each of you. So you need to devote yourselves entirely to learning Torah. Well, someone will come along and say, “But it’s not for me. It’s not where I belong. It’s hard for me.” And that’s true. Some things are hard; some things aren’t simple. I’ll tell you: when you encounter difficult sugyos, when you reach places where you feel, “I don’t know how to learn Gemara, and it’s hard for me,” and so on—what can I tell you? I know a little from my own experience learning, too. I’ve done a few things in my life, so I can tell you this: there were outstanding people who sat here in yeshivah with me, whether in classes above mine or below mine—it doesn’t matter. Outstanding people we were sure would reach the heavens afterward, guys who really were tremendous scholars. Today they’re observant Jews, boruch Hashem, Chabad chassidim, and everything is fine. But, well, they found their place in some particular niche, and that was the end of it. Nothing more came of it. Of course, they sit and learn Gemara, halachah, Rambam—everything they need to. Every so often, they learn Gemara in depth, the Talmud. But it isn’t what people had thought. Let’s put it this way: reality has shown that the greatest talent a person can have is not his brain or his intellect, or how sharp or knowledgeable he is. What do you want? A niggun? Before we go on—you know, the guys like to sing. They know how to sing. That’s all good. I’ll sing here. …

23:13 Speaker 2 … Before I explain what a yeshiva student really needs in order to succeed in learning, let me tell you about the Maharam Schick. Have you ever heard of the Maharam Schick? Maharam Schick, not “Maharamshick.” Have you heard of him? The Maharam Schick was Rabbi Moshe Schick, a student of the Chasam Sofer. Once, the Chasam Sofer was traveling in a wagon with a group of students, and the Maharam Schick was one of them. On the way, the Maharam Schick dozed off, and his head fell onto the Chasam Sofer’s shoulder. The Chasam Sofer was like—well, I don’t have a measuring stick for these things, but he was among the greatest Ashkenazi Torah scholars of his time. He was in Pressburg, and his stature was beyond dispute. By the way, the Chasam Sofer had a room in his house—I don’t know if you know this—for dealing with informers. What’s an informer? Someone who harassed the local community by reporting them to the non-Jewish authorities or taking them to their courts. So what would the Chasam Sofer do? Do you know? He would put such a person in that room, and they wouldn’t come out. The Chasam Sofer was also known as a great kabbalist. That was unusual among the Ashkenazi scholars, who were generally less involved in Kabbalah, but his teachers, Rabbi Nosson Adler and the author of the Hafla’ah, were great kabbalists. He was a remarkable, interesting figure. That’s just an aside.

28:28 Speaker 2 Every erev Tisha B’Av, the Chasam Sofer would sit on the floor with a small book—I’m not sure which book it was—and cry and cry until he filled a cup with tears. At the seudah hamafsekes, he would dip his bread in those tears and eat it. That was his seudah hamafsekes. It was an entirely different way of being.

28:51 Speaker 11 On Tisha B’Av, he would eat that at the seudah hamafsekes.

28:54 Speaker 2 On erev Tisha B’Av he would cry, and then in the afternoon, when he returned for the seudah hamafsekes, he would dip his bread in those tears. That’s the story as it’s told in several places. In any case, the Maharam Schick is sitting in the Chasam Sofer’s wagon, dozing off on the Chasam Sofer’s shoulder. The students wanted to wake him. What a disgrace! Think of one of the great Ashkenazi rabbis today—not even a Chabad rabbi; I’m not talking about Chabad right now. If someone dozed off and rested his head on Rabbi Elyashiv, they’d move him away in a second. But the Chasam Sofer calmed the students down and said, “Let the Maharam Schick rest his head on me.” He spoke of him in extraordinary terms: “He is a walking Sefer Torah.” He used to call him “the bookcase.” He said, “I can’t come up with any new Torah insights in front of him, because he already knows everything.” That’s how he spoke of the Maharam Schick: he couldn’t offer any new insights, because the Maharam Schick already knew it all. So why am I telling you this? As a child, the Maharam Schick couldn’t learn even a single page of Gemara. I don’t want to use harsh expressions, but he couldn’t prepare a page of Gemara. One page, with Rashi’s commentary—something that would seem fairly straightforward. Not Tosafos studied in depth; he couldn’t learn a plain page of Gemara. There’s a long story behind it, and I won’t go into all the details. In any case, at a certain point the Maharam Schick decided to devote himself to it completely. He began sitting and learning day and night, until he grew into the person he became. If I were to ask you: How many Tannaim do you know? How many Tannaim do you know

30:44 Speaker 2 from the Mishnah? How many Tannaim did you learn about this morning? Did you learn Gemara this morning? Mishnah? Rabbi Meir, Rabbi Yehudah, Rabbi Yochanan, anyone? Right. So how many female Tannaim have you learned about? Have you ever encountered a female Tanna? Have you come across such a thing?

31:01 Speaker 11 Literally speaking.

31:02 Speaker 2 Have you, huh?

31:03 Speaker 11 Just innocent Temimim.

31:04 Speaker 2 Just innocent Temimim. What, Tu BiShvat? The fifteenth. A female Tanna—which female Tanna have you encountered? Was Bruriah a female Tanna? Bruriah was Rabbi Meir’s wife, the wife of a Torah scholar, admittedly, but... Huh?

31:20 Speaker 11 The wife of a Torah scholar is like a Torah scholar.

31:20 Speaker 2 Apparently, she is like one, but no. Even if we get clever and say Bruriah was a female Tanna, her story didn’t end well. So no, I won’t go into it. She later disparaged the words of the Sages, and so on. We won’t get into that. You’ve never seen a female Tanna, right? Probably not. And I want to tell you this. I’ll tell you why I’m bringing it up. There was a woman who lived—it’s a well-known story, though I assume you won’t know it. I know a little about Jewish history; I know the story. One day I was at some kind of gathering. It wasn’t a memorial; it was something like a thanksgiving meal for some occasion. I don’t remember exactly what, but it was hosted by someone who wasn’t a Chabad chossid. An older man came in and started talking to me and a friend of mine. We got into a discussion, and he said, “Why are you so proud of all these rabbis around today? We had a rebbetzin, a female Tanna, in our community.” A female Tanna? The man didn’t look particularly religious—he had put on a kippah for the occasion, or perhaps he was traditional. I said to him, “Boss, what do you mean? Which female Tanna?” He began telling me: “There was a rebbetzin named Rebbetzin Asenath.” Rebbetzin Asenath Barzani, I think her name was—Asenath Adoni. Anyway, he started telling this story, and I thought, Wow, the things old people can make up! Their imaginations really get going. But I nudged my friend lightly with my foot and said, “Do me a favor—quickly check whether this is...” My friend had Google right there. He searched in a second. These days, whatever comes up, you can check it instantly. And it turned out there really was such a woman. I’ll tell you about her. Of course, I’ll explain—this is all part of the introduction to what I want to say.

33:02 Speaker 2 Just a moment. There was a Jewish woman named Rebbetzin Asenath Barzani. Some of you here have gotten married, and you have siblings, sisters—presumably, right? So before the wedding there were all kinds of arrangements: the apartment, the shopping, right? And at the wedding itself there’s a kesubah, right? You have to write a kesubah. If you look at its contents, what does it say? That the husband undertakes to care for his wife, provide for her, and so on. Now, this woman, Rebbetzin Asenath—her father was in contact with Rabbi Chaim Vital. He was a great kabbalist. When she got married, there was a small problem: her father wouldn’t agree to her husband having her do the housework. He made her husband swear that she would spend all her time sitting and learning. Why? Because he had no sons, only daughters, and he wanted, so to speak, someone learned to carry on after him. So he sat and taught her. I joke about the verse, “You shall meditate on it day and night.” Who says it has to be read as addressing a man? Is there vowel pointing in a Sefer Torah? There isn’t. You could also read it as addressing a woman: “You shall meditate on it day and night.” That’s an option too, right? But of course, that’s just a joke. In any case, this woman would sit and learn, to the point that when her husband was busy and couldn’t give classes at the yeshiva, who gave the classes? She herself taught advanced classes to outstanding students. You’re laughing, right? There were also daughters of Rebbes who gave classes. There was Rebbetzin Devorah Leah—I think she was the Alter Rebbe’s daughter, if I’m not mistaken—who taught advanced classes to outstanding students. Of course, they taught from behind a curtain, in a modest manner and so on, but they taught in depth. The Rebbes had family—within the family of

34:50 Speaker 2 The Rebbetzins were great Torah scholars. Have you ever studied the sicha for Parshas Emor 5750? We won’t go into the details now; that’s not our subject. But in that sicha, the Rebbe speaks at length about women’s obligation to study Torah, and the Rebbe also mentions that the Rebbe educated his daughters in that spirit—to study Torah properly, in depth, and so on. There were great women Torah scholars in our ancestors’ families too. The Alter Rebbe’s grandmother, Rebbetzin Rachel, is described in Sefer Hazichronos as a very great Torah scholar. I’m telling you this—you probably know the story about how she carried gloves and books on Shabbos. I won’t tell the whole story, but the Alter Rebbe’s paternal grandmother was the mother of his father, Reb Baruch. Her name was Rebbetzin Rachel, and the Alter Rebbe’s paternal grandfather, Rebbetzin Rachel’s husband, was Rabbi Schneur Zalman. This Rabbi Schneur Zalman did not favor women studying Torah. Those who followed Kabbalah held that women should study Torah, while those who opposed Kabbalah were less in favor of it. So his wife, who knew Gemara, couldn’t study when he was around. Why? Because her husband might see her studying. Oh no, that would be a problem. So what did she do? Whenever her husband left the house, she would go to the bookcase, take out a Gemara, and study. Her daughter, Rebbetzin Devorah Leah, who was actually the Alter Rebbe’s aunt, wanted to study too, but she couldn’t. Why? Because her mother couldn’t teach her; her father didn’t agree. So the mother became a great Torah scholar, while the daughter less so. And once it happened

36:37 Speaker 2 that she—I won’t go into all the details of the story. It appears in Sefer Hazichronos, I think in chapter 83 or 92. Rebbetzin Rachel went out with the family on Shabbos. Her father was there, along with her husband and brother, and so on. Suddenly they were told that the eruv had been breached. They had gloves on their hands, and I believe it also says they had books with them. So the question was: What do we do now? Is it permissible to carry, or not? What do we do? They began debating the matter back and forth, but couldn’t reach a decision. Why? Because they were great at Talmudic debate, but they weren’t halachic authorities. So Rebbetzin Rachel’s father said, “All right, let’s ask Rebbetzin Rachel what to do.” Rebbetzin Rachel told them exactly what they needed to do, and her husband looked at her in shock. He hadn’t known his wife was such a great Torah scholar. When he got home, he couldn’t believe it. So what did he do? He immediately opened the Tur and Shulchan Aruch, leafed through them to see whether she was right, and discovered that she was. When he saw that, he was quite upset. He said something like this: “You said earlier, ‘The wife of a Torah scholar is like a Torah scholar.’” Rabbi Schneur Zalman said to his father-in-law, Rebbetzin Rachel’s father, “Well, it says, ‘The wife of a Torah scholar is like a Torah scholar.’ But what happens when the wife herself is a Torah scholar? In other words, she herself is learned—then she doesn’t need her husband, so to speak.” He was upset about it. So his father-in-law answered with a pointed remark. He said, “There’s a statement in the Jerusalem Talmud: ‘The wife of a bandit is like a bandit.’ So the choice is yours: will she be the wife of a Torah scholar, or the wife of a bandit? Will you be a Torah scholar or a bandit? I knew you as a Torah scholar.” In any event, this sounds so far removed from our reality, doesn’t it? A woman who was a Torah scholar—it sounds like something exceptional. I don’t know if you

38:21 Speaker 2 know, but there was a very well-known Chabad rabbi in the previous generation named Rabbi Shemaryahu Sassonkin. He was a rabbi in Batumi, Georgia. He was something of a friend of the Rebbe’s father, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak. Rabbi Shemaryahu Sassonkin was a Torah scholar in his own right, and a very creative man too. There’s a book called Sefer Zichronosai, in which he writes his memoirs. There he describes one of his co-mothers-in-law—where are the Tur and Shulchan Aruch in the yeshivah? Where are the Tur and Shulchan Aruch? Huh? Very good. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the old editions of the Tur and Shulchan Aruch. My father has copies at home from my grandfather. I don’t know how anyone can read those books today. I mean, they’re almost impossible to read. It’s very, very hard. Everything is crammed together, the type is worn, and they’re full of mistakes. Today, say, the Tur and Shulchan Aruch are divided into about thirty-eight volumes, so they’re organized and easy to use. In the past, the entire Tur and Shulchan Aruch came in something like four, five, or eight volumes. I mean, the whole Shulchan Aruch was one great block. So Yoreh Deah might have taken up one or two volumes—I think it was two—each as thick as Bava Basra, a really fat volume. Rabbi Shemaryahu Sassonkin describes his co-mother-in-law—meaning her daughter married his son, or the other way around. She knew all of Yoreh Deah by heart. Her husband was a shochet and bodek, a ritual slaughterer and examiner, and she would argue with him about all sorts of laws of treifos and salting and such. Sometimes she would even get him to reverse his ruling. This isn’t a fantasy or some vague claim: she knew

40:12 Speaker 2 all of Yoreh Deah, all of Yoreh Deah, by heart. You can’t grasp what that means. Why not? Because you’ve never studied the Tur and Shulchan Aruch. To understand them, you have to learn the subject from the Gemara through the Rishonim and Acharonim. It’s a whole involved analysis. And Yoreh Deah has some frustrating, difficult sections, the Shach’s rules concerning doubtful cases, and things that are not simple at all. She knew the entire Tur and Shulchan Aruch by heart. Not only that: he relates that once there was a wedding or something, a sheva brachos. They asked her to watch a pot before the sheva brachos—to cook some dish, keep an eye on the pot, and stir it so it wouldn’t burn. And he says that when she was cooking in the kitchen, what would she do? She would study Tanya. She’d have the pot boiling, stir it, and study. That was her routine. Then, he says, one time she got caught up in chapter 46, I think. I don’t remember exactly. She became engrossed in some point she was studying, and while she was cooking for the sheva brachos, the pot suddenly began to burn. So she jumped up and hurried to it. Why am I telling you all these stories? What’s my point? I deliberately brought examples of Jewish women and girls. First of all, I can tell you that there have been hundreds of women Torah scholars over the generations. People don’t know this, but if you want, I can give you a three-and-a-half-hour class right now, with sources from all over the world. I went and collected them myself, in my humble way, because it’s such a fascinating subject. Hundreds of women who were Torah scholars over the generations—in Chabad and outside Chabad, among the Rishonim and the Acharonim. Truly remarkable things, remarkable. By the way, in a letter, the Frierdiker Rebbe doesn’t describe this; rather, he says two things. The first thing he says is,

41:51 Speaker 2 The Ohr Hachaim Hakadosh has a commentary on the Torah, right? The Ohr Hachaim commentary. How did he write it? Do you know how he wrote it? The Frierdiker Rebbe describes in a letter how he wrote it through learning with his daughters. He would learn Chumash with his daughters, because he had no sons, and that’s how the commentary came about. Anyone who studies the Ohr Hachaim sees that it contains a great deal of Kabbalah, many very complicated ideas, a great deal of Gemara, and so on. He learned it with his daughters. That’s a subject in its own right. But why am I talking about this? Why did I mention it? It’s a kind of introduction to... Earlier I told you that I’ve seen many young men, genuinely exceptional young men. I don’t want to give details, but there were things here you wouldn’t believe. There was a young man here whom the principal, Rabbi Ulfa[?], had to drag away to make Kiddush on Shabbos. He would sometimes sit here until six in the afternoon on a summer Shabbos—practically fasting on Shabbos. There was a young man who would sit and learn. There were really guys here who... You’ll see in a moment what I mean. You don’t know these crazy things, and don’t do them either. But there were young men here who would learn on Thursday night. Once, someone even came into the zal and caught [unclear] at around two in the morning. They would decide to learn all Thursday night. Now you need to sleep, right? After all that, you’re exhausted. On the other hand, if you go home, there’s no guarantee you’ll get out of bed, right? It’s warm and comfortable, especially in winter. You’ve gone to sleep at four; now get up at seven and go to the Chassidus study session. So what did they do? Sorry. They would fill the zal with tables, those small tables. Not

43:30 Speaker 2 the zal—sorry, the oister. They would take the oister and fill the whole thing with tables. Each one would find himself a corner on that strange platform, or whatever you call it, and go to sleep. How did we know? Because sometimes they were caught red-handed in the morning: they were so dazed with exhaustion that they’d fall asleep. Night comes at seven, so that was rare. Once he caught one of them, but two or three times he saw the whole zal—the whole oister—full of tables and couldn’t understand who thought this was a funny prank, while the young men were sitting and learning. They were exceptional, truly exceptional. I’m saying this because... How did we get here? Yes. If I look at those young men—all the young men, not specifically the ones who slept there, but those who studied in depth and so on—I’ve thought about this more than once. Later I saw that Torah greats write about it in many places too. If you look at a young man and ask, “Wait, what was his gift? What brought him success in learning?” the answer wasn’t talent. Don’t put your faith in talent in life. Don’t put your faith in talent. Really, don’t—not your own and not anyone else’s. Don’t rely on talent. The fact that a young man is brilliant and grasps things quickly doesn’t mean anything will come of it. On the contrary, sometimes it works against him. Reb Elimelech tells of two young men. Well, I don’t want to spoil it, but I’ll tell you. It can even work against the scholar himself. Sometimes, because he’s a scholar, he sort of relies on his learning: “I’ll manage.” I can tell you about a young man who was here. I’m saying this in a forum where he was here in the yeshiva. Incidentally, it was Rabbi

45:05 Speaker 2 Dubi Wolf. I don’t know whether he’s still the rabbi for the afternoon girsa session; he was there too. It was the same in my time. He would sit and learn, and there was a young man in the yeshiva who would sit like this, his head resting on his hand, dozing off in the middle of the shiur. When a rabbi sees someone like that, what does he do? How does he catch him out? Suddenly, in the middle of the shiur, he says, “Go on, continue reading the Gemara,” or throws him a question. At the time, I wondered whether this young man had ruach hakodesh, because the instant the rabbi told him to continue or asked him a question, he would stay just as he was, casually give the answer, and carry on sitting like that. Nothing fazed him. He absorbed it all. I don’t know how he managed to listen like that. He really was talented. But I can tell you: those talents are good and wonderful. Blessed is anyone who has them; by all means, let him build on them. But they’re no guarantee of success. Absolutely no guarantee. Why am I saying this? There are many talents, but the real talent a young man needs—the real talent that is hard to acquire, the one that will truly lead you to success in learning, whether in Nigleh or Chassidus or anything else—is the talent for persistence. The talent for persistence. You should know that the yetzer hara has no problem letting you study Gemara in depth for a whole day, and Rambam in depth, and Chassidus—you learn Samech Vav, or whatever you’re learning here. You’ll have an amazing day. But the next day he’ll put all his energy into bringing you down to at least half of that. What does “at least half” mean? Today, don’t be quite so persistent with Gemara, just

46:43 Speaker 2 with Chassidus. Two days later, he’ll cut that back too. Another week, and suddenly he’ll let you feel, for a moment, as though one of the great Torah sages is walking around here and people simply don’t know it. You know, I once heard a story—I’m telling it secondhand. There’s something called Kinyan Torah. As I understood it from the person who told me, it involves a series of exams. They take a few hundred candidates and narrow them down until they reach two young men, or two married scholars, whom they test on practically the whole Torah: Shas, the Rishonim, the Acharonim. Whoever succeeds is called a Kinyan Torah, and for ten years they provide him with an apartment and a car so that he’ll have the freedom to study Torah. A friend of mine in kollel once told me that he spoke to one of these scholars after he’d won the big contest. He asked him, “How do you feel? What’s it like to walk around knowing a substantial part of the Torah? How do you feel when you walk around?” The scholar—I won’t say which community he belonged to, of course—kept evading the question. He didn’t want to say. Finally he said, “When I walk down the street, I feel like one of the great sages of the generation is walking around here; people just aren’t aware of him.” He said it seriously. He really meant it. Okay, so sometimes a young man has a day when he feels, “Wow, today was a really strong day, really strong.” That’s wonderful. The question is what will happen tomorrow. That’s the question. In the evening, you feel good about it. What the yetzer hara wants is for you not to keep it up. Learn

48:14 Speaker 2 Properly, but please, don’t keep at it. Don’t stick with it all the time, consistently. Why? Because consistency, without a doubt, is how a person acquires knowledge of Nigleh, Chassidus, whatever it may be. Consistency, consistency, consistency, consistency. A bochur can be a genius, he can be whatever you want, but in the end he can still fall. If a bochur has that stubbornness—and if he has it, he needs to put it to work in Torah study. It isn’t simple. You keep putting it to work, again and again. If you have that kind of stubbornness, it’s an asset. You have no idea how much. Reb Mendel told a story, the one I mentioned earlier. Reb Mendel said that in Tomchei Temimim there were two bochurim, brothers. I think they were brothers, or study partners—I’m not sure. Either study partners or brothers. One of them was an enormous genius, very gifted, and the other was a tremendous masmid. He wasn’t so gifted, but he was seriously diligent. And he tells how that tremendous genius did fine, developed fine, but it only went so far. At a certain point, the diligent one overtook his brother—or his study partner, whoever it was—and reached far higher levels than he did. Now, what do I mean by levels? I’m not talking about levels where you catch angels or grab Hakadosh Boruch Hu by the beard, nothing like that. I mean knowing Gemara, Rashi, Tosafos. Not just studying them. Do you dream of one day knowing at least Maseches Shabbos by heart? Could that happen? If that’s a dream of yours, if that’s how you think, be consistent and you’ll get there. If a person sits down like that and... I once spoke with a Jew who had received a blessing from the Rebbe to open businesses, a Jew who, thank G-d, as they say, doesn’t

50:05 Speaker 2 lack bread and milk. So I once asked him, “How—how did it happen? The Rebbe’s blessing, the Rebbe’s blessing, fine, but how did it happen in practical terms? What exactly was the...” He told me the very same thing, exactly the same thing. He said, “The bottom line is that you have to push yourself, push yourself, push yourself.” Then I asked him the tough question. I said, “Wait, but there are weeks, there are months, when you ask, ‘From where will my help come?’ You sit there, and the monthly balance sheet shows the business is in a slump and there are problems.” He used an expression that isn’t appropriate to repeat among the Temimim, because it’s a bit coarse. But his point, in other words, was: “Push yourself, push yourself, push yourself.” What am I getting at? You sit and learn, and it goes well. You come away feeling really good. Then suddenly a day comes when everything is a mess. You aren’t learning properly. And don’t dream dreams or imagine things. There’s this phenomenon—let me say a vort by way of introduction. For some reason, every week people are surprised by Friday all over again. You know what I mean? How often does someone find himself rushing right before sunset? Not because of mivtzoim, right? Cooking for Shabbos, getting the house ready, and so on. Somehow, even if Shabbos were to begin at midnight, he’d still leave everything to the last minute, right? It’s quite something. We count the days: today is the first day of the week, the second day, the third day—and for some reason, by Thursday our memory is wiped. We don’t know Friday is coming; suddenly it surprises us anew every week, right? That’s how it is. I don’t think I’m wrong. Correct me if I am. Every Friday is a fresh surprise. It’s amazing.

51:35 Speaker 2 If it surprises you once, twice, three times, fine. But even the Satan needs an entire pilpul to explain why he doesn’t get confused by the shofar on Erev Rosh Hashanah, right? You know the Rebbe’s sicha about that? The Rebbe comes to explain it—after all, he’s an angel, and he knows. You don’t have to be an angel. If it happens to you fifty times, fifty-four times—fifty-two times a year—then even Rav Preida, who had to explain something to his student four hundred times... How long have you been alive? Fifteen years times fifty. You passed five hundred Fridays a long time ago, right? So at some point you’re supposed to realize, you’re supposed to know, that Friday has arrived, right? There’s reason to think that one day Friday will come. Why am I saying this? Bochurim sit and learn. I’ve heard this more than once or twice. They sit and learn, and suddenly what do you see? Somehow a day comes when things don’t go well, and you get upset. Nothing works—not the learning, not anything. And somehow all the troubles come at once, too. Then you’re late as well. The counselor yells at you, and by the end of the day, or even halfway through, you’re completely disappointed. So I’m sorry to tell you—or rather, I’m not sorry. I’m happy to tell you: those troubles are going to come. Be absolutely clear about that. In a younger yeshivah, in an older yeshivah—don’t think you’re going to become an angel, sprout wings, become something else. No, no, no. Troubles are going to come, and problems are going to come. As the Rambam says, these are things that happen through the circumstances of life. A prominent rabbi once said to me, “I have a bit of a problem.” I asked him what the problem was. He said, “If people come to ask me questions on certain days when I’m under pressure and things are difficult, I’ll have trouble answering

53:04 Speaker 2 the person. I won’t want to answer him. Why? Because right now I’m in a constricted, difficult state. I don’t—and my state of mind, my emotional climate, might affect the ruling I give him. It could happen, because my mind isn’t focused, because...” So I said to him, “All right, what do you want? For your mood to be pleasant and cheerful your whole life?” You can work on it, but it won’t always be that way. The days won’t always be pleasant or nice, with you sitting and learning, knowing everything, and everything working out. There are times when you sit and learn and, as people say, it’s a real slog—a very hard slog. You try to work through it again, and it still doesn’t go. So I can happily tell you that it’s going to happen. Why do I say that happily? Because when you realize that your whole life won’t be rosy, that you will have problems and bad days, you’ll know what to expect. You’ll be calm when they come, and you’ll get through them, too. I’ll tell you something quietly, in confidence, in confidence. I won’t say the names, but a certain collection came into my hands. It contains some letters and records. Maybe they weren’t circulated because they seem not entirely fitting to the honor of great Torah scholars. I don’t know, but they themselves wrote these things. There are letters from great Torah scholars, various letters and statements. People had asked great Torah scholars from different circles, “Sometimes it’s hard, hard to learn. A bochur finds it hard to learn, or an avreich, or anyone else, a working man who finds it hard. What do we do? What do we do?” Their answer was: “What do you think—that it isn’t hard for us to learn?” That’s what they said. “It isn’t hard for us?

54:39 Speaker 2 It is hard.” One of the great Torah scholars once put it this way: “When I sit down to learn, I don’t want to learn. It’s hard for me.” This was a Jew who knew all of Shas, Gemara, Rashi and Tosafos, by heart. I think he also knew all of [unclear] by heart, and I say that because someone once asked him a question and he found an answer in the Alter Rebbe’s Shulchan Aruch. But I have a slight suspicion that he knew it by heart. I don’t have information, but that’s my impression, at any rate. He said: “When I sit down to learn, for the first five minutes I force myself”—that was his expression. Now think about it: this is a Jew who studied for hundreds of hours in his life—what am I saying, hundreds? Tens of thousands of hours. He sat and toiled in Torah and avodah, and it was still hard for him to learn. There were times when he had no desire and no motivation. So what did he do? He said he did the following: “First of all, when I don’t feel like learning, I start with the simpler things.” He would start with the simpler things. Ah, but sometimes even the simple things don’t go. So you bang your head against the wall and keep going and going and going. He said that for him, after twenty minutes, the enjoyment would begin to come; he could take more pleasure in the subject. Why am I saying this? Because I was a bochur too, and I spend some time with bochurim today. These frustrations are familiar to me, these difficulties are familiar to me, these things are familiar to me. They’re normal and understandable. A person gets up in the morning, and if he’s a little hungry, or things haven’t gone well, or he didn’t eat something good the night before, it will affect his learning. Make no mistake about it. It will definitely affect his learning. Definitely. And if his father upset him and his mother said something to him at the wrong time

56:10 Speaker 2 And he has a fight with his sister, and he has a fight with someone else—that will affect his learning too. He’ll arrive at yeshivah upset, and his study partner will annoy him, and his rabbi will say something to him, and that will annoy him. Your whole life isn’t going to be smooth sailing. Understand that. And why is it important to understand? Because then it will be much easier for you to learn consistently. Okay, you’ll understand that days like that do come, and that you can still make yourself sit down and learn. And I promise you, unequivocally—I’ve seen it with my own eyes, time after time after time: someone who sat and learned consistently, even if he wasn’t the greatest genius or the most diligent learner... I can tell you a story about this, from the Chofetz Chaim, I believe. I’m telling it because... Oh, yes. There was a Jew who had been one of the Cantonists, in the time of the Tzemach Tzedek. There were Cantonists, Jews who were taken into the army not for three years but for twenty-five years. That was the system. Military service for a Cantonist who was seized meant twenty-five years in the army. So they would come out at around age thirty or thirty-five, depending on how old they were when they were taken. The Russian non-Jews had given one of these Jews a name—Ivan, or Ivan, or Ivan. It wasn’t written with vowels, so I didn’t know how to pronounce it. Ivan or Ivan, that was his name. This Jew was sitting there, and what happened? He heard the people learning in the shul in the evening, discussing and studying. And what were they learning? Tractate Yevamos. So what were they saying? “The yavam,” “the yavam,” “the yavam,” “the yavam.” He was sure they were saying—he didn’t know what a yavam was, right? He had no idea. He barely knew how to daven.

57:55 Speaker 2 So he was sure they were talking about him, using that insulting name the non-Jews had given him. As if they were making fun of him, laughing at him. He heard it again and again. Eventually he had enough, so he went over to them and said, “Guys, come on. What you’re doing isn’t nice. You should be ashamed of yourselves. It’s disgraceful to treat someone with such contempt.” Oh, an aside—and this is relevant to right now too. I’ve already made a lot of asides, but this is important. Two days ago, I saw conclusive proof that when you want to learn and do shlichus, Hakadosh Boruch Hu sends wonderful things your way. I’ll tell you a story, without names, of course, because it’s still unfolding. Something happened, and three and a half hours ago I got a message about another development in the story. There’s a Jew who’s involved with a group of people who aren’t Chabadniks—not Chabadniks at all. You could even say they’re opposed to Chabad matters in a way that... how should I put it? We won’t go into that. He has ties with this particular group. They don’t know he’s a Chabadnik, and he doesn’t look like one either. That’s one of his advantages. I mean, we tease him about it and call it a disadvantage, but somehow there’s nothing about him that looks Chabad. Nothing about him that looks Chabad. He’s an interesting Jew. He’s also very neat and formal, so he doesn’t look like a Chabadnik. Anyway, this Jew told me about something that happened and showed me the whole exchange. We won’t go into all the details. A whole group of them were laughing at another Jew and speaking about him disrespectfully, and he rebuked them. As a Chabadnik, the way they spoke really bothered him, so he rebuked them, and it reached a point where he... The Rebbe expresses this in letters in two places: when you want to bring Torah scholars who specialize in the revealed parts of Torah closer to us, what do you do? You take—

59:39 Speaker 2 Yes, to bring scholars of the revealed parts of Torah closer to us—what do you do? The Rebbe says that first of all, you show them respect. You show them respect and begin with the revealed parts of Torah. You share an in-depth discussion with them, some Torah topic. They see that you know something about the revealed parts of Torah, and then you bring Chassidus into the conversation as well, almost without their noticing. And this Jew was clever, very perceptive, and he spoke with them. It got to the point where they developed great regard for him and respected him very much. The bottom line of the story is that there’s a certain Jew who belongs, I think, to... Again, these are circles outside Chabad. And this Jew is extremely, extremely influential. He has a worldwide following, truly international. He gives a great many classes, so many. And today, three and a half hours ago, that Jew received a book of Chassidus. I won’t go into the details. I heard a recording of him speaking after the book arrived by mail and so on. They recorded him talking about the book for a minute and a half, full of admiration and excitement. This is a Jew with no connection to Chassidus. I doubt he’s ever opened a Tanya or a book of Chassidus or anything. Nothing. Nothing. And how did it happen? It began with a young man—a young married man—who protested when a group of people spoke disrespectfully about another Jew. From that, a connection suddenly developed with him, and today he... Well, some things are recorded, so I can’t say more. You can work out the rest. In any case, that Jew was sitting in the shul hearing “yavam, yavam, yavam,” and he was sure they were laughing at him. He didn’t understand that they were saying “yavam,” but they tried to explain it to him. “No, my friend, we weren’t laughing at you. We’re talking about the yavam who performs yibbum with the yevamah, and...” But what could he do? Where had he grown up? Among

1:01:32 Speaker 2 the Cantonists. So apparently he no longer trusted anyone. Something in him had probably been broken. He didn’t believe anybody. Whatever you told him, he assumed first that you were lying; only afterward would he check whether you were telling the truth. So what did he do? He said to them, “No, I don’t believe you. How can I believe that’s what you were saying? I don’t know how to read the alef-beis, so I can’t tell whether you’re saying things that aren’t written there. Why are you telling me about a yavam and a yevamah? You’re making up these terms, and I can’t dispute it because I can’t read.” All right, they said to him, what can we do? How can we prove it to you? He said, “Fine, teach me the alef-beis. Teach me the alef-beis, and then I’ll be able to read and know whether what you’re saying is true.” The fellows there had no choice, so they taught him the alef-beis. It took a few weeks. But knowing the alef-beis still wasn’t enough. He had to understand the terms in the Mishnah. He didn’t know what “yavam” and “yevam ah” meant. In short, over the next few months they began explaining Mishnah and a little Gemara to him, until he was satisfied that they hadn’t been calling him names. But since he had already gotten into it, he kept learning and learning and learning. The Chofetz Chaim tells this story, and he ends by saying that he knew this Jew. By then, people no longer called him by that name, or even by his real name. They called him “the gaon of Lipni,” if I’m pronouncing the town’s name correctly. “The gaon of Lipni”—that’s how the Chofetz Chaim knew him. The man had become an extraordinary Torah scholar. And how did all that happen? Try learning the ABCs sometime. I know what

1:03:06 Speaker 2 Try doing this with the ABCs. I’m half French. Try learning French. Try understanding French. Go on, try. The French letters and their pronunciations make it a complicated language. What would happen? You’d give up halfway through? You’d give up at the start. That Jew took the alef-beis, and for him it was French. What kept him going? What brought him as far as he got? Persistence, persistence, persistence. Get that into your heads. I’m telling you unequivocally. They asked me to come speak here. I said, what am I going to say to the boys? Start preaching to them? So I decided to share the little bit I’ve learned from my own limited experience. I have to say this, and I’ll tell you why. Sometimes a bochur is sitting there and feels broken, really broken. Who am I? What am I? Where is this going? You know the story of the Jew who came to the rosh yeshiva and said, “I want to take my son out of yeshiva. I want to take him out.” The rosh yeshiva asked, “Why?” He said, “Because he isn’t learning properly. At least if he goes out, he’ll make a little money, right? My son isn’t going to become some Rabbi Akiva Eiger, some tremendous scholar. So why should he stay in yeshiva? Let him go to work and earn a little money.” The rosh yeshiva looked at him, smiled, and said, “True. But if your son goes to work, he isn’t going to become a Rothschild either, is he? So he might as well stay in yeshiva. Leave him be.” You understand? When a bochur sits and learns, there are times—and I’m not singling anyone out here—even if someone tells me he’s never felt this, I’ll tell him one of two things: either he’s lying or he hasn’t experienced it yet. You sit and learn, and sometimes you look at that fellow and think, wow, how does he do so well?

1:04:38 Speaker 2 He fires answers back at the maggid shiur. You look at another fellow—how does he do so well? He’s got this going for him. That one has a good chavrusa. And where am I? Who am I? What you’d call the hang-ups every bochur knows. It’s normal; it makes sense. But what happens? A bochur sits and learns, and all kinds of thoughts and worries start coming up. Then what does the yetzer hara do? You know it says, “The reward for a mitzvah is a mitzvah.” Yes, “The reward for a mitzvah is a mitzvah,” right? But it doesn’t say, “The reward for an aveirah,” or “The punishment for an aveirah is an aveirah,” does it? Why? I’ll explain. When a Jew commits an aveirah, the yetzer hara isn’t after the aveirah itself. You know what he gains from it? He wants the depression afterward. That’s what he wants. The aveirah itself isn’t his point. If you committed an aveirah and stayed happy, you ruined his whole plan. He wants you to commit an aveirah and then fall into a bit of sighing and misery, a kind of heaviness. Why? Because then you say, “So what am I worth? Who am I? What am I?” And what happens then? Your learning afterward is so-so. And little by little, little by little, you lose your desire to learn, your desire to do a mitzvah. That’s what he wants. He isn’t looking for you to commit aveiros; he’s looking for your sadness. I have a serious attention deficit. I didn’t come here planning to speak; they put me up front for a bit, so I’m rambling a little, if that’s all right. I’m saying this because the obstacle to persistence in learning—the obstacle to persistence in learning—is that feeling of, “Ah, that one is more successful, and that one has this, and that one has that.” You know what you need? In this regard, a person has to be blind. Blind! Completely blind. All right, someone from Chaim speaks about this. Ay, ay, ay, ay,

1:06:23 Speaker 2 Ay, ay, mm, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, mm, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, mm, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay. Oy, “My soul, be still before G-d alone, for my hope comes from Him.” Oy, “He alone is my rock and my salvation.”

1:08:05 Speaker 12 “My stronghold; I shall not be shaken.” Ay, l’chaim. Is there a Sefer Hamaamarim, Basi Legani 5758, here? Do we have one? Does anyone know where it is? Basi Legani 5758.

1:09:00 Speaker 13 Please.

1:09:03 Speaker 12 Um, before that I want to tell a story. There are witnesses to it here, too. I thought a lot about whether to tell it. I don’t think there’s any pride in it, and even if there’s a little, I’m willing to put myself on the table a bit to get the point across. I can tell you that when I was a young boy in eighth grade—what we called tenth grade back then. I don’t know if you even remember there being a tenth grade in cheder. Do you remember that?

1:09:27 Speaker 13 No.

1:09:27 Speaker 12 In my day there was a tenth grade. There was a program called tenth grade. It was the same age as eighth grade; they simply started counting the grades earlier and ended at ten. I won’t get into the details now. In any case, in tenth—or eighth—grade, we had a teacher, and that year we learned Kiddushin, Gemara Kiddushin. There was a group of outstanding boys, as they called them, who sat and learned and planned to be tested on Kiddushin. They spent the year learning it. I can tell you that I attended the classes and sat there. The class was maybe forty-five minutes long. That was the kind of class it was, especially during the regular learning sessions: forty-five minutes, and it was like—I’d compare it today to race cars. You sit there, and the rabbi fires the material at you. I’d estimate today that maybe fifty percent of the boys there didn’t understand a thing; they couldn’t make heads or tails of it. But there were good boys, lots of good boys who did understand. What could I do? I was a little kid, and I didn’t understand. I’d sit there going crazy, unable to keep up with that speed. It wasn’t for me. At some point I realized it was a waste of time. Why was I sitting in that class? What for? I told myself, all right, forget it, let’s go learn it on my own. You know the main building upstairs? I’d sit there and start learning Kiddushin, and it wasn’t easy. There are some difficult sugyos there too. Perek Ha’omer, and even around pages 50, 51, 52—all those sugyos. And you reach a point where you start saying, “Well, apparently this isn’t for me. There’s no chance. This isn’t the right thing for me.” You also begin to sink into what I’d call depths of despair. And then

1:11:05 Speaker 12 I remember a thought flashing through my mind. I said, “What is this? I’m here after everyone else. I’m still here when everyone has gone; I’m the last one to leave. What’s going on?” I told myself, “I’m sitting here learning Kiddushin. The world can turn upside down, but I’m finishing it this year, and I’m going to take a test on it too.” And I’ll tell you, I was afraid. I didn’t take the test; I didn’t dare. But I told myself, “Look, I’m going to learn this Kiddushin, and in the end I’ll be tested on Maseches Kiddushin in the cheder.” Don’t ask me why Hakadosh Boruch Hu put that thought in my head. It just came to me. I have reliable witnesses here. He was tested on Kiddushin—did he pass or not? Shmuel Halperin is here. He was tested on the whole of Kiddushin, which is no simple thing at all. I’m telling you from experience: I was afraid, and I didn’t take the test, but I told myself I’d get there eventually. So how long did it take me? Well, a little while—almost twenty years. It took me nearly seventeen years to get there. I’m not telling you this, G-d forbid, to boast, or... There’s nothing to boast about here anyway. I mean, what great thing happened? But the point is that sometimes you find yourself in certain places. I’m saying this—I told this story so no one would say, “Fine, anyone can talk.” Someone who hasn’t experienced it doesn’t know. I’m telling you, I experienced it, I went through it, and I know what I’m telling you. A person who finds himself in those depths—I don’t know if people tell you this, but I’m telling you now—a person who finds himself in such depths that he says to himself, “Where am I?” and feels, “Who am I? What am I? How will I succeed? Nothing’s working; everything is awful.” If you

1:12:29 Speaker 12 Grit your teeth and hold on tight; eventually you’ll get there. Maybe next week you’ll fall again, and again you’ll feel discouraged and all mixed up—how did that fellow succeed, and what about that other one, and... But what can I promise you unequivocally? I can make you two promises. Let’s put it this way: I can promise you that you’ll have setbacks and hit rock bottom. One hundred percent, that will happen. And I can promise you that whoever holds on tight will come through it in a big way. What does “come through it in a big way” mean? It doesn’t mean becoming depressed. It means he’ll succeed in ways you can’t even imagine. You may even overtake all the fellows around you. Why did I ask them to bring [unclear] in here? There’s a story about a Chassidic rabbi and a Lithuanian rabbi. It really happened; I just don’t remember the names right now. There were two rabbis in one town, one a Chabad Chassidic rabbi and the other a Lithuanian rabbi. The Chassidic rabbi was more learned. What do I mean by “more learned”? He was more capable of issuing halachic rulings. You can be learned in Gemara with Rashi and Tosafos, in the early commentators and so on, but not be able to issue rulings. You don’t have the ability to decide a case. That takes a different ability altogether. In that respect, the Chabad rabbi was more knowledgeable and more learned, and the Lithuanian rabbi less so. But the Lithuanian rabbi was better known. So once the Chabad rabbi asked him—I’m not getting all the details of the story exactly right—“How is it that you’re so well known, while I, who am, so to speak, a bit ahead of you, am less well known?” So the Chabad rabbi—

1:14:09 Speaker 12 The Lithuanian rabbi said to him: “Look, when you go into a Lithuanian cheder—no, not Lithuanian; this applies to half of Europe. I don’t want to put down anyone in the Jewish people. You go into a cheder outside Chabad, one that doesn’t follow the Chabad approach, and the teacher asks a question. Suddenly one of the children gives an answer.” Let me tell you something, as an aside: I give a class in in-depth Gemara study for married men. They don’t come like you fellows, enjoying life, with no need to work or anything. These people arrive at nine at night, exhausted after a whole day of children and work and everything else, and sit down to learn Gemara. They really do. You sit and learn seriously too, thank G-d, but without that burden. These men sit and learn. So every so often I bring them various questions that were asked of great Torah scholars. I’ll ask you an interesting one and see whether you... A great Torah scholar was once asked a question. He was known as Reb Heshel. Have you heard of him? Reb Heshel was the teacher of the Shach. Do you know the Shach? Sifsei Kohen. He was his student and received semichah from him. You should know him—one of the great commentators on the Shulchan Aruch. His teacher was Reb Heshel, who was exceptionally sharp. He taught all the great Ashkenazic scholars of that generation: the Shach, the author of Teshuvos HaGershuni, the Bach, all of them. Don’t worry about all the names I’m mentioning right now. Anyway, when Reb Heshel was young, they asked him: How many Shabbos candles must a woman light? Strictly speaking, how many does she need?

1:15:30 Speaker 14 One.

1:15:31 Speaker 12 One. How many does the Shulchan Aruch say to light? Two. One corresponding to “Remember,” and one corresponding to—

1:15:35 Speaker 14 “Observe.”

1:15:35 Speaker 12 “Observe.” How many do people actually light? There is a custom to light candles for the children too. There are different customs, so today people light one for each child, but as a matter of basic law, two are enough. May a woman light one candle next to a mirror, so that it counts as two candles? What do you say?

1:15:58 Speaker 14 No.

1:15:59 Speaker 12 She doesn’t want to waste anything. She’s one of those people who say all that fire makes a hole in the ozone layer and isn’t healthy for the planet. So she’ll light one candle in front of a mirror, and she’ll have two candles. What do you say—does it count or not?

1:16:10 Speaker 14 No.

1:16:12 Speaker 12 I ask anyone who gives an answer to give a reason too. Not just a gut reaction—an answer with reasoning. Well, what do you say?

1:16:18 Speaker 14 A woman would have to light another candle.

1:16:20 Speaker 12 How so?

1:16:21 Speaker 14 There’s another woman in the mirror too, and she needs to light.

1:16:22 Speaker 12 Ah, brilliant! That’s what that rabbi answered them. He was nine years old at the time, so he answered on the same level as the question. In other words, it was a silly question, and he answered: “If a woman lights in front of a mirror, there are two women here, so they need four candles. It won’t help.” Why am I telling you this? Very good—you gave the answer beautifully. One of the married men in my class teaches second grade—I’m sorry, I almost said third grade. He went into his classroom and wanted to encourage the children, so he asked them this question. All right? And one of the second graders immediately came out with the answer, just like that, without hesitating. All right? Why did I get into this? Ah! Let’s go back to the story. The Lithuanian rabbi says—no, the Chabad rabbi says: “A teacher is sitting in a cheder and asks the children a question, and suddenly one child comes up with a wonderful line of reasoning. So in a Chassidic cheder, in a non-Chassidic cheder, what do they do? They make him out to be a great scholar, the next leader of the generation, and on and on, building up his name. But in a Chabad cheder, the teacher supposedly picks up a shoe and gives him a knock on the head. He says, ‘What are you so proud of?’ and gives him a little humbling, so he won’t grow up arrogant.” One of the great mashpi’im in Lubavitch once said to me, “So who ends up becoming someone?” He meant, “What am I?” The mashpia said to me, “Who becomes a mashpia? The ones who managed to escape the teacher’s shoes in cheder, the ones who got away from the blows—they managed to make something of themselves.” That was said in jest. So that rabbi, the non-Chabad rabbi, said to the Chabad rabbi—

1:17:57 Speaker 12 “You see? We built them up. You have to give a few knocks, so that’s where you stayed.” Why am I saying this? For years, this whole matter really puzzled me. Do you need bittul, self-effacement? Of course you do; there’s no question. That is the very essence of why Tomchei Temimim was founded. In a sicha from 5702, the Frierdiker Rebbe quotes his father, the Rebbe Rashab, as saying: “We have no need to establish another yeshiva.” It’s a very striking expression. We don’t need to establish a yeshiva. There are enough yeshivos, thank G-d. We don’t need our own yeshivos just to study nigleh. There’s no need. Think about the time before Tomchei Temimim was founded in 5657. Where did all the Chabad young men study before that? In all sorts of places that weren’t Chabad at all. They studied in yeshivos, many different yeshivos. The Rebbe Rashab explains that we established it to create a yeshiva where they would study nigleh and be G-d-fearing people. He uses these distinctive expressions about being complete in Torah and fear of Heaven. It’s a very interesting turn of phrase. At any rate, I wondered: Wait, where is the boundary of this bittul? Am I supposed to negate myself in everything now? “I shouldn’t learn—who am I to learn? Who am I?” There’s a certain attitude that someone who is learned in nigleh, or who studies much nigleh or Chassidus—it doesn’t matter—should simply be ashamed of himself. Do you know this phenomenon, or don’t you? Either we haven’t yet had the privilege of encountering it, or you’ll encounter it soon. One of the two, but you’ll experience it at some point. It’s a phenomenon, and in a certain sense it has its place. Why? So you won’t walk down the street saying, “Wow, why isn’t everyone kissing my hands?” Because

1:19:28 Speaker 12 No, they still don’t recognize my greatness. I’m still, uh, just a student in the beis midrash, and there will be—there are people like that, you know. Do you know the story of the humble man from Brisk? There was a humble man in Brisk. It’s told as a joke; whether it happened or not, the point is true. They say that this humble man from Brisk would lie on the floor at the entrance to the mikveh every Friday, so that everyone coming in would have to step on him and he would have bittul. People would step on him. But of course the townspeople respected him. So what did they do? They would walk in and step over him. Apparently they had some notion that if you stepped over him, you wouldn’t grow, or some other nonsense like that. So they stepped over him with great reverence. One day a chossid came to town, understood what was going on, went into the mikveh, and gave him a good, solid step. The man jumped up and said, “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? Don’t you know I’m the humble man from Brisk? How dare you?” You understand? Chassidus is no joke. A similar story is told in Sefer Hazichronos. Do you know the one about Simchas Torah and the dayanim? Do you know the story? First of all, you urgently need to read Sefer Hazichronos. You might call it one of the Chabad guidebooks. That’s not an expression I’ve heard, but it gives a very distinctive outlook. I won’t tell the whole story, but what happened? In the period when Chabad Chassidus was becoming established—and even before that—there were mixed communities. The community had one shul; the younger people had become chassidim, while the older people were still misnagdim, so to speak. This is described in the Alter Rebbe’s responsa. By the way, there’s an interesting passage where a rabbi, Rabbi Eliezer Katzki [unclear],

1:21:12 Speaker 12 I think that was his name; I don’t remember. He asks the Alter Rebbe to tell the young married men to change their prayer text—that is, to stop davening Nusach HaAri. Why? Because it was causing trouble in the shul. The Alter Rebbe heard this. What do you think—tell them to stop using that nusach or not? He told him: “If they won’t harass the young men or interfere with their davening as they wish, then they can do as they wish. For the sake of peace, I’ll tell them not to daven Nusach HaAri, but to daven Nusach Ashkenaz.” It’s a very interesting passage. Anyway, there were mixed shuls like that. On Simchas Torah, one of the chassidim decided to play a joke and approached the gabbai. The gabbai was an innocent man, and the chossid said to him, “For the prestigious seventh hakafah, call up the most humble man in town.” The gabbai didn’t catch the joke. He banged on the bimah and announced that the humble man of the town should come up for the seventh hakafah—or the sixth; I don’t remember. A procession of four or five fellows came forward: the dayan, the town rabbi, and the others. So one of the chassidim approached the last man in line, I think—or... Listen, I don’t know the details. I read the story years ago and don’t remember it precisely. He approached one of the town leaders, or whoever it was, and said, “What? Aren’t you the most humble man in town? Why are you third or fourth in this procession? How can it be that you’re not the most humble?” He replied, “Of course I’m the most humble. The problem is that the rabbi up front doesn’t know it. That—

1:22:43 Speaker 12 that’s the real problem.” You understand? Sometimes a person learns, and... what has he done? He may become arrogant, and then he needs a few slaps, so to speak, to bring him back down to his proper size. But what’s the problem? Sometimes a person is so humble—“I’m not capable of learning this, I’m not capable of that”—that he loses all his drive to learn, whether nigleh or Chassidus. Why am I saying this? The truth is, for a long time I was looking for the right outlook, as people say—the central point. So let me show you what I found in Basi Legani. It isn’t this year’s maamar—though it would be good if it were—but I’m glad I saw it a few years ago, four years ago. The Rebbe explains this at length here. I won’t go into every detail. In section three, the Rebbe connects it to the tenth section of the Frierdiker Rebbe’s Basi Legani, where a person turns sheker, falsehood, into a keresh, a beam, in his avodah [unclear]. What does that mean? Let’s read a few lines: “The matter will be understood by first citing the Baal Shem Tov’s teaching on humility.” It turns out the Baal Shem Tov has a teaching, an outlook on this. He, too, is said to have been a chossid, somehow, so he has an outlook on humility. “When humility is out of place, it contradicts the service of the Creator.” Do you hear that? Very strong words. When humility is out of place, it contradicts the service of Hakadosh Boruch Hu. You can be serving Hakadosh Boruch Hu, but you say, “I’m humble—who am I?” They ask you to answer a halachic question or say a maamar, and you say, “No, who am I? What am I? That’s not for me, I—

1:24:20 Speaker 12 I can’t...” Even if you don’t say it to anyone, you think it to yourself: “Who am I? What am I?” You’re being false to yourself and going against Hakadosh Boruch Hu. And he explains: “That is, when a person thinks to himself, ‘Who am I and what am I?’ and, because of his lowliness, does not believe that through his prayer and Torah study he draws down sustenance to all the worlds, and that even the angels are nourished through his Torah study and prayer, this can lead, G-d forbid, to a decline: he may think, ‘Since my actions have no effect Above, I may as well follow the stubbornness of my heart.’” The Rebbe is saying: what happens to someone who says, “Who am I, what am I?” If I told you that your davening this morning brought things about among the angels, removed accusations, accomplished something— I remember that in yeshivah there was a man here. I won’t say his name, because I think you all know him. He used to come to daven Shacharis. He would cry during an ordinary weekday Shacharis. Seeing it brought tears to your eyes; it was something else. By wonderful hashgachah pratis, I sat beside him, and whenever he cried, my chavrusa and I would nudge each other’s legs: “Look, look.” Really, he was an extraordinary man. Where would he cry? During Ahavas Olam, before Shema. At “Place in our hearts the understanding to comprehend and discern.” You might ask, what happened? It was an ordinary weekday davening. It didn’t take him more than an hour—an hour, I don’t know, fifty minutes. A completely standard davening. He would sit here and cry. It was something special. The Rebbe says: if I told you that your davening nourished things in the higher worlds, what would you say to each other? What would you say to each

1:25:57 Speaker 12 other?

1:25:58 Speaker 15 Let’s do it.

1:25:59 Speaker 12 Really, come on. Who are you? What are you? You’re soiled and lowly. Remember everything that Rabbeinu [unclear] says in Tanya, right? Who are you, what are you... But no, says the Rebbe Rashab, that isn’t right. It isn’t right. G-d forbid that you should think you’re some great authority or something—that’s not right either. Find your place, but know that what you do has an effect Above. Why? Because if you don’t think that way and reflect on it, you’ll say, “Well, I don’t accomplish anything or do anything anyway.” The Rebbe says that’s a perfect recipe for a decline. I’m not saying it—here it is: “This can lead, G-d forbid, to a decline: he may think, ‘Since my actions have no effect Above, I may as well follow the stubbornness of my heart.’” And it’s like what our Sages said: “The humility of Rabbi Zechariah ben Avkulas destroyed our House.” Do you know that Gemara? Where is it?

1:26:45 Speaker 15 Gittin.

1:26:45 Speaker 12 Which page?

1:26:47 Speaker 15 In Nezikin.

1:26:48 Speaker 12 7a. What do we learn from Rabbi Zechariah ben Avkulas? What happened there? Bar Kamtza arrived with a sacrifice from the Roman emperor, and it had a blemish on its lip or its eye—the Gemara gives different opinions. So what does the Gemara say? They said, “What should we do? If we offer the sacrifice, people will say we offer blemished sacrifices. If we don’t offer it, there will be trouble.” So what was the conclusion? What should they have done? Killed Bar Kamtza. I can tell you... I don’t know if you know the stories about chassidim who took informers and, as they put it, gave them an aliyah of the soul. I’d heard stories like that here and there. I met a Jew here in Nachlas Har Chabad who told me that on certain Shabbosos he would travel to Tiferes Chabad to attend a farbrengen. He was a young man, and he’d go with a friend. They would stay at the home of one of the elders there—I won’t say his name. That was their routine before certain special Shabbosos. The family had a custom that had stuck with them: the father was a very elderly Jew, and before Kiddush they would say to him, “Come on, Grandpa, tell the story, tell the story.” He liked it that way: “Come on, Grandpa, tell the story.” Then he would tell how once, in Russia, a group of them were baking matzos, and suddenly a Jew came in who might inform on them to the authorities. They knew he was a KGB collaborator. So they would ask him, “And then what happened, Grandpa?” Everyone knew what happened, but sometimes there were guests, and they wanted them to hear it firsthand. “Well, we did the first oven, the first oven...” That’s how he would tell it. They

1:28:30 Speaker 12 would give him an aliyah of the soul. So that’s how it was, [unclear]—I heard it secondhand, but from a trustworthy Jew. Why am I saying this? There are situations where you have to take Bar Kamtza and send him to a better world. But what happens? He comes to you in shul and says, “No, no, no, no, no. It’s not so simple. What will people say?” The Gemara says: What will people say? Someone who brings an invalid sacrifice—what do they do to him?

1:28:50 Speaker 16 They kill him.

1:28:51 Speaker 12 They kill him. It isn’t appropriate, it isn’t appropriate. There are situations where you need to know that some people have to be given an aliyah of the soul. Not by you, G-d forbid, right? But why am I saying this? The Rebbe says that this is humility where it doesn’t belong. It’s along the lines of that kind of humility. Now, we don’t need to kill anyone. The point about humility is that we’re killing ourselves. You have to understand that there are times when you need to stop being humble. Believe in what you’re doing; believe in the truth. Believe that you’re capable, that you can become a scholar, that you can find a class in Nigleh and a class in Chassidus. If you believe, it will come. One hundred percent. It isn’t only in our writings; you find it in all sorts of places among non-Jews, too. We don’t need them to tell us this. I’m just giving an example that even in the outside world, non-Jews understand the point. If you truly have that inner drive, keep at it and brush things off. You fell? Brush it off. Keep going, keep going. Don’t get stuck in that depression. I promise you, it will take you places you never imagined. Never imagined. And then, on top of that, you suddenly become so humble, so holy... Do you know the video where the Rebbe calls over Shmuel Maidanchik? The Rebbe is distributing dollars to the tankists, and then the Rebbe says, “There’s a Jew here who drives not a tank, but a whole train.” So the Rebbe asks him to come over, and he doesn’t want to. He refuses. The Rebbe calls him again, and he’s like, “What am I? Who am I?” Then the Rebbe smiles and gives this hearty laugh. The Rebbe says, “That’s humility where it doesn’t belong, humility where it doesn’t belong. What can you do?” In the end he came over and took, I think, a hundred-something dollars—I don’t remember exactly. You can see it

1:30:17 Speaker 12 in the video. There are times when humility is out of place. I can tell you that most of the time, your humility is out of place. How do I know? Because before you could become arrogant and full of yourself, you have plenty of people around you who’ll make sure that doesn’t happen. You can relax; you have all your friends. The moment you try to raise your head, they’ll give it a little tap, and you’ll come right back down. So it’s all right. If anyone is worried he’ll become arrogant, I can promise him it won’t happen, especially not in Chabad. You know, there was once a Jew they wanted to ask to lead the prayers. He came to the rabbi with a question: “I can’t lead the prayers. I have a problem.” The rabbi asked, “Why?” He said, “I get filled with pride. When I lead the prayers, I get so proud of all my flourishes and everything.” The rabbi told him, “Don’t worry. Lead the prayers, and I’ll take that pride out of you in a moment.” So what happened? He went up to lead the prayers, with all his flourishes. Then someone came over to him in the shtiebel, tapped him on the back in the middle of davening and said, “Look behind you.” A few others were splitting their sides laughing. All his pride vanished in an instant. That’s all right; they’ll take it all out of him. If you’re afraid of becoming arrogant, I can promise you: you won’t be arrogant, ever. And even if you are, someone will bring you back down. A Jew once told me—a prominent Chabad rabbi, actually—“I’m always encouraging my children. Encouraging them, encouraging them.” Why? Because people outside will clip their wings soon enough. There are plenty who’ll do that. My job is to lift them up a little; others will do the clipping. There are people doing that job already, and that’s enough. When a young man comes

1:31:39 Speaker 12 and starts learning, he says, “All right, I’m going to know—I’m going to finish the Torah, I’m going to know all of Shas. I’m going to do this, I’m going to...” We go for the grandiose, the enormous goal. And then you start learning. A day—sorry—a day, two days, three days, it lasts. Suddenly the fourth day comes, and whoosh, there’s that downturn. This didn’t work out, that didn’t work out, this happened to me, that happened to me, and something else happened. I can tell you, there was a Jew here in the yeshivah. One person. I’ll even tell you where he sat. I remember it because it was so funny. It was Ta’anis Esther. I was in my second year, I think. When does the yeshivah finish? One o’clock, a quarter to one, something like that. I don’t know, Rabbi Shochat. Anyway, he was here around two, two-thirty, sitting and learning Gemara, Tractate Shabbos. I used to remember the page; I don’t remember which page it was anymore. It was such an interesting scene. He sat and learned, right here opposite this pillar, a little toward the middle. He sat and learned and learned and learned and learned, and he’d decided he wasn’t going to use Schottenstein. He’d got it into his head: “I’m not using Schottenstein. I want to understand the sugya on my own.” Now, I don’t know if you know this, but when the compilers of Shas put it together, they expected you to know at least one seder by heart: Seder Moed, Seder Nezikin, Seder Nashim. Know one seder by heart. How do I know? Who revealed it to me? There’s an introduction you don’t know about. Do you have Tractate Berachos? Check whether it’s an Oz Vehadar edition. If it isn’t Oz Vehadar, those editions are a chillul Hashem. Gemara, Gemara. That’s not right. There’s, there’s

1:33:20 Speaker 12 Never mind, it’s all right, never mind, never mind. There’s a very beautiful introduction, and for some reason, once Rashi came along, he made it unnecessary. It isn’t a book; it’s a few pages. I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed it. At the beginning of Tractate Berachos... You won’t find this in any other Gemara. There’s the usual title page, right? And suddenly there’s an introduction to Shas. Did you know Shas has an introduction? Every self-respecting book has an introduction, right? An introduction to Shas. There is one. I assume you’ve never read it, and no one has bothered to enlighten you about it either. So take a look: it’s two pages long. Who wrote it? I’m telling you, noise throws me off; it muddles my mind. You know. The introduction was written by Rav Nissim Gaon—that was his name. Rav Nissim Gaon was one of the great Geonim, and he writes various things there. I won’t go into all the details—the chain of transmission of the Torah and so on. Then he writes this: “Sometimes the Gemara says—sometimes the Gemara says—” Remind me to get back to the story about the young man here. I keep leaving stories and coming back to them. So remind me about him. Sometimes the Gemara presents a disagreement between Tannaim, and it looks as though there’s no disagreement. So what does the Gemara ask? “What is the practical difference between them?” And the Gemara says, “The difference is the incident involving Rav Bruna,” or “The difference is that man who ate”—I don’t know what. Now you try to figure out: what does “the difference is the incident involving Rav Bruna” mean? Where? We haven’t discussed Rav Bruna anywhere in the sugya. Who is this Rav Bruna we’re suddenly talking about? There’s no Rav Bruna at the beginning, the end, or the middle. So what

1:35:25 Speaker 12 do you do? You go to Rashi. And what does Rashi tell you? “As we learned later, on page 29b.” But you’re on page 5. You’re on page 5 and the Gemara tells you—I’m just giving an example—“The difference is the incident involving Rav Bruna,” and Rashi tells you, “As we learned later, on page 29.” Excuse me, wait a minute. How am I supposed to know what’s on page 29? We’re on page 5. Am I supposed to have learned page 29 already? How am I supposed to know all this? The Gemara treats it as obvious. What’s this about Rav Bruna? Any writer of a basic book knows that if you publish a book with no references and suddenly throw in a piece of information with no explanation or introduction to what I’m about to learn, that book will sell two or three copies at most. Shas sold thousands of copies even before Rashi came along and explained it to us. What were the compilers of Shas thinking? Rav Nissim Gaon says they expected you to be familiar with at least one entire order of the Mishnah. So what did they do? They said, look, sometimes we say, “The difference is the incident involving Rav Bruna”—I’m continuing with our example—and we put the incident ten pages later. Sometimes it’s in another tractate. You search the whole tractate for Rav Bruna doing this thing, and it isn’t there. There’s no Rav Bruna. Where is it? Ah, it’s discussed in Bava Kamma, in Bava Basra. You can rack your brains and still won’t find it. They had mercy on you and kept all the information within one order. They didn’t transfer information from one order to another, from Nashim to Nezikin or from Nezikin to Nashim and so on. They didn’t do that. They had mercy on us. Then Rav Nissim Gaon says: I want to spare you the headache

1:37:18 Speaker 12 So whenever the Gemara mentions something—say there are ten places where it says, “The difference is the incident involving Rabbi Buna”—he says: At every such place, I’ll write, “See Berachos 60.” That’s where the incident involving Rabbi Buna appears. Then someone learning Shas suddenly comes across “The difference is the incident involving Rabbi Buna,” or “The difference is such-and-such,” and knows where to look. Or sometimes the Gemara says, “As we learned later in this discussion,” and it appears another twenty pages on. In those cases, Rav Nissim Gaon directs you there. Today we have Rashi, who does it right there on the page. You know how Rashi sometimes gives you a tiny introduction to a sugya or explains something you haven’t encountered before? No, no—Rav Nissim Gaon. Why, Rav Nissim Gaon asks? Because the compilers of Shas, the holy Amoraim, expected you to learn the entire Shas by heart. He writes that explicitly. That was their understanding. Just as people learn Mishnah by heart, they would learn Shas by heart too. What does that mean? Rav Sherira Gaon, one of the last and greatest of the Geonim, describes how he had reciters in his yeshiva. What were reciters? You could send Rav Sherira Gaon a question: “Tell me, in Eruvin, page 17b, third line from the bottom, does it say Rabbah with a hei or Rava with an aleph? What does it say?” He had reciters who knew the entire Shas by heart. “What does it say? It’s Rabbah with a hei. It’s a hei, not an aleph.” They knew everything, everything, everything, everything. Let’s get back to our young fellow. He’s sitting there—also in Taanis 10, I told you, here beside the pillar. Why do I remember that? Anyway, the young man is sitting and learning. He decided not to use Schottenstein, and he reached a sugya about tumah and taharah in Tractate Shabbos. I think it’s somewhere around page 150. And he sits there

1:38:57 Speaker 12 learning and learning. I remember Rabbi Akiva’s opinion, milk that turned into something else, and then he starts racking his brains. He doesn’t understand it, doesn’t understand it, doesn’t understand it. He opens the Rishonim and anything else that might help him, except for contemporary commentaries. The young man was stuck on it for a full two hours. Two hours. I said to him, “Are you serious? Give yourself a break. It’s all right—keep learning. What happened? You won’t die if you open a Schottenstein. It isn’t a prohibition from the Torah, or even a rabbinic one.” “No, I want to understand it on my own.” This young man sat here for two hours, two and a quarter hours. I remember it. There was a prankster here, a bit of a clown, who threw a firecracker—something like dynamite—through the window into the hall. Just a young man who wanted to scare us. And just as the firecracker went off, our young man jumped. We were sure the blast had made him jump. It was a terrifying bang. I was here. But it turns out he jumped because, at the exact moment the firecracker exploded, he understood the sugya. That story stayed with me, and I said to myself: Wait, what did this young man do here? What did he spend two whole hours on? He could have opened a Schottenstein and understood it in ten minutes, less than five minutes. But then I said to myself: Notice that you can seemingly spend two hours on something—seemingly, he wasted them—but, G-d forbid, they weren’t wasted at all. Why? Because what did he engrave in himself? He engraved this: A person has to toil and rack his brains. During that time he trained himself: I’m going to sit and learn. It will be etched into me. I’ll sweat blood, I’ll get frustrated, it will be aggravating and unpleasant. But no—you learn. You have to rack your brains. Some people will come and say,

1:40:38 Speaker 12 “All right, you need pages of explanation.” And that’s true when it comes to putting the sugya together. Obviously, it’s worth opening a commentary. But the invaluable gain he came away with was the realization: I need to make my learning part of me. And I can tell you, this young man wasn’t especially gifted. He wasn’t foolish or brilliant—very average, truly average. And look where he is today. I would tell you his name, but I didn’t ask his permission to tell the story, so I won’t. He’s someone who has truly reached very high places, wonderful levels. Today he sits and learns; he’s a great and thorough Torah scholar with a deep understanding. I’ve strayed a little from the subject of bittul. Let me get back to it. You need to understand bittul. Of course you need to have bittul. There’s no question about it. No question. You need to have bittul. But I once saw—and unfortunately I don’t remember where it appears in Toras Menachem—that the Rebbe speaks about bittul and says it shouldn’t be bittul like a threshold everyone tramples on. What does that mean? You pass through a doorway and everyone steps on the threshold. A person needs to have bittul. A person certainly needs to have bittul, but not a bittul of “I’m nothing,” like a trampled threshold. “I’m nothing, I’m nothing.” There’s a story about the rabbi of Kfar Chabad. You didn’t know him. I didn’t know him either. He passed away in an accident sometime in 5735. His name was Rabbi Shneur Zalman Garelik. He had studied in Lubavitch, for example, and he used to lead farbrengens. Once he said that our Rebbeim had “abandoned him to the rabbinate,” something like that. He had an expression along those lines. What did he mean? Now he had to be a rabbi, and being a rabbi means dealing with all sorts of matters and with a community and so on. So he said that our Rebbeim had, so to speak, abandoned him to the rabbinate. And from then on, there was

1:42:17 Speaker 12 There was a Jew in Kfar Chabad who picked up on this and said, “Well, if there’s a chance to take a dig at the local rabbi using his own words, why not?” So he came and started in on Rabbi Schneur Zalman Garelik: “Ah, you’ve been given over to everyone, you’re at everyone’s disposal. As a rabbi, you’re at everyone’s disposal, you’re public property,” and so on. And it’s hard to learn when you’re a rabbi. It’s hard to learn; you’re busy with a million things. At one point Rabbi Garelik looked at him and said, “Look, fine, I was given over. True. So remember who gave me over, and why he gave me over. And remember who gave you over, and why he gave you over.” So I was “given over” to the rabbinate. “Given over,” in quotation marks. Yes, he meant that he could have found himself learning on his own, delving deeply, becoming a great mind in Chassidus, all of that. Oy vey, now he’s also dealing with the community. But why did Garelik say this to him? Fine, one needs bittul, certainly one does. He feels he’s been given over, so to speak. He feels he was capable of more and has come down from his level. But you mustn’t take bittul to the point where... There’s a story about a rabbi, though I don’t remember his name, so I won’t say it. But there was a certain Chabad rabbi, apparently living in Haifa, and he said this: he had always wondered about various great rabbis from different circles. What was his question? They themselves sign their letters “hakatan”—you know what that means? “The insignificant so-and-so.” And sometimes, in those same letters, all sorts of wonderful praises are written about them. They sign “hakatan,” while the letter calls them “our teacher, the great Rabbi” and so on and so forth. So he said he couldn’t make sense of it. Either way: if you’re insignificant, they shouldn’t write all those titles about you; and if you’re great, you shouldn’t write the... So this sharp-witted Chabad rabbi—

1:44:00 Speaker 12 He said he didn’t understand it until he reached the laws of the bathroom. There it says that when a person strains for “great things,” he comes to “small things.” All right, those who understand will understand. What’s the point? Mind you, he said it as a jab at the fellows who said it to him. There were a few Chabad matters involved there, so he took a little dig at them. A bit of joking around, as they say. Joking, but a sharp expression. What I’m saying, again, is not—there is a phenomenon among us: we dismiss people. Fine, this phenomenon exists in Chabad, and we shouldn’t ignore it. This one and that one dismiss people: “That one is nothing. His ideas are nonsense; it’s all rubbish...” Hey, hey, hey, wake up. Do you know what that Jew did? He sat and learned with tremendous depth. There are very great rabbinic authorities whom the Rebbe held in very, very high regard. Really, very highly. I won’t go into details now, but... You sit and learn, you sit and learn; you’re immersed in the sugya, you’ve understood it—have bittul. Don’t get caught up now in a sense of “who am I and what am I,” but don’t have that kind of bittul. Because... Fine, the Gemara belongs to you. Tell yourself: “The Gemara belongs to me. The siddur belongs to me. I can repeat a maamar.” I don’t know who repeats maamarim here in the evening. Who does it on Friday night? Not Friday night—Friday afternoon, Motzaei Shabbos. Bochurim, or...?

1:45:27 Speaker 17 Bochurim.

1:45:27 Speaker 12 Bochurim. Suddenly you might have something like this: five or six bochurim, I don’t know, maybe fifteen, who repeat maamarim there. Then a bochur comes along and says, “Well, I’m capable. I can do it.” What stops him? “They’ll say that now I’m also one of the people repeating maamarim on Motzaei Shabbos,” and all that. Who are you afraid of? Yourself. That’s the answer. “What will they say about me? What will they say, and how will it look? Am I really someone who can do that?” You start eating away at yourself with some sort of... You have a farbrengen with yourself in a way that... I’ll read it to you in the language of the maamar. The Rebbe says a person should contemplate that the great and awesome King watches and keeps His attention on a person’s lips. Hakadosh Boruch Hu sits and watches your lips. However much you’ve learned of the revealed parts of Torah, Hakadosh Boruch Hu is interested in hearing you. He wants to hear you. Think about that. Can you picture it? If some great rabbi came in here now—I’m giving you an example, I don’t know, a world-renowned rabbi—and sat down beside you as you learned a sugya, listening to you learn. He wants to hear from you. Imagine how you would learn, with such excitement. Well, Hakadosh Boruch Hu is standing beside you. The Rebbe tells you: He’s listening to you and He wants to. He’s interested in hearing what you learn, even though He already knows what you’re learning. He’s interested in hearing it. So why do you now come along with, “Me? Who am I?” And I’ll tell you, sometimes you don’t even say this to yourselves. I’m not just talking to you; I’m talking to myself too. You don’t say it to yourself. No, but deep down inside, that’s what keeps going through your subconscious all the time. And why am I saying this? Because you should know that one of the greatest obstacles to learning—you

1:47:06 Speaker 12 can be diligent, as we discussed at the beginning. Even if you’re not especially gifted, you have that... You sit and learn steadily and everything. You don’t fall into the depths; no, you hold on tight and sit and learn. But then some issue comes up. Wow, how full of bittul you suddenly become! Reb Sholom Yechiel could only envy you. You become such a champion of bittul. It’s so wrong. I’ll read another part of the maamar here: “Now, from the Baal Shem Tov’s statement that humility where it does not belong is like the humility of Rabbi Zechariah, which caused the Destruction, it follows that when a person takes the opposite approach, knowing that all his actions matter”—I’ll skip the parentheses here—“and because of this he serves Hashem with joy and gladness of heart, more than from all abundance, then through this he builds the Beis Hamikdash.” Do you understand what the Rebbe is saying? The Baal Shem Tov is telling you: Sir, if you become this champion of bittul, you’re like Rabbi Zechariah ben Avkulas. What are you doing? You’re destroying yourself. You’re bringing about the destruction of the Beis Hamikdash. You’re destroying Hakadosh Boruch Hu’s house, destroying yourself, destroying everyone around you. So if you don’t have humility when you need it, you’re... You have bittul, but when humility isn’t called for, you step forward and do what’s needed. What happens then? Ah, then you build the Beis Hamikdash. So as the Rebbe says regarding shlichus, ultimately this applies to each and every person. Every Jew has a Beis Hamikdash, and do yourself a favor: stop tearing it down. If you don’t build it, at least don’t destroy it. All right? Don’t destroy it. You’re sitting and learning? Sit and learn. With diligence, with persistence. Think about—I'm repeating these things so you shouldn’t think or imagine things that aren’t there. Ah, ah, ah, the Rebbe—I told

1:48:50 Speaker 12 you, the Rambam writes that there’s a concept called “the contingencies of time.” These are things that happen. What can you do? Things happen. A person might promise—a person thinks to himself now and says, “From today until the end of my life, I won’t catch a cold.” He knows for certain that at some point in his life, even if he’s the healthiest person in the world, once or twice he’ll catch a cold. Well, you know it’s going to pass. How can you not say—you don’t say... Are you certain of that? You are. Of course you are. Okay. There are contingencies of time. A person sits and learns. A person sits and applies himself to Torah. I’m dwelling on this point a bit because it’s important. Because, because these moments—I told you: do aveiros, do mitzvos. How did Rabban Donton[?] once put it? “Do an aveirah, do a mitzvah, but for Hashem’s sake, do something already.” Do you understand? A person sits—I call it “depression,” in quotation marks. Maybe that isn’t quite the right word, but this attitude of feeling inferior, this low feeling, this downturn, this “Who am I? What am I?”, this feeling of “I didn’t succeed, and I didn’t...” I’m telling you, if a person hangs on by the skin of his teeth, Hakadosh Boruch Hu will bring him success. That’s clear as... I could sit with you here—I have a three-volume book at home, nothing but stories about great Torah sages and all kinds of Jews from every circle and background, including Chabad, if you like. They’re all in there. The book has one central point. You can see it plainly: the person who sat and toiled and acted and... How did one of the great Torah scholars put it? He said: “You don’t need too much. You don’t need to stay up at night; you don’t need to...” What do you need to do? How, how, how do you become—h-how do you learn? How do you acquire knowledge properly? You

1:50:33 Speaker 12 You get up in the morning, eat, daven, sit down and learn, eat lunch, sit down and learn, keep learning, then supper comes, you eat supper, sit and learn a little more, night comes, and you go to sleep. Eight hours. You get up in the morning, eat something before davening, learn Chassidus, daven. If a person does that—but with what? There will be, there will be a schedule. In other words, you know, this is the order: I learn. Not bread and salt, nothing like that. Just learn in an orderly way, as you should. I can—do you know who Rabbi Baruch Magnen[?] was? Have you read the memoirs of Rabbi Baruch Magnen[?]? Do you know what he knew thoroughly? He knew the entire Orach Chaim by heart. The entire Orach Chaim by heart. I’ve read in books—what we call books, let’s call them secular books. I mean, not Torah books, but books describing Jewish life in Poland a hundred years ago. They would say you could easily go into a shul and find ordinary householders, Jews who got up in the morning and worked for a living and all that, who didn’t learn all day, weren’t kollel students or anything, and they knew Shas thoroughly. Shas, with Tosafos, with the Rosh—they knew Shas. Why? They weren’t great geniuses or anything. What did they do? They came for Minchah and Maariv, sat and learned for an hour, or an hour and a half after Minchah. They sat and learned systematically. But what happens when you’re learning? Suddenly a friend comes over, right? He starts talking to you. Chazal already said, right? When one person learns, he’s learning; two make a chavrusa; three make a farbrengen; and four is already the ingathering of the exiles. A huge farbrengen. You can bring in singers and everything, make it a real performance. A bochur comes over to you and interrupts your learning—and he is interrupting. What happened? You’re allowed to say it. He’s interrupting your

1:52:11 Speaker 12 learning. You’re sitting and learning, and he interrupts you. You tell him, “Sir, talk to me afterward.” What you deal with here—your biggest dilemma in the morning is whether to take cheese or cottage cheese. That seems to be the biggest dilemma in your lives. Cheese, cottage cheese, an omelet with onions, an omelet without onions. That’s the dilemma in your lives. I know a Jew, a traditional Jew from Kiryat Malachi, becoming more observant, a strong Jew, boruch Hashem. He tells me he went to a restaurant. And who did he go with? Four friends of his from Ashdod who aren’t so particular about wearing a gartel. Just like him. He doesn’t have a gartel at home either. In short, Jews who aren’t—yes, of course, [unclear]. They’re not overly particular. So they got to the restaurant. He went in, and I had told him—he eats food with Rabbanut certification; food is food. Fine, he’s a Jew who’s drawing closer. I told him that at least he should insist on Rabbanut chalak. At least, little by little. Not just Rabbanut—Rabbanut chalak kosher. He gets to the restaurant. He tells me this, and my hair stood on end. He goes in with his friends, four friends and their wives, and they sit down. Suddenly he goes over to the restaurant owner and says, “Where’s your kashrus certificate?” He asks the waiter, “Where’s the kashrus certificate?” The waiter says, “I’ll bring it to you. Of course everything’s kosher, everything’s in order.” He goes and comes back. No kashrus certificate. What? Who? Where? He called the owner. The owner brings the kashrus certificate, and it says: “This certificate is valid until”—I don’t know—“13 Kislev 5783.” It had expired two months earlier. The kashrus certificate was no longer valid. The owner tells him, “No, listen, I have a certificate, and I have this.” Too bad. I want to stress, this isn’t a restaurant

1:53:51 Speaker 12 like the ones you know around here. I go here—I won’t name restaurants—yes, I go to the middle or the end of the street to eat. Not restaurants like those—we go to restaurants, eat at fancy restaurants, as they say, eat and [unclear]. Not like that. Whatever you’re thinking, just in passing. Respectable places. And he tells me, “A scene starts developing because I’m asking for the certificate. I see there isn’t one. I say to the man, ‘Where’s your certificate? Where’s the kashrus certificate? This one isn’t valid.’” And he starts shouting, and my friend says, “No. Fine, I’m not willing to eat here.” His wife says, “You’re embarrassing us so much,” and all his friends say, “Come on, stop already. What’s with you?” Half an hour earlier he had been just like them, yes. He could easily have given in. In the end the owner says, “No, I’m telling you, it’s kosher.” He says, “Kosher? Then get the mashgiach.” Bottom line, they waited three-quarters of an hour. At one in the morning they managed to reach the mashgiach and woke him up. The mashgiach told him the place was kosher. Of course, not under our standard of kashrus—under a middling standard—and explained why they hadn’t brought the certificate: the owner hadn’t yet paid the fee to the Rabbanut. “But I’m there every day, and everything is supervised.” Now he tells me: for three-quarters of an hour people are looking at him, he’s standing outside in the rain, and all his friends and their wives are already looking at him like he’s out of his mind. He’s embarrassing himself and embarrassing his wife. He tells me, “Listen, in the end, boruch Hashem, I stood firm. I managed to verify that everything was kosher.” I heard that and said to myself: when do I face a challenge like that, one where I can say I stood firm? A bochur comes over. You’re sitting and learning. You decided to sit down and learn. You decided to finish a masechta. You decided

1:55:20 Speaker 12 to learn during free study time—whatever you decided. You’re sitting there, learning diligently. Suddenly someone comes over: “Wow, look at this and that. Wow, look over here and there. Wow—” Now, sometimes you’re not interested in what he’s saying, but you feel bad brushing him off. Right? You feel uncomfortable, so you give him your attention. About that they said, “The humility of Rabbi Zechariah ben Avkulas destroyed our House.” Why do you need to destroy your own Beis Hamikdash over a young fellow like that? He came to talk to you. He came innocently; he didn’t come to bother you, G-d forbid. He doesn’t realize you’re absorbed in something. He came to talk to you about things. You need to tell him nicely, with a smile, “Sir...” People won’t be offended, and even if they’re a little offended at first, it’s all right. No one ever died from that. You can put him at ease. Stand your ground. Don’t be so bound by the people around you. Yes, what people around you think matters, and it says, “You shall be above reproach before Hashem and before Israel.” You don’t need to be some kind of... I don’t want to quote a story here, something that—no, no, no—I’m not encouraging violence. But there was once an incident around here. I know we played this niggun earlier, but I’m fond of it, so I started it again. That’s... I’ll tell you another point. I happen to spend time among various Jews who, in the nature of things, learn a little Torah—or at least try to. When I was a young bochur, I was fourteen, there was a bochur who—by the way, here’s an idea that I think is wonderful, even brilliant. He shared it with me. There was me and one other person. No, it wasn’t anything big. I would sometimes see him go up to the main building. I don’t know if you know, but in the main building here in Nachlas Har Chabad there are books

2:00:01 Speaker 12 enough for three kollels put together. Boruch Hashem, there’s a vast number of books here. He would go up, take a book, open it, read a little, close it. Take another book, leaf through it a little, close it. I couldn’t understand what was going on with him. I knew him, and I thought, what are you reading there? Are you doing some Tikkunei Zohar, uniting souls? What are you doing? So I asked him, “What’s the idea?” He told me he was doing a “head full of books” campaign. What does that mean? He said, “Look, you have to get to know books. The Jewish bookshelf, boruch Hashem, is very large, very, very large. We have hundreds of thousands of books, perhaps. Not all of them are in print, not all of them are—but there’s an enormous number of books. And sometimes you sit and learn and learn. You can learn and know things, but if you’ve never touched a particular book, why would you be familiar with it? Right? And it’s embarrassing not to know it.” What do I mean? I don’t want to speak ill of the Jewish people. Do you know what the Mishnah Berurah is?

2:01:07 Speaker 3 Yes.

2:01:07 Speaker 12 You know it, right? A commentary on the Shulchan Aruch, written by the Chofetz Chaim 120 years ago. Do they know it or don’t they? There was once a student—uh, no, I won’t get into the details now. Who he was and all that. Chabad or not Chabad—it doesn’t matter. Someone asked him whether the shul had a Mishnah Berurah. I don’t know whether this actually happened or not, but it’s a nice point. A fellow came up to him and said, “Is there a Mishnah Berurah here in the shul?” So he thinks for a moment, looks around, and says, “Look, Mishnah Berurah—I don’t know if we have that, but we have Kehot Mishnayos if you’d like.” I heard this from someone as a true story, as they say, but I don’t know how much to believe it. In any case, the message is clear. I’m telling it to get the message across.

2:01:48 Speaker 3 Reyzel.

2:01:48 Speaker 12 A person can sit and—

2:01:50 Speaker 3 The name is Reyzel.

2:01:51 Speaker 12 There’s Reyz—what are you saying? A person can sit and learn, but there are basic things you need to know. You have to be familiar with the Jewish bookshelf. Why? I’ll tell you why. Sometimes a person sits down to learn Gemara. Why do you go and learn Gemara? Mishnah, Gemara—you learn it because that’s what you’ve learned since first grade. Fourth grade, I think, is when they start Mishnayos and Gemara. Fine, you learn it in order, reach yeshivah, and carry on. But let me first tell you a story. There’s a car company called Chrysler. For some reason, its sales started plummeting and kept falling. Things weren’t going well; they couldn’t sell cars. So what did they do? They brought in an outside consultant to advise the company. What did he do? He gathered all the company executives and managers and told them, “Gentlemen, I can solve your problem in five minutes.” “How can you solve it in five minutes? You need to look at the company’s figures and analyze the problem.” He said, “Trust me. Five minutes.” They seated the whole board of directors around a big table. The consultant began: “Gentlemen, I’d like everyone to take out their key rings, get them out of your pockets, and put them on the table.” Everyone did. Then he started: “You, you, you, you, you, you, you—you’re fired. Go home. Don’t come back.” They stared at him. What’s wrong with this madman? He claims to solve the problem in half a minute, and he fires half the company’s managers! Then the consultant explained: “Look at these people’s key rings. This one has a BMW, that one a Mitsubishi, that one a Honda—you name it. Not one of

2:03:41 Speaker 12 them has a Chrysler. This one, this one, and this one have Chryslers; those others don’t. If you don’t believe in the product you make, how will you sell it to anyone else? You can’t. So what happens? You work because it’s your job, because you’re here, because you get a salary and all that—but you aren’t selling the Chrysler. If you aren’t selling it, leave the company. What are you doing here? You’ll never manage to raise sales.” How does this apply to us? We sit and learn Gemara, right? We have an enterprise called learning Gemara. You can come to it thinking, “What can I do? My parents sent me here. This is the yeshivah schedule: we learn Gemara and Mishnayos, we have shiurim, we sit and learn. That’s how it works, and that’s my life.” Fine—that’s one way to come. Or you can come to it as your own enterprise: “This is me. This is mine.” If you come like some outside journalist covering what happens in the yeshivah, you’re wasting your time. How do you expect to—you need to be completely in it, with your whole mind. You’re here on a mission. And why am I bringing this up? A person can’t connect to what he does or what he learns if he doesn’t know what he’s dealing with. If you’re learning this one page of Gemara but don’t understand the vast system it belongs to, you’re wasting your time. You’ll rack your brains over the Gemara, but it won’t be the same. One

2:05:18 Speaker 12 of the things—not the only thing, but one of the things—that helps ensure you enjoy learning and really get into it is understanding where you belong. And you can understand that only if you know how the Mishnah began, how Moshe Rabbeinu began. Let me ask you something. You’ve learned the passage in the Gemara that you say every morning: “Rabbi Elazar said in the name of Rabbi Chanina: Torah scholars increase peace in the world.” Right? Clear? Clear, but is it? As it says, “And all your children shall be taught by Hashem”—“Do not read ‘your children,’ but ‘your builders.’” Right? Has it ever happened that the rosh yeshivah, or the mashgiach, stopped you at the entrance to the zal and said, “Ah! It says here you were late this morning. What’s this about being ten minutes late to Chassidus?” Right? What would you say to the mashgiach? I’ll give you some advice—I hope this mashgiach won’t take offense—but here’s my advice. Tell him, “Don’t read ‘ten minutes late’; read ‘on time.’” A religious-guy solution, right? “Don’t read this; read that.” “Don’t read one hundred; read two hundred.” You get a payslip at the end of the month, right? Has anyone paid you a salary? “Don’t read fifteen shekels; read fifteen thousand.” What is that?

2:06:23 Speaker 4 What’s it meant to add?

2:06:24 Speaker 12 Huh?

2:06:24 Speaker 4 What’s it meant to add?

2:06:26 Speaker 12 What does “don’t read” mean? Where did this “don’t read” come from? What’s it meant to add? So I’ll say to my boss, “Sir, I have a payslip here for fifteen thousand shekels. That’s nice, but it was a busy month, so don’t read ‘fifteen’; read ‘eighteen.’ Give me another three thousand.” What does “don’t read” mean? Who came up with these things? What is this? And for that matter, what is a gezeirah shavah? Sometimes there seems to be no connection between the picture and the story at all. You have one verse that says “you,” and another verse that says “you,” and that means such-and-such. You know what happened? This past Shavuos, I sat and learned with a fellow. He came with real mesirus nefesh, may he be well, to learn Gemara with me. On Shavuos night he finished Tikkun at his shul downtown, then came to Tiferes Eliezer to learn Gemara. He wanted to finish Tractate Tamid and get a feel for Tractate Taanis. He sat down to learn with me, and suddenly the Gemara said, “Don’t read this, but that.” He expressed himself rather strongly, and I waited to see what he would say—whether he would react to what the Gemara was saying. He was trying to understand something, and the Gemara was saying, “No, the Mishnah says this, but don’t read it that way; read it this way.” Or, “The Torah says this, but don’t read it this way; read it that way.” So I read it with him and, quite innocently—or pretending to be—I was about to continue. He said, “Wait, wait, wait, wait. What does ‘don’t read’ mean?” I just repeated the words; I didn’t explain: “Don’t read this, but that.” He looked at me and said, “You have to admit…” I’ll repeat his words, even though they’re a bit much, so you understand the point. What he

2:07:44 Speaker 12 said was, “You have to admit that if someone who wasn’t religious were sitting across from you, he’d hit you over the head with a chair.” That was his expression. What does “don’t read this, but that” mean? Who invented these—what are these ideas? And more generally, what does “a halachah given to Moshe at Sinai” mean? “A halachah given to Moshe at Sinai”—and that shuts down the discussion. That’s it. Who decided? And besides, who says that over the generations someone didn’t slip that in as “a halachah given to Moshe at Sinai”? Think about it. You’re learning Bava Basra, aren’t you? You’re learning Bava Basra now? Do you know what “whoever is stronger prevails” means? Have you learned that? Have you reached the chapter Chezkas Habatim? What does “whoever is stronger prevails” mean?

2:08:23 Speaker 4 Either through arguments or by—

2:08:24 Speaker 12 Whoever succeeds, right? Whoever goes and seizes it by force wins. Right?

2:08:29 Speaker 4 Or through arguments, no?

2:08:30 Speaker 12 Or with this argument or that argument. But there’s an opinion that says: by force of arms. Would that hold up in court today? Could you explain something like that logically to someone outside? Could you make a reasoned case for it? Do you understand what I’m saying? If you can’t explain the logic of it, that means you yourself haven’t understood anything. You haven’t understood. I’m the tough guy? How many tough guys are out there? How many? Plenty. Anyone can bring in some criminals, pay them money, and whoosh—they’ll take the ship over there. They’ll take it. What kind of violent culture is this? Think about it. I could sit here now, and I don’t want to dismantle this whole thing for you, but you can take any topic. What is it? Where did it start? Where does it end? Things that seem, on the face of it, utterly illogical and unreasonable—we don’t know; we just read them. Do you know what Ben Hei Hei says? How many times have you read it this year, last year? Right. Ben Bag Bag says, “Turn it over and turn it over, for everything is in it”—right? Ben Hei Hei says, “The reward is according to the effort.” Who is this Ben Bag Bag? And this Ben Hei Hei? And why are they, of all people, the ones with these funny names? Excuse me. What is Ben Bag Bag? What is Ben Bag Bag? What? Does that name mean something? Do you know what Ben Bag Bag means? What is Ben Bag Bag? Was that his name? That wasn’t his name. Who is Ben Bag Bag? People who really study this—go and check. But what I’m trying to say is: what is all this? If you don’t know where things began. Moshe Rabbeinu, Rabbi Yehudah Hanasi. Do you know that people used to study—until twenty-two hundred years ago, they studied Torah only while standing. Are you

2:10:06 Speaker 12 aware that you would have had to stand from seven-thirty in the morning until seven-thirty at night? Not counting the time spent studying the sederim.

2:10:13 Speaker 4 Until the end of the world.

2:10:14 Speaker 12 Until when? Until when did they study standing up?

2:10:16 Speaker 4 Until Rabban Gamliel the Second.

2:10:18 Speaker 12 The second, or the first, or the third?

2:10:19 Speaker 4 The first.

2:10:20 Speaker 12 The first. Who said that?

2:10:22 Speaker 4 The Ran.

2:10:24 Speaker 12 Good, so I see people here know something. Good. But then we need to understand: if we don’t understand where—what is this Gemara? What is this whole pile back here, the Tosefta? Who needs it? Who even deals with it? What is this Tosefta? What—what’s it for? What difference does it make: Tosefta, baraisa? Fine, you encounter baraisos in the Gemara. If the baraisos were left out of the code and the Mishnah was kept, why do you need a baraisa? I’m compiling a law code and leaving out all kinds of things that don’t seem right to me. That’s what Rabbi Yehudah Hanasi did. Then the Amoraim come along, take a bypass, and bring proofs from the baraisos. What is this? What kind of practice is that? And what is this Tosefta, where a Tanna suddenly gets dropped in on me—a Tanna, a Tanna, a Tanna? Think about it for a moment. And in Tosafos, too, I can show you contradictions, contradictions in matters of belief. Tosafos contradict one another: one says A, one says B, one says C. Endless contradictions. I could bring you hundreds—dozens. What is this, different people? Have you ever seen someone put together a book with two hundred people credited as its authors, and the book is full of contradictions? Does it make sense to you to publish a book like that? Does it make sense to publish it or not? Would it get through Koren Publishers?

2:11:41 Speaker 4 Yes, your brother’s.

2:11:42 Speaker 12 There’s your grandfather, the publisher. Would he publish a book like that or not? I’m not mistaken—it’s your grandfather, right? Would he publish it? He’d tell you, “Sir, go and decide what you want. Then come back to me.”

2:11:53 Speaker 4 Yes, you have many books that—

2:11:56 Speaker 12 But what’s the logic of putting together a book by two hundred people? Each one contradicts the next. Let each one write separately; put things in order.

2:12:02 Speaker 4 He doesn’t have that.

2:12:03 Speaker 12 Who says? Where are you getting the information that they didn’t do that? Where are you getting that information?

2:12:07 Speaker 4 The fact is that there are contradictions.

2:12:08 Speaker 12 Ah, the fact is that there are contradictions? So if I see a contradiction, I don’t say, “Fine, we just have to accept the contradiction.” I say, “All right, apparently that’s a fact.” That’s actually a distinctive feature.

2:12:15 Speaker 4 Why are there almost no contradictions in Rashi, despite all your...?

2:12:17 Speaker 12 There are almost no contradictions in Rashi? Who says? There can be contradictions in Rashi too.

2:12:20 Speaker 4 There are contradictions.

2:12:20 Speaker 12 Well, well, all right. Have you learned about Aga’as Mash? Do you know what Aga’as Mash is? It’s not the name of a weapon. What is Aga’as Mash? Do you know what Aga’as Mash is?

2:12:29 Speaker 4 Tosafos Moreh Nevuchim.

2:12:30 Speaker 12 What is it?

2:12:31 Speaker 4 Tosafos Moreh Nevuchim.

2:12:31 Speaker 12 Where did it come from? How did Tosafos Moreh Nevuchim get into Rashi? Where is Tosafos found?

2:12:38 Speaker 4 Outside.

2:12:39 Speaker 12 Outside Rashi, right? Outside. Rashi is on the inside. Suddenly one of the authors of Tosafos slipped in and inserted things into Rashi. And you’ll see that it appears only on certain pages. Suddenly, on other pages, it disappears. Nowhere to be seen.

2:12:51 Speaker 4 Printings.

2:12:52 Speaker 12 Printings? Who has the nerve to say that, eh?

2:12:55 Speaker 4 Printing—that’s right.

2:12:56 Speaker 12 It just slipped in there all of a sudden. Does that sound logical to you? Oz Vehadar, yes? A new edition.

2:13:02 Speaker 4 That’s what happened seven hundred years ago.

2:13:05 Speaker 12 So they left the blunder in place, just like that? Somehow it slipped in there? There was no printing seven hundred years ago, my dear. So it would have had to be four hundred and fifty years ago.

2:13:13 Speaker 4 Or even earlier, in a manuscript.

2:13:16 Speaker 12 So they just got confused and put it in. Then they should add a note, as they do for all sorts of things. Add a note: “This slipped in.” There have been cases where Tosafos for page A appears on page B. So they add a note: “This Tosafos belongs on page B.”

2:13:26 Speaker 4 Where are the answers?

2:13:28 Speaker 12 Before the answers, I want to present the problem first. What am I trying to say? Am I trying to bring you down? Not at all. First of all, I had these questions too, and I worked hard to find the answers. So do some work yourselves first. What happened—should I just hand you everything now? I’m joking. But we need to understand that this is much, much broader than we think. And if we understand what we’re dealing with here—what is even going on in this strange book called the Gemara? Why get tangled up in it? There’s a Shulchan Aruch; spare me this Gemara. What does the Rambam write? What do you know about the Rambam? What does he write in his introduction?

2:14:00 Speaker 4 To study only Chumash?

2:14:01 Speaker 12 Someone who studies my book needs only to study Chumash and the Rambam. That’s it; nothing in between is needed. Right? Are you familiar with that or not? Right. Does the Rambam really mean it?

2:14:12 Speaker 4 Yes.

2:14:13 Speaker 12 Yes?

2:14:13 Speaker 4 In terms of halachah, not in terms of—

2:14:14 Speaker 12 In terms of halachah. Do you understand what the Rambam is writing?

2:14:17 Speaker 4 Then they would understand.

2:14:18 Speaker 12 Today—leave “then” aside. The Rambam didn’t write, “Then they would understand.” He said it, and he meant it for every situation.

2:14:22 Speaker 4 Then the generations changed.

2:14:24 Speaker 12 Fine, “the generations changed” is the easiest answer. Yes, anything can change. But that’s not written there. Even in the Rambam’s own time, they didn’t understand him. What was the Rambam thinking there? I’m not here, G-d forbid, to bring anyone down. I’m saying there’s a deep and broad logic behind all this. The introduction by Rav Nissim Gaon that I mentioned earlier—Rav Nissim Gaon’s introduction to Berachos—is essentially an introduction to Shas. The Rambam’s introduction to his commentary on the Mishnah also sheds light on a great many things. The Rebbe once said that he didn’t understand why people don’t study the principles of the Talmud. Do you know there are principles of the Talmud? There are rules for how to study Gemara. Where are those rules found?

2:14:59 Speaker 4 I’m some distance away.

2:15:00 Speaker 12 Where?

2:15:00 Speaker 4 I’m some distance away.

2:15:02 Speaker 12 I asked where they’re found.

2:15:04 Speaker 4 At the end of Maseches Berachos.

2:15:05 Speaker 12 At the end of Tractate Berachos. So the Rebbe says in the sicha that he doesn’t understand what he meant. The Talmud is the simplest example: if you’re going to study a book, you have to learn its rules. Otherwise, you won’t understand the strange things it suddenly throws at you. So the Rebbe says, “The only answer I found is that it’s at the end of Tractate Berachos.” That’s a tractate that doesn’t go over well in yeshivos. Why? It isn’t analytical enough. So they pushed it aside. The Rebbe Rashab has Kuntres Eitz Hachayim, a whole explanation of how to learn, what to learn, and how to go about it. He refers you to a book by Rabbi Yitzchak Canpanton. Do you know who Rabbi Yitzchak Canpanton was? Who was Rabbi Yitzchak Canpanton? Enough nonsense. His name was Rabbi Yitzchak Canpanton, and he was one of the greatest Spanish sages of five hundred years ago. He was described as an extraordinary genius. He would give his students a question and send them off to find an answer, then tell the other students: “Watch—five hours from now, this one will come back with this answer, that one with that answer, and the others with their answers.” And five hours later, that was exactly what happened—not through ruach hakodesh. How did he do it? He had such a powerful mind. He understood his students’ thought processes so well that he knew each would arrive at a different line of reasoning, and he knew which reasoning each one would reach and by what route. Do you understand what kind of mind that takes? So he writes in his introduction: “The first rule you need to know—first of all, when you’re learning Gemara and feeling like peacocks: ‘What kind of reasoning is that? What is this—is that Rabbi Yehudah? Nothing here makes any sense!’” Right? How often does that

2:16:32 Speaker 12 happen? Does it happen or not? There’s no need to be embarrassed; it’s perfectly understandable. “What was Rashi thinking? I don’t understand.” You get this feeling of, “Where were Ravina and Rav Ashi, the people who compiled the Talmud? Why didn’t they consult me?” Right? So what’s the answer? Rabbi Yitzchak Canpanton says that the first rule when you learn is to know that these people weren’t fools; they were exceptionally wise. And if one of them says something that seems to you to have no reasoning behind it at all, there’s a deep rationale there that your little mind can’t grasp. You see a Tosafos that suddenly builds an argument on it. I came across a Tosafos this week and said to myself, “For heaven’s sake, what kind of reasoning is this? Where did they pull it from?” They toss out these basic assumptions in three-odd lines, as we say in plain Hebrew, and now go find someone to help you understand what they understood. You open the Maharsha, who tells you, “See Bava Kama, in Keitzad Haregel; that’s where the Gemara reached a conclusion on this issue.” In the middle of a discussion there, the Gemara slips in a sentence that actually resolves the issue in Bava Basra, and Tosafos knew that. And Tosafos reasoned that, since there’s a ruling here, the reasoning in the Bava Basra discussion must be such and such. But they didn’t tell you the whole story, because as far as they were concerned, well, don’t you have the sense to learn Bava Basra, understand it in light of Bava Kama, and make the connection yourself? “I’m just telling you the reasoning at the end.” So the Maharshal says of Tosafos that they rolled the entire Talmud around like a ball of fire—rolled it around like a ball. Now, you need to understand. I’ll give you a tiny example. You want answers, answers. A tiny example. When Rabbeinu Yitzchak the Elder—Rabbeinu Tam’s nephew, for example—would study with his

2:18:08 Speaker 12 students, he had sixty of them. Each one knew one tractate, and knew it by heart. He might have known other tractates too, but not at the same level. Every one of them knew an entire tractate by heart. Rabbeinu Yitzchak would sit with sixty students before him—because sixty tractates make up the Talmud—and throw a question into the room, an objection or a law or whatever it might be. Each of them would start turning it over in his mind. Suddenly, he’d bring up a discussion: “Wait, that doesn’t fit with the discussion in Taanis.” So the one who knew Bava Basra would say what it had to say, and that was how they could roll through the entire Talmud. Do you understand what that means? You’ve got sixty people who, between them, have a command of every tractate, the entire Talmud, each with deep insights of his own. And then you come along in all your brilliance at eleven-thirty in the morning, humming “Rejoice, My Innards.” Right? After breakfast. You know, there was a Lubavitcher Tomim who would spend an hour davening with tremendous inner effort, but perhaps didn’t feel like learning. So the mashgiach asked him, “Well, if you daven with such effort, where’s the learning? Why don’t you learn so well?” He told the mashgiach, “What can I do? Breakfast comes in between.” They told the Rebbe Rashab, and the Rebbe Rashab enjoyed it very much. In other words, you’re immersed in spiritual matters, and then you eat a little and suddenly lose that focus. Afterward, you go to learn, but you’re not... When you learn Tosafos, you need the humility even to understand what you’re looking at. Wow—do you know how they put it together? How they arrived at it? Where were their minds? Where is your mind right now? What makes you

2:19:43 Speaker 12 think you can understand its depth in half an hour of learning? Absolutely not. There’s the Maharsha, and we have halachic authorities and commentators who... Really, who needs all this bulk? Do you know how thick Tractate Berachos itself is? I don’t know if you do. How much of this whole volume do you think is Tractate Berachos? Half? A third? Not even a quarter—maybe a fifth. You’ve got piles of commentators here, and Hakadosh Boruch Hu knows who stuffed them in and why we need them. Did they come to give me a headache? Who’s the Yefeh Einayim? What do I need him for? [unclear]. Why did he get stuck in here? Maharsha? Maadanei Yom Tov, Shmuel Chadash? What do we need all this clutter for? Kitzur Piskei HaRosh—as though someone asked them to flood us with material. Give me a break. Why do we need it? And have you ever even opened the Rosh?

2:20:31 Speaker 5 The Rosh, yes.

2:20:32 Speaker 12 Huh? You’ve opened the Rosh?

2:20:34 Speaker 5 The Rosh, yes.

2:20:35 Speaker 12 Yes. How many times have you opened the Rosh? Fine, no problem. Have you opened Maadanei Yom Tov down below? Have you opened Pilpula Charifta?

2:20:42 Speaker 5 No.

2:20:43 Speaker 12 Why do we need it? I’m not getting into the practical side for no reason. Let me explain something. If we understand how this was put together... I once sat here with a Jew who had become observant—a Chabadnik, a Chabadnik who had become observant, a relatively new chossid, still very new. Eight years, five years, but nobody had ever spoken to him about Gemara and all that. When we bring people into Chabad, we assume they know the entire Talmud inside out by heart, so we don’t even remember to teach anyone anything. He was sitting there, and suddenly I realized he had no idea what the Mishnah was and what the Gemara was. He knew, but not really. So I gave him an overview. It took some time, and suddenly he said, “Oh, this is completely different.” What happened? I hadn’t taught him anything new, nothing new at all. I’d only put things in order. If you don’t know what you’re dealing with, you’re wasting your time. Any desire you have to learn will be gone from then on—really, from then on. Why? Because it’s like my handing you a geometry workbook right now. Here, take a workbook. Did you do your matriculation exams? You didn’t, right? You’re not even that age yet. A geometry workbook. Here, read it. You start reading: “What do they want from me? Yosef left Jerusalem at this time. Nachman left Tzfas at that time. At what time did they meet on the road at Ein Zeitim?” Who even cares? Come on, let me out of this. You’re studying math—what do I need all this for? Do you know the answer? The answer is that you’re right. There’s no reason for someone to sit and learn with enthusiasm if he has no connection to what he’s learning. If he understands what this book is, who was... If you don’t have the keys to a Chrysler, you’re wasting

2:22:18 Speaker 12 your time. You can read about it, but you won’t sell one, you won’t want one, you won’t use one—nothing. And that doesn’t apply only to this. Have you ever seen Hanochos HaR"P? Have you heard of Hanochos HaR"P or not? Hanochos HaR"P—have you heard of it?

2:22:28 Speaker 5 Who’s HaR"P?

2:22:30 Speaker 12 That’s the question: who is this rabbi? Hanochos HaR"P—have you heard of it? You’re reading the Alter Rebbe’s maamarim, and suddenly Hanochos HaR"P lands in the middle of them. Who is this Hanochos HaR"P, getting under the Alter Rebbe’s feet? Huh? [unclear]—what do we need his transcripts for? Aren’t transcripts of the Alter Rebbe’s own words enough? Why do we need him? We’re not necessarily looking for an answer. We have enough; are we lacking... A friend here had a book, a book of the Rebbe’s maamarim. The book Meah Shearim. Ever heard of it? Huh? Meah Shearim. Where did you read it?

2:23:07 Speaker 5 Fifty minutes of the Alter Rebbe. Fifty minutes of...

2:23:10 Speaker 12 There are maamarim there too.

2:23:11 Speaker 5 What?

2:23:12 Speaker 12 There are maamarim there too.

2:23:13 Speaker 5 Yes, too.

2:23:14 Speaker 12 Me’ah Sh— the book Me’ah She’arim. It’s clear that it’s the Alter Rebbe; it’s clear he said it. Not everything there is clear. We won’t get into the details. There are so many books by the Rebbe, by— If you don’t read a little Jewish history and try to understand who’s who and what’s what... I once sat with a certain young man, and he told me, “Right, so the Geonim came after the Rishonim.” If you don’t see the problem, then you’re in trouble. The Geonim lived before them—roughly eleven hundred years ago. The Rishonim came right afterward. And more generally, how was the Torah passed down? How did it reach me, and why did they give me this Gemara? Do you understand where I’m going with this? What I’m trying to say is—let me put it simply. If you want to connect with what you’re learning, with what you know, with the Gemara—I don’t know, I’ve applied this to everything. I used the Gemara as an example because it was the book in front of me. If you want to connect with it, you must, must, must know who’s who and what’s what. True, that isn’t the main point of learning. Absolutely true; it isn’t the main point, and I agree. The Rambam himself, when he gives a bit of an overview of the Tannaim and Amoraim, writes, “This is not a major part of learning.” But after writing that, he spends something like three pages explaining it. If he thought it had no real importance, he would have left it out. He wouldn’t have written it at all. There’s a principle here. The Rambam himself didn’t need it, because he had a desire to learn and everything, but our generation—if you don’t understand where you stand in relation to what you’re learning... You

2:24:46 Speaker 12 know that when someone enlists in the army, besides lessons on handling a weapon, target practice, shooting, and so on, they try to connect him to the idea, to the ideology. Do you know what an ideology and an idea mean? Without an idea and an ideology, you’ll go to war like some... like a duck. You just go along. You have no brain, no heart. What are you fighting for? What are you fighting for? For what? For nothing. Religious Jews, Jews who believe in Hakadosh Boruch Hu—everyone believes; the question is whether it’s [unclear] or... So what are you going to fight for? For the holiness of the Land of Israel. You have spiritual concerns, you know Tanach, you have a deep connection here. If you aren’t deeply connected, why are you making all this fuss? Let’s sit in Tel Aviv and have some peace and quiet. Leave me alone. Give them the whole Ashkelon area and northward so they’ll be quiet, and that’s the end of it. No, you have to be connected to an ideology and an idea, or it doesn’t work. When you learn, too, you have to be connected to the idea, and that idea will come—Chaim. That idea will come if you reflect a little, a little, a little, and understand who’s here and what’s here. Look at the responsa, the questions and answers. Did you know there was a woman who compiled a book of responsa? Did you know that? There was a woman who compiled a book of halachic rulings. What’s it called?

2:26:16 Speaker 6 Not her name.

2:26:17 Speaker 12 No, not the woman. The name of the book.

2:26:19 Speaker 6 Kol Bo?

2:26:20 Speaker 12 Who said Kol Bo? Good. There is an opinion—not everyone agrees—that a woman compiled the Kol Bo. Who is the Maharik? Do you know who the Maharik is? Maharik. Who was he? I asked who the Maharik was; why make it complicated? Who was he? All right, I’m being a little hard on you here, as though you were kollel students. You don’t study in kollel, but there are other Rishonim too: the Rashbash, the Rosh, the Rashbatz. You hear the names, you hear the words, but you have no idea who came before whom. One of the great halachic authorities of our time wrote about a certain responsum. He didn’t mention its author by name, but afterward I found where it appears. In that responsum, one of the great rabbis had, unfortunately, made a small mistake. What was the mistake? He wrote, “So-and-so disagrees with so-and-so,” when it was the other way around. It was the other way around in the sense that—let’s say, I don’t know—he wrote that the Rosh disagreed with the Beis Yosef. The Rosh lived two hundred years before the Beis Yosef, right? A hundred and fifty years before the Beis Yosef. You can’t have the Rosh disagreeing with the Beis Yosef. If anything, the Beis Yosef disagreed with the Rosh. Now, it’s a mistake. Fine, he made a mistake. He wasn’t wrong about the actual issue, that’s true, but it’s the kind of mistake that makes people dismiss the whole thing. You find yourself mocking it. Fine, he learned it; everything’s fine. We have no issue with him, G-d forbid. But if we want to be connected to our learning, we have to be connected to the idea. What is the Mishnah? What is the Gemara? What are Tosafos? What is Rashi? The Rif—where did the Rif come into the picture? What did the Rif do for us? Why did he create his book?

2:27:47 Speaker 6 Halachah.

2:27:47 Speaker 12 Huh? Just halachah? That’s all? You could write like the Rambam and be done with it. Write a shorter book.

2:27:54 Speaker 6 A book that’s half as long.

2:27:56 Speaker 12 What?

2:27:56 Speaker 6 A book that’s half as long.

2:27:57 Speaker 12 The book is half as long?

2:27:59 Speaker 6 Everyone relies on the Rosh.

2:28:00 Speaker 12 No, fine, but don’t bring— If you see that commentaries have to be added to it, then don’t write it that way. Write more clearly. Simple.

2:28:04 Speaker 6 There are commentaries on the Rambam too.

2:28:05 Speaker 12 Huh?

2:28:05 Speaker 6 There are commentaries on the Rambam.

2:28:06 Speaker 12 As many as on the Rif?

2:28:08 Speaker 6 Maybe fewer.

2:28:09 Speaker 12 As many as on the Rif, or fewer. I’m not going to get into an argument now; I want to raise the issue. What you’re saying is right, but again, you need to understand who came along, what happened here, what this whole array of books is about. The Rosh, the Rif, [unclear], came to Ashkenaz, gathered [unclear], and so on. So that’s what I wanted to tell you: a campaign to fill your head with books. Open a book to find out who its author is, what he’s about, who he was. You’ll connect with him, you’ll understand him, and you’ll say, “This is mine.” Once you say it’s yours—that the learning is yours, that you’re inside it—then you won’t be like a journalist who comes along to study and read some pleasant, interesting sugya with a sort of emotional detachment. You must, must, must connect emotionally with what you’re doing. Otherwise... I was once learning with a young married man here in the community. He used to study Gemara but couldn’t really learn Gemara at all. I asked him, “What did you do for six years in yeshiva?” He told me, “Honestly? For six years I sat down, opened a book, learned nothing, closed it at the end of the study period, and went to the classes.” I said, “Really? Not even one line?” He said, “This and that. My study partners and I talked the whole time. We got nothing out of it.” This is a man who now sits and learns Gemara in depth from nine to eleven at night. He attends a class and then learns independently. Yes, a man sits and learns Gemara.

2:29:22 Speaker 6 Nine in the morning?

2:29:24 Speaker 12 At night. Two hours. He works during the day. Why am I telling you this? What happened? Why was this night different from all other nights? Did he suddenly become some tremendous genius? No. He simply sat down, and someone explained to him what it was about, what it was about, and why we need the whole thing. And why did it have to be studied in Aramaic? Have you ever thought about the idea of a kesubah in Hebrew? Have you heard a kesubah read at a wedding? Have you or haven’t you? Has anyone ever understood what the kesubah is doing there? What are they saying? Aside from the rabbi’s chanting as he reads it out. Even if you wanted to understand, you wouldn’t understand the Aramaic he’s saying. Couldn’t you find something more up-to-date and put it into Hebrew? Incidentally, that idea has been raised. I’m not just making this up. Put the Gemara into Hebrew. Can’t you? Make it simpler, make it easier to read and so on. Why do we sometimes get stuck with all sorts of things like old-fashioned people, as though we were three or four hundred years behind? Those are questions people ask. Do you know why you don’t ask them? Thank G-d, you mentioned a good point: because we sit and learn, focusing on the subject itself. That’s true. Someone coming from outside doesn’t know the subject at all. We grew up with it, so it’s a little hard to ask these questions when you’re already immersed in it. People from outside ask them, but we need to ask them too. Why? Because if we ask these questions and, of course, get answers, I promise you that your learning will be completely different. Because a person who learns... You know the story about the man who learned Eruvin and said he had learned the entire tractate but hadn’t understood just two things? He

2:30:49 Speaker 12 He didn’t understand two abbreviations. What do the abbreviations “reisha areisha” and “seifa aseifa” mean? He already understood the rest of the entire tractate. If there are basic things you don’t know, then you don’t understand the point, the ruling. But if there are things you don’t know, if you’re not connected to what’s going on, you may still learn and do fine. It doesn’t mean you won’t learn anything. But I promise you—I can say this wholeheartedly—I’ve seen Jews who seemingly had no connection to learning at all. Once you connect, you understand what you’re dealing with. If you understand that what you’re learning now is... You know, I sat with a Jew who not only wasn’t particular about wearing a gartel, he wasn’t particular about Lubavitch shechitah either. He wasn’t necessarily particular about shechitah at all, and he even ate species that aren’t slaughtered. A Jew you could really describe as... We don’t like those labels, but in short, he didn’t observe the mitzvos with meticulous care, traveled abroad, did what he wanted. He sat down to learn Gemara, and suddenly it clicked. I explained to him what Gemara was, what Mishnah was—it was a Gemara and Tanya class. He said to me, “Wait, I don’t understand. These texts”—that’s what he called them—“are two thousand years old? Is that really true? Is everything written here really what happened? Are these the exact same words?” I told him, “Yes.” From that day on, the man changed completely. He opened a Gemara with reverence. When we were trying to understand the reasoning, he would get upset if he

2:32:15 Speaker 12 didn’t understand something: “What is this? How did we suddenly get here? Why do we need this?” There was none of that indifference. Now, thank G-d, we grew up in religious homes and all that, so, in a manner of speaking, we have what we need. Yes, but you grow up and you don’t understand the “mai lagdolei,” as they say. Suddenly you look at it differently. “Wait, that’s how it is?” I can promise you that if you start to scratch the surface, just a little... It isn’t something you acquire in a day, or two days, or a year, or even two years. Each time you get another bit of information, as some of you know. A little more information, and a little more, and a little more, and slowly a whole picture is woven together. You understand what you’re doing. And if we go into finer detail—you understand what “al tikrei” is, what a gezeirah shavah is, what a halachah given to Moshe at Sinai is. There are rules for all of it: how it happened and what happened. Once you understand how the whole thing began, your learning itself improves, but your connection to learning also becomes much stronger. You’re not just stuffing pages of Gemara into your head, stuffing and stuffing. You understand what you’re doing. You understand what you’re connected to. You understand that you’re part of the entire process by which Torah has been transmitted through the generations in a remarkable way. Your attitude, your understanding, and the positive feeling you have toward Gemara and learning in general are completely different. Now, if we were great chassidim and understood that we should do this—not that we shouldn’t—contemplate the oneness of Hashem and the fear of Hashem, and understand that when you learn Gemara you cleave to Hakadosh Boruch Hu, as the Alter Rebbe says in Tanya, that this is a wondrous union unlike any union in the physical world, and so on and so forth...

2:33:46 Speaker 12 Da-da-da-da. It would all be simple. Why? Because you can see it right before your eyes. As one Jew once told me, “I bored my yetzer hara to death.” So if he has nothing to feed on... I’m joking. This fellow sits and learns, a bit of what you’d call a bookworm. He sits and learns. I said to him, “Tell me, don’t you ever feel like going out for a bit?” I was genuinely concerned about him, because sometimes it can be something going on in a person’s head. I told him, “Take a break. Go out, get some air.” He said, “I already bored him to death.” He gets bored, so he learns. That’s a joke, but some people are like that by nature. That’s why the Rambam says there are people whose nature is to sit and learn. Fine, I’m not saying you have to be like that. You also need some fresh air. There are grassy places too, and things like that. But fine—if we had killed our yetzer hara, if we were, I don’t know, completely connected to G-dliness, that would be something! Yes, everything written in the maamarim and Tanya—we’d be all set. At least a beinoni of Tanya: he would sit and learn, with no yetzer hara, and everything would be fine. We’re not at those levels yet. We need to engage other parts of our souls. And part of the way to reach those places is to sit down and understand what you’re dealing with: who these people are, what this is, how it got here. Once you understand... You know what? There are Tosafos Yeshanim here. Have you ever come across Tosafos Yeshanim? Who decided they were “old”? Do you know what they called the Mitteler Rebbe? I said the Mitteler Rebbe, fine. During his lifetime, no one knew he was the “middle” Rebbe. He hadn’t become the middle one yet. So yes, the Mitteler Rebbe, the Tzemach Tzedek—but in the Tzemach Tzedek’s time they knew

2:35:15 Speaker 12 he was the middle one. In his own time he wasn’t the middle one. Middle of what? What? Who decided these Tosafos were old? What, they’re out of date? They put them off to the side? Do you understand what I mean? Have you ever seen... You know what, you have the Ramban in the back, the little Maharal, the little Maharal. Have you ever looked at the commentators on the Rif in the back? There are fascinating discussions there—a real feast. You read some of the expressions, some of the things there—it’s a feast. I can tell you that when a person learns this way and tries—again, aside from the learning itself, which is important and goes without saying; I’m not even talking about that obvious point, as we discussed at the beginning—when you understand the whole structure of learning, who is responding to whom, what Shas is, what Mishnah is, what Gemara is, what Tosafos, Rashi, and the Rishonim are, and so on, your learning will be entirely different. You need to understand that. It’s important. So l’chaim, l’chaim, gentlemen. May we merit to learn ourselves. No, no, don’t despair, guys. I can tell you that when I was a bochur, they used to warn me. They’d say—and this is how I remember them telling us—“Guys, this is your time to learn. Later there will be the worries of making a living and all kinds of other worries. Don’t waste it. Put in the effort.” So some of the time we were obedient, we listened, and we put in effort, and more effort, and more effort. But no matter how much effort you put in, afterward you regret it and say, “Why didn’t I learn more?” So put in the effort. Learn. Have big aspirations—to know the entire Shas, entire tractates of Gemara. And I can promise you that if you have the desire and keep that idea in mind, you’ll get there. Keep at it even if the friends around you disturb you. You’re allowed to give a friend a gentle nudge, move him out of the way, and tell him, “Sir, we’re learning now.”

2:36:58 Speaker 12 There’s nothing to be ashamed of, even when it’s hard, even when you fall into the depths—what you might call the depths of despair, in a way. Guys, take it easy. It’ll happen to you too. As they say, hold on to the horns of the altar. That’s clear. Hold on to the horns of the altar; keep your fire burning even when you don’t feel it—try to kindle it. And I’m really asking you, gentlemen, don’t break. Don’t break, because I’ll tell you one more little thing. I have a friend I sat with here in the study hall. We were together from the age of fifteen until... And we made a sort of bet about something. Not a real bet, you know, but I told him, “One day we’ll do such-and-such.” The details don’t matter right now. It was something to do with learning. One day we’ll do such-and-such, and these are things that don’t just involve the two of us; they involve other areas and other people too. You want to set up certain projects? He said to me, “Forget it. It won’t work. It’s a lot of work, it’s a lot.” I told him, “Maybe it is a lot of work. So what? It’ll take however long it takes. Maybe we’ll succeed—who knows? Let’s try.” So we made an effort to work on it. And a rather funny situation developed: whenever either of us made some progress with it, we’d call the other and say, “Oh, there—we’ve paid off that debt from twelve years ago, fourteen years ago, fifteen years ago.” Think about it. Sometimes you say, “Wait, you planned something twelve years ago, and you’re only putting it into practice twelve years later? That’s a very long time.” The answer is no, it isn’t a very long time. All these things you learn and do keep building and building, keep growing stronger. So what you learn here in yeshiva at fourteen or fifteen lays the foundations for what you’ll do at thirty—if you believe in it and pursue

2:38:37 Speaker 12 it with all your strength, even when you can’t see it. And trust me, I’m not that old. I’m only thirty-one, but from where I stand I can look back fifteen years and see who put in the effort, worked, and did something. They didn’t perform miracles. I want to stress that: they didn’t perform miracles; they didn’t suddenly become some enormous genius. They made the effort to learn what they needed to and finish a tractate. There used to be a group of boys here in the yeshiva who would finish the tractate being studied and another tractate besides. By the time they reached the older yeshiva, they had seven or eight tractates under their belts, while their friends in other older yeshivas really had only one or two. Their friends were stunned: “How did you manage it? How did you do it?” There’s no great genius involved. You sit down; you have an evening; you learn. Of course, I’ll stress again, these things are as plain as day, as they say. You don’t need to— So there are mivtzoim and there are other matters. There’s the sicha that we [unclear]. Attendance, mussar. There are things you’re told and things people speak to you about. You know all this, and I don’t need to go on about it. Have time? Sit down and learn. Bear in mi— You know what? Do you have time to sit and learn? Bear in mind that all the mivtzoim are destined to become unnecessary except for the Torah campaign. Do you know why? You know the story of a Chabad boy who offered someone the chance to put on tefillin. This big, tattooed, tough-looking guy walked past. The boy jumped at the opportunity—surely he was about to find someone who hadn’t put on tefillin yet, right? He went over and said, “Brother, did you put on tefillin today?” The guy turned to him, you know, and said, “Sure, first thing this morning.” So the boy turned away. What a disappointment, right? That’s what happens, and people don’t realize it. Hello, hello! How wonderful it would be if everyone put on tefillin on their own. We

2:40:11 Speaker 12 aren’t looking to lose any of the mivtzoim. We do mivtzoim because they’re needed. But our goal isn’t, “All right, let’s keep thirty or forty left-wing or right-wing people who aren’t religious in reserve, so we’ll have these little projects of ours.” You know the... Once there was a Jew who was looking for a truly needy person—a needy person, really needy—for Purim, so he could fulfill the mitzvah of giving gifts to the needy in the best possible way. Just before sunset he found someone who really had nothing. He gave him the money, and went home overjoyed. Suddenly a friend met him on the way and asked, “What happened? Why are you so happy? Because it’s Purim?” He told him, “I was looking for someone truly needy. Just twenty minutes before sunset, I found the perfect poor person. He has nothing, absolutely nothing. Destitute.” His friend said, “Well, tell me who he is, so I can have the merit of giving him Purim gifts and helping him too.” He replied, “I’m saving him for next year.” Next year too... Tefillin, all the mivtzoim, tzedakah, and so on—all of it, all of it, all of it, all of it is, so to speak, “destined to become unnecessary” in the time to come. What does that mean? Not truly unnecessary, but everyone will be Jewish and observant, and so on. But what will there be in the time to come? “The earth will be filled with the knowledge of Hashem as the waters cover the sea.” And then the Rebbe brings this in a sicha from 5737: the Gemara says, “Fortunate is the one who comes here with his learning in his hand.” That’s what the Gemara says, right? What does “Fortunate is the one who comes here” mean? “Here” means Gan Eden, yes? “Fortunate is the one who comes here with his learning in his hand.” The Rebbe asks, “What does ‘Fortunate is the one who comes here with his learning in his hand’ mean? Wouldn’t it be enough to say, ‘Fortunate is the one who comes here’?” Someone who gets to Gan Eden is already

2:41:38 Speaker 12 delighted. Someone who merits to experience the days of Moshiach and all that is already delighted. Why “with his learning in his hand”? What does that add to our understanding? The Rebbe says it’s straightforward: his learning is in his hand because the inner dimension of Torah that you’ll learn in Gan Eden will correspond to the revealed Torah you learn here in this world. And not only revealed Torah—Chassidus too. What you learn here in this world, revealed Torah and Chassidus, will determine the inner dimension of Torah you receive in the higher worlds. There, there’s only the inner dimension of Torah, right? That’s what you’ll receive. In other words, we have to invest in learning, and invest seriously. And I’m telling you again, you will reach ti— It’s important to me to say this. You will go through dry, annoying, frustrating times, and you have to hold on to the horns of the altar, hold on to the horns of the altar. Don’t—no matter what’s happening around you. Learning didn’t go well today? Never mind. Move on, move on, let it pass. Keep learning as you should. Having trouble learning? Rack your brain. It’s getting on your nerves? Good, excellent. Rack your brain even harder. You got fed up, closed the book, walked away; it isn’t working, you don’t kno— It doesn’t matter. Don’t let these supposedly small things distract you from learning itself. Sit down and learn. It isn’t your responsibility to finish the work, but you aren’t free to abandon it either. You too have to sit down and learn. And I promise you—look, I don’t have ruach hakodesh, I’m not a prophet, and I don’t have the power to give blessings. But the simple fact is that when a person puts himself into learning, he doesn’t need special talents; he doesn’t need to be a genius. If you have those gifts, all the better—just be careful they don’t trip you up. Don’t feel, “I...” The Mishnah in Berachos says—well, in Avos. “Don’t say...” No, I’ll remember in a moment.

2:43:15 Speaker 12 Well, that your friend is like you, in your hands. I don’t remember how it begins. Um... “Don’t say that it will come after you.” No, before that. How does it begin? How, how—well?

2:43:33 Speaker 7 “Don’t say about myself...”

2:43:34 Speaker 12 There’s more after that. No, no, no, no, no, that’s good. [unclear], but the point is that the Rebbe Rashab writes that when you learn, you shouldn’t always rely on yourself. You always need to be in a learning environment, with people who will remind you and whose words will get through to you. So, guys, I’m really asking you to hold on tight. If you preserve your ability to persevere, that’s the ability that will take you furthest. That’s our goal: to connect ourselves to learning. So l’chaim, l’chaim. May you be connected to Hakadosh Boruch Hu, connected to the Rebbe, bound to the Rebbe, as I said at the beginning. That’s your job; that’s what you’re about. Let the other things go. You can even steal a little time from things at home. Nothing will happen. Slip away once in a while. If they ask for help, you can help up to a point. You don’t need to be the one who does everything around the house. You need to slip away to shul and learn. You have a break? That doesn’t mean you have to take a break from learning. During bein hazmanim, you sit and learn Gemara. I know bochurim who just can’t manage otherwise. How can a day go by without learning a page of Gemara? Of course, Chassidus in the morning goes without saying. Everyone learns Chassidus. What’s the problem? That’s the easiest thing, right? It doesn’t obligate you to do anything, either. You learn, but that’s not good either, right? The Rebbe Rashab doesn’t want people to learn that way. Sometimes you learn, and it’s sort of like reading Tikkunei Zohar before Kiddush. Have you ever—do you know what people do before Kiddush? Sometimes they read ten pages before Kiddush, and that’s not how it works. To learn Chassidus, you need to learn sugyos in nigleh, but we won’t get into that now. That’s not—your mashpi’im will speak to you about it. But Chassidus is simple, supposedly simple, to learn. It’s more firmly rooted, but you need to learn nigleh and Gemara. So open [unclear] first.

2:45:15 Speaker 12 If you get tangled up, [unclear]. It’s not terrible. Again, I emphasize: how does it say—what do we say earlier in davening? “They bowed and fell, but we rose and stood firm.” Does it say, “They bowed and fell, but we didn’t fall”? That’s not what it says. “They bowed and fell, and we fell too,” in other words, “but we rose and stood firm.” That’s the difference between them and us. Some bowed and fell. We rose and stood firm. We bowed and fell too, yes; no one is guaranteed not to fall. But we rose and stood firm. L’chaim, l’chaim, Rabbi Yitzchak. May we merit all these things, with joy and gladness of heart. L’chaim.

2:45:54 Speaker 8 L’chaim and blessings.

2:45:57 Speaker 12 We’ll finish with that.

2:45:59 Speaker 8 Rabbi, could you give a shiur on at least one of Rabbi Numa’s [?] questions?

2:46:02 Speaker 12 On what?

2:46:04 Speaker 8 On what the logic is behind “whoever is stronger prevails.”

2:46:08 Speaker 12 I told you: sit down and learn. Am I supposed to give you all the answers just like that? All right, guys, I’ll give you a shiur on it. When we were in second-year shiur, we had a whole shiur on this. You need to understand a few basic principles, and then you can understand “whoever is stronger prevails.” You can’t explain it in a few words. First of all, I’ll tell you that there are explanations of this rule—how can it be based on bullying? What kind of bullying is that? The simplest explanation is that when a person is certain of his claim—meaning, “This is mine”—after all, when do we say “whoever is stronger prevails”? When do we say it? Whatever you answer, you’ll be wrong, because there’s a dispute among the Rishonim about when it applies, but never mind. In principle, it’s when one of the parties stands to lose money and neither side has proof, okay? When there’s derara demamona, right? You learned derara demamona, didn’t you? Did you learn it in Bava Kamma? You didn’t learn derara demamona? Derara demamona means a monetary loss. It means we can see that one of the parties is likely to suffer a loss—based on their claims and so on. Then we say, “Whoever is stronger prevails.” Why? Because the person who stands to lose the money—that is, the one whose claim is genuine, while the other one is lying—will make the effort either to bring proof or to prevail by force. And he won’t give up; he’ll keep trying. But you say to yourself, “Wait a minute. Nowadays that argument doesn’t hold.” Why not? Because there are plenty of bullies and criminals who do whatever they want. You should know that I carried this question around with me—it’s an example—from the time I was in second-year shiur. How old was I, fourteen or fifteen, more or less? From the time we learned in second-year shiur, in Bava

2:47:41 Speaker 12 Basra, about “whoever is stronger prevails,” it never sat right with me. Even then I thought: they’ll just come in and bully people. The other fellow will bring in some criminal, I don’t know who, and make a whole spectacle of it. That proves nothing except that you’re strong. Right? So when did this question finally get resolved for me? Do you know how long I had it? Give me an answer: [unclear].

2:47:58 Speaker 8 Yesterday.

2:47:59 Speaker 12 Two and a half months ago. Why? Siman 175 in the Shulchan Aruch discusses laws—laws similar to “whoever is stronger prevails.” There’s a case there where people divided something in a certain way and drew lots. We won’t go into the details. In that siman, if I’m not mistaken, it’s se’if three or se’if four, it’s explained in Pischei Teshuvah. There’s a commentary on the Shulchan Aruch called Pischei Teshuvah. The author of Pischei Teshuvah took the responsa published roughly from the time of the Shulchan Aruch onward, and for each se’if he included what this responsum or that one says about it. All right? So there’s a responsum called Shevus Yaakov, if I’m not mistaken. I don’t remember whether it was that or Shalem Yaakov. I think it was Shevus Yaakov. And the Shevus Yaakov writes: “I wondered how ‘whoever is stronger prevails’ can apply in our times.” Now, the Shevus Yaakov lived two hundred years ago, and there were criminals even then, so he says “in our times.” When I saw that, I immediately got excited. Wait, wait, here’s the Shevus Yaakov saying, “I don’t accept ‘whoever is stronger prevails.’” And do you know how he concludes? He concludes, “In fact, I’m ruling something novel. I’m ruling that the law of ‘whoever is stronger prevails’ no longer applies today, and we’ll draw lots between them. We’ll return to the original ruling and draw lots.” Why? Because there are so many aggressive people and criminals, and so on and so forth. No more “whoever is stronger prevails.” He more or less erases that ruling. Then he says, “Ah, this is an enormous innovation.” But he says, “I’m certain that my teachers and colleagues, and everyone, will agree with me, given that the situation is such that we can’t say ‘whoever is stronger prevails.’” Bear in mind that the Shevus Yaakov is talking about a case where drawing lots is an option, but the halachah says to use “whoever is stronger prevails”; if that doesn’t work, draw lots.

2:49:43 Speaker 12 So the Shevus Yaakov says, “Fine, I’ll eliminate ‘whoever is stronger prevails’ entirely and always leave it to the drawing of lots.” But what happens in a case where the halachah says only “whoever is stronger prevails”? Would the Shevus Yaakov say to erase that too? So what would we do instead? We have nothing we can do. Huh?

2:50:00 Speaker 9 Until Eliyahu comes.

2:50:01 Speaker 12 There’s no drawing of lots. You don’t just draw lots for no reason. It depends on which laws apply. You can’t invent a lottery in every situation, right?

2:50:05 Speaker 9 Until Eliyahu comes.

2:50:06 Speaker 12 So it stays put until Eliyahu comes. You have a ship worth twelve million dollars sitting at sea. You don’t know whom it belongs to. The ruling is supposed to be “whoever is stronger prevails.” You can’t apply that, so leave it there.

2:50:15 Speaker 9 Claims.

2:50:16 Speaker 12 In this case there are no claims, nothing. The case is stuck. Do you know the answer?

2:50:20 Speaker 9 They divide it, they divide it.

2:50:21 Speaker 12 No, they don’t divide it. What do you mean, divide it? We don’t say to divide it. When there’s property and a dispute and [unclear], we don’t say to divide it. What do you do in a case like this? Do you know the answer?

2:50:31 Speaker 9 Whoever is stronger prevails.

2:50:31 Speaker 12 Guess.

2:50:32 Speaker 9 Whoever is stronger prevails.

2:50:33 Speaker 12 I don’t know. Maybe I’ll have to wait until I’m forty-five. Another fifteen years until I find the answer to this one.