Reiche Aivarim

00:00 Lowly things. They tell of a student of the Baal Shem Tov named, I think, Reb Yonah of Ostroh. Once, this student visited a town where he had lived before. When he arrived, he found his old friends engaged in self-mortification, fasting, and the like—serving Hashem through suffering. Reb Yonah said to them, “Let me tell you a story. Once there was a mayor of a city. In time, he left, and another mayor was appointed. One day, the former mayor came to visit the city where he had served and entered the new mayor’s office. He found old clothes, old shoes, and other such things there—things that do not belong in a mayor’s office. He asked, ‘What is all this?’ The new mayor replied, ‘The city needed money to make repairs, pave a road, and so on. It was decided that every resident would give a certain sum, say, a hundred rubles. And from anyone who did not pay, we took

01:43 collateral. [unclear] G-d forbid, we should not have to resort to such measures.’ At any rate, they took things as collateral—shoes and the like. The former mayor said to him, ‘What are you doing? You’re going about this the wrong way. There are rich people in the city and poor people. Take from the rich; let each of them give a thousand rubles, and then leave the poor alone.’ And so Reb Yonah said to his friends: ‘The body, too, has rich limbs. Why burden a Jew and force him to dwell on sad thoughts? A person can be immersed in a subject in Chassidus, he can study revealed Torah, and still go around all day thinking: What will become of me? I have this sin and that sin, distracting thoughts bother me, and this and that besides, and I have no connection to anything—what will become of me? Instead of going to the poor limbs and taking things from them—that is, G-d forbid, [unclear]—we can take from the rich limbs we have. After all, thank G-d, we have Chassidus, which explains such profound matters: what a soul is, what mitzvos are, what a Jew is—matters we can understand with our minds and delight in.’