39. The Chossid's Life Was Saved By The Chanukah Candles

00:17 Here is another Chanukah story with the Tzemach Tzedek. There was once a wealthy, rich Hasid that traveled a lot for business to go buy stuff and sell stuff. He had to go travel to other cities. Sometimes he had to travel during the winter in Russia. In the winter, there's a lot of snow, so it's not easy to travel. He used to travel sometimes with two feet of snow on the roads, and they didn't have cars. They had... They didn't have plows like we have today. You know, the city plows the streets, takes away the snow. Those days, they didn't have that, so people had to travel with their horse and buggy in the snow. It was so hard. So this Hasid had to travel a lot. So once he came to the Tzemach Tzedek for before Chanukah, came for a Shabbos, and before he left town back to go back home, he went to the Tzemach Tzedek's room for yechidus, and Tzemach Tzedek said to him, "By the way, when you travel on Chanukah, don't forget to bring a menorah with you because you might travel, and you might end up traveling overnight somewhere, and you need a menorah." "And make sure," he said to him, he said something very strange, "Make sure that you bring very long candles, the longest candles you could find." Hasid said, "Okay, I'll do that." The Hasid was a little surprised and puzzled. "Why should I get these very long candles? First of all, I'm not planning to travel

01:54 at night. I plan to go leave in the morning, and before dark, I'll be already in my town, the town that I need to get to. I need to go to a certain city to buy and do business. I can go to a hotel there before night and light my candles there. Why do I need such huge candles? And why is the Rebbe saying I should bring a menorah with me and li- have, um, huge candles, big candles?" He couldn't understand it. But the Rebbe said, he listened. So it happened that on Chanukah he had to travel. He remembered what the Rebbe told him, and he ha- bought these huge candles for his Chanukah menorah. He traveled and traveled. He went. He left in the morning. He was hoping he can get to the city he needs to go, um, before night so he can light the menorah on time. But he got lost on the way. He got lost on the way, and he couldn't find his way around, didn't know where he was going, and he ended up getting lost and lost and more lost and more lost till he ended up in a forest, and it was getting dark. The sun was setting. And he got very scared because in the forests in Russia in those days, besides the fact that it's very cold and there's lots of snow, there's also lots of wild animals. Some of them can be dangerous. There's also dangerous people, robbers, gangsters, people that kill. They can

03:30 kill people. So he got very, very scared, didn't know what to do. And he kept traveling in the forest. Maybe he can get out of the forest. But the more he traveled, the deeper he got into the forest and the darker it became, and he got even more scared and more scared. And then he hears a noise, and now he was really, really afraid. What is this noise? And then he sees with his eyes a terrible thing, a group of 12 robbers circling around him and saying, "Okay, you stay where you are. Don't move. Raise up your hands." And he raised his hands. He was very afraid. He started davening in his heart for Hashem. "Please save me. I don't want them to kill me." Then the robber said, "Come down from your wagon now. We need your money. You probably have a lot of money with you. We're gonna take all your money. But I know we can take all your money now, but you're gonna go tell the police. Then the police is gonna chase us and find us, so we're gonna have to kill you. We're gonna kill you and bury you here. They'll never find you, so you won't be able to tell the police on us. So we'll be able to take all your money and your wagon and your horses and take it for ourselves. We'll be so rich. We'll have all your money." "But," they said to him, "we have a c- a custom. We, every time we

05:17 kill a person, we tell the person, before we kill you, you can ask for one thing to do, and we'll let you do it. We wanna be nice. You know, we're gonna kill you, but if there's one thing you wanna do before you die, please, we'll, we'll help you do it. We'll let you do it." The Hasid thinks, "What should I ask them to do? What should I tell them I wanna do? What should I tell them? What should I tell them?" Then he remembers the Rebbe said, "Bring big candles and light the menorah." So he said to the robbers, "Okay, before you kill me, I wanna light some candles because it's a Jewish holiday, Chanukah, and we light candles. Do... Let me do this before." They said, "Sure. Sure. Go ahead. Hey, you can do it. If that's what you want, you can do it." It was the fifth night, so the Hasid took out the candles with the menorah from his wagon, and he lit the menorah. And because the candles were so big and so tall, and the wicks were so thick, the flames were really big and huge. The robbers were looking at the menorah. Wow, they've never seen such big candles. They've never seen such beautiful light. And the Hasid said the bracha first before he kindled the menorah. He said, "Baruch ata Hashem" with great kavannah, and he cried to Hashem. He said, "Hashem, I'm making the last mitzvah of my life. I'm lighting this menorah for you." And

06:45 maybe Hashem will save him, he thinks in his heart. And he lights one candle, and another candle, and another, and he lights all the five candles. They made this huge light in the forest. Now, far away on the other side of the forest, there were some policemen looking for something. A whole bunch of policemen on horses were traveling around the forest to look for bad people. They saw suddenly this light from far, far in the forest because the light was so big and so strong that you could see it from very far away. So the policemen were very, uh, surprised. "This light in the middle of the forest, that's so strange. Let's go there. Let's see what's going on there." So they whipped the horses, "Yo, let's go," and the horses took off and went quickly. In the meantime, the Hasid finished lighting the candles, and he says to the robbers, "But we have a custom. We gotta sing a nigun." "Hanerot Halalu." And the Hasid made sure to say it very slowly, very slowly. "Hanerot." He dragged it out. "Halalu. Halalu." It took him a long time to sing it, and then he said, "We sing it twice." That, the nigun, is to sing it twice. So he sang it a second time just to drag, to take time, and by the time he finished singing almost the second time, the policemen arrived, and they see 12 robbers. They pulled out their guns and said, "All you robbers, stand up here now and raise

08:34 your hands up, all the way up." And the police arrested all the robbers, and the Hasid was saved. And then the Hasid realized why the Rebbe the Tzemach Tzedek told him to get these big candles, because the Tzemach Tzedek saw, Baruch HaKodesh, that this Hasid will get lost in the forest in the middle of the night, and there'll be robbers who are gonna wanna kill him. But they're gonna let him do one thing. He's gonna light the menorah, and it's the big candles that bring so much light that's gonna save his life. You see, that's what Hanukkah is all about. The light of Hanukkah is so powerful that we put it even in the darkness. We light it at night, 'cause darkness is like the bad things. Nobody likes darkness, right? Light is good. Darkness is usually a, you know, bad. We don't like darkness. You can't see. You, you, you bump into things. You don't even know what it is. You know, it's scary. Darkness is a little bit scary. But that's why bad things, aveiras, are called darkness. The Yetzer Hara is like darkness 'cause it makes you do bad things. Spiritual darkness. But the light of Hanukkah can even get a person out of spiritual darkness. Just like it saved this Hasid, the light was so big that it saved the Hasid from evil of the robbers. It can save every one Jew. Every Jew who lights the menorah, Hashem can help you, that even if you're in the darkness with the

10:12 Yetzer Hara, you can come out of it, 'cause the light of Hanukkah is very, very special. It says that those lights are more powerful than the lights of the Beis Hamikdash. You know, in the Beis Hamikdash also had a menorah, but the light of the menorah wasn't as powerful as the light of, of Hanukkah. Because the light of the menorah was only in the Beis Hamikdash, a holy place, but the light of the menorah couldn't shine in a bad place, in a evil place. But the light of Hanukkah can even shine in the darkness, which means it can even shine in the evil. Even a Jew who's very, very deep inside his Yetzer Hara and does what the Yetzer Hara wants, comes Hanukkah, he sees the light. Wow, he wants to do teshuva. That's why you should go ha'mivtzoyim and find Jews that don't know about Torah and mitzvahs. Make them light the Hanukkah menorah. The light of the Hanukkah menorah will save them from the darkness, just like the light of this Hasid saved his life from the darkness of the forest and the darkness of the evil of the robbers. Freilechen Chanukah.