41. The Shochet That Was Saved From Evil

00:16 Shalom Aleichem, children. I'm gonna tell you three stories. Tonight, only one story, but this story will lead to a second story the following week, which will lead then to a third story. And the purpose of the three stories, which were told by a very famous Hasid of the Tzemach Tzedek, his name was Rabbi Mordechai Yael. The first story tells us the greatness of the tzadik, Reb Zev Wolf of Zhytomyr. Reb Zev Wolf of Zhytomyr was a friend of the Alter Rebbe. He was a talmid of the Mezritcher Maggid. In the first story, you see what a great tzadik Reb Zev Wolf of Zhytomyr was. In the second story, we'll learn how Reb Zev Wolf of Zhytomyr, uh, said things about the Shpala Zayde and how great the Shpala Zayde was. So you can imagine if the Zev, Reb Zev Wolf of Zhytomyr is such a great tzadik, as you'll find out from the story now, as I will tell s-too-soon, and he said that the Shpala Zayde was a tzadik that no one can really understand how great he is. And then in the third story, we'll hear and see how the Shpala Zayde spoke about the Alter Rebbe, what a great holy tzadik Alter Rebbe is. So you can imagine how great the Alter Rebbe is. Here is a story with Reb Zev Wolf of Zhytomyr that shows us what a great tzadik he was. Reb Zev Wolf was the s- the Rav of Zhytomyr, and in the city of Zhytomyr, there was a

01:51 shochet, a Jew, a very, very special Jew, a talmid chacham who learned a lot. He was the shochet of the city. He was also the mohel. He did all the brisin in the town, and he was very important to Reb Zev Wolf. He was one of the closest and most beloved Hasidim of Reb Zev Wolf of Zhytomyr. This shochet, everybody in the town wanted him to be the mohel for their children. Whenever they had a baby boy, they would call the shochet and say, "Yankel, please come. Be the mohel of my baby." And so the, um, shochet, he said, "Well, I'll have a bris." Now, this shochet had a very close friend. The friend's name was Yankel Eliezer. Yankel Leizer. Yankel Leizer. That's how we called him, Yankel Leizer. Yankel Leizer was a very close friend of the, of the shochet, and Yankel Leizer lived next to Zhytomyr in a different town, very close, but in a different town. Yankel Leizer didn't have children for many years, till one day, Yankel Leizer came to the shochet, his close friend. He was his closest friend, and he said to the shochet, "Listen, my wife just had a baby boy." Mazel tov. How amazing. What a nes. "After all these years, my wife had a baby boy, but please, can you be the mohel for my baby? And the bris will be on Shabbos." As you know, kinderlach, that when a baby is born on a Shabbos, the bris has to be the next Shabbos, and then

03:41 we do the bris even on Shabbos, even though it involves, you know, doing a bris, which, uh, has a little bit of blood and with Shabbos you're not allowed to do this. But for bris, you're allowed to do it if it's on time. That means if the bris is exactly on the eighth day that the baby was born, then the Torah says you should do the bris on Shabbos. So Yankel Leizer says to his friend, the shochet, and he says, "Please, please, I beg you, come to-- for me-- to me for Shabbos. You won't be able to come on Shabbos. It's too far. Can't ride on Shabbos, so you'll have to stay with me for Shabbos, and you'll do the bris during Shabbos." And the shochet says, "No, I can't. You know that I never refuse anyone. I always am ready to do a bris for anybody, but in this case, it's on Shabbos, and I'll have to leave Zhytomyr for Shabbos, and I won't be able to hear the words of Torah from my dearest Rebbe, Reb Zev Wolf of Zhytomyr. And I wanna hear his Torah. My Rebbe, he w- eats Shalashudes on Shabbos late afternoon, right before the end of Shabbos, and he says a lot of Divrei Torah. And I wanna hear his, his, his Hasidas, his, his words of Torah. I don't wanna miss a Shabbos." So Yankel Leizer says to him, "No, please, please, please, I'm your best friend. How can you not come to me?" Eh, but the

05:08 shochet says, "Well, but this is too much for me. Uh, my Rebbe is the most important thing to me. For me to miss one Shabbos with the Rebbe and not hear his words of Torah is too difficult. I wouldn't do it even for my best friend. It's hard for me to miss a Shabbos here at my Rebbe's Shalashudes Divrei Torah." So Yankel Leizer says, "Listen, I have an idea for you. See, the Rebbe, Reb Zev Wolf, starts his Shalashudes late Shabbos afternoon. He washes his hands, he makes a bracha motzi, and then they sing some songs. By the time he says Divrei Torah, it takes hours and hours till they sing all the songs. It's already... Other people, for them, it's already Motzei Shabbos. The Rebbe extends the Shabbos even, you know, it's-- he makes the Shabbos longer, right? He- sits till very late at night and davens Ma'ariv like in the middle of the night at midnight. Until then, he still extends the Shabbos. Then he makes Havdalah at midnight. But until then, he says Divrei Torah. So I have an idea for you. You come to me for Shabbos. As soon as Shabbos is over, we'll look at the calendar, it says Shabbos is over, we're gonna make we're gonna have Ma'ariv, we have Havdalah. I have some very good horses, and I'm gonna hire a special wagon driver that's gonna take you very quickly from my town to Zhitomir. By the time you'll get to Zhitomir, it will be still early, eight

06:36 o'clock at night. The Rebbe has barely, barely sung a few songs. It'll be way before his Divrei Torah, because he's gonna say his Divrei Torah much later. So you'll be able to be at your Rebbe's table and, and hear his words of Torah. So you can come to my house for Shabbos and still make it to the words of Torah of your Rebbe." So the Shaychet heard this and said, "Okay, you know what? That's a good idea." Now, he spent Shabbos with his friend, Yankel Lezer, and the Bris went by very nicely. There was a beautiful celebration and a meal, and everybody came from that town and they celebrated and said Mazel Tov, and they wished a lot of brachos. After Shabbos was over, the Shaychet said, "Quick, quick, quick, let's make it Ma'ariv, we have Havdalah. I wanna get back on time to observe Wolf's Tish to his table, and where he's still s- celebrating Shabbos. For him, Shabbos isn't over. He's going to say Divrei Torah, and I wanna hear his Divrei Torah." Now, to get from that town near Zhitomir back to Zhitomir, you had to go through, for half an hour through a forest, a small forest. Now, the whole trip would take maybe less than an hour. To go from that town back to Zhitomir would take less than an hour, and about a half an hour you go through a forest. And the Shaychet gets into the wagon, they ride, they get into the forest. Shouldn't take very long,

08:08 but then as they get into the forest, a heavy, heavy, very powerful rain started coming down. It started pouring and pouring so heavily that the Shaychet became like soaked all the way to his bones. He was like soaked, soaked wet. And then he started getting cold, freezing from the cold water of the rain all over his body. His clothes were soaking. And then you know the forest is made out of dirt. The floor, the ground is f- dirt, dirt ground. So when it pours so much rain, what happens to the soil and the dirt on the ground? It gets muddy. When it gets muddy, it's very hard for horses to go fast. And the wagon also has to be dragged slowly through the mud. It's very, very hard, very hard to move. But, uh, the Shaychet kept whipping the horses, "Come on, keep moving, keep moving." But they get slower and slower and slower. It's harder and harder for them to move, to move until they got so slow that they could barely move. And the Shaychet is getting desperate and he's saying, "Oh, no, I, I won't make it to the Torah, uh, the Divrei Torah of my Rebbe, but at least I wanna get somewhere where I can get warm. I'm, I'm freezing and it's raining and raining. I, I need a house where I can go inside and stay overnight until the rain is over." He gave up on going back to Zhitomir to be with his Rebbe. But he-- maybe in

09:38 the forest is a house. And then he sees from a distance a little light, and he moves the horses to drag and tug heavily and slowly, one step at a time till they get to that house. He didn't know who's living in the middle of the forest, but he sees this house. It's not just a house, it's a huge mansion. So he knocks on the door. Who could be living in such a beautiful, beautiful mansion in the middle of a forest? And as he knocks on the door, the door opens up, and two gentlemen open the door and they said, "Oh, Shalom Aleichem, come inside." Wow, they're Jewish. They say Shalom Aleichem. They-- and they, they're very nice. They look like really special Jews. They look like, uh, from Jews, you know, Jews with-- who, who learn Torah, very, very, very special Jews. And they open the door and says, "Come inside." Then he comes inside and he sees this magnificent hallway in the entrance of the house, of the mansion, and then they tell him, "Please take off your clothes and g- we'll give you different clothes so you can dry up a little bit. And, and come, come inside. Come inside. In fact, we have our Rebbe here. We have a Rebbe here. He's saying Divrei Torah. Come, he, he told us to invite you to the table." And he-- they take him into a big, big room full with people and all with beards, and they all have white beards, long white

11:05 beards with payos. And the head, the Rebbe, the leader of the, of the, of the, of the whole group i- is sitting at the head of the table and he says, "Oh, bring him over, bring him over. Let him sit next to me." And they invite him to sit at the head of the table next to their Rebbe, next to their leader. And the leader starts saying Divrei Torah, words of Torah. And, um, uh, the Shaychet is listening. He says, "Wow, it's very impressive." And then when he finishes, the leader finished saying the Divrei Torah, he turns to the Shaychet and says, "Listen, um, now I think the rain has stopped. You can go back, uh, to Zhitomir. And if you need any help, like y- you have a problem on the way and something terrible happens, like something dangerous, then I'll give you a little piece of parchment, a little piece of paper, and, and I'll write something on it, something from Something, some secretive thing, like a Kabbalah thing, from Kabbalah, like a name of something, and you don't worry about it. You use this and it'll save you from any problem. Wow. The shochet is very impressed. He's such a... He must be a great tzaddik that he can write such a little note, and you, and you hold it in your hand, and all your problems are solved and all the dangers go away. So he took the little piece of note, and they accompany him to the door, and they're

12:32 very, they're very, very nice to him, and they said, "Please go, be safe, and go travel back." And he goes into his wagon and he sees, oh, the horses are waiting and that the ground is dry and he's taking off. And within like 20 minutes he was already back in Zhitomir, but he was so exhausted. So from the whole night being up in the rain, this, he went straight home and went to sleep. Oh, um, the next day he gets up in the morning and he still feels tired, so he decided not to go to the shul of the-- his Rebbe, Reb Ze'ev Wolf. And he went, he's a shochet, so he went to a place, to the place where they shecht the animals, did his job, came back home. He felt he was gonna go daven by the Rebbe again. You know, he never missed a day where he didn't daven with his Rebbe, but this time he felt like very tired for some strange reason. Like second day in a row he feels tired and he's not going to his Rebbe. So he, uh, he goes home, he goes back to sleep. And then the next morning again, he feels like tired again and he goes to, uh, shecht the animals and to a special place where they do the shechting of the animals. And at the end of the day, he wants to go daven Maariv, but the Rebbe hasn't seen his Rebbe in a few days. Never happened before to him,

13:56 but he's so exhausted and he decides he's going home. This happened like three, four days in a row. Never happened before that he hadn't seen his Rebbe in four days. Never happened. So on the fourth day, a, a man comes to him from the town of Zhitomir, a Jew who just had a baby boy. Uh, in fact, he didn't have a baby boy. His wife was going to have a baby boy, but his wife was having a hard time giving birth to the baby. You know, sometimes it happens that a mommy wants to give birth to-- she needs to give birth to a baby, the baby's not coming out. The baby's not coming out. It's pushing and pushing and pushing, you know, and the baby needs to come out before he gets born. It can be very stressful for the mother, and the baby's pushing and it's not coming out, and that can be very dangerous for the mother because if the baby pushes and it's not coming out, it can, chas v'Shalom, cause very bad situation for the mother where her body would, would fall apart and she might, chas v'Shalom... You know, like we learned, uh, last week's Parsha, the mother of Yosef and Binyamin, Rachel, you know, she passed away when she would give birth to Binyamin. Well, it's very dangerous. So this man comes over to the shochet and says, "Listen, my wife is now trying to give birth, but she can't and, and she's in danger. And, and I, I

15:26 don't know the Rebbe well, but you are very close to the Rebbe. Can you please go to the Rebbe and tell him that he should give me a bracha?" So Reb Ze'ev, uh, the, the shochet was very tired. So he said, "You know what? I don't have time to go to the Rebbe now, but you know what? Um, let me, uh, give you a piece of paper." And he takes out a note which this old man, the leader with the long white beard that he f- met in the forest in this big mansion. He gave him that note and he says that with that note he can be saved from anything, anything bad, anything dangerous. "Take this note, put it under the pillow of your wife. You'll see she'll-- everything will be good. She'll have a baby." And that's what this man did. He went to, to his wife and she was lying in bed crying because she was in pain and it was, was very, very hurtful. He put this note under her pillow and lo and behold, within a few minutes she gave birth. Mazel tov. There was a baby boy. That was a miracle. Now, in the time of Reb Ze'ev Wolf of Zhitomir, there was a minhag that if a miracle happened to someone, especially if it's something from a tzaddik that made a miracle, then they would bring special food, mezonot and wine to the shul where Reb Ze'ev Wolf used to daven. And after davening, they would say l'chaim

16:47 and thank Hashem for the great miracle. So the next day, this man who had just had a miracle, his wife couldn't give birth for weeks and weeks, she was in pain, and now within a second, there's this tzaddik that lives in the forest and the shochet brought a little note which he gave him and that made a miracle that his wife had a baby boy. So they-- He was gonna bring mezonot and honey cake and wine to the shul the next morning, and after Shacharit, Reb Ze'ev Wolf will say l'chaim and everybody there will also say l'chaim and everybody will-- I think everybody will be happy thanking Hashem for the miracle. Now, this man, the father of this new baby, is carrying the cake and the wine in a bag and is walking to the shul. And as he's walking to the shul to bring the cake and to tell everybody the great miracle that happened, Reb Ze'ev Wolf says to his Hasidim, "Please go outside and tell this man who's coming with the cake and the wine," Reb Ze'ev Wolf saw Very surprised people go and said, "No, don't come with the cake. The Rebbe doesn't want you to come into the shul." Says he doesn't wanna celebrate a nest which is not a nest. It comes from Klipa, from evil. As you know, from this week's parasha and next week's parasha, we'll learn about Pharaoh and his magic magicians, how they were able to make miracles. But you know, Hashem gave the power

18:35 sometimes to evil forces to imitate and mimic and imitate the, the miracles of the tzadikim, even though they can't do them exactly the way the tzadikim do them. Uh, but the chartumim of Pharaoh, the magicians of Pharaoh, were able to copy some of those miracles. But really, their miracles are not miracles from Hashem. These are miracles that are performed by evil, evil forces, evil things called Klipahs. Hashem gave them a power only just to give us a little bit of a challenge so that we were tested. Hashem gives us a test to see if we're gonna be impressed with those stupid miracles. And as Moshe Rabbeinu pointed out to the magicians of Pharaoh, "Hey, you can only do so much." And when it came to the ma'ak of kinim, remember? The lice? They couldn't do it because the, the evil forces, the Klipahs, they cannot make certain miracles. Only Hashem can do them. So this happened here. The Rab Zev Wolf is saying that this baby was born by a miracle, like magic done by the evil forces. He doesn't wanna celebrate this. Tell him not to come to my shul. The man was so surprised and shocked, and he was so upset. He went back home and put down the cake and the wine and then ran to the Shaychet's house and says, "Please, please, do you know what just happened? The Rebbe, Rab Zev Wolf of Zhitomir said I cannot come and celebrate the miracle that just happened to my wife, that she

20:01 gave birth to a beautiful baby boy because the miracle, the baby was born through the forces of Klipa, of evil." The Shaychet was very shocked. What? Um, he wanted to go and talk to the Rebbe. So the next morning he goes to the Rebbe for Shacharit, and as he comes closer to the Rebbe, to the Rebbe's shul, the Rebbe told the Hasidim, "Please lock all the doors and lock all the windows. Don't let the Shaychet come in. Don't let the Shaychet come in." Everyone was surprised. The Shaychet is the most beloved Hasid of the Rebbe. The Rebbe is so close to him. Now the Rebbe is saying, "No, no, no. I don't want him around me. I want him away, away. Tell him never to come here. I can't look at him. I can't be in the same shul with him. Tell him it-- Lock all the doors." The Shaychet comes to the shul, he thought he's gonna open the door and walk in and go straight to the Rebbe and talk to him about what happened. But the doors are locked. He begins to cry and says, "Hey, hey, please, open the door. I'm, uh... This is me, the Shaychet." Nobody opens the door. So he starts knocking, knocking, and knocking on the windows. And then he sees Hasidim there inside through the window. He can peek and can see. They're hiding. They don't want him to see them. But apparently he understood that this is on purpose. They were told not to let

21:24 him in. And then he realized, "What's going on over here? Why? Why aren't they letting me in? What's going on?" Then he realized it must be the Rebbe. The Rebbe must have told them to lock the doors and not to let him in. But the question is, why? So he started crying. He says, begging, "Please tell the Rebbe that if I did something wrong, I wanna do Teshuvah. Please tell him to tell the Rebbe that he should have rachmanus on me. Should have big pity on me and let me come in. I wanna talk to him. And if I need to do Teshuvah, I'll do Teshuvah, but please, I, I, I wanna come in." And he cries for hours and hours, but the Rebbe said, "Nope. Nope. Nope. Nobody let him in. I don't wanna see him. He can't be in my shul." Finally, he cries all day. He says, "I'm not leaving this place. I'm standing by the door of the shul and crying till the Rebbe lets me in." Finally, the Hasidim went to the Rebbe's room and begged the Rebbe, "Please help him out. He's crying so much." And the Rebbe said, "Tell him that right now I can't see him. There's only one thing he can do to fix something wrong he did. He went to the forest last Motzei Shabbos, and he spent time in a mansion which was nothing but not a real mansion. It was a mansion from the Klipahs. And inside, the people that looked like Hasidim

22:58 and they looked like Talmidei Chachamim, they were nothing but the agents of the Yetzer Hara, the agents of the Satan. They are the forces of Klipahs. And he ended up in their net. He was trapped by them. They pretend to look like Hasidim. They pretend to look like tzadikim, and they have a long white beard and payos, but really, they're really evil." You see, the Yetzer Hara to you comes also to us like that. Sometimes the Yetzer Hara doesn't tell you, "Do an aveira," but he tells you, "You know what? This is really a mitzvah." But really, the Yetzer Hara wants you to get you to do the wrong thing, but he dresses up like a Hasid. You gotta remember this. This is what the story means, right? He ends up in a place in the forest, and they look like so beautiful and such tzadikim, but really, they're very evil. "And you went there and you praised them, and you were very impressed with them. That means there's evil inside of you now. They trapped you now. The only way for you to undo the evil they did to you, the evil that's crept into inside of you, is by going back to the forest and go back to that place, and you have to tell them that they're despicable. Don't be impressed with them. Tell them, 'No, you're evil. I know who you are. You're just disguised. You look like tzadikim. You look like Hasidim, and you're evil.' And you have to tell

24:24 them exactly what they are and not be afraid of them. Now, it's possible that they will come out and begin to try to hurt you. You cannot be impressed with that. It'll be scary, 'cause they will start showing you things that are very scary. But don't be afraid. Just tell them, 'I'm not afraid of you, and you can't hurt me because I'm a Hasid of Rab Zev Wolf of Zhitomir. I'm a Hasid of this great tzadik, and therefore, I don't feel afraid of you.' And you close your eyes, and if it gets very scary, you just close your eyes and you imagine my face. Think of my face, my image, and that will save you from them. And if you keep strong and you're not afraid, and you say, 'No, you're evil and you're despicable, you're disgusting,' you'll they'll go away and they won't be able to hurt you. And after you do that, you can come back here to me and everything will be fine. See, this story tells us about how we fight the yetzer hara. Sometimes the yetzer hara comes and says, "Yeah, yeah, it's such a good thing to do. Yeah, why not? It's even a mitzvah maybe, right?" You have to tell the yetzer hara, "No, this is evil. You're a yetzer hara. You're not good. You're just pretending to be good. You're making me do something bad, something evil. You're making me lying to someone, telling me that it's a mitzvah to lie in this case because, oh, yeah,

25:51 you need to lie because so and so is, is gonna be, uh, upset if you don't, uh, if you say the truth." Well, you have to be very careful. We have to be careful to know when it's the yetzer hara dressing up like a Hasid. And the only way for us to protect ourselves against the yetzer hara is by telling him, "No, you're evil. The Torah says clearly not to do it." And then the yetzer hara goes away. You don't feel tempted by the yetzer hara anymore because you have stood strongly and said to the yetzer hara, "No, you're despicable. You're disgusting." Right? You have to be very firm, very strong, and not be afraid of the yetzer hara. And that's what the Reb Zev Wolf told him to do to these people in the mansion. So the Shaychet understood what had happened, and the next Motzei Shabbos he got ready and went back. He went back. He went back to the, um, the forest in the middle of the night, and he saw the, the mansion again. He stood there in front of the mansion, and as he came to the mansion, the door already opened up before he even knocked. And he said, "Oh, here's a good friend, the Shaychet of Zhitomir." And they felt like they're his best friends. They said, "Oh, come. Welcome back." But he right away spit on the ground and says, "You are disgusting. You are despicable. You're not what you pretend to be. I know you're evil.

27:23 Get... You, you should be des- you should be destroyed. You're bad." And they look at him, "What? Why, why are you treating us like this?" He says, "Yes, you're disgusting. Don't pretend you're good." And they call quickly to their leader inside the big room who is, uh, you know, having Melava Malka with, with his Hasidim. And they call him and say, you know, "The, the Shaychet is here, and he's cursing at us. He's telling us that we're bad and evil." And the leader comes out and says, "Welcome back. What's, what's, what's, what's... Why do you stay outside? Come inside, join us at the table." And the Shaychet starts screaming at him, "You are a fake. You are a phony. You're not a tzadik. You're a rosha. You're evil. You're Klepus. And, and you should be destroyed. You're the enemies of Hashem." And as he says that, the leader says, "What? Why are you cursing at us like this? I am going to have to destroy you." And the Shaychet realized right away, he remembered what Reb Zev Wolf, the Rebbe, told him before he left, that he must not be afraid. The leader might want to hurt him. And suddenly the leader said a word, a very strange word, and the Shaychet began to see strange images. Images of scary-looking snakes with their mouth wide open, ready to swallow the Shaychet. They came from all over, all around him. He... And it was a tradition, it was scary. It was very scary. And he saw

29:15 fire everywhere. It was, like, very, very scary. But then he remembered what his Rebbe said to him, "Don't be afraid. Just close your eyes and say, 'I'm not afraid of you. I'm a Hasid of Reb Zev Wolf of Zhitomir.' Just say it loud." He did exactly this, shut his eyes and screamed at the leader, "I'm not afraid of all these things you're trying to do to me. You can't hurt me because my Rebbe is Reb Zev Wolf of Zhitomir." And when the leader heard, "Reb Zev Wolf of Zhitomir? He's your Rebbe? Oh, let me check. I have a book, and in that book I have names of a lot of Rebbes that are alive. Rebbes that some of them are not such great Rebbes. They're, they're, they're good people, but they've done a few averas here and there. And sometimes they learn Torah, but they're not learning Torah for the right reasons. They learn Torah because they wanna be, you know, get covered, right? A real tzadik is someone who always learns Torah only to connect with Hashem. So I have a book for every single Tz- Rebbe of-- that is alive today. If he had some thoughts when he learned Torah that is not for Hashem but for himself, to make himself great and big, then he's in my book, because that means I have a piece of him in my book, in my, in my net, in my trap. And therefore, if he, your Rebbe, is one of those in my book, he

30:42 cannot protect you. I can hurt you and swallow you and destroy you. But if he's not in my book, that means he's really a holy tzadik that has never had any thoughts of evil and always learned Torah only Mishnah for Hashem's sake, then I really cannot hurt you." And the leader told his- Help us to go bring a big book. They opened the book, and he started going through all the names of Rabbanim and, and, and, and, and the Rebbes and, and Jews, all kinds of Jews that are in his book, and he couldn't find Reb Ze'ev of Zhytomyr. He said, "Oh, your Rebbe is really a great tzadik. He's-- He, uh, he's never had a very-- an evil thought in his life. So I have no choice, I have to let you go." And as he left, he saw that the mansion with all the people inside disappeared. They disintegrated. He understood that these were not real people. These were forces of evil dressed like people, like tzadikim, trying to make him do an aveira. And this is the story with our Yetzer Hara too. Once you go tell the Yetzer Hara, "I'm not listening to you. This is nonsense. This is evil. You're just pretending that this is nice and sweet and so exciting and it's so tasty, and oh yes, it'll be so, so much fun to do this aveira." But when you tell him, "No, this is not fun. This is evil. I don't wanna have anything to do with you,"

32:12 then the Yetzer Hara goes away from you, and he cannot trap you. Anyways, he went back to Zhytomyr, and the first thing he did, he went to the shul of the Rebbe. And this time, the Rebbe said to him, said, "Go outside and greet my sh-- friend, my Hasid, the Shaychet, um, because I want him to come in right away so we can drink l'chaim." And my friends, this is the concept of teshuva. When you have a person does something wrong, let's say you once lied to someone, or you once were not nice to your parents, not nice to your friends or to your Rebbe. You did things that you weren't supposed to do. Everybody knows what it is. Uh, the, the Torah tells us that to do teshuva means to be regretful. You have to regret what you did. That's what teshuva is. But the best teshuva is if you have another chance to get angry again at your parents or get angry at your teacher and say something not nice to them, or you get a desire to say a lie or desire to do something else, and y- this time you say, "No, I'm not gonna do it. Yes, last time I did the aveira, but I'm not gonna do it this time. Yetzer Hara is coming to me again, and I'm gonna say no." If you can do that, uh, the, the Gemara says, and the Rambam writes this, that's the best teshuva. Hashem loves this teshuva because here, not only

33:41 did you regret what you did last time, but yeah, now when another opportunity came for you to do the same aveira, you dacha don't do it. So you have proven that you really changed. You're not gonna do aveira. This is what happened to this Hasid. He had to go back to the forest, meet the same people again that made him part of them and trapped him, and then say, "No, I'm not gonna listen to you." And that's what made them disappear. That's the first story of Reb Ze'ev of Zhytomyr.