43. The Maharshal Performs תחיית המתים

00:16 Shalom Aleichem, kinderlach. Today I'm gonna tell you an awesome story that happened to one of the greatest gaonim, tzadikim that lived about four hundred years ago in, uh, in Poland, in the city of Lublin. His name was Reb Shloime Luria. He's also known for The Maharshal. Maharshal, the word Maharshal stands for Moreinu HaRav Reb Shloime Luria, Maharshal. He was the rav of Lublin. He was a close friend of the Maharal of Prague. You all heard of the Maharal of Prague, who created a golem. The Maharal of Prague and Reb Shloime Luria, when they were young, they studied together. They were friends, and they studied together for a number of years by the same Rebbe. His name was Reb Yitzchak. Reb Shloime Luria was also friends of the famous Rama, the Rama who wrote part of the Shulchan Aruch. So the Maharshal was the rav of Lublin, as I mentioned. He had a big yeshiva. He had many, many talmidim. The Maharshal was also the ancestor of the Alter Rebbe. The Alter Rebbe's grandmother, Rebbetzin Rachel, she was a descendant of the Maharshal. The Alter Rebbe mentions the Maharshal many, many times in his Shulchan Aruch. The Maharshal was a great rav. And one day, one of his talmidim, who was married but didn't have any children, was only married for a year. His wife suddenly got sick, and then she died. The Talmud of the Maharshal, when his wife died, became very sad. As we can imagine, he lost his wife. She passed away, so

02:23 he got very sad. But he continued to be sad. He continued to be very, very depressed in a way that was not normal. People are sad, you know, when somebody passes away in the family. It's very sad. But after a while you forget, and you come back to yourself. You know, you go back to your normal life. But he wasn't coming back to his normal life. He was sad and depressed, and you could see on him that there's something really bothering him. And finally, the Maharshal, his Rebbe, heard about it, and he called him over and told him to come to his house. And the Talmud came to the house of the Maharshal, and the great Maharshal says to him, "My dear Talmud, why are you so depressed? I understand your wife passed away and it's very sad, but you seem to be much more sad than normally people are when their wife passes away. You must be troubled by something. Something is troubling you. Something more than just your wife not being around. There must be something bothering you that you're not telling anyone, so please tell it to me." The young man, the Talmud, was at first not happy to tell and to reveal what bothers him. But then in the end, when the Rebbe told him, "You must tell me," he told him the truth. He says, "I want the Rebbe to know that a few days before my wife passed away, I was speaking to her. I was standing next to

04:00 her bed." And he says, "Me and my wife, we loved each other very much. And she said to me, 'After I die, you'll forget about me. Well, I want you to promise me that you'll never forget about me and that you'll never marry another wife. Because if you marry another wife, you'll forget about me.' And I said, 'No, no, I'll never forget about you. I'll never marry somebody else.' Says, 'I want you to make a promise, like a shevua.'" You know what it's make a shevua? It's a very serious thing to make a shevua and saying, "I will never do something," or, "I will do something." You have to keep it. It's a big averia not to do it. If you make a shevua, it's an averia in the Torah not to keep it. You have to keep what you're saying. "So the wife said, 'I want you to make me a shevua you'll never marry another wife.' And so I, I said-- I promised her with a shevua I'll never to marry another wife. Then she passed away, and now I realize I could never get married again. I'll never have a family. I'll never have children because I promised my wife that I will never marry anybody else." Reb Shloime Luria heard this and he said to him, "Listen to me. Don't worry about the shevua. You can get married." The Talmud was surprised. "Rebbe, you're telling me to break my promise. It's a big averia in the Torah to break a promise.

05:37 How can I break a promise?" And the Maharshal said to him, "In the Torah it says that you have to make a shevua. When you make a shevua, you have to keep it. That's only if the shevua is something that, you know, you're allowed to do or not allowed to do. You're allowed to do. You can sh-- make a shevua I won't eat meat and make a shevua I will, uh, jump, uh, out of my house. You can make all kinds of shevuas, but as long as it's permitted." But if somebody says, "I make a shvua that I will never say Shema again." That that's not a shvua 'cause that's doing an avera. You're making a shvua to do an avera. Somebody makes a shvua he's gonna do an avera, "I'm gonna eat treif food. I make a shvua I'm gonna eat treif food." Are you supposed to keep it? No. A shvua that goes against the Torah is not a valid shvua. You don't have to keep it. It's meaningless. So he said, "You made a shvua never to marry again, but you have a mitzvah to get married and have children. You don't have any children yet. So therefore, the shvua you made to her is meaningless. You can... You're not breaking anything. You're allowed to go get married." Young man was very relieved. He felt so much better. Okay, he can get married. Well, a few months went by and he found a beautiful wife, and he got married. Something shocking happened

07:01 after that. A few months after the wedding, suddenly the young man went to bed, he went to sleep, and he died. Everybody in the city was shocked, and everybody thought this must be because he had made a shvua to his previous wife who had died, and now he's not keeping his promise, and that's why he died as a punishment. So people were very shocked and very upset. So they told the Rav, the Maharshal, the Rav of Lublin. He's the one who told this young man to get married and to break his shvua. 'Cause he told him the shvua is not a valid shvua, 'cause he made a shvua about something which the Torah doesn't allow you to do. He must get married. It's a mitzvah. So the Maharshal said, "Listen, this is what we're gonna do. We're gonna take his body and clean it and dress him in the tachrichim." Tachrichim are the clothes, the white clothes we put on a dead body before we bury it. "And we're gonna do a regular thing, a funeral, a levaya. We're going to take him to the cemetery and dig his grave and put his body in the grave. Let's do it." And everybody do-- they did it. The Chevra Kadisha did that. They put him in the grave, and then Reb Shlomo Luria, the Maharshal said, "Don't close the grave. Leave the grave open. Don't put the dirt back on top of the coffin. Leave it open and leave the coffin open." And he took a

08:55 note where he wrote down the following thing. "Shalom shalom to you, Pamalya Shel Ma'ala." That means the best din of Shamayim. "I paskened al pi halacha al pi din that my talmid is allowed to get married and he's obligated to get married because it's a mitzvah. And I paskened that his shvua is not meaningful. It means nothing because he did a shvua about something which he's supposed to do. He can't make a shvua that he, he's not gonna do a mitzvah. Therefore, I decree with the power of Torah that I have that you have to bring back my talmid. Bring back his neshama down here." He signed his name on this note, and he told the Chevra Kadisha, who take care of the body, to put the note in the hand of his talmid and to leave it in the kever, and to leave the kever open, and everybody should leave the cemetery. Everybody left. Short while later, the young man came out of his kever, dressed in the tachrichim and white clothes, and started walking into the city of Lublin, walking down the streets as if nothing happened. When he came home, he went straight to his house. His wife saw him. She got so scared and so shocked. She ran away to her father's house, to her parents' house. She's, she's afraid. Her, her husband, who is dead, came back. In the morning, the Maharshal sent a message to this talmid that he should take off the tachrichim, the special clothes from dead

10:49 people, and should get dressed like a normal person and come to the yeshiva like he learned in his yeshiva before. "Come to yeshiva and learn like, like you always did, and put on normal clothes." When the talmid came to the yeshiva, the talmidim, the other talmidim were afraid to sit next to him. They thought he was a dead person. Maybe it's just his neshama came back. Nobody understood why. They knew he was dead. So nobody would-- People were afraid to sit next to him. And his wife also ran away. I- it was impossible for him to live. Nobody wanted to talk to him. People were afraid. So the Maharshal, with his power of Torah, he had a special Koach of Torah. He said there's a malach in Shamayim that's in charge of forgetfulness. This malach can make anybody forget everything. And he decreed that this malach should make everybody in Lublin forget about the story that this man died, that his talmid died, and that they buried him, and that he came back from the kever. Nobody should remember it. And suddenly, overnight, everybody forgot that this talmid was once dead and that a miracle happened that he came back, and the whole subject was forgotten. And he went back to the yeshiva, and everybody was normal with him. Nobody even remembered that this happened. And the young man became like all normal people, and his wife came back home. She came back from her family, "Oh, yeah, let me go home." And there her

12:34 husband was, and they had children and generations of children who learned Torah and did a lot of mitzvahs. This story seems like an, a crazy story, but this story was told by the Rav of Lublin, another Rav, many years later. His name was Rabbi Meir Shapiro. Rabbi Meir Shapiro was a very famous Rav in Lublin who passed away maybe ninety years ago. He was the famous founder of the yeshiva in Lublin, the Chachmei Lublin, very famous yeshiva. He said he read this story in the archives. This is from the Chevra Kadisha of Lublin, 'cause Rabbi Meir Shapiro was the Rav of Lublin. The Maharshal was Rav about three, four hundred years before Rabbi Meir Shapiro. But the city of Lublin had papers that were written hundreds of years by the Chevra Kadisha, stories that they saw when they were involved in burying b-bodies. So they... One of the stories in that box, in that closet, was that story that happened in the time of the Maharshal in the city of Lublin. It tells you a very important lesson, that people that have learned a lot of Torah, and they learn Torah the way they should, like with the, with love of Hashem, with the fear of Hashem in their hearts while they learn Torah, they have a special power. Hashem gives them the power that they can control nature. They can even bring back a person who died and make him alive again. Here would be a good question for you to think about. If

14:18 he really died and came back, as the story tells us, would he have to marry his wife again? What happens when a, a wife loses her husband, her husband dies? The woman can get married again, right? Because she's no longer married. If a couple gets married, when can a wife get married again to another person? Either they get divorced, the husband has to give a get to his wife, or the husband dies, and then she can get married to someone else. What if the husband dies and he comes back to life? Does it mean she's no longer married to him, even though he came back to life? Or the fact that he came back to life means they're married again? Which would mean, does he have to make another chuppah and get married to his wife? Or does he not have to do anything? They're married like they were before. He was just in the middle, a little bit dead for a little while. You can ask this to your rebbes, your rosh yeshiva, or maybe your tatties and mammies.