140. The Tzadik's Home That Caused A Yid To Do Teshuva.

00:16 Shalom Aleichem, kinders. I want to share with you a story that I just heard, and I read this from a Yid shliach who heard it from the person himself. An amazing story. A story with the Rebbe. In France, there lived a family. The father, the mother of the family came from, uh, Poland, and they survived the Holocaust, the war with the Nazis and the concentration camp. And after the war, unfortunately, they became so upset and angry that they lost their whole families, that they became angry with Hashem and with the Torah, and decided not to keep any Torah mitzvahs anymore. Unfortunately, this happened to a number of Jews who, because they went through so much suffering and so much difficulty, and they saw so much... So many members of their family that were killed and murdered by the Nazis, so they felt like, "Why is Hashem doing this?" They didn't have enough emunah and bitachon in Hashem that Hashem does this for a reason that we cannot always understand. So, but they, they decided to get angry and to say, "Okay, we don't wanna have anything to do with Torah, with Hashem, and with mitzvahs, chas v'shalom." And this is what happened to this family. They decided nothing. No Chanukah, no Purim, no Sukkot, no Rosh Hashanah, not even Yom Kippur. They don't fast Yom Kippur. They decided they're gonna eat on Yom Kippur, chas v'shalom. They're not gonna go to shul. Nothing. And so they had children, and they raised their families without any,

02:08 any Yiddishkeit. They knew they were Jewish and that they were born Jewish, but they didn't have any connection to Torah mitzvahs. One of the sons, uh, not surprising, um, his name is Yitzchak. Isaac. They didn't call him Yitzchak, but, uh, something... Yitzchak in French would be Isaac, um, or something similar. And he decided, you know, he was-- went to college, became a dentist. He wanted to become a dentist, and he met a non-Jewish woman, and he wanted to get married. It wasn't anything special for them, but marrying a goy, you know, they, they didn't keep any Torah mitzvahs, so big deal. So you marry a goy, didn't m-mean-- didn't mean a big deal for them to marry a goy. You know, nobody cared. And so they decided to get married. They decided, decided to get married, and they got ready for the wedding. They decided to rent an apartment and somewhere in Paris, and it's called the, the, the name of the street was, uh, a street called Rue Boulard nine. That's the name of the place where they rented, where they were going to move in after they get married. He already moved into the apartment, and she would come and visit, and they would plan their wedding. One day, a few days after he moved into this apartment and was getting all excited about the wedding, and she would come over, and they would plan the wedding, and they were gonna do this and gonna do that, he suddenly starts feeling very, very

04:04 sad and very depressed and uncomfortable, and he didn't know why. He wasn't happy. He couldn't understand what was wrong. Something was wrong. So he started walking in the streets of Paris looking for something that will help him feel better. Finally, he goes by a shul and he decides, "You know what? Maybe I need to... I'm Jewish. I've never been to a shul, but maybe I should go into the shul." Walks in, sees people davening, but he doesn't know how to daven. He doesn't know how to open a siddur. So somebody helped him, and he took a siddur with French translation, and he was able to read. And then he decided a few days later to go again to the same shul, and this time he met the Rav of the shul, and the Rav spoke to him about where he's from and what he's doing here. And you know, and he said he just wants to be in a Jewish place. He said he right away felt a little bit better. Not totally, but a little bit better when he got into the shul. Then one day, this went by, this took a plot for a while. This took a while. After a few months, uh, this, his fiancée is the girl that he was gonna marry, the non-Jewish woman, came over to visit and to plan some more of their wedding and talk, and suddenly he felt... He was sitting in the apartment on Nine Rue Boulard, that apartment that he rented. He's sitting

05:45 there and he's feeling this terrible fear suddenly out of nowhere. Like a panic, a panic attack. Like he's getting very nervous and very anxious. He didn't know what it was, but he felt like very, very anxious, and he felt like being with this woman made him very anxious. And he got so anxious that he said to her, "Listen, please, leave the apartment. I can't spend time with you. I can't spend time with you. I'm afraid that we're not gonna be able to get married because I feel very anxious about it. I feel very scared. I don't know why. I have no idea why. Don't ask me why, but I feel very, very scared." And she was very upset. Why is he saying this? They decided to get married, but now he's saying that he's very scared. So she walked out of the apartment. He locked the door, and he felt very, very bad. He doesn't know why. He decided he can't marry her. He doesn't know why he can't marry her, but he knows that when he's with her, he feels anxious and scared and angry. And so he decided to leave the apartment. He told the landlord who he rented the apartment from that he- he's not renting it because he's not getting married, and he went home to his family. A- And he started going more frequently to the shul, till one day he decided he wants to move to Eretz Yisrael. He moved to Eretz Yisrael, and he ended up in the

07:29 city of Tzfat. There in Tzfat he met a community called the Breslov Hasidim. He became a Breslov Hasid. But later on, he was already a dentist then, he moved to Yerushalayim. He opened a dental office and became a dentist in Yerushalayim. He got married, and he had a family. One day, he shows up. He sees a, a pamphlet, a little, uh, journal, a little magazine, and there is a description of the Rebbe's life, the Lubavitcher Rebbe's life. And there it mentions that the Rebbe in the 1930s, before World War II, the Rebbe lived in France and lived for five years in an apartment on 9 Bullard, Rue Bullard. And he says, "Wait a second, that address sounds familiar." He started thinking, "When did I see this address? I remember something about it." Couldn't remember what it was, and then finally he remembers, "Oh, no. This is the time when I was gonna marry this non-Jewish woman, and I rented this apartment, 9 Rue Bullard, so we can live in that apartment after we get married." He says, "Now," he says, "the Rebbe lived before that, before the war, in that same apartment f- for five years." And suddenly he realized that when he went in the apartment, he felt this panic. He, he says, "I can't marry this non-Jewish woman." And he ran away from her, and he became f- uh, observant and became religious. He became shomer Torah and mitzvos. He became a Hasid, a Breslov Hasid. And he realized that it's because the

09:28 Rebbe lived there. He never understood why suddenly out of nowhere he felt this incredible need to run away from this shiksa, this non-Jewish woman, and become more involved with Torah and mitzvos. He couldn't understand why, what suddenly struck him like this unexpectedly. And now he understands, because when a tzadik lives in a place and he's, and he is avod Hashem, he davens and learns in that apartment, the tzadik leaves a certain kedusha there, and that kedusha stayed there for a long time. That when he moved in with that non-Jewish woman that he wanted to marry, that kedusha affected him, that he wanted to go away. He realized that this is not what he's supposed to do. His nefsha woke up, and he realized that he needs to-- This is a terrible thing for him to do, and he didn't understand at the time why he feels that, but now he understood. It's that kedusha the Rebbe left into that house. The truth is, every Jew, every child that does a mitzvah leaves a certain kedusha on the place where you do the mitzvah. When you daven Mincha in a certain place, you say a couple Tehillim. The Baal Shem Tov says that sometimes you travel somewhere, and you end up in a place you didn't expect to be. You go on a plane, and the plane ends up going to a different city because there was bad weather where you wanted to go, so you need to go to a different place, and you have

10:58 to daven Mincha there. It's all Hashem made it that way so that you can daven in that place, and your davening would have an effect on that place. That's true for everyone. But when a tzadik, by tzadik, he can reveal the kedusha so strongly that many years later, a Jew who does not anything about Torah and mitzvos walks into that apartment, feels suddenly a strange feeling that he wants to daven, he wants to be a Jew, and he shouldn't marry somebody who's not Jewish. He feels this very strange feeling that he never, never realized that this is something that he has. And that's what happened to this young man, and he told that story to the shliach in Givat Shaul in Yerushalayim. Moshe Katam is a shliach there for French Jews. Since he's French, he used to go there sometimes to hear a shiur, and he walked over to the shliach and told him that story. And that shliach told it to a friend of mine who told me that story. So you see the great power of what a mitzvah can do on a place, especially tzadikim and the Rebbe. You go into 770. The Rebbe davened there for so many years. The kedusha of that place that the Rebbe, uh, uh, placed there and left in that place is so intense, so strong that if you go there and daven, it should wake you up and make you feel, like, so much closer to HaKadosh Baruch Hu. Daven with greater kavana, and daven

12:27 and learn Torah with greater excitement, and become a Hasid, yiray shamayim