156. The Mesiras Nefesh Of A Young Kantonist

00:15 Shalom Aleichem, kinderlach. The following story was told by the famous Mashpia Hasid, Reb Shmuel Levitin, who heard it from his Mashpia, Reb Shmuel Grenim Esterman in Lubavitch, who heard it from the famous Rav, Rabbi Avraham Kuzebener, a Hasid of the Reb Rashab and a Hasid of the Reb Maharash, who told the following story. And the story is about the Aptner Rav, the famous tzadik of Apt. A Yid once came to the Aptner Rav and told him that his wife is in a very big danger. His wife is pregnant and she's finishing the pregnancy. The baby is supposed to come out already after nine month, but the baby refuses to come out. And no matter how much the doctors try to get the baby to come out, the baby is staying inside, and that can be very dangerous for the mother. So he needs a bracha from the Aptner Rav that the baby will be born. So the Aptner Rav closed his eyes and lead-- leaned his forehead on his hands and went into a deep thought. It took a long while. He was thinking and thinking. Then after a while, he opened his eyes and he said to the father, to the husband, "Go home because your wife is giving birth any minute now to a baby boy." So the husband went home, and that's what happened. She gave birth literally a few minutes afterwards. So one of the Hasidim who saw this, so he understood that there's something unusual happened here, 'cause he saw

02:00 that the Aptner Rav was closing his eyes, putting his head on his fore- uh, forehead on his hands, and deep in thought. What did he do? What was he doing? And then when he opened his eyes, he said, "The baby is coming." So he asked Aptner Rav if he can explain to him what happened. So the Aptner Rav said to him like this: "When a mother, a woman, cannot give birth and the baby's not coming out," which happens sometimes, it's because the neshamah refuses to come into the world. The neshamah wants to go back to where it comes from, from Shamayim, close to Hashem. It doesn't wanna come into this world. And this baby that didn't wanna come out from his, from his mother's womb, didn't wanna come out, and I spoke to the baby. You know, with neshamas, you can speak in your thoughts. You don't have to say words. So when I closed my eyes, I was actually meeting the neshamah, and I told the neshamah, "Why don't you wanna come out? Hashem sent your neshamah down into the world for a reason." So the neshamah said, "I can see that I will have a lot of tzoros, a lot of problems, and big, terrible tests because there's a Tsar Nikolai. The Tsar of Russia is Nikolai, and Nikolai is a evil man, and he's going to force many children to stop doing Torah and mitzvahs. And I see that I'm gonna be one of them, and I'm afraid that I'm not going

03:37 to be able to stand strong enough and not to listen to him. That's why I wanna go back, and that's why I'm not coming out of the womb." So the Aptner Rav says, "I told the neshamah that you should know Hashem gave you special, special koach, special strengths that will enable you to be strong and not to, um, not to give in to Nikolai's, um, Nikolai's decrees. You'll be able to stand strong as a Jew. You will not-- He will not succeed. He will not be able to force you to abandon Torah and mitzvahs." And the Aptner Rav concluded and said that when this neshamah heard what I said to her, since the neshamah knows that I'm a neshamah here in the world already, I've already gone into the world, so when this neshamah heard about a neshamah like me, he's telling it and to say that the neshamah has koach to stand up against any test that Hashem gives it. So then the neshamah agreed to come out, and that's why the baby came out. So the Hasidim understood that this is a special neshamah, that the Aptner Rav had a conversation in his head with that neshamah, and he promised the neshamah that this neshamah has a lot of strength and not to be afraid to come into the world. So they knew it's a special neshamah. So some of the Hasidim decided that they're going to pay attention to this baby. When the baby is born, they're going to look after this

05:20 baby to see what's going on, what happens to this baby. Now, a short while after the baby was born, his father died. After seven or eight years later, his mother also died. So when he was eight, seven or eight years old, or maybe nine years old, he didn't have any parents, not a father, not a mother. And he was probably, um, raised by some family member or maybe a friend, a neighbor in the, in the, in the town. Now, when he turned ten, the- The Tsar's army came to catch children. As you know, that at that time there was a special terrible decree from Nikolai to grab Jewish children and take them into a special army base and f- and force them to eat treif and to stop davening and stop keeping Shabbos and become like Russians, and train them as to become good soldiers, and they would stay in the army for 25 or 30 years. And they took them as young children, with eight, nine, 10 years old, would take them away from their families, and they would take from each family one or two children. They were called the Cantonisten. There are many stories about them. This boy was a c- became a Cantonist. The Russians, the Russian army took him to the special army for children, where they're going to force Jewish children to stop being Jewish and to eat treif and, and not to keep Shabbos, and so on. Now, one of the Hasidim who knew about this child's story

07:12 that had the Apta Rov before even this child was born, the Apta Rov said that I promised this Neshama that he'll have special strength. So he decided to stay in contact with this child to see what's gonna happen to it. So he used to write letters to the child. You could write letters to the army base and say, "It's a letter for this and this child." So he kept writing letters to him. And the, the child, the boy would, would write back. He was 10 years old. He would write letters back and say how terrible the, the place is, would tell him what, what terrible suffering they make him, they give him, and all the tzus that he has to suffer from. And he told them, "I-- they want me to eat treif, but I'm not eating any treif, and even though I'm gonna have to starve, and it's very, very difficult, but, but I really don't want to do any aveiras. And they want me to convert to another religion, and I don't want to. I told them no. No matter how much pain they cause me and how much they beat me, I don't listen to them." And so this Hasid kept writing back and forth to this boy. After a half a year of writing back and forth, he no longer got letters from the boy. No more letters. It was very strange how come the boy... The Hasid kept sending him letters, and he waited for a response, and there was

08:43 no response. After a, a few months, the Hasid got a letter from a friend of this child saying that this child had died from so much suffering, because he didn't wanna convert to another religion, so they made him suffer a lot, and from that he died. Then the Hasid saw that this is what the Apta Rov was trying to do when he told this Neshama, "Hashem will give you special strength, that you'll be able to stand up against those who wanna force you." But unfortunately, he could not live, because they gave him so much suffering that he died from it. But he had Besias Nefesh until the end. Absolutely not. No matter what suffering they did to him, he kept Yiddishkeit, didn't eat treif, and davened every day. He kept Shabbos, didn't work on Shabbos, and even if they beat him, he didn't care. He's not gonna stop being Jewish. Unfortunately, in the end he had to die, but this was a very special Neshama, and the Apta Rov could see it before he was born that this is a special Neshama. That's why he went out of his way to, to, to speak to this Neshama in his thoughts, in his head, and tell the Neshama that, "Don't worry, Hashem is gonna give you special strength."