183. The Nes That Saved The Pnei Yehoshua’s Life

00:15 Shalom Aleichem, kinders. I wanna tell you a story that is related to something we learned in Parshas Vayeitzei. Remember when Yaakov Avinu left Be'er Sheva and he was on his way to go to Charan. And at one point, he ended up on the Har Habais, the place which later on, many years later, was the place of the Bais Hamikdash. And he went to sleep there because it was getting dark, and he was, um... When he went to sleep, he saw the Malachim going up and down on the ladder. And when he woke up in the morning, he realized that this is a very special place, that he had such a dream, it must be that this is a very holy place. And he davened to Hashem that Hashem should save him, should save him from, from Esav, who wanted to kill him. And also, he's going to Charan, where Lavan lived, and Lavan was also not a very nice guy, so he was afraid of what's going to happen, so he asked Hashem to protect him. Hashem should protect him and should give him what he needs to live, food and clothing. Before he started davening, he said, "Vayidor Yaakov neder," he made a neder. He made a, he made a promise to Hashem. "If, Hashem, you give me everything I ask you, I ask you for bread, I ask you for food and for clothing, then I promise you that everything, all the parnasa, all the money you'll give me, uh, through the years,

01:49 I will give ten percent to you," to Hashem. "I'll give it to tzedakah." He also promised that the rock that he used to sleep on, when he comes back from Charan, back to Eretz Yisrael, years from now, he will use that as a mizbeach. Now, the Midrash tells us that from Yaakov Avinu, the Jews learned a very important lesson. For Jews in a dangerous situation, you're afraid of something very, very serious, very dangerous, then when you daven to Hashem, also make a neder, make a promise. Say, "Hashem, that if you save me from this, I will do this special mitzvah." Right? Make a certain promise that you will do if Hashem saves you. We learn it from Yaakov Avinu. So I wanna share with you an amazing story, uh, that has to do with this idea that when you're in a s-- dangerous situation, you want Hashem to save you. You daven. Of course, you daven to Hashem. But you also, during the davening, you say, "Hashem, and if you save me, I will, I will do this. I promise I will do something special." Right? So in the time of the war, during the, the concentration camps, many times there were Jews that did this, exactly this, and they were saved. There was a Yid, the Kloizenberger Rebbe. He was a Yid who was in the concentration camp, and after the war, he was the famous Kloizenberger Rebbe. He had many Hasidim. And the Kloizenberger Rebbe was once shot in the hand. He was

03:27 shot in his hand, and it was bleeding. Now, normally, when you bleed, you get a bullet, somebody shoots in your hand and it's bleeding, where do you go? To the infirmary, right? To the, to the clinic, where you could-- they can give you medicine and bandages and creams, antibiotic creams. But he knew that if he goes to the infirmary, uh, he may not come out alive because the concentration camp with the Nazis, if somebody got sick and ended up in the hospital, in the infirmary, they would let him die there because they said, "Okay, he's sick anyway," so they would shoot him or kill him. So he knew that it's dangerous for him to go to the infirmary, but what is he gonna do? His hand is bleeding. He can die from, from, from... If the blood is not stopped, he can die. And it could also become an infection. So what did he do? He says, "I went over to a tree." It was the middle of working. They had to work in the... Right? They had to work very hard to, to, to carry heavy loads of stones and bricks. It was very hard work. But he says, "I went quickly over to the side," and so took a leaf, a big leaf, a large leaf, and pressed it against the wound to stop the bleeding. "And I held it down, and then I took a twig, a very soft, thin twig, like a little branch, and I tied it around the leaf

04:49 so that it would hold onto the leaf, it would stay on the, on the wound." And he says, "And I, and I... That's how... what I did. I bandaged it up with a, with a, with a, with a, with a, with a branch." And three days later, mamash, a miracle, it got healed. Baruch Hashem. So he said that, "I made a neder." He says, "Hashem, if you get me out of this concentration camp, and I survive and I live, so when I come out to freedom, I promise, I make a neder, I will build a big hospital where everything in this hospital will be done according to Torah, according to Halakha." And that's exactly what he did. After he came out of the hospital, he started... He had... He was a Rebbe with a community, and he moved to Eretz Yisrael and built this huge hospital called Laniado Hospital. So many other Jews did this, you know? When you're in a danger, you, you daven, but you also make a neder that if Hashem saves you, you will also... You promise you'll do a special mitzvah. So I'm gonna share you a story with the Pnei Yeshua. Pnei Yeshua is the name of a Sefer. The, uh, guy who wrote the Sefer from three hundred years ago was a very famous Gaon. And, uh, a great, great Rav, a famous Rav, Rabbi Yaakov Yehoshua Falk. He was the Rav of Frankfurt. He was a great, great gaon and a great tzadik. And, and, uh, he

06:22 was in the time of the Ba'al Shem Tov. He was older than the Ba'al Shem Tov. He was quite a bit older than the Ba'al Shem Tov, but the Ba'al Shem Tov met him a few times. Uh, the Ba'al Shem Tov, uh, once came to Frankfurt. At that time, the Ba'al Shem Tov wasn't so famous. And the Pri Yeshua, Rabbi Yehoshua Falk, who was the Rav of Frankfurt, had a talmid. You know who the talmid was? The Mezritcher Maggid. Mezritcher Maggid, before he became a Hasid, before he became a talmid of the Ba'al Shem Tov, he was a big Misnagid. He was against Hasidim, and he didn't wanna have anything to do with Hasidim. And he learned by the Pri Yeshua. Pri Yeshua was his Rebbe. For a while, he was his Rebbe. The Ba'al Shem Tov very much, he saw in Shamayim that the Mezritcher Maggid is supposed to be his talmid, and he's gonna take over. He's gonna be the next Rebbe, the next leader after the Ba'al Shem Tov's his ta'achus, he's gonna become the next Rebbe. So, so once there was a story that the Pri Yeshua was teaching the talmidim in the Beis Midrash. Like he taught every day, he also had a yeshiva. He was the Rav of the city, also had a yeshiva in the Beis Midrash, and he would teach a shiur Gemara every day. One day, he's teaching Gemara, and somebody comes into the shul and taps the Pri Yeshua on the shoulder and says to

07:52 him, "There's a man waiting outside. He says he needs you to come outside. He has a very important thing to tell you." So the Pri Yeshua says to him, "Listen, I'm in the middle of learning Torah. Tell him to come back later. I can't interrupt my... It's the middle of Torah. I can't interrupt my learning Torah just because he wants to see me outside." So the man went back outside and told this person, this mysterious person, that, uh, the Pri Yeshua said that he should wait till he finishes his shiur. So the, the-- this mysterious person said to the shliach, "Go back inside and tell the Pri Yeshua it's very, very urgent. He must come outside now because it's very, very important." So Pri Yeshua heard this. He said, "Okay, who knows what, what's going on? Maybe somebody's dying. There's, uh, somebody's in danger. Who knows what's wrong?" He went outside, and this mysterious... He sees this, this young man who's telling him, um, "I want you to know that the shochet in your city is a very bad person, and he's selling treif meat. He's actually making treif meat, and he's making many Jews eating treif. And go check him out quickly because, uh, Yidden are doing aveiras every day by eating his meat." And as soon as he finished speaking, this mysterious man, he drove off. And Pri Yeshua was standing there, said, "What? What did he just tell me?" So what the Pri Yeshua thought, "What can I do? Maybe let me

09:27 try. Let me find out." He called over the shochet, and he asked him a few questions, and he started asking many complicated... Until he found out the truth, that it's true. The shochet was not a good person, and he was causing Yidden to eat treif meat. He didn't do the shechita right according to Halakha, and, and many Yidden ate, Chas v'Shalom, treif. So of course, they fired the shochet. Uh, a few months later, again, the Pri Yeshua is teaching his talmidim, and in the middle, a man comes inside and taps him on the shoulder and says, "Rebbe, there's a mysterious man outside. He wants to speak to you right now." Pri Yeshua said, "Well, I'm in the middle of a shiur." So he goes outside, tells this mysterious man, and the man says, "No, tell him it's urgent. It's very urgent." Man comes in and says, "Okay, the, the, the, the man outside says it's very, very urgent." So Pri Yeshua went outside, and in the room where the Pri Yeshua was teaching his talmidim, one of the talmidim was the Mezritcher Maggid. Now, the Mezritcher Maggid, all his life, since childhood, had a very sick leg. One of his legs was not... Was very sick, and he would always limp. He had a, he had a, he had a problem on his leg. So he was always very sick on, on, on, on one of the legs. So when the Pri Yeshua went outside, he sees the same guy who came a few months

10:57 ago and told him that the shochet gives treif food to the whole community. A-and he realized then that this must be a, a big tzadik. How did he know? Ruach Hakodesh, right? Now he sees him again, and the man says to him, "Listen, I want you to tell your talmid, uh, the Rav Dov Ber," who was the Mezritcher Maggid later, "tell him that his leg cannot be cured. He will not have a healing on his leg unless he becomes my talmid." And that's when the Pri Yeshua realized this is the Ba'al Shem Tov. So this is a story they tell about him. Now, the story that I really wanted to tell you, which is related to the story with Yaakov Avinu making a neder when he davened that Hashem should save him, because he was in a real danger, in a real sakana, has to do with the Pri Yeshua. The Pri Yeshua himself tells the story in the beginning of his sefer on, on Masechet Kiddushin. The beginning of his sefer, in the introduction, tells an amazing story. He says, "I was-- when I was a young man, I was married and I had a five-year-old daughter. Uh, my wife was the daughter of a very rich man, big talmid chacham, but very rich, and he supported me, so I could sit and learn all my life. And I was living in Lviv." Lviv, sometime-sometimes it's called Lemberg. "I was living there because this is where his father-in-law lived." So he says, "I had

12:36 a little yeshiva. You know, I was learning all day, and I was teaching talmidim. I had a little, like a little yeshiva, and I would teach talmidim all day. I had a little house where we learned every day. One day, I'm learning with the talmidim, and suddenly I hear a terrible noise, a commotion outside, and I go outside. I see, ooh, there's this huge fire." Somehow, there was... In one of the houses next to the house where the Pnei Yeshua was learning, like two, three houses down, there was in a basement a few barrels of gunpowder. You guys know what gunpowder is? Now we don't have this. Used to have it in the olden days. People used to use it for guns. To shoot, they used to use with powder, and this is very flammable. That means if, if a tiny spark touches a barrel of gunpowder, it explodes. It, it goes flames raging. It's very dangerous. You gotta be very careful. Not allow even a tiny spark to come close to gunpowder. But what happened is somebody... Somehow it happened. The houses had gunpowder in the basement, and a spark somehow ended up in the gunpowder, and the whole thing exploded, and the house was suddenly full of fire. Everywhere there was fire, fire. In the olden days, most houses were made out of wood, so the fire started spreading to the next house and the next house and the next house. And so, like four or five houses got... were totally, uh, you

14:11 know, taken with fire. Fire was raging and burning in all the five, four or five houses, and thirty-six Jews died in that fire. And some of the homes, when the fire burned, the homes collapsed. They fell down." He says, "The house that I was in was also collapsed." Now he says like this: "My wife died in the fire and also my daughter. My wife's mother and her father, my wife's mother's father, also died in that fire." He says, "I was in another house where I was learning with talmidim, but talmidim all fled. But I got stuck in the house, and the house collapsed on top of me. The whole building... I was, like, on the floor, and, like, the entire house with all the beams and all the... everything, everything just fell down, and I was stuck under a huge pile of rubble of all kinds of building stuff, like bricks and, and whatever, beams and wood and everything was just... all fell on me, and I was pinned down to the ground, and I couldn't even... I could barely breathe. I couldn't say anything. I couldn't even scream because my, uh... I was, like, literally didn't have any air. And it was totally dark because the, uh, it was the entire building was lying on me, and I thought I was gonna die. And then I heard that they put out the fire, but I was stuck under the rubble, and people were trying to save lives. And they tried to save lives and,

15:55 and go through the rubble and maybe pull out people who are still stuck in the rubble. Um, but so then I said, 'Hashem, please save me. Take me out of here.' Even though it didn't look like it's gonna be possible, because normally, you know, if such a whole house falls on a person, you're, you're not gonna survive, you know? You're gonna s... You're gonna choke and then die." He says, "I said to Hashem, 'If you save my life and make me come out of this place, even though it doesn't seem possible, but if you make a nes, you get me out of this place, I promise that I will devote my whole life. I will learn Torah, Gemara, Rashi, Tosfos, Gemara, and Shulchan Aruch and Rambam. I will learn all the Gemaras and all the halachas. I will teach it to my talmidim, and I will write a sefer. Write a sefer that will explain difficult parts of the Gemara so people can have a better, easier understand the Gemara.'" And he, the Pnei Yeshua, had a grandfather who, who wrote a very famous sefer, Megillas Shlomo. And the Pnei Yeshua and his grandfather, they were descendants of Rashi. And you know, in the Gemara, many times Tosfos asks some very difficult questions against Rashi's pshat. Rashi said so and so, and Tosfos said, "No, how can it be?" He says... Asked some very difficult questions, and then Tosfos disagrees with Rashi. This, uh, the grandfather of Pnei Yeshua wrote a Sefer Megillas Shlomo, and

17:29 he answered all the questions of Tosfos against Rashi, 'cause Rashi was his ancestor, his great-great-great-grandfather. So he said, "I will also write a sefer like this." The Pnei Yeshua said when he's under the rubble, while he was lying under the rubble and could barely breathe, "Uh, I couldn't..." He didn't... He thought he's gonna choke and die. And the pressure of the, of the entire building was so hard. It was pressing against his body and his bones. He felt he's not gonna be able to survive this too much longer. And he made a neder, "Hashem, if you get me out of here, I will write a sefer, and I will, you know, make it... explain a lot of difficult Gemaras so people can learn and understand it better." And as soon as he finished saying this, he says, "I looked up, and I see there's, like, a, like, a crack in the rubble that's like a, like a, like an opening to an all the way up to the top of the rubble, right? The top of the mountain of all the pieces of, of the house that fell down. I see, like, there's a clear opening. I can see the sky." He said, "This is unbelievable. I didn't see this before. And I decided I can start slipping out. I started sliding out through that opening till I got to the top, and I came out of the rubble. I looked at my body. There wasn't a single scratch on my body." I said, "How

18:55 is that possible? The entire building fell on me." It was ma mirsha nes. He says, "I realized then that Hashem had listened to my tefillah and to my neder. I made a promise, and that's why I decided to learn and learn and learn and then write a sefer with all the things that came to my head to explain the Gemara, and that's why we have a Sefer Pnei Yeshua." And for hundreds of years, all over the world, Jews who learn in yeshivas learn the Sefer Pnei Yeshua. Every Yeshivat Bachur who learned in yeshiva knows the Sefer Pnei Yeshua. It's one of the most important sefarim that every Yeshivat Bachur will learn. And it all happened because of this nes that happened to the Pnei Yeshua.