195. How The Gaon Reb Meir Margolis Became A Talmid Of The Baal Shem Tov

00:16 Shalom Aleichem, kinderlach. I'm going to tell you a story of one of the great gaonim of his time. His name was Rabbi Meir Margolyes. Rabbi Meir Margolyes wrote a very famous Sefer, Meir N'tzivim. This is a Sefer on Halakha. He was a great gaon, and many, many Rabbanim would turn to him with shailas. At a very young age, Rabbi Meir and his brother became talmidim of the Baal Shem Tov. The Baal Shem Tov loved him and his brother so much that one day he said to him, "Tell me what I can do for you. I'd like to do something nice for you because I love you so much." And the Baal Shem Tov said, "I'm gonna write you in my siddur, your name and your mother's name, and I will daven for you every day. I'll have your name in front of me in the siddur. Tell me which bracha in Shemoneh Esreh do you want me to write your name?" And Rabbi Meir and his brother said they want Bashma Koleinu, the bracha of Shema Koleinu. They want the Baal Shem Tov to have their name written down in his own personal siddur right next to the bracha of Shema Koleinu. And now that siddur of the Baal Shem Tov is in the altar-- is in the Rebbe's library on Seven Seventh Eastern Parkway. It's by the Rebbe's library, and, mm, if you open up the siddur, you'll see Meir and his brother both are mentioned in that siddur on the side with the

01:43 Baal Shem Tov with his own, uh, holy handwriting, wrote down their names. This Rabbi Meir Margolyes, when he was a very young child, was brilliant. When he was five years old, only five years old, he already started learning Gemara. And in... The father of Rabbi Meir was the Rav of the city. And, uh, in those days, it was the custom that when a child starts learning Gemara, that Shabbos of the week when he started learning Gemara, the, the family would make a kiddush in shul, and the child would say a dvar Torah, would say a speech. Now, normally, boys start learning Gemara at seven, eight, or nine, depending on what, what, what place you come from. But five is very unusual. Five is usually when a child begins to learn Chumash. But this Meir was so, so smart that when he was five, he already knew Chumash, he knew everything. He started learning Gemara. He already learned Mishnah. Now he started learning Gemara. No, that Shabbos, his father, who was the Rav of the city, made a kiddush in honor of his son starting to learn Gemara. So they took the little Meir'l, who's very-- He was only five. He was very short. They put him on the table, and they said, "Okay, now you give a speech. Give a drasha." He di- No, nobody prepared the speech for him. He made his own speech. First of all, they told him, "Tell us which Gemara you learned this week." And he learned that week the

03:16 Gemara in Eilu Metzios in Bava Metzia, which many children start learning for the first time when they learn Gemara. You start from Eilu Metzios. And what did he learn there? That if y- if you find a lost object, something was lost from someone, right? There's a mitzvah, shomer haveidah. You have to return it. You have to try to find the owner, and he has to give you signs that it's his ob-- so you know that it's his, uh, piece of, uh, object, and then you give it back to him. Let's say you lose a coat or you lose a watch. So the finder has to go and see, advertise that he found the watch. He doesn't say exactly what the watch looks like because then everybody's gonna come running, "Oh, it's my, it's my watch." So you're not supposed to say all the specifics, what it looks like, but he says, "I have a watch. If anybody lost a watch, come and give me the simanim, the signs," and then you give it back to him. It's a mitzvah in the Torah. You can't just leave it lying on the ground and say, "Okay, I'm gonna walk. I don't have time for this." No, if you see it in, in, in a Jewish neighborhood where Jews probably lost it, you're chayav, you, you have to. It's a mitzvah in the Torah of picking it up and making sure that you've tried to find who lost it and return it to the owner. Now, the Gemara

04:33 discusses what happens if somebody has two haveidahs. He sees one property, um, which he knows belongs to his father and one to his Rebbe. Which one should he return first? The, the, the lost thing, the lost, uh, um, the lost item which belongs to the father or the lost thing that belongs to the-- his Rebbe? And the Gemara says his Rebbe's haveidah comes first. Why? Your father is also important. You have to kibud av va'em. Why the reb-- Why giving kavod to your Rebbe is more important than giving kavod to your father? Because your Rebbe teaches you Torah, and he gives you the zechus to go to Olam Haba through the learning of Torah. Whereas your father, he's your father, he brings you into this world, right? He's your father. He, he, he-- Your father and your mother gave birth to you, right? So he brought you into the world, in the physical world. But the Rebbe is teaching you Torah, and he's bringing you to Olam Haba. So you have to give your fa-- your Rebbe's lost property first. So that was, uh, nice. That's all he had to say. The speech usually when a child started learning Gemara was that he would say what he learned that week in the Gemara. But then Meir'l surprised everybody. He surprised everybody with a very, very surprising question, which for a five-year-old boy was extremely surprising because it was brilliant. He said there was a Parashat Shemot, and the boy Meir asked a question. It says,

06:18 "told us Moshe veAharon", the Pasuk says, "These are the children of Moshe and Aharon", Parashat Shemot. These are the children of Moshe and Aharon, and it goes on by talking about the children of Aharon. and Elazar his son. Why does it start... When it, it says, "These are the children of Moshe and Aharon", and it only mentions the children of Aharon. It doesn't mention Moshe's children. So why are we calling Moshe's children the, the children of Aharon? These are the children of Moshe and Aharon, and which children are they? Who are these children? and Elazar and his son, but these were children only of Aharon, not of Moshe, yet the Torah calls them also the children of Moshe. They're the children of both Moshe and Aharon, says Rashi. This comes from the Gemara. This teaches us that if you teach Torah to somebody else's child, it's as if this is your child. As if you gave birth to him because you taught him Torah, right? You can be a child of someone physically, you can be a child of somebody spiritually. So says Rashi, that's why it says that were the children not only of Aharon, they were the children of Moshe because Moshe is the one who teach, taught them Torah. He was teaching them Torah. So the k- That's why the Pasuk calls them Moshe's children as well. The Pasuk considers it as if... Asked little Meir a question, "Why do we have to say that Moshe taught Torah to the children

07:59 of Aharon? That's why he was like a father to them. He was like a tati to them because he taught them Torah. He's more than that. He's bringing them to Olam Haba. Didn't we just say from the Gemara that if you find a lost, uh, thing from a father, a lost thing from a Rebbe, you have to give the Rebbes first because he's greater than your father, 'cause he's bringing you to Olam Haba. So why are we saying Moshe is a Rabbeinu, he's so great? He taught them Torah. He's like their father. He's more than their father. He's like a Rebbe. A Rebbe is more than a father. He brings you to Olam Haba." Everybody was shocked to hear this, such a question from a little five-year-old boy. And then he gave an answer. I'll give you the answer. The word the Pasuk considered as if he gave birth. going up. He's greater, and he, he gave a very, very interesting and brilliant answer to his own question, and everybody was, like, shocked. Whoa. Nobody expected a five-year-old to speak with such brilliant and smart, uh, Divrei Torah. Then the mother was in another room, and she sees through the window there was a man who looked like, like a peasant. Didn't look like a learned Jew at all. He was like very simple, ignorant peasant that lives on a farm, 'cause he wore like a fur coat that l-- which only peasants used to wear. He was wear-wearing a fur coat, and he's staring

09:41 through the win-- The window was open, and he's staring through the window on her son, Meir. Everybody in the shul was so surprised and stunned and shocked by how smart Meir is. Wow, and everyone was so quiet and thinking what Meir just said, and this man is standing outside the shul, and he's looking and staring at Meir. And the mother of Meir started getting very scared. Who is this man that's staring at him like this? Maybe he's gonna give an ayin hara to her little Meir'l. And she ran into the shul. She grabbed Meir off the table and took him away. And people were still waiting to hear maybe more Divrei Torah, more, more words from Meir because they were so amazed how much he's, he knows and he understands. They wanted to hear more, but the mother just grabbed him and ran outside. And the father, the Rav, yelled and said, "Well, why are you taking him away? We, we, we wanna have him here." She said, "No, no, no, no. There's somebody looking at him. I'm afraid." And she took him away. She took him to the other room. Now, this happened when Meir was five years old. The story was forgotten. Meir grew up. When he was still a teenager, like a bocher, he found out about the Baal Shem Tov, he and his brother, and they both traveled to Baal Shem Tov, and they became very close talmidim of his and great Hasidim of the Baal Shem Tov. Many years later,

11:18 the Baal Shem Tov suddenly once asked Meir... Meir was already a Rav in the city of Ostra. He was a big Rav, a gaon, and he came to visit the Baal Shem Tov, and Baal Shem Tov said to him, "Tell me, Meir, Meir'l, what happened to you when you were a little boy? You were five years old." And Meir is thinking, thinking, "Oh, yeah. When I was five years old, I started learning Gemara, and then my father made a kiddush in shul, and the minhag was, the custom was that I would... That the child would give a speech, and I gave a speech, a whole drashah on, on..." And Baal Shem Tov says to him, "What else happened?" He says, "Oh, I can't remember. Oh, I remember now. My mother suddenly came into the shul, and she grabbed me away. She didn't want me to stay in the shul." And she said to my father, "The reason she's taking me away because she's afraid of this man who looks like a peasant, and he's staring at Meir so intently, so strongly. I'm afraid. Maybe there's an ein horah in his looks." When Baal Shem Tov heard this, he smiled and said to Meir, "I want you to know that I was this peasant." Because this was the time when the Baal Shem Tov was not yet revealed. As you know, the Baal Shem Tov for a long time was living very secretly. Nobody would know that he's a big tzadik. People thought he was just

12:50 a peasant, an ignorant person who doesn't know how to learn, doesn't know how to do mitzvahs. He pretended to be like that. So he was dressed like with a fur coat, which only peasants wore, so people would think he's a simple person. And he says to him like this, "I was standing by the window and I heard your whole speech, and I looked at you because I wanted to, with my look..." You know, when a tzadik looks at someone, he's able to give him something like a spiritual thing. He can make him, lift him up, make him more holy, more, more, more li- give him love of Hashem. He feels the love of Hashem. Because when a tzadik looks at someone, he can actually change him. At that moment, the Baal Shem Tov says, "I was looking at you and trying to s- put inside of your heart a desire for Hasidus, so that that's why a few years later you wanted to look for me. You looked for me all over where you... And you found me, and you became my talmid." From here we learn that the look of a tzadik can make a huge difference. It can change a person. And, um, many years later, the Baal Shem Tov was once traveling in the city of Brod. Brod was famous for a lot of Misnagdim. There was a very big shul which had a lot of gaonim in that shul, and they were against the Baal Shem Tov. They were like Misnagdim.

14:24 So Baal Shem Tov was there for shvuos, for the yom tov shvuos, but because they respected the Baal Shem Tov, they didn't wanna embarrass him. So they invited him to come and give a, a, a pilpul. A pilpul means a very deep, uh, drash on a Gemara, you know, in nigla. You know, Gemara with lamdus. And the Baal Shem, they wanted, they wanted to see if Baal Shem Tov knows how to learn because they would say always, the Misnagdim said the Baal Shem Tov doesn't know how to learn, but it wasn't true. So Baal Shem Tov told them a very deep inyan in nigla, a very lamdish drash, and they were like mamash amazed. So they asked him, "You, you, you, you, you prepared this speech?" And he said to them, "No. The speech is actually not mine. This speech was given this morning on Yom Tov." The Baal Shem Tov was speaking on Yom Tov, and he said that that morning, far away in the city of Ostra, my talmid, Reb Meir, uh, Meir Margolis, which everybody knew his name because he was very famous, a big gaon. Reb Meir Margolis gave that, that pilpul, that drash in his city. So people, so people realized, wait a second, either he, if he's lying, it's not coming from Reb Meir, then he made it up. That means he's such a gaon because, because it's an amazing speech. But... Or he's saying the truth. The, it comes from Reb Meir, but then that means he has

15:59 ruach hakodesh. How would he know what Reb Meir, uh, drash and the drash of Reb Meir, which he gave earlier in the day, which was still Yom Tov, and it was Yom Tov now. So he couldn't have gotten a letter in the meantime because it was Yom Tov. So they decided that motzei Yom Tov they're going to send a letter to Ostra, to Reb Meir, and ask him what drash he gave on Fri- shvuos in the morning. And the letter came back, and he told them what he spoke about, and it was exactly what the Baal Shem Tov was saying. So then the Misnagdim saw that the Baal Shem Tov was a great man, and he, uh, saw ruach hakodesh, what's, what drash his talmid, and he could be able to repeat it word for word. So they say he was also a big gaon also.