229. Reb Leib Sara’s Beats The Austrian Emperor Black and Blue

00:16 Shalom Aleichem, kindlech. I wanna share with you a gevaldig story with the great tzadik, Reb Leib Soros. Reb Leib Soros. His, uh, mother's name was Soros, so they called him Leib Soros. Leib, the son of Soros. Reb Leib Soros was a great tzadik. He was a talmid of the Maggid. He was also early on a chassid of the Baal Shem Tov. He met the Baal Shem Tov a few times. He was mainly a talmid of the Maggid. He wasn't like other tzadikim, the talmidim of the Maggid, who had many chassidim, they were big rabbonim, rebbes, and everybody knew about them. He was, like, more secretive. He would just travel constantly from town to town, from village to village. He, he was never in one place. He would always go help Jews that he saw needed help and, and then he would help a Jew who was doing aveiras and he wanted to make him do teshuva. He would constantly travel to help, help neshamas, Jewish people that needed help either physically, b'gashmiyus, or they needed help bruchaniyus, and that was his whole life. He was a big tzadik and a big baal ruach hakodesh and, uh, a very-- a miracle, a miraculous person. Mamish a, a person who was doing nissim, unbelievable nissim. This Reb Leib Soros, why was he called Leib Soros? Because there's a story behind it. Why use his mother's name? Why did they attach his mother's name to him? Story's like this. In a small village somewhere in Ukraine, there lived

02:08 a couple, and they had a couple of children. Their oldest child was a daughter. Her name was Sorah. Sorah was very good-looking, and the local paritz was very rich and owned a lot of villages and owned a lot of farms and owned a lot of animals and gold and silver. He was very rich. His son once saw Sorah and he wanted to marry her. He came to his father and said, "Daddy, I want you to tell these Jews that they need to let their daughter marry me, 'cause I really wanna marry her." So the father listened. He went and sent a few of his guards and invited the couple, the parents of Sorah, to come to his palace, to his mansion. When they came to the mansion, he sat them down. He invited them in the living room. He says, "Listen, I have a wonderful son. I know he's not Jewish, but he's a wonderful son, and he really likes your daughter. He wants to marry her, and I think you should let her marry him." So they said, "Yeah, but we're, we're, we're Jewish. We, we can't marry outside our religion. Uh, you know, we-- Jews only marry Jews." And he said, "Listen, listen, listen. Your daughter is living-- You guys are poor, and when she marries my son, she'll be very rich, 'cause we'll have a lot of money, and she'll be able to get whatever she wants. She'll be very happy." So they said, "Yeah, but I don't know if our daughter's

03:40 gonna wanna marry him because, uh, we're Jewish. We only marry Jewish people." So the paritz said, "Listen, if you don't listen to me, I will take you and put you in the dungeon, and you'll never come out of there alive. And then we're gonna force your daughter to marry my son. You better go and talk to your daughter and tell her that it's good and that you approve and you let her get married to our son." The couple left the mansion very heartbroken. They realized this is a terrible situation. They knew that it's impossible for their daughter to marry this goy, this shaygetz, and she didn't know what to do. They knew they were in trouble. They came home, and they finally told their daughter the truth of what's going on. And the daughter said, "Listen, Tatty and Mommy, I'm gonna do something that's gonna solve the problem." So they asked her, "What are you gonna do?" So Sorah said, "There's an elderly man who lives with us a few months out of the year to teach the little brothers Torah." In those days in the villages, they didn't have a cheder. So how did they teach the kids Aleph Beis and Chumash? They used to hire a melamed from the big city, a teacher, and they would bring him into the house. He would live with the family for, like, a few months, and then he would go home back to his family in the big city. But he would live with them many

05:14 months of the year and teach every day the children, and they would pay him, pay him for his job. He's an elderly man. He's, like, in his sixties. Didn't have a wife because his wife had died. His children were grown up. "You know what? I'll marry him because there's no other Jew in the town I can marry." There was nobody her age, and the only man that was not married was this elderly guy in his sixties. She said, "Listen, I'm gonna marry him quickly. We're gonna get married very fast, and the paritz will see I'm already married, so they will say, 'Okay, too late,' and they won't bother you anymore." And that's what she did. They called a rav, and the rav did the chuppah. And this young Sorah married a man who was probably old enough to be her father, but she married him anyways. Turns out that this elderly man was a tzadik nistar, a hidden tzadik, which nobody knew. After he married her, he said, "Listen, I know what you did is an amazing kiddush Hashem. You sacrificed everything. You could have married any bachur in yeshiva, but you realized that the goy, the, the Paritz is gonna force you to marry his son. So you did something amazing. You married an older man only so that you wouldn't have to make a chilul Hashem and marry a goy." He said, "Let me tell you that we will have a son. I may not live long enough to see him grow up,

06:54 but you will raise him. He will be a very big neshamah, a holy neshamah, because from such a wedding that was done only for Hashem. It wasn't done for other reasons. Only the Shamshom Ayim, for Hashem's sake, so that you wouldn't have to do the avera. So Hashem for sure is gonna send a very holy neshamah through this marriage, through us, and you'll see that he will be a very big tzadik." And that's how Reb Leib Soros was born. And that's why they called him Leib Soros because his mother, Sorah, because of what she did, Mesirus Nefesh, she had in order not to be doing, chas v'shalom, this big avera of marrying a goy. So she was zoche, she had this zechus to have such a holy tzadik as a son. So they always called him Reb Leib Soros because it was because of his mother, Sorah, that he was born. Reb Leib Soros, I'm just gonna say one more thing about Reb Leib Soros. Reb Leib Soros would go around often helping Jews who had problems with the local Paritz or with the... And sometimes he would do things in such a miraculous way, such a nes. He would make Nissim. One time, the, the king of Austria-- In those days it was the Austrian Hungarian Empire. It was the-- It, it spanned over a big part of Europe, including Poland and, uh, Ukraine, or maybe not part of Ukraine. And the king, who was the big emperor of this big empire, which included

08:44 many of the Jewish communities, um, made a special gezira, a bad decree against the Jews, that they need to, um... They had-- Jewish children have to go not to cheder anymore, no longer to cheder. They have to go to a school. They'll make special schools where Jewish children will learn not so much Torah. They'll learn like science and math and other things, and history, history of the kings, and they should learn less Torah. They should learn more about goyishe things. Of course, it was a terrible thing. And Reb Leib Soros realized that he needs to do something to save the Jewish people. So in the year Tet Kov Mem Alef, there was the, the, the Emperor Joseph II. Jos-Joseph II was the name of the, the emperor. He decided to open these schools and force Jewish children not to learn Torah, but to learn other things. So he did what he did many times. He traveled to Vienna, Wien. Vienna. Vienna is the capital of Austria. That's where the king lived. And he managed to get into the courtyard of the king's palace, and none of the guards noticed him. He had a special ability that he could make himself invisible. Just like Eliyahu Hanavi can come to a bris, can come Pesach night by the Seder, but we don't see him. He sees us, but we don't see him. He had a special power, 'cause he was a big tzadik, he was able to do this, that he would not be visible. And he

10:47 went like this into the palace, and nobody noticed him. Nobody saw him. Till he get deeper, get into the first room, second room. There were many chambers, many rooms to go into the palace, till you get to the deepest room inside the palace where the king was sitting. He was-- And there were guards all over, watching that nobody should get through. But nobody saw him, so he would just go through open doors and go in. Nobody would notice him. Till he got to the room of the king himself, the emperor himself. The emperor actually did see him. He's the only one that saw an elderly Jew with a long white beard. And all the guards and the soldiers that were around the king didn't see anything. So suddenly the king sees a Yid who is, uh, in his room right next to him, and he starts screaming to, to all the ministers and all the guards, "Who let this poor old man come into my, my, my room? How did he get here?" So the ministers looked at the king and they said, "We don't know what he wants. Nobody sees anybody. What is he talking about? Who is here? There's no old poor man with a long beard in this room. There's no- nobody, just us." The, the king- The emperor and all the, the ministers and some soldiers, guards, but there's no other person here. So the king's son pointing with his finger, "Look, he's here." He pointed on Reb Leib Soros, but

12:28 nobody saw it. They, they thought that the... So the guards and the ministers are thinking maybe the k- king became crazy. He sees things in his head. Maybe he's getting sick, he's getting crazy. Suddenly the king starts screaming, "Oi, this old man is beating me up. He's beating me up. Go grab him, take him and put him in prison." But nobody saw anybody, so all the, the ministers were, like, shocked, didn't know what to do. The king must be going crazy. Something is wrong. And the king understood that this must be some holy person, came there to threaten him that he should take away the gezirah against the schools for Jewish children, to let Jewish children go to cheder and learn Torah the way they always used to do. It seems that the king realized that he has no choice and that he's helpless. There's nothing he can do. And so he, the king took away the decree. But there were many other geziras that happened during that time. It was the end of the life of Reb Leib Soros towards his later years, and he realized that these are very much the suffering of the Jewish people that will happen before Mashiach comes. So he decided that Hashem should-- He took upon himself to suffer physically in his body, yissurim from illnesses, so that would be bring a kaparah for all the Jewish people. And, uh, with him, he had two great tzadikim that were his friends, Reb Moshe Leib of Sasov, also a

14:16 number of years before he passed away, had terrible suffering in his body, painful, painful diseases and illnesses and sicknesses that made, made, made it very painful for him. The same thing, Reb Zusha of Hanipoli, also was a friend of Reb Leib Soros and decided to, to accept upon himself many sufferings, and he said this should be a f- a, a forgiveness for the Jewish people, so the Jews shouldn't have to suffer so much. Because they saw there were many geziras starting to happen in those years, and so they, these tzadikim, protected the Jewish people with their yissurim, with their suffering.