235. The Baal Tshuva Doctor Who Became Talmid Of The Magid

00:15 Shalom Aleichem, kinderlach. One of the Talmidi Hamagid, the Mizrachi Magid. You all heard of the Mizrachi Magid? Was the Talmid of the Baal Shem Tov and the Rebbe of the Alter Rebbe and Rebbe Yehoshua Heshel of Berditchev and the Rebbe Lemelach. He's the Rebbe of all the Rebbes. One of his Talmidim was actually a doctor. They called him Dr. Gardia. Dr. Gardia. Now, what is the story with him? How did he become a Talmid of the Baal-- of the Rebbe-- the Mizrachi Magid? And was he always a, a Talmid Chaham, a learned person? Uh, he became not only a Talmid of the Magid, he became like a tzadik, a very big tzadik who did, um, moifs and miracles. Ruach Hakodesh. He became like a big tzadik. So he actually is-- came from a-- from family, like a religious family. And then when he was young, he was still very young, he started studying medicine. Went to university, studied in university, and he became very successful. His, uh, his knowledge of medicine became very famous. So much so, he lived in Prussia. Prussia, which is, uh, Austria, and in those days there were a few other countries that, uh, were part of the Prussian, uh, kingdom, the Prussian Empire. So this, um... His name was Rebbe Aharon. Rebbe Aharon. He became doctor, Dr. Gardia. He became very famous until he became the personal physician of the royal family in Prussia. Later on, he moved to Poland, to Russia. He became there also the doctor of the,

02:04 the royal-- of the royal family. And, uh, bec-- they honored him. He became very famous and very rich, made a lot of money. And he left Yiddishkeit. You know, when you become so famous and so good, you mix with amongst the Goyim, um, he stopped, uh, observing Torah and mitzvahs. Um, one day he had a beautiful fancy coach with beautiful horses. He was very s-- He was very rich, so he could afford some nice stuff. He had a beautiful coach, and he took a ride on his, on his, on his wagon on Yom Kippur. It was on Yom Kippur. And suddenly out of nowhere, as he's sitting in the wagon driving on Yom Kippur, he remembers that it's Yom Kippur today, and suddenly he also remembered the melodies you sing on Yom Kippur, right? In the davening. There's a special nusach, a special, uh, uh, nigun that, uh, the chazan sings, which is you can hear this is a Yom Kippur tune. And also maybe the nigunim we sing for Yom Kippur, like Darkei chu eloheinu, which is the nigun for Yom-- We read it on the night of Yom Kippur. And then there is Ki yomu amechu. So this is also we read it on Yom Kippur. So he started remembering all those tunes and the melodies and the nigunim, and it made him feel like very bad. "Oi, look at me. I'm not keeping Shabbes. I'm eating treif. I'm doing all kind of averas. And today is Yom Kippur, and I'm riding in

03:45 my wagon." And all these nigunim kept coming into his, into his mind, and it made him feel very bad about where he is, what he's doing with his life. And somehow he was so moved by these thoughts, by these memories of the nigunim, that he decided that he has to change his life. He has to start doing teshuva. After Yom Kippur, he decided... He heard once with the Magid. He even heard a story of the Magid, where the Magid did a moifas, a miracle about someone who was very sick, and he knew about it. And he, he heard about this incredibleness that was performed by the Magid. So he decided, "You know what? To be a real baal teshuva, I gotta go to the Magid. He'll help me become a real baal teshuva." And so he traveled to the Magid. The Magid was very nice to him and welcomed him. Gave him a way how to do teshuva. And he stayed by the Magid in Mizrich, and he learned from the Magid for years and years, and became, like, very learned. He started learning a lot and davening, and he became like a tzadik. And, um, Magid also used him as his personal doctor. Um, Rebbe Aharon or Dr. Gardia, as they knew him, was, uh, the end of the life of the Mizrachi Magid, he was the doctor who took care of him. Now, he used to always say to people, "I, uh, I'm not healing. Uh, doctors, doctors can't really heal. It's all

05:21 Hashem doing. We're just doing, you know, a few things. Hashem wants us to do something on a natural level, but really it's Hashem that's bring, bringing the cure. Hashem makes the person well, and he heals the person. I'm not doing really much." So people would tell him, "No, yeah, but the Torah says that a doctor has the right to heal, so to be a doctor is an important thing." He said, "Nah, I'm not important. It's all Hashem doing. I'm not doing it. It's Hashem doing it." Once there was an, an incredible story. Uh, there was a woman in town who called the doctor, Gardia, to come, uh, to see her husband. Because he's very sick. Uh, Reb Aaron, even though he sat and learned most of the days, but, uh, he used to go-- When people needed his help, he would go as a doctor and, and help people and prescribe medicine. And for poor families, he would never take money. He would go for free. This was a very poor family. There were ten children in the family, and the father is very, very sick. So when he came into the house, the woman, the wife was crying bitterly. She says, "Doctor, Doctor Gardia, can you please save my husband? He doesn't look good. Looks like he's gonna die. I'm afraid, I'm afraid." So doctor says, "Okay, let me examine him." You know, he did everything a doctor does. He examines him. And he said, "I noticed," he says to him- himself, he didn't

06:52 say it to the woman, "that he's indeed very, very sick. He's so sick that I don't think anybody can help him. No medicine is gonna save him anymore. He-- And he's not gonna live for more than another day." Doctor Gardia said to himself, "It seems that he has maybe one day to live, and that's it." But he didn't wanna say to the woman, the woman was crying so hard. Why, why would he break her heart and tell her, "Hey, your husband's gonna die tomorrow"? So he, he didn't say anything, but he said to her, "You know what? Uh, here, I'm gonna give you a prescription." You know, what does doctor-- How do doctors write a prescription? They take a piece of paper, and they write down the name of a medicine, and then they write down how many times you should give it to the sick person, every day, for so-- every three hours or something. So Dr. Gardia, because he didn't wanna give it-- make her feel bad and tell her the truth, so he pretended like he's writing there's hope. So he's gonna give her medicine that maybe will help him, even though in his heart he knew it's, it's nonsense. The, the-- there's no medicine that's gonna help him. He's gonna die tomorrow. But she, she wanted to make her feel a little better for now and think that maybe there's hope. So he wrote this prescription. He said to her, "Listen, this medicine on this piece of paper, um, you should

08:11 give him every three hours with a big spoon." Okay, she took it, and he left the house. He was very broken inside because he knew the truth, that the husband, father of ten children, has no chance of living more than a day. And, and, and at night, when he went home, the doctor went home, he literally couldn't sleep all night because he knew that this man, he can't help him. He's gonna die. And then what's gonna happen after he dies? There are gonna be ten children without a father. And what's the woman gonna do, the mother? She also can't work. She doesn't work. So her husband is, is bringing in all the money, and now he's gonna die. She's gonna be without any income. And he's thinking, "How can I help them after he dies?" Okay. He, he hardly slept that night. He gets up in the morning. He says, "Let me go quickly and pay a visit in that house." And he thought that who knows, maybe he's already dead. So he goes to the house. He thought he would hear, like, crying and wailing, the kids crying, their father is dead, the father died. But he goes, no, he doesn't hear any crying. Then he opens the door, and he's very hesitating. What is he gonna see? Terrible sight, a terrible scene. A terrible scene where, where the, the father just died, and the children are sitting there crying. He opens the door, and no. The w- the wife is smiling, and she's

09:35 b- coming over to the doctor and says, "You know, thank you, thank you. You gave the right medicine." He asked her, "What did you do? Where did you get this medicine?" Maybe this medicine doesn't even exist because he just made up something so-- to g- to give her some hope. She said, "What do you mean? I took the piece of paper you gave me, and I understood that this is the medicine. So I put it in a boi-- pot of water, and I boiled the paper in a pot of water. And then I took from the water, and I gave it to my husband every three hours, uh, like you said." You told me this is a medicine. She misunderstood. She thought that he's telling her this piece of paper is medicine. But really, what doctors do, they write on a piece of paper what medicine to buy in the pharmacy. But she didn't understand. She just took it literally. This piece of paper with the recipe on it, that's the medicine, and she has to cook it. So she cooked it for a long time, and then she started giving from the water that she cooked, uh, the, the piece of paper, and gave him every three hours. And she-- and her husband, she says he's getting better and better. And after a day or two, he was totally well. So Doctor, um, Reb Aaron, he said, "Ah, this, this is so clear that Hashem is doing it because I, I didn't-- I-- She

10:58 didn't even take my med- medicine. She just used my piece of paper." When a person trusts in Hashem, then Hashem helps him. Um, once he came to the Maggid and said, "The Maggid, uh, Rebbe, I, I have done Tshuva, and I stopped going back to my ways. I was very famous. I was a famous doctor. The-- All the kings wanted me to be their famous, their, their family doctor, and I made a lot of money and everything, but I was doing a lot of Averis. But that's a long time ago. But even though now I'm a, I'm a Fruhmer Yid, I learn, and I daven, and I do all mitzvahs, and I serve Hashem with all my heart and soul. But at, at time to time, the thoughts coming into my head that, uh, from, from those days when I was doing Averis, like, I have, like, these evil thoughts that come into my mind about what hap-- what I did in the past. And the Yetzer Hara comes and wants me to think about it, and then maybe I should go back to it." So he asked the Maggid, "What do I do? How do I get rid of these bad thoughts?" So the Maggid told him, "I'll tell you a Mashal." There was once a Jew who lived in a village. And to a lot of Goyim, he was maybe one of the only Jews in the whole village. Maybe he was the only Jew in the village. He had... What did he

12:23 make a living from? He had, in his house, he had a little room where he had, um, a bar, where the Goyim would come and drink. He would sell them mashke and they would drink. And he, you know, as you know, these Russian Goyim, they love drinking every day. They worked a whole day till they were very tired, and in the evening when they finished the day of work, they would come and drink, and they would get drunk in the bar, and they'd throw bottles at each other. You know, but this is the way they are. And the Jew made a good living from, from the bar. He sold a lot of mashke. These Goyim liked to drink a lot of mashke, so he made a lot of money. One day he decided, "That's it. This is not a parnasa for me. This is not a, a, a, a business for income for me, where the Goyim get drunk and they, they get violent and drunk. No, I'm stopping. You know what? I'm gonna start doing a new business, a different business. I'm gonna have a grocery store where people buy food." Um, okay. One day he closed down the... He got rid of all the, the, the bar machines the where, where you make, where you can make mashke and everything, and no more mashke, no more... This is a grocery store, and he filled his store full with food and, and so on. The next morning, or the next evening, when the Goyim

13:41 came from work, they wanted to drink again. So they think, they don't know that he changed, uh, his store, that he's no longer selling mashke. So they clapped on his door, on, on the window, and they kept clapping, clapping. You know, "Jid, Jew, open up. We need to, we need to drink." And he tells them from across the, the door, from the other side of the door, he doesn't open the door. He says, "No, no, no, no. I'm, I, I'm, I, I'm no longer a bartender. I'm no longer a person selling mashke. I now am a grocer. I am selling food." And then Reb Zusha of Anipoli said, "This is a mashal." We were once maybe doing some averos here, some averos there, and sometimes when you do an avera once, even once or twice or three times, especially if you do it three times, it leaves an impression on you. And that means that even if you turn away from it and you daven, you learn, you don't do averos, but deep inside you, there might be a little bit of an effect, something left of the avera, a little bit left of the avera, and it's that tumah that's left from this avera inside, deep inside your neshama, that wakes up, may-- can be sometimes years later, and makes, and, and brings up thoughts, evil thoughts about averos, and the yetzer hara starts, you know, driving you crazy to do the avera again. He says, "But the, the yetzer hara is nothing but

15:13 like someone knocking on your door." It's like the Goyim knocking on the Jew's door, "Hey, give us the mashke. Give us the ma-- Let us get drunk." So what are you supposed to say? "I'm, I'm not the bartender. You know who I am? I'm a grocer." Says to Reb Aaron, uh, he said, Dr. Gar- Dr. Gardia says, "Reb Aaron, when the yetzer hara knocks on your door and says, 'No, no, no, where are the averos you used to do? Come on, where are they?' You say, 'Oh, I'm not, I'm, I'm no longer that person. I'm a different person now. I no longer, uh, uh, do averos. I, I'm in a different world. I do different things now.'" In other words, you have to see the yetzer hara as an outsider trying to knock on your door and to, and ask you to let him in. Don't let him in. Say, "You're in the wrong address. I'm not the person that you think I am. I was that person, but I'm no longer that person, so you've no right to come into this house. This is not for you."