כשהניסיון לסייע לישראל מזיק

00:01 This is Igris. We are starting something of a new initiative today in response to, uh, a discussion that we had last time outside of the regular Shiur recording. If you don't come in person, you don't get the side discussions. Where I mentioned that I'd been squeezing, um, the letters from exactly fifty years ago pretty hard, and they weren't giving me material every day. So we decided that we were going to expand our reach a little bit. And from now on, we are either going to do a letter from exactly fifty years or exactly forty years ago today. We are also looking at letters from Tav Shin Chaf Dalet. This has opened up so many new avenues of possibilities, and I thought that I was going to give you a Shiur today on how the Rebbe does not want girls to enlist in the military. And, uh, that's what I thought it was gonna be about because there is a letter from the Zayin Shvat of Tav Shin Chaf Dalet forty years ago. The letter is Ches Tav Shin Nun Vav, where the Rebbe tells girls not to enlist in the military in Eretz Yisrael, not to enlist in the IDF. However, it turns out that there's something in this letter that I'd rather go into that we have a lot of material on, and that doesn't mean we won't return to this. We might end up doing a Shiur later on the Rebbe's position on women in the military. Just about every letter we're looking

01:00 at today has, uh, could have one or two Shiurim on them. But we're gonna look at one line that runs through a lot of them, which is an expression that the Rebbe uses in a couple letters, where he says that somebody's trying to solve a problem, uh, and the, the way that they're solving the problem is so ineffective, is so ridiculous, is so counterproductive that it's the equivalent of pouring gasoline on a fire instead of pouring water on a fire. And I think we'll see. I, I went through Igris. I found, as far as I know, every single time the Rebbe uses this expression, and you'll find that he uses it in a very specific scenario to describe a very specific kind of mistake. So let's take a look at our first letter. Our first letter is Ches Tav Shin Nun Vav from exactly forty years ago, Zayin Shvat of Tav Shin Chaf Dalet. Not exactly, you know, give or take a day. He writes, "Shalom u'bracha. Draft. Draft. Thank you. That helps. There's no draft for girls, but she wants to enlist on her own. This is the equivalent of someone who wants to put out a fire by pouring gasoline on top of it. Because they say, "Look, it flows like water, so it's going to help." So a person says, "Here, I have a hose. It flows like water. It's gonna be fine." And they end up pouring it on a fire to put it out, only to discover that it makes

03:02 it worse. Her idea is a good idea. She wants to put out a fire. She wants to help Eretz Yisrael, but violating what the Rebbe sees as a Torah prohibition, which I think we're gonna give a Shiur on one time, uh, of women joining the military. He says this is something that just causes more trouble because you're doing an Averah, and somebody doing a sin does not help a situation. So she's hoping to put out a fire, but she's pouring gasoline on top of it instead. This is a theme we're gonna see across another five letters or so, where people usually, almost always, I think even maybe always, are writing to the Rebbe saying that they wanna help Eretz Yisrael in some way, but it's going to require them to do a certain Averah. And the Rebbe tells them, "Your desire to help Eretz Yisrael is admirable 'cause you wanna put out a fire, but you put out a fire with water, you don't put out a fire with gasoline. If your interest is in helping Eretz Yisrael, you don't do a sin to help the land." We're gonna see a couple examples of this, and we're also gonna see where the source is for the idea. The first letter I wanna show you though, before I show you the source, is another letter from the Rebbe about a similar thing. This is a super long letter that we, I think, are gonna do an entire Shiur on because it's an enormous issue for the

03:58 Rebbe. This is a, this is a landmark in the Rebbe's Torah. This letter is Gimel Tav Tav Lamed Daled. It's in the, uh, Yud Tes Tishri of Tav Shin Tes Zayin, and this is one of the many letters the Rebbe wrote about ships running on Shabbos around Eretz Yisrael. You might have heard of this. Um, the Rebbe-- Eretz Yisrael, uh, the Medinat Yisrael, the government decided that one of the ways that they were going to make money is by offering a mixture of pleasure cruises, and I believe also travel to and from Eretz Yisrael using ships that would run over Shabbos, even though they were run by Jewish crew and, uh, and Jewish people maintaining the ships. They claimed that the ship was entirely Shemes Shabbos, that the ship was able to run automatically, and that technology had gotten to the point where a Frum Yid could be on this ship on Shabbos and not have to worry about anything. And the Rebbe wrote many, many letters explaining that he is an expert on ship engineering. That's what the Rebbe actually knows how to do better than anybody. The Rebbe's training is in engineering, and then furthermore, he went to the Brooklyn shipyard and designed ships. He says, "I know ships, and I'm telling you this technology doesn't exist. You're having Jews work on Shabbos." So he wrote letter after letter about this. We will explore this at some point in the future with God's help. In the middle of one of these very long

04:58 letters, the Rebbe writes this. "Derech Agav," the Rebbe says, "By the way," Certainly you who, uh, this Rav who he's writing to, certainly you know. You probably know that we have received from Eretz Yisrael thousands and probably more than thousands of Mezuzahs and Tefillin from Eretz Yisrael. That they are photographed. Uh, and the idea is they probably weren't trying to fool anybody. The way that this still applies is that when you get a Mezuzah in the mail or from Amazon or from some other place, they frequently will send the Mezuzah case. If you're buying a Mezuzah case, they'll put a paper scroll inside, and Yidden who don't know any better just hang it on their wall without realizing they gotta take the paper out. If I recall correctly, a few years back, some Seferim went through a-- did like a spot check of Mezuzahs and found that a ridiculous majority of them were pieces of paper because people didn't know they had to put in a special scroll. So the Rebbe says, "Eretz Yisrael has been selling us these photographed Mezuzahs." The Rebbe says, "This is all going under the, uh, the code of Yishuv Eretz." People are saying that because we need to make money for Eretz Yisrael, we need to sell things that might mislead Yidden. Don't get into details when we're trying to raise money for the country. Don't bother me about the ethics of what we're doing. As long as we're trying to raise money for Eretz Yisrael, it's okay. The

06:09 Rebbe says- So he says that, uh, in response to these claims that in order to help Eretz Israel we need to do averas or allow averas or allow untoward things, I will respond what was apparently told to the Friediker Rebbe, possibly twice. The Rebbe says in the year tav reish pei zayin that somebody asked him, "When there's a fire, are you really gonna be specific about what kind of water we use to put out the fire, whether it's cloudy water or clear water? What, you need Poland Spring to put out a fire? Whatever water you can find works." And the Friediker Rebbe answered back, "Yeah, whatever water you can find works, but you're not gonna pour gasoline on it. If you pour kerosene on top of the fire, that's worse than doing nothing." So the Rebbe says that this also applies to people who want to, uh, use, I guess, sin of some kind, uh, in this case selling faulty mezuzahs and tefillin in order to raise money for Eretz Israel. You're not pouring unideal water or not clean water on top of a fire. You're pouring kerosene on a fire. You're making the situation in Eretz Israel worse. Uh, when looking for the source for this in the Friediker Rebbe, I found one of the examples. I had-- didn't find the second one. The Rebbe actually says in this letter he's not sure it was said twice, so maybe it wasn't. But in Igris Friediker Rebbe this does appear. This appears to be something

07:29 that the Rebbe Rashab said to the Friediker Rebbe. Uh, this was surrounding the Asifa in Leningrad that was supposed to take place. This is a historic moment also in Chabad. A lot of these letters that, that we're looking at right now are historic letters in and of themselves. There was supposed to be a big conference in Leningrad that was run by-- that was officially a way of getting all the rabbis in Russia together, but it was secretly a GPU effort to get all the rabbis to, uh, to buckle and to give into things that they wouldn't wanna give into and to force them and to get them in trouble if they didn't. And the Friediker Rebbe saw the writing on the wall, and basically nobody else did, and he railed against the Leningrad conference, really pushed back against it, and it is one of the reasons he got arrested. Uh, one of the proximate reasons. I mean, he probably also got arrested for funding ef-- funding and running every mikveh and cheder in the entire country, but one of the immediate reasons why they arrested him was 'cause he pushed back so hard about the Leningrad conference. And about the Leningrad conference, he made this exact statement. So we have this letter, and this is in Igris Friediker Rebbe. It's in Volume One. It is the letter that is-- I have my s- things in the way, so I can't see the bottom. The letter is in Volume One, and it is labeled-- It's just

08:28 on page six fifty-one. I don't know if they-- I think it's shin lamed vav, but I can't remember. Uh, it's shin lamed vav, I believe, in the first volume of Igris. And he says, uh, "My father, uh, responded the following." It's, it's, it's great if anybody comes. He doesn't have to be a firefighter. He doesn't have to be a professional. We'll be grateful for anybody who comes and puts out this fire, and if this non-professional brings water that is black or brings water that is, uh, that is dirty to put out this fire, we're not going to be upset. It's true we're not gonna be specific. When there's an emergency, we can't be main-- we can't be demanding that everything be exactly perfect in fixing the emergency. You don't need perfect water to fix a fire. Abal, but But somebody who wants to bring kerosene or gasoline to put out such a fire, I don't know what you call him exactly, but it certainly isn't a helper. It certainly isn't a firefighter. Skipping the parentheses, he says, "The Rabanim need to stand on the foundations that they stand on. They need to stand firm." That Hashem should give them strength, that the entire Jewish people should know whose lock they have fallen under, that they are under the, that they are under the Rabanim and they can trust the Rabanim. And these who want to, uh, fulfill their obligations for Torah and religion by giving good speeches shouldn't bother the rabbis. Ad kan lashon HaKadosh.

10:02 So this is the source in the Friediker Rebbe that the Rebbe is quoting when he says he's using this expression, and the Rebbe, as I told you, pretty much exclusively uses it for people who want to help Eretz Yisrael but do it in untoward ways. We have another example of this. This is a letter labeled dalet kuf lamed hei. It's from the year tav shin tes zayin. And here the Rebbe responds to somebody. Uh, let's see if we know who it is. Oh, Yelis, Rav Yelis from Philadelphia, uh, who wrote to the Rebbe that he'd been to a, he'd been to a farbrengen. He wrote up a summary of the sicha that he'd got, that he'd heard from the Rebbe, and the Rebbe issues some corrections to this sicha. He says, "Rebbe, I received, uh, your letter and the thing that you sent me." Uh, and he says i-- and he says, "I've received your ha'aras, uh, but abal" When I spoke, I was talking about money that was earned through hilul Shabbos, not money that comes from people who violate Shabbos, and I was speaking about loans that are made with ribbis and not money taken from people who make loans on ribbis." To give you the context, though, we're about to read it in a second. The sicha had said that we cannot be supporting Eretz Yisrael with money that came from untoward places. So if somebody had their store open on Shabbos, and then they made extra money that Shabbos, and then

11:05 they decided to use that extra money from having their store open on Shabbos to send money to Eretz Yisrael, the Rebbe said this doesn't help. This causes more damage than it, uh, more, more, more, more harm than good. Same thing if somebody makes a loan with ribbis, an illegal, an, an, a, an user loan with ribbis, that is they lend to a Jew, they don't have a heter iska, they loan with interest, and then they take that interest and use it to fund initiatives in Eretz Yisrael, the Rebbe says that's more harm than good. So Rav Yelis, when he was recording the sicha, clearly misunderstood a, a small piece of it. He thought the Rebbe was saying we should not be accepting money from people who violate Shabbos or people who aren't careful about ribbis. The Rebbe says, "I don't mean that. People who aren't frum can totally donate. I don't mean that. I mean that they can't use the money that they earned in ossur ways to fund Eretz Yisrael." The idea of what I was trying to say is that people think that, uh, mechallel Shabbos, somebody who violates Shabbos, thinks that the money that he earns on Shabbos will help him, and somebody who loans with interest thinks that the money that he is gaining through loaning with interest is gonna help him. Like somebody who thinks they're putting out a fire with water. But it is the opposite. As it says, some things that a master guards end up being bad

12:15 for him. Like somebody putting out a fire with gasoline. And my intent in the sikha was to talk to-- was to speak to those who think that they're helping Eretz Yisrael by sending Israel money that they earned in asur ways. Number one, So first of all, the Rebbe is not happy with the Israel bonds. Um, what year was this? This was the year-- this was sixty-seven. So this, yeah, this would-- this was nineteen-- yeah, this was nineteen sixty-seven. So there were a lot of war bonds being sold at the time. It was a thing that American Jews were doing in order to help Eretz Yisrael. And of course, bonds, uh, by, by, by their very nature are interest models. There were a million heterim that were written at the time to, uh, to allow Israel to charge, collect, to pay interest in order to fund its war effort. One of the big ones was that since it's a country, not a person, maybe you can make a heter. The Rebbe has many letters about how he's not happy with this at all. I told you, every single letter we're looking at today is an entire discussion around the Rebbe's heter. But the Rebbe was very unhappy with these bonds. He said that there was no such heter. The heterim didn't sound good to him, and they had to be made with a proper heter iska, and nobody wanted to make them with a proper heter iska to allow, uh, to allow the in-- to allow

13:25 a loan with interest in a halakhic way. So the Rebbe said, first of all, people who think that they're helping Israel by, uh, by buying these war bonds, they're, they're severely mistaken. You can't help Israel by violating halakha. You're just going to add gasoline to the fire. And second, and also these boats, the boats I told you about earlier, the ships that, uh, that they were saying, "We're raising money for Eretz Yisrael using these ships that were mechallel Shabbos." You're not gonna tell me that you're gonna be able to raise money from ships that are mechallel Shabbos to help Israel. That is adding fuel to a fire. It only makes things worse. So again, we're seeing this expression that this is like somebody trying to put out a fire with gasoline, specifically applied-- huh? Specifically applied to, uh, specifically applied to people who want to help Eretz Yisrael and are doing it in a way that the Rebbe, that the Rebbe writes are asur, a way that is asur. This is a long letter that we're not gonna read. We're just gonna read a paragraph of it. It's in Yiddish. It is, "Hey, tov, tov, tzadi, hei." It's from Tov Shin Yud Hei. And down here, the Rebbe uses that expression again and again in this context. He says, uh, "By everybody, it's already forgotten." Everybody's forgot that that Hashem says in his holy Torah, that when a person is mechallel Shabbos, is nitnar, it's not just that he cannot have anything positive come out

14:38 of it for Eretz Yisrael, but furthermore, uh, it will, uh, do what Chazal say in Shabbos on that Yerushalayim was destroyed only because people violated Shabbos. The Rebbe's saying here, uh, once again, that people think that they can help Eretz Yisrael by violating Shabbos, but that's impossible because one of the reasons-- first of all, one of the reasons Eretz Yisrael got destroyed in the first place by the destruction of the Beis Hamikdash was because of the violation of Shabbos. And furthermore, uh, if they want to help Eretz Yisrael with money that they earned from mechallel Shabbos, then they are going to, uh, be pouring kerosene on top-- pouring, pouring, uh, pouring what? Pouring kerosene or neft on top of a fire. There you go. It's like putting out a fire with kerosene or with, uh, or with gasoline. So he says here once again that if somebody wants to use the money that they earned through mechallel Shabbos to help Eretz Yisrael, they're only going to cause more harm than good. This is like pouring kerosene on top of fire. There is one example that I found. These, by the way, are all the examples that I could find. I don't think there are any other examples in Igres of the Rebbe using this expression. So it is revealing that every time the Rebbe uses this expression, the Friediker Rebbe uses it to, to push back against the Leningrad Conference, but the Rebbe used it exclusively to talk about people who want to help Eretz

15:46 Yisrael by doing something asur. Uh, first of all, by enlisting in the military as a woman. Second of all, by these ships traveling on Shabbos. Third of all, with these war bonds, and over here, through money that was earned through mechallel Shabbos. There is one example that I found in the Rebbe's Igres where it's not specifically about Eretz Yisrael, but even then he's writing to somebody in Eretz Yisrael and telling them, "Your mechallel Shabbos is going to harm Eretz Yisrael." So the Rebbe seems to use this constantly as an expression of mechallel Shabbos harming Eretz Yisrael. But this letter is a little bit different and also kind of special. It's also a very old letter. This letter is, uh, although it's printed in a later volume, it is in volume, uh, kuf alef. It's the Miluim. So in kuf alef, they put in the letters that they'd missed in the first couple volumes. It's from the year Tov Shin Beis, and the letter is labeled zain tov tov, and it's in the Friediker Rebbe's Igres. So, uh, what's very interesting about this is that it's almost certain that the Rebbe wrote it, uh, 'cause it's in the Rebbe's Igres as well. In the Friediker Rebbe's Igres, it just says the maskir wrote it and was told by the Friediker Rebbe to write it. So, uh, in the Friediker Rebbe's Igres, this letter is officially dictated by the Friediker Rebbe. In our volume of Igres, it's by the Rebbe. I guess I, I, I don't know

16:44 what that means. I don't know if it means that the Rebbe took the Friediker Rebbe's words and put it in his own words. I don't know if these are the Friediker Rebbe's words. I know that this is in-- It depends on what volume of Igres you're looking who said this, but the following is a letter that is at least in our Rebbe's Igres and attributed to our Rebbe, almost certainly attributable to our Rebbe, and that is zain tov tov. Here is the letter. I'm responding to your letter. You told me about one of your friends who is found in the-- who lives around Eretz Yisrael, and they travel, uh, they want to travel on Shabbos, or they're going to travel on Shabbos itself to a place where there are Yidden because they want to eat there, and they want to have on Shabbos at least kosher meat, and they want to mix and sp-- they want to spend some hours with, uh, They want to spend time with, uh, other Yidden. So it's a-- This actually is a classic question. You get this question nowadays all the time, is that somebody wants to go to a Chabad house on Shabbos, they want to eat kosher food, they want to socialize with other Jews, they want to have a Jewish experience, but they're going to have to travel on Shabbos. They'll have to be mechallel Shabbos in order to do it. The-- This woman, uh, this m-- Yeah, I can't tell. I don't know if it's

17:43 a woman or a man. This person writes to the Rebbe saying, uh, "What do you think about this?" And the Rebbe says, "Do you think this is a good idea for my friend so that they can eat kosher food and strengthen their connection to the Yidden and Yiddishkeit around them? Is that worth it?" And the Rebbe says, when it comes to this, generally say The Rebbe says that the Torah, the, the generally say about everything, and the truth is no matter what strain of Judaism you come from, the Rebbe says, this makes sense to everybody, that a person cannot be sitting and measuring different Torah mitzvahs. It says in the Mishnah that you have to be careful about a lenient mitzvah just like a very strict one. And, uh, even though we-- even though you're judging, even though we judge about mitzvahs that are kalah versus chamura, you can't make that judgment call on your own. So we have an i-- we have a general idea that we don't weigh mitzvahs and say that Shabbos isn't worth it if I'm going to instead eat kosher. And certainly, in this case, you understand that both things are pretty serious. Kosher food is very important, and Shabbos is very important. So if you're asking me, should they travel on Shabbos to avoid eating treif, you're asking about two very serious mitzvahs, and we normally don't weigh mitzvahs. The Rebbe says, First of all, let me tell you why treif food is such a problem. Forbidden foods are

19:02 First of all, there's a terrible punishment for people who eat treif. He says, "Although this isn't easy to understand, it can't always be grasped by the mind, they ruin a person. They break the heart. They, they, they stop up the heart and the mind of a person who eats them." And I'm gonna skip the rest of this paragraph because he talks about how negative treif food is, and we're running short on time. Also There's also great-- also incredible is the importance of Shabbos, and I don't need to, uh, expand upon, says the Rebbe, how important Shabbos is, and since the Rebbe says he doesn't have to expand upon it, I'm gonna skip that paragraph too. What is this similar to? What is this-- So you're, you're telling me that you have a choice between treif and, uh, and hilul Shabbos, and they're both really serious. So what is this similar to? It's like somebody who has a fire in their house, and somebody's life is in danger. So you gotta put out the fire. Their life's in danger. petroleums, that they throw, uh, they throw, uh, they throw petroleum on top of it instead of water. 'Cause what the person is saying is that, and, and, and I, I have, I have personally had this question asked to me on many, many occasions, is somebody saying, "Look, this is, this is spiritual life and death. This house is on fire. This person needs a relationship with their fellow Jews. They need kosher food. They need

20:13 to, uh, they need to be in shul on Shabbos. This means a lot to them. Don't you think it would make sense to macher them driving on Shabbos?" And the answer is, their house really is on fire, and they really are in danger. But you're gonna justify throwing-- You're gonna throw gasoline on top of it? The, the only thing that could possibly make someone's situation worse if they're already having trouble with kashrus and already having trouble with Yiddishkeit itself, the only way to make it worse is to have them traveling on Shabbos. You've just taken a situation that was negative and thrown kerosene on top of it. He says to this person, "Open the-- open your friend's eyes. Tell your friend about this. Really explain it to them." And, uh, you need to-- Because everybody's rely-- everybody is, uh, responsible for one another. The situation overseas for our brothers and sisters is horrible. This is, uh, during w-- this is during the Holocaust, right? 'Cause it's, uh, it's, it's, it's I think. This would be forty-two? No, fifty-two. F-- No, forty-two. Forty-two, yeah. This is, this is in the middle of the Holocaust. So the situation right now is very serious around the world. Says that, uh, it-- Hashem should say that things are enough, and it shouldn't allow this evil to spread even further. And the Rebbe is implying here, as he does throughout the rest of this letter, that a strengthening in Torah and mitzvahs can help our brothers and sisters overseas, and

21:29 God forbid the opposite would result in the opposite. So the, uh, the Rebbe's answer to this question, uh, if I'm struggling to connect to Yiddishkeit, if I'm struggling with kashrus, should I fix that by being mechalel Shabbos is, uh, only if you would fix a house fire that puts your life in danger by pouring kerosene on it. So we have here several examples of the Rebbe saying essentially the same thing, but in many different situations, that, uh-- And I think it's important particularly because these are each real tricky questions, 'cause in each of these questions, a person is saying that I wanna violate a Torah law. I know it's important, but I have really good intentions. I have a really good reason to do it. I might even have an where we would sometimes say I have a, I have a real serious situation where we need to help. Eretz Yisrael needs my money, or I need to eat kosher food, or I need to, uh, or I need to help in the military. And the Rebbe's saying in each of these cases that if something is asur, you're not helping. You think you're helping. Uh, it's not that we're trying to choose between Eretz Yisrael and Shabbos. It's not that we're choosing between this person's kashrus and Shabbos. It's that we're not going to make it better. There is no choice. There's no choice. There's no possibility of us choosing to violate Shabbos and making the situation better. So with that, that's the Rebbe's

22:32 approach to each of these questions, and I think over the next couple weeks, we might open up some of these letters and really dive into them. The Shabbos ship one, the war bonds one. These are all big inyanim for the Rebbe. Agios, the, the, the enlistment of girls. There's a lot to talk about here, but that's it for now. Thanks, everybody.