Page 236 - 20780

236 | A New Light
ben Durdiya is welcomed to the life of the world-to-
come….”
…Rabbi [Yehudah Hanasi) wept and said: “There is a
person who acquires his world in a few years, and there
is a person who acquires his world in a single hour.”
And Rabbi [Yehudah Hanasi also] said: “Not only are
penitents accepted by heaven, but heaven calls them
‘rabbi.’”
We see from here that a person can rise in a single hour of strong
prayer from the lowest level of Sheol to the level of being a rabbi
ordained by heaven.
From One Extreme to the Other
This idea is taught in the Hasidic work, Yismach Yisrael (Shabbat
Hagadol):
Out of Hashem’s great compassion—which is high and
elevated, beyond the conception of any created being—
when a baal teshuvah [a person doing teshuvah] cries out
from the midst and depth of his heart, seeing that his sins
have grown frequent and that he is in the realm of
troops of wild beasts and bandits, “plagues of human
beings” who drag him like sheep to the slaughter with the
ropes of a meaningless life (may the Compassionate One
protect us) to follow them, and he has no refuge and
place to escape, then he cries out, “Please, Hashem,
save me, please!” That is to say, “With the power and
might of Your infinite and unlimited holiness, have
compassion on me, elevate me to the heights, where
those entities have no permission to enter. May those
insolent dogs may not rise and not enter. Then, when
you save me from them and I can rest a little, I will
Chapter Six: | 245 8
trained troops with horses and chariots. The children of Israel had
the terrifying feeling that they were hanging over an abyss. The
midrash gives the image of a dove in the cleft of a rock. Inside is
a snake and outside is an eagle, and the dove cannot do anything
but cry out with all its might. The midrash tells that the children of
Israel “made use of the skill of their forefathers” and cried out
to Hashem with all their might.
Rabbi Yerucham Leibovitz (Divrei Torah: Shemot) comments on this
midrash. What is the meaning of “the skill of their forefathers”? He
explains that every time the holy forefathers prayed for spiritual
salvation, they felt exactly like the children of Israel who were
trapped between the Egyptians and the sea, and who had no staff
and support but prayer and outcry to Hashem. The forefathers felt
that if they are not saved spiritually this very moment, they will
literally experience death. They felt as though they were standing
between the sea and Egypt. That means that they experienced a
sense of tremendous danger here and now, a sense that that they
had not a moment to lose, and so they pleaded for spiritual salvation
at this very moment, here and now. As a result, their prayers were
always effective. Thus, they attained what they attained and became
the fathers of the world. We see here how they laid the foundation
of the people of Israel, who are called “believers, the children of
believers,” because they inherited the skill to always feel themselves
between the Egyptians and the sea—the skill of our forefathers,
who knew to live and experience their danger in every prayer.
Rabbi Yerucham states that this is “the great secret of prayer”!
He writes:
We have a tremendous piece of information: we know that even
when the holy forefathers were well-off, they always prayed out of
a sense of ultimate urgency, no less than the urgent prayers of all
of the children of Israel in their great distress at the sea. The secret
of the matter is that the children of Israel are always on the level of
‘from the straits….’ They never have anyone but Hashem on whom
to rely and turn to. They cry out only to Hashem.
This illustrates a wondrous passage that I saw in Michtav