Don't Let Go! | Rabbi Yisroel Besser

There was a Yid, a Sochatchover chosid, who was a lumber merchant in Poland, and he spent the winter working in the forests, as lumber merchants do. And as the weather got better in the spring, he would start to travel home, where he spent the summer months with his family, but he always coordinated the trip that Shavuos, the Yom Tov of Shavuos, he should spend by his Rebbe, the great Gaon, the Sochatchover Gaon, the Avnei Nezer, the Eglei Tal. Where better to spend Shavuos, the Yom Tov of Kabbolas Hatorah, than by the pillar of Torah, the Avnei Nezer? One year, as he's traveling to Sochatchov for Shavuos, the weather turns bad suddenly and it's raining and the roads are muddy and the wagon driver takes a wrong turn, and the wheel breaks, and with no choice, it's already Erev Shavuos, they have to go into the closest town, the first town, and that's where they're spending Shavuos. And this lumber merchant is miserable. He's not by his Rebbe, and not only he’s not by his Rebbe, he's not with his family, either. He's alone in a town where he knows no one. And he asks around: Are there any Jews? And they said: Yeah, there's a little Jewish shul over here. And he goes there. And to his dismay, he sees that it’s not even such an impressive shul. There's no Talmid Chacham, there's no Rav. It’s a shul of Cantonists. Boys who had been forced, conscripted, they had been pulled into the army as children, pulled out of Cheider. They knew very little. And then they had spent 25 years or 30 years in the army, that was the term, and they came out as adults. And what did they know? They knew nothing. They knew that they were Yidden. Maybe they’d say Shema Yisroel, they knew that it was Shabbos, but they didn't know Torah. They weren’t Chasidim certainly. And this was going to be his Shavuos, spending his Yom Tov in the Cantonist shul. And he was there for Yom Tov, and he did the best he could to endure. A Yid gives himself Chizuk. A Yid finds ways to stay upbeat and to find spirit and resilience and strength. And that was his Shavuos. After Yom Tov, he continued on his trip and of course, he went to Sochatchov, to his Rebbe. He told the Rebbe about the miserable Yom Tov he had spent in this little shtetl, and the Rebbe said, Did you hear anything? Did anybody speak in shul over Yom Tov? He says: Yeah, there was like one ‘Rav’, that means one of the people in the members of that shul, knows a little more than the others, he’s less an Am Haaretz, so before they read, before they leyned the Ten Commandments on the first day, he spoke before leyning. And the Sochatchover, the Avnei Nezer said: What did he say? So he said: This Yid, the Cantonist, said over, that the Gemara tells us that before Matan Torah, Hashem picked up the mountain, and he held it over the heads of Klal Yisroel and he said, If you're going to accept the Torah, great, and if not, שם תהא קבורתכם there is going to be your burial place. That means I’m going to put down the mountain, and that's it. If you don't accept the Torah, then there's no point in this whole thing. So the Cantonist Rav asked, It shouldn't say there is going to be your burial place, it should say: פה תהא קבורתכם right here, they were under the mountain. I'm going to drop the mountain on you right here. You're not going to make it out of here alive. And he answered, this Yid, he said over that the Ribono shel Olam was telling them, Very nice. You have Moshe, you have Aharon, you have Zekenim. This is the glory era of Klal Yisroel. You’re going to Eretz Yisroel, you're going to the Mishkan and then to the Beis Hamikdash. Everything is great. But there's going to be a time when it's not going to be so illuminated and radiant and the Ziv Hashechinah is not going to be shining, you might give in and just drop it. And then, there shall be your burial place, then it's over. What's the point of all of this? Why am I giving you a Torah if it's going to end that way? The Cantonist Rav looked at the people in his sorry, pathetic little shul and he said, We don't know very much. Most of us have no Chinuch. What do we know? But we have to hold on. We have to know that there's such a thing called Shabbos. We have to be careful who we associate with, we’re Yidden. We have to be careful what we eat. And if not, the Ribono shel Olam was telling us, There shall be your burial place. If you're not going to hold on, then what do I have of this whole Torah? We're the ones who are holding up the Torah. And then the Avnei Nezer looked at this Chosid and said, The Ribono shel Olam plans the footsteps of man. It was worth it for you to go through what you went through and to end up in that shtetl for Shavuos, just to bring us this vort. Now imagine what that Cantonistishe Rav would have said in 2026, where it's impossible to walk down the street. You can't go to the corner to mail a letter without being assaulted in a million different ways. It's so hard to hold on. But if we're going to let go, there shall be our burial place. We have to keep it alive. It's our Torah. He's looking at us, the Ribono shel Olam, and he's saying, Don't let go! Don't let go.