The Tzadik Who Came Back From Heaven To Give Us A Message

0:07Rabbi Yisrael Salanter was Kodesh Kodeshim. Now, this is only a couple of hundred years ago, a little less than a couple hundred years ago. They asked Rabbi Yisrael Salanter to give a shiur answering a hundred questions. A hundred questions, and they gave him the questions ahead of time. They gave him the questions ahead of time. When he arrived, two little heroes The Talmid saw that the questions had been changed. He thought, "Oh Hashem, what's going to happen? What are we going to do? What's this? What's that?" And he saw the Rabbi continue giving the shiur, starting the shiur as if these were the hundred questions he had prepared for. And he gave the shiur with all of the answers, as if he were Mount Sinai and Hashem was speaking through him. After the shiur, one of his Talmidim asked him,

1:33When you got there, you had a delay. You noticed that there were a hundred different questions, right? He goes, how could I not notice? I prepared for a different hundred questions. He goes, so what was the delay for? I said the delay was whether if I see that somebody is trying to do a big chilul Hashem here. Now, if I say that I know all the answers anyway... Maybe it's midat ga'avah. Maybe they're going to think, oh, this guy thinks who he is. Oh, he's a big ga'avan, he's a big ego. But on the other hand, I thought to myself, if I don't, then I allow the chillul Hashem to happen, and they'll think that someone that learns Torah doesn't actually know the answers, as if he's the one that knows the answers, as if it's not Hashem talking through him. So I decided to go with option one and give them the answers because I figured that way there's more Torah in the world. So the delay wasn't because he didn't know the answers; the delay was because he was just thinking in 10 seconds what we don't think in 10 years. He was considering what everybody else thinks, how they're going to view it, what will happen, and whether this decision will result in more Torah or less Torah. Now, his talmidim were also malachim. Two of them...

2:52got together after all of the years of trying to become tzadikim, day after day, every day working on their tefillah, every day working on their tzedakah, every day working on their limud, every day working on something. Seventy years, non-stop, doing teshuvah. Yeah, but you're the Gadol Hador. What do you mean? I still have to do teshuvah. You're the biggest rabbi in the world. Yeah, be'ezrat Hashem, I'll be a talmid one day too. What rabbi? People call you rabbi, you think you're a rabbi? First, I have to be a Talmid. That's why a Talmid Chacham is called a Talmid Chacham. The Gadol HaDor is not called the biggest Rabbi in the world. What is he called? A Talmid Chacham. Why? Because if you're really a Chacham, you're a Talmid first. You're a student first. So these two Talmidim, they're not little 18-year-old Talmidim anymore, they're 70. And they realize that the time has come; Shamayim is calling. The Baalei HaMussar said that every time you get a gray hair, it's Shamayim giving you a text message: "We're coming soon." You got a gray hair? Oh, Baruch Haba, you're coming closer. It's a call from Shamayim. Last year, I got a bunch of them. So anyway, the Talmidei Chachamim of Rabbi Yisrael Salanter, his students...

4:18They realized they had reached the age of seventy and recognized that Shamayyim (Heaven) was calling. They weren't even sure if they had done teshuva yet. So one said to the other, "Listen, whichever one of us goes up to Shamayyim first, promise that when you get there, you will come back to the other in a dream and let them know what's going on in Shamayyim. Why? Because if we're wrong and we still haven't done teshuva, at least give the opportunity to the one who is still alive to do teshuva." Give him an opportunity to do Teshuvah. I mean, okay, you're doomed. You're up there. What can we do? But at least the one that's here, at least we can do Teshuvah. That's what friends are for. So one of them dies, and 11 months pass. Every night, he's waiting and waiting and waiting. And after 11 months, finally his friend comes to him in a dream. And he says, I have a few questions for you. First and foremost, what took you so long? He said, until now, they've been judging me in Shemayim. This is the biggest tzaddik in the world. Eleven months, they haven't stopped judging him for more than a second.

5:36It's not like here; 11 months pass, but there's no time over there. 11 months in our time is an infinite amount of time in Shamayim. They are judging him on every single second that he lived. Oh, this second, you thought about this. Why did you think about this? Why would you spend a second thinking about something that's a little bit less Hashem? It's not not Hashem. It's less Hashem in the world. He says, okay, fine, 11 months. So can you tell me what's going on in Shamayim? Says, well, I'm not allowed to tell you everything. I can tell you one thing. You know how we tried to dedicate our whole life, and we learned, and we did, and we tried to improve ourselves, everything. We didn't do enough. The judgment in Shamayim is much heavier and deeper than we can imagine. This is coming from a person. Spent his entire life working. All he did was work for himself. That's it. He didn't work on Wall Street. He didn't build buildings. He didn't do any of that stuff. All he did was work for himself. And when he comes to Shamayim (Heaven), it's a simple idea, well-known. This is a famous story. He says, "We didn't do enough." The judgment in Shamayim is much heavier, much deeper. They look at every second, every second you're alive.

6:59So, this is a person that believes in Hashem and now has to evaluate himself. If he can't evaluate every second, he should at least evaluate every minute. If he can't evaluate every minute, he should evaluate every hour. If he can't evaluate every hour, can you at least evaluate your day? You finish the day or you start the day and say, "Oh, you know what? Yesterday I wasn't really such a good servant of Hashem. Yesterday I barely prayed. When I prayed, it was like I was doing God a favor. I arrived late. I was thinking about work the whole time. I couldn't wait for the Amidah to finish. I almost cursed the rabbi when he did the Chazarat HaShatz, because I was in a hurry," and so on and so forth, all the shtuyot that go on in our head. And when the Gemara opened, I was thinking about what's the stock quote for the new stock I just bought, and maybe it rhymes with this Gemara. Maybe I was thinking the Gemara is going to tell me a new pattern of how to buy stocks. And then I couldn't wait to finish the shiur about the Gemara because I had to buy a car, because I love this car. This car is my life. You know, people make their car their life. So if a person does a real cheshbon hanefesh, he starts realizing that there's no free lunch.

8:17If the tzaddikim were scared, what about us? So, like I said,