Parshas Shelach

When we were in Lubav­itch, ” the Rebbe said, “we could not imag­ine the dark­ness of Ros­tov. For some­one whom the dark­ness doesn’t bother, it brings him no ben­e­fit; but one who is dis­turbed by the dark­ness — and who over­comes it — reaps its ad­di­tional light. ”¹⁵

15. Zohar, Section 3, 47b: The superiority of light over darkness — signifying as well, the superiority of light that comes from darkness. ↩

Reb Aizel told his stu­dents that when the de­cree was is­sued to con­script Jews into the Rus­sian mil­i­tary, there was an in­di­vid­ual who wept and fasted to the ex­tent that his teach­ers came to him from Above.

“How is it pos­si­ble, ” he asked, “that you re­main silent in the face of such a de­cree?”

“We in­deed protested, ” they an­swered, “but when they showed us the plea­sure in Heaven en­su­ing from the spir­i­tual re­fine­ment, we were too em­bar­rassed to say that — on an earthly plane — it is con­sid­ered an evil de­cree. ”

On Purim, 5695 (1935) in Leningrad, R. Elchanan Mo­ro­zov told me and my friend Pin­chas Al­thoiz:

The po­suk states, The peo­ple who walked in dark­ness have seen a great light.²⁶

How can we un­der­stand this? It was dark­ness; how could they “see a great light”?

Rather: How can one pos­si­bly go through dark­ness? Only when — ear­lier — “they saw a great light.”

Ad­di­tional Sto­ries Pre­pared by the Au­thor for the Sec­ond Edi­tion

The Al­ter Rebbe

26. Yeshayahu 9:1. ↩