There is a known Torah from the Baal Shem Tov that everything you see and hear is a lesson in the service of Hashem. We saw this clearly in the farbrengens of R. Mendel Futerfas, OBM, in his where he spoke of what he learned from his time in the Gulag. As we are before Pesach and Pesach is the time of Exodus (Yetzias Mitzrayim) and redemption and being in exile is like one big jail.
This past Purim we went on mivtzoim to a correctional facility. One thing we generally find by those who are incarcerated is that they rarely admit personal fault. It’s always their lawyer, or a partner, etc. So it is by us. The Gemorah asks why after the destruction of the first Beis Hamikdash, the length of exile was revealed to be for seventy years and the length of the current golus is not revealed (the current exile is almost 2000 years).
The Gemorah says that the sins that brought about the first exile were revealed (idol worship, immoral conduct and murder), so therefore, the time limit was revealed. The current exile is not openly revealed what specific sin caused it, so it’s time limit was not revealed. The Alter Rebbe asks why if the sin is revealed does it have to do with whether the length of the exile is revealed. The answer is that it does not only mean revealed to the public, but revealed to the person who sinned. Since the Yidden of the First Beis Hamikdosh knew where they went wrong, they knew what to correct. So the seventy years mirrored the seven emotions times ten, every emotion contains ten attributes and after seventy years their teshuva was complete.
However, the destruction of the Second Beis Hamikdosh stemmed from hatred without any reason (sinas chinom). A person always finds an excuse to dislike another, but if you analyze his logic, you see that there is no substance to it. That’s what sinas chinom is. When we tell someone about it, he or she says “I have a reason I am acting this way!” he doesn’t admit his fault and it’s hard for him to correct it, so the person remains incarcerated in his mindset and does not do teshuva. We live in an era of a lack of personal responsibility, when we come and tell a person there is a problem, he will say, it’s my parent’s fault, my teacher’s fault, etc. So a person will never change.
When we were in the correctional facility on Purim, there were different groups of inmates in different areas who had to be gathered together for a program. We went to the guards, who announced on the loudspeaker the names of these people to come out to the door, and they had to call two or three times before these people realized they were being called to hear the Megillah. The guards were complaining that they had made our announcement ten minutes ago, and no one was responding so we shouldn’t bother because the inmates don’t want to come out. We had the guards announce again and again, until the inmates showed up. We find by Yetzias Mitzrayim that when Moshe Rebbenu spoke to the Yidden about Geulah, they did not listen – they couldn’t perceive it – “from their shortness of breath and hard labor”
as the Torah tells us. They were so involved in their tasks, that they couldn’t even hear what Moshe Rabbenu was trying to tell them. This is what I saw with my own eyes. The lesson I gained is that sometimes people speak to us and we are so involved in what we are doing that we do not hear them. One of the responses we say to a l’chaim by a farbrengen is l’chaim vl’vracha – to life and blessing. In the HaYomYom of 29 Adar it explains the l’vracha means lev raka – to soften the heart. Maybe it means that sometimes we are so engrossed in ourselves that we don’t hear what anyone is trying to tell us until we sit by a farbrengen and sing a nigun and say l’chaim so it cleans “the wax from our ears” so we hear and our hearts should be able to absorb what the other person is saying. Maybe this is the reason it is so important to say l’chaim in the setting of a good farbrengen – to become a good listener – and it should pierce through the heart.
Similarly, when a child tells his or her parents something, the parents must clear out their ears to hear what the child is saying.
At the second correctional facility we visited we had a list of inmates and asked the guards to call out these people. But many of them were not in their cells – we had to locate them. This list I received Friday and by Sunday the inmates were elsewhere. It would have been easier to have been content to find only the people who were where they should have been; nevertheless we searched with the guard to find the other people where they were, to gather them to hear Megillah. The lesson I took from this is that physically (b’gashmius) we see people who were secure in their wealth have lost it, the same spiritually (b’ruchinus), similarly in our service of Hashem, one can feel secure that he has reached a certain level and overcame an obstacle and the next day he feels he’s been moved elsewhere and still has to struggle.
Sometimes we judge people and think they are on a certain level and maybe they were; but today when we speak to them, we have to reevaluate if they are still on that level today. Perhaps we are expecting too little or too much from someone. In our imaginations he is somewhere where we want him to be and he is not there. We didn’t determine whether he is on the level where we are communicating. This experience teaches us that when we address someone we have to be on their level – in their place, not where we imagine they are – that is the only way they can be helped.