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There's a very beautiful story about the Hasidic master of Moshe Leib Sasever. Moshe Leib was in his house in the middle of the night when all of a sudden he heard a banging on the door, and he rushes to get up to see who it is. And it's the town drunk, Yankala the drunk. And Moshe Leib opens the door just a little bit and he says, Yankala, what do you want? It's the middle of the night. And Yankala says to him, Rebbe, I'm so drunk. Can I please crash in your house? Can I please go to sleep? And Rebbe Moshe Leib wasn't in the mood to have a drunk lying down. in the middle of his house, passed out. And he said to him, Yankala, go with your own people. You know where the other drunks sleep. You know where to find your Hevra. And the drunk looked at Rebbe Moshe Leib Sasever and he said to him, Rebbe, as long as I'm alive, it seems that the Rebbeinu Shalom still has a place for me. Is there no place for me in your home? And of course, if Maisha Leib let him in. Now, this is not a commentary on letting drunk people into your home. Obviously, it goes without saying that a person has to be careful not to put him or his family in a situation of sakana.
But at the same time, I think there's a very valuable lesson to be learned from this story. And that is that we should never give up on people. As long as a person is alive, as long as the Rabbeinu Shalom, who's called Hamakom, who's called The Place, still has a place inside of him for each and every one of us, it means we need to find the godly dignity in each and every person and to treat that person with tremendous respect. And that requires the capacity to look through some of the darkness of a person's life and to see Maisha right through to their essence. I was talking to somebody today, a person who's in a terrible amount of pain in their life, a person who at some point, Lo Alenu tried to commit suicide, a very, very broken person. And it's very difficult for them right now. They're not in a state of observant Judaism. And they feel very judged by our community. They feel very much like there's no place for them. And they don't really want to participate, not because they don't want to be observant, but because they feel like everywhere they go, people look at them and they see only the worst.
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And of course, there's definitely some of this that's happening inside of that person. There's no doubt that this person is projecting onto others what's probably going on inside of themselves. But at the same time, it's our obligation, to be mikabal the musr. And I think the musr is in this place that we can be sometimes a judgmental community, in an effort to maintain our own sanctity. Sometimes we, perhaps unwittingly and perhaps wittingly, push out others that really do belong. I remember once an article was written, by Rav Yaakov Horowitz, and he was talking about what it's like to be at a chasna. And inside of the circle by the Chosim or the Kala is the closest friends. And then there's the closer friends, but not like the closest friends. And then that third circle is like the people that were just invited, that they're there for their spouses. And then there's an entirely different circle with the Chosim's father and the Kala's mother. And L'ma'is are those people in the middle circle.
They're holding their hands very tight. It's their way of saying, this is our circle. We're the ones that are Mamish, the closest friends. And sometimes we do that in Judaism also. We lock hands with each other and we say, it's us who are the guardians of the Torah. We're the ones. And there's something very beautiful about that. There's something that comes with a tremendous amount of beautiful pride of saying, I'm a person who's holding up Hakadosh Baruch Hu's Torah in this world. There's also something exceptionally dangerous about that. Because there are those that are also people who are... in very much want to come close to Hakadosh Baruch Hu and they very much want to be a part of that circle that says, I'm a person who's utilizing my life to serve the Eberster. And L'maysa, our hands are locked. And our hands are locked with judgmentalism, and with an eye in Ra, looking at a person and saying, this person presents a danger. And of course, we have to be careful. I'm not Chas V'Shalom saying a person shouldn't be careful. We don't let drunk people into our homes. But at the same time, we have to be careful never ever to give up on a Jew. I'm reminded myself of a tzaddik that lived in Farakwe.
who used to invite my brother to come over to his house. And even though my family definitely did not have the same hashkafa as this tzaddik, his house was a place of warmth and acceptance. And as a result, it had a hashpa on my entire family. It's my sincere blessing to everybody in Klal Yisrael and certainly to myself that we open ourselves, open our hearts to each other, to invite each other into that middle circle, to be able to join together as we will one day do in Mashiach, dancing in the circles that Tzaddikim point to the middle and say, this is my God.
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