Reb Yaakov Galinsky, one of the last great magidim (storyteller/teachers), was invited to speak at the Yavneh shul in Tel Aviv in 1987. He took a bus from Bnei Brak to Tel Aviv, got off at the Shuk Hakarmel, and began walking down Rechov Allenby to the shul. As he walked down the sidewalk, he heard cars honking and people yelling. Not paying any attention, he continued walking. Then he heard someone yell out “זֶה לְעֻמַּת-זֶה,” “this in balance with that!” Thinking that there are many crazy people in Tel Aviv, he continued walking without looking at the traffic. Finally, someone near him on the street yelled out from his car “Reb Yankel, זֶה לְעֻמַּת-זֶה, this in balance with that!” Hearing his own name, he looked over and saw a car blocking traffic right next to him. When he looked at the driver, he called out, “Berel?!” The man said that yes, he was Berel, and indicated that he should get in the car.
Who
was Berel? Forty years earlier, they had both survived the war and met in a
displaced persons camp outside Berlin. There, they became good friends. One day,
Berel, who had lost every single member of his family in the Holocaust, confided
in Reb Yaakov that he simply did not want to live anymore. He couldn’t go on.
Reb Yaakov told him, “Not long ago, Hitler, י"ש, killed himself in a bunker not far from
here. But just one week before he died, after it was already completely clear
that the Nazis had lost the war, he sent 80,000 German troops to the Russian
front even though it was certain that they would be slaughtered. Where did
Hitler get the ability to keep moving forward with the war effort even though it
was clear that it was hopeless and that he had lost? He got it from the Jewish
people. If a Nazi can keep going despite all opposition based on the forces of
impurity, how much the more so a Jew can pick himself up and say (Tehilim 26:11)
‘וַאֲנִי בְּתֻמִּי אֵלֵךְ,’ ‘I will walk forward with simplicity,’
just as Avraham Avinu and Dovid Hamelech have done.”
