“Rav Soloveitchik used to give shiurim on the West Side for baalei batim in Moriah [shul - one of the founders of this shul was my grandfather a"h E.E.] . One night on the way home in the car, I said something to him, and he said, ‘Shhh. The Lubavitcher Rebbe is speaking. I want to hear what he has to say.’” The Rebbe’s speech was being broadcast on the radio. “When we dropped him off at his apartment, he said, ‘I sat and listened, but I couldn’t understand anything.’
Then, after he went to the famous farbrengen, where the Rebbe stood up for him and everything else, he said, ‘Du zitzt a Yid, and he quotes Gemaras, Rashi, Tosafos, the Zohar, everything without looking inside. Ven ich darf reden finef minut (when I have to speak for five minutes), I write for myself lots of notes. But here Torah is flowing out of the Rebbe like water, un ales shtimt (and it all fits).’ “Rav Soloveitchik used to tell me, ‘I know the Lubavitcher Rebbe from Berlin. I can testify that he didn’t miss even one day of going to the mikvah.’ And then the Rebbe sent him a message asking him to come to the celebration for his 30 years of being Rebbe, and he went.”
We live in a very spoiled generation. People like things quick and easy. If Halacha demands more than people are comfortable with then it is deemed irrelevant. The opposite is true. To be religious is to sacrifice.
Big topic.
Religious activity is, in essence, an experience of suffering. When a person encounters God, a personal sacrifice is demanded of him by God, which finds expression in a struggle with his primitive instincts, by breaking his will, by accepting a transcendental “burden”, by denying exaggerated desires of the flesh, by sometimes withdrawing from the pleasing and the pleasant, by addiction to the strange and bitter, by colliding with a secular authority, and by yearning for the paradoxical world (!) which is incomprehensible to others. Offer your sacrifice! This is the essential command given to the homo religiosus. The chosen ones of our nation, from the time that they discovered God, occupied themselves constantly with sacrificial activities.
על אהבת התורה וגאולת נפש הדור
