אִם יִרְצֶה הַשֵּׁם
ח׳ חֶשְׁוָן תשפ״ז
From the chiour of Rav Yosef Mizrachi chlita on gilgul, the night of 8 Cheshvan 5787.
This post has not been reviewed by Rav Mizrachi chlita
A neshamah returns for what it did not repair. Whatever is still hard in this life, that is the tachlit. Yirat Shamayim is to know that the din is still open, and to do that avodah before one stands again.
The Rav thanked the doctor and his wife who opened their home. They had asked for the mystical matter of return: why a life contains things this life alone cannot explain.
1. The book is not ours
Yirah starts with the Author.
Torah is learned in four layers. Peshat is the plain reading. Remez is the hint in the text. The Rav's picture was Avraham, whose name, he said, comes in a chapter in sevens, and the same kind of pattern with others. Dig long enough and the book stops looking like a human book. Derash is what happens behind the stage. You see the actors. You do not see them changing clothes and taking instructions. The written Torah stays short. The oral Torah, given with it, carries the rest. There is no spare word. At the Akedah, "take your son" is not enough, because Avraham has two. "Your only son" is not enough, until it is Yitzchak, the son of Sarah, and not Yishmael.
He then stopped on the one place, in his reading, where the order reverses. Everywhere else the person comes first and the description after. By Yishmael the description comes first: pere adam. The danger is the title. The human being comes second. With that he taught the rule of the night. When Israel is up, Yishmael is down. When Israel goes down, Yishmael goes up, more religious and more dangerous. October 7, and what he has been describing for years in Europe, he put on that rule.
If Yisrael is with Hashem, Yishmael has no power to do damage. If Yisrael leaves Shabbat, tzniut, and tzedakah, Yishmael rises. The generation chooses the din it will live under.
Sod is not the Kabbalah Centre. Forget that name, he said. It is a machine, and it teaches the wrong things. The secret that may be learned sits in the Zohar, from Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and Rabbi Abba, and in what the Arizal opened in Tzfat and Rabbi Chaim Vital wrote down. The Ari lived a short life, about thirty-eight years. Before that, this layer was hidden. The Rav pointed to a date the Zohar gives, around the year 5600, when a great deal of new wisdom enters the world. The book of the night is Shaar HaGilgulim, the Gate of Reincarnations. A soul is sent back for what it refused.
2. A check is a signature
Tzedakah is an eternal reward, on one condition: it went to a kosher place. Money given to idolatry, to a room that teaches murder, to a marriage the Torah calls abomination, to a reform or conservative room, or to a modern-orthodox room with no mechitzah and a rabbi who will not rebuke the donors, is written as their sins. There is no mitzvah in supporting the opposite of the Torah.
Tzedakah to a place of Torah is reward in olam haba. Tzedakah to avodah zarah, to bloodshed, to to'evah, or to a place that throws off the Torah, is a shutafut in the aveirah.
The other side is just as exact. A yeshiva that learns, a rav who is not afraid, a place that moves people to teshuvah: every good that comes out of it is written to the giver.
Shabbat is the handshake, the sign between Hashem and Israel, because the world was made in six days and the seventh was rest. We are told to be like Him and to create nothing. A car on Shabbat is fire in the engine. Gentiles are not invited into that sign. A Jew who drives to shul in order to pray is, in his words, investing a million to make a dollar. Support a shul where nobody dares to pull up to the door. If someone parks far away and walks, that is not the rav's sin. Valet parking on Shabbat is a disgrace of the sign.
Righteous gentiles have a portion. A gentile who keeps the seven laws of Noach, and who is a decent person, goes to the next world without becoming a Jew. Judaism does not chase customers. A group that runs after you and says ordinary Torah Jews are not enough is not the Torah.
Hashem judges the gift according to the place it was given.
3. Four ways back
A soul that failed stands in din. The trial can take up to a year. That is why kaddish is said through those months, and why, once the twelve months are finished, it stops. Kaddish is four gears, and the amen between them is the shift.
The first paragraph praises the Name. The second speaks of the world He created as He willed. The third speaks of life, yours and the life of Israel. The fourth is the purpose: a Jew is here to make it known that there is one God. He chose the fathers, gave the book, and told Israel to teach the world that there is a Creator, and that murder, theft, and idolatry are not a life.
A soul can be back in a new body before that year is over. Sometimes the verdict is obvious in days. About twenty-five years ago, a Persian woman in Israel, the mother of a friend of his mother, died. A few months later his mother dreamed that the woman was calling her: Miriam, the nurses are starving me. Weeks later the grandson's baby was born and did not grow. The cord had been disconnected. She was not getting food. He told his mother: this is that woman, come back. The family had already gone to Rabbi Kaduri, still alive then, and had heard the same thing. This baby is your grandmother. She will live a measured time. That is the correction.
From Shaar HaGilgulim he taught four kinds of return.
A person can come back as a baby, in another city, another language, another sex. A Yisrael can return as a kohen, a kohen as a levi, a levi as a Yisrael. The standing rule is that Jews return as Jews and gentiles as gentiles. A Jew in the body of a gentile is, he said, a rare and severe punishment, an exception you should not stare at. Hashem leaves an exception so the rule can be seen, the way sight is understood by the person who cannot see. Gentiles can convert when the rabbis are convinced they are serious.
A person can return in what grows: tree, plant, fruit.
A person can return in what does not grow. A man who had a shul in his town and would not walk in can be set into the wall of that shul for decades, while the prayers pass through him. What he refused, he is now made to hear.
A person can return in an animal. Here the room laughs, and the laugh is the mistake. The life of the dog is irrelevant. A dog with a fortune is not a pleasant gilgul. A dog kicked in the street is not a worse one. The punishment is the attachment: a Jewish soul joined to the nefesh of the animal.
The soul has five levels, and it is entirely spiritual. The lowest is nefesh. The Torah says not to eat the blood, because the blood is the nefesh: it glues soul to body. That is why kosher meat is salted until the blood leaves. Above nefesh is ruach, then neshamah, and two levels higher still. In ordinary speech, "soul" means all five. To envy the rich dog is to have missed the shiur.
4. Whatever is still hard is why you came
In the din, every middah is opened. What you repaired, you are not tested on again. What you left the world with, with that you are born.
If anger was broken and you died calm, the next life does not hand you that test. If you died breaking Shabbat, the desire to break it wakes up young. If you died full of pride, you are the child who takes the microphone. If you died modest, you come back with no appetite to be looked at. If you died strictly kosher, pork will not call you, even if the rest of religious life is still a stranger. He has met people who barely say they believe, and still will not eat on Yom Kippur. The desire was already removed.
The opposite is the point of yirah. A woman keeps Shabbat the week she hears of it, kashes the kitchen without a fight, and then says: modesty I cannot do.
What comes easily was already repaired. What is still a milchamah every day, tzniut, a hand that does not want to give, an image one cannot turn from: that is the tachlit of this gilgul.
He put three children of one birth in the room. One gives the whole bag. One will not give a single pretzel. One stands in the middle. Same mother, same hour, three souls. Yaakov and Esav are the older picture: one womb, and from one brother the nation that carries Hashem's name, and from the other the line he traced through Amalek. The middot came with them. This life is for the middah that is still broken.
A great deal of the sin is not ideology. It is the fee. A doctor who fills a day with abortions is in love with the quiet clinic. A judge who lives inside a secular court is judging with the laws of men. The Torah's penalty and the state's penalty are not the same book. Do not sell the day for a salary Hashem will read back to you.
5. Measure for measure
Suffering is not only from this body's record. A child has not sinned yet. The soul has. Eyes pay for eyes. The stomach pays for the stomach. Mouth and ear pay for speech and for what was listened to.
He said this plainly about children who cannot speak or understand in the ordinary way, autism and Down syndrome as he named them. In his teaching that birth is a final gilgul. No further return. After it, the world to come.
He also said the teaching landed in Israel like a bomb, until a family sent a video he had kept: twins, a sister born ordinary and a brother not, the brother later typing, the family coming back to Shabbat, tefillin, kashrut, and dress. In the session he described, the brother typed a past he was not proud of, speech he had not been allowed to speak. The Rav took that as measure for measure.
This is his sod. It is not a diagnosis, and it is not a verdict a neighbor may pass on any child. Parents who need medicine need medicine. Parents who need a rav need a rav.
The older picture is Kayin. Some of that soul, he taught from this gate, returned in Yitro, and some in the Egyptian whom Moshe struck as he was about to kill a Jew. The daughter of Yitro given to Moshe closed what a killing had opened. You killed me outside the law. I answer inside it. Then the debt is paid. Next time something is done to you, do not imagine a court can create your portion. What is yours, nobody can remove. What is not yours, a judgment on paper will not install in your hand. He told of a friend burned by a defective firework, awarded a fortune he could never collect, who died without the money and with teshuvah. The paper was not the portion.
Suffering here also cuts the punishment later. A wicked life that stays smooth is a bill being saved. People do not repent when the table is pretty. After October 7, he said, the shock did what comfort never did. In the three years since, he has brought more people back than in the twenty-nine years before.
Two people do not pay the same for the same act. One loses money and says: it was Yours. Another loses the same sum and cannot breathe, and if it returns three days later, only the second one suffered. Hashem knows whether that pain reduces the debt. It depends on who raised you, what you could understand, and how hard the test was. A woman who has beauty to display, and dresses with modesty anyway, receives more than a woman who had nothing to hide. Only Hashem weighs the room. Our job is to fear the scale.
6. If it is yours, it comes back
Money of his was taken. He was going to get the people out of bed. A rav told him: shame on you. You teach emunah, and you are going to drag people out of bed over cash. If the money of the world belongs to Hashem, crying will not move it. If it is yours, it returns. If it is not, a court that forces it out of them can take it back the next week in a hospital bill.
The Torah still has courts, that rav said, because people with no God in the house will kill each other over fifty dollars if you give them no judge. A person who knows Who runs the world does not prosecute Hashem. Go home. Open a bottle of wine with your wife. Dance that He is good.
He was young, and the mortgage was due. In a Georgian shul, a man sat through two hours of Torah for the first time and wrote seven thousand dollars. The Rav tried to refuse it. The man wrote a second check for the same amount, which was what the bills required. The rav he ran back to was not impressed. Of course it returned. He dated the story about twenty-six years before this night.
The last picture is the shiur in one house. A girl learned in yeshiva for seventeen years because a man she had never met paid the tuition, on the order of a thousand dollars a month, while his own children sat in public school in Brooklyn. Years later the son became frum. The shidduch was that girl. The Rav saw the marriage. You did not do her a favor. You did it for yourself, and for your son.
So with every check you are tempted to skip. You are not the patron of Heaven. When you stand there, they will show the sins, and they will also show the people who learned because of you. The months you skip are on the same page. A tight month is a reason to give a little less and cover it later, not a reason to miss the line. Hashem does not need the money. The giver needs the line in the book.
Yirat Shamayim
The gate was not opened so that a person should enjoy secrets. It was opened so that he should fear Heaven, and know what the neshamah was sent back to repair.
Whatever is still heavy upon you, that is the tikkun of this gilgul. Shabbat that comes easily, kashrut that comes easily: in that you have already stood. Do not take the easy mitzvah as the avodah of this life. The middah you still cannot carry, for that the neshamah returned.
Give where the rav speaks Torah and is not afraid of those who give. Money to a shul that a car may drive up to on Shabbat, or to a cause whose teaching is the opposite of the Torah, is not tzedakah. It is a shutafut in the aveirah, and it is written in your name.
Shabbat is the ot between HaKadosh Baruch Hu and Yisrael. In six days He made heaven and earth, and on the seventh He rested. We are commanded to be like Him, and to create nothing.
If the nisayon is the mouth, or the eyes, or tzniut, that is middah ke-neged middah. Remain in that avodah. The neshamah was not returned for the mitzvah that no longer costs you anything.
What is yours, no man can take. What is not yours, no beit din can put into your hand. If it belongs to you, Hashem returns it from another place. One who learns does not spend the night weeping over money, as if the money were his and not the Creator's. And the Torah still set batei din in the world, for a person who has no emunah will come to bloodshed over a small sum. Before you take on the level of that rav and let go of a claim, ask your own rav.
Kaddish is said in the year the neshamah stands in din. The Rav said: twelve months, and then one stops. For the count that you yourself keep, ask your rav.
The girl who learned for seventeen years on tuition she never saw paid: she was the zivug of the son. A man did not perform a kindness for a stranger. In tzedakah, in helping, in finding a person his parnassah, he does only for himself.