The Chassidic master Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev once said: I learned the meaning of love from a drunk. I once passed two drunks drinking in a gutter and overheard the conversation between them:
Drunk #1: “I love you!”
Drunk #2: “No, you don’t.”
Drunk #1: “Yes, yes, I do. I love you with all my heart.”
Drunk #2: “No, you don’t. If you love me, why don’t you know what hurts me?”
The Shpola Zeideh ("Grandfather from Shpola"), a disciple of the Maggid of Mezritch, was a man of intense fervor, far more than any of his colleagues - the Maggid's other disciples. When he visited the Alter Rebbe in Liadi in 5569 or 5570 (1809 or 1810) he related that when he was a child of three he saw the Baal Shem Tov. "He placed his holy hand on my heart and ever since I have felt warm."
— Hayom Yom, 14 Tevet
The Shpola Zeideh was a beloved figure enthusiastically spreading cheer to downtrodden Jews wherever he went. Most people in feudal Russia and Ukraine were serfs, but Jews were mostly forbidden from farming, so they would rent businesses such as inns from the nobles who owned the land. The nobles would put them in the dungeon if they failed to pay the rent, and the Shpola Zeideh made it his life's work to travel around redeeming these captives. #ShpolaZeideh#HayomYom#ChassidicTeachings#ChassidicTales#JewishHistory
We were not placed here to do the possible. Let the heavenly beings bring cause into effect, potential into actual. He did not breathe from His innermost depths into flesh and blood to achieve the facile and the ordinary.
We are here to achieve the impossible. To teach the world tricks it feigns it cannot do. To fill it with light it does not know. To make the blind see, the deaf hear, the bitter sweet, the darkness shine. To make everyday business into mystic union. To rip away the façade of the world and to bring it to confess its secret oneness with the Divine.
When they tell you, “You can’t go on that path, it’s beyond you!”—grab that path as your destiny.