Israel at war: At the end of the Simchat Torah holiday in the USA, upon learning of the horrors perpetrated by Hamas terrorists on Simchat Torah morning of, Rabbi Yoshiyahu Pinto gathered his students to strengthen them.
"It is painful to even talk of the agony that the Jewish people are going through," Rabbi Pinto said at the beginning of his remarks, "the Jewish people are going through something incomprehensible. We have all gone through plenty in our lives, but what we are experiencing now - we have never experienced. Terrible things happened on the day of Simchat Torah, on the day of rejoicing with the Torah, on the day when the entire Jewish nation is finishing the Torah and dancing with the Torah, and on this day - even before the time for the morning prayer arrived and we had not yet taken the Torah scrolls out of the Holy Ark to finish the Torah and dance with it - they didn’t let us do that."
Choked in tears, Rabbi Pinto said: "A thousand Jews were martyred for the sanctification of God, this is an unimaginable reality. Sorrow like no other. The pain of the parents who cry, “Where are our children?” A mother sits and sees her children in a terrible state. In life we get used to every situation. The Holy One, blessed be He, created memory and created forgetting. The Jewish nation is barely 14 million people, we do not have large numbers, our nation is small, souls that the Holy One, blessed be He, has specifically chosen. We are the chosen nation from all nations, and now the nation of Israel is experiencing something that is extremely agonizing. The entire Jewish people should weep over the conflagration sent by God."
"You should know," said Rabbi Pinto, "all day and night we receive messages from people. We received a message from a man who wrote us that his daughter has cancer and she needs her radiation treatments, and she is missing and they can't find her. What do you say to such a father? How many people connected to our Shuva Israel Yeshiva were slaughtered for the sanctification of God’s Name? The Jewish nation is a strong nation, and we must not fall into melancholy, this is the advice of the evil inclination. If we all despair and become depressed, then one infects another, and since sadness and despair are contagious, we all enter a negative state and lose everything."
Rabbi Pinto commented on the controversies that have increased recently among the Jewish people: "Respect for the Holy One, blessed be He, respect for Torah scholars, respect for our parents, and respect for each other - everything has been trampled lately. We have lost all these values. We have to speak to ourselves, we have to strengthen ourselves. Things have gone awry and we have wrecked our lives. The world has descended to the most sordid places. Heaven has seen that we have outdone ourselves in controversies, hatred and other bad things, including slander. We have contaminated the world with the greatest pollution. Everything that God told us to do - we did the opposite. Why? Because we let the Satan enter each and every one of us."
"How do you get rid of this Satan? How do you purify this air?" Rabbi Pinto continued with words of encouragement, "By unconditional love, by faith and wholehearted service of God. Through this, we will erase the despair and the wrong kind of joy. How do we subdue evil? With the joy of the Torah, by being loyal to God and by suppressing the sadness that the Satan is pushing us to."
He asked his students to stop watching the videos uploaded by the terrorists showing the horrors of their massacre. "Stop looking at all the videos and all these movies. Don’t do it. You are harming your soul. Even if you don’t feel it now, in ten years you might begin to suffer from anxiety and fear, so stop looking at and hearing all the details. How will it help you? What will it give you? You won't see the results now, but in another 5-10 years you will suffer anxiety. The mind is very sensitive."
In conclusion, Rabbi Pinto said: "The Holy One, blessed be He, knocks on our door and says: Open the door for me and give me your heart. If we will accept the yoke of Heaven’s Kingdom - then we can bring the Redemption closer without suffering and torments, but if we don't do that - God forbid it will be in agony and great difficulty."
This article was written in cooperation with Shuva Israel