The Seudah That Defeated the Samech Mem

It is told that Rav Avrohom Dov and Rav Mordechai of Chernobyl were once invited to a bris milah. The host honored the Chernobyler Maggid to serve as sandak, and the Maggid answered that he would be honored, on one condition: that the father make a seudas mitzvah.

The father explained that he was not a wealthy man. His whole weekly salary came to five gulden (seventy-five kopecks), he had already spent it on his household, and he had not a kopeck left. The Maggid insisted. He told him to borrow an advance from his employer, to be repaid by deductions from his wages week by week, and he counted out a generous sum of his own as a contribution. The father did as he was told, and they held a beautiful bris and a fine seudas mitzvah.

Then the Maggid explained. The Soton is called the Samech Mem, from the initials of his angelic name, and the same letters begin the words seudas mitzvah ein la'asos, that one should not make a feast. The Evil One is crafty, he said. He has already succeeded in preventing many people from making a seudas siyum at the completion of a tractate, and now he had turned to the seudas bris milah. The Maggid declared that he would stand up to him and put out both his eyes.

The Bas Ayin agreed and added that this is how the archangel Michoel defeated the Samech Mem. When the Samech Mem boasts of how people listen to him and sin, Michoel answers that they do not listen wholeheartedly. Has anyone ever heard of a person making a festive meal to mark a sin? But after a mitzvah, such as a bris, the father gathers his friends and relatives and makes a lavish feast. That proves how joyfully mitzvos are done.

The Bas Ayin also had a close, warm relationship with the Maggid's son and with the other Rebbes of the Chernobyl dynasty, including the Rebbes of Trisk and Cherkas. He once told one of his talmidim that this closeness was one of the reasons he decided to leave his birthplace and move to Eretz Yisroel. A kingdom can have only one ruler at a time, and he felt that his own position as Rav encroached on the rightful domain of the Chernobyl Rebbes over the area.