The Greatness of Reb Elimelech

Rav Shmuel of Karov was originally from Neustadt, near Cracow. When he heard of the Rebbe Reb Elimelech, he travelled to study under him.

When he first arrived, Reb Elimelech rebuked him, saying, “I can smell the stench of something rotten coming from you.” Rav Shmuel was at first taken aback and greatly offended. But Reb Elimelech repeated the rebuke several times over the weeks he spent in Lizhensk, and Rav Shmuel began to review his own deeds. He decided that he surely had some character flaw, and that the failing his Rebbe meant must be arrogance and false pride. After he began to work on this flaw, Reb Elimelech drew him close.

At that time a cholera epidemic was plaguing the region, and Reb Elimelech sought a segulah to end it.

One of the local villagers had an older daughter, thirty-six years old, whom he was unable to marry off because of his poverty and his inability to give her a suitable dowry. He approached Reb Elimelech. There was a well-known segulah against plagues and epidemics to marry off the poor, the indigent and orphans, so Reb Elimelech proposed a match and made her a shidduch with the water carrier, an orphan of thirty.

The Kozhnitzer Maggid took up a fiddle, and the Chozeh of Lublin cracked jokes, acting as a jester and badchan to entertain the assembled guests at what was surely a wedding never to be forgotten.

Reb Elimelech turned to Rav Shmuel and said, “Come, let us go together to the simchas chassan ve’kallah, and let us make the chosson and kallah happy.”

As they stood there, they heard the grammen, the rhymed couplets of Yiddish prose and verse that the Chozeh of Lublin used to entertain the dancing guests.

Reb Elimelech asked Rav Shmuel of Kariv, “Can you see how the fire dances and swirls around them all?” When Rav Shmuel answered that he could not see it, Reb Elimelech said, “You must have some speck or dirt clouding your vision.” He took out his handkerchief and cleaned and rubbed Rav Shmuel’s eyes. Then Rav Shmuel saw for himself how the fire danced around the merrymakers and the dancers.

Then the tzaddik himself joined the dance, and Reb Elimelech danced for longer than an hour. Afterwards he declared that “Chessed ve’Emes” has the same gematria as “Chassan and Kallah.”

Then Reb Elimelech davened, “Ribono Shel Olam, Master of the World, In the merit of our dancing, this mitzvah tantz, may we merit to put out at least one fiery coal that was prepared for us in Gehinom.”