During the cold wave striking our land, when snow is already falling in Jerusalem, our teacher, the holy gaon and tzaddik Rabbi Eliezer Berland shlit"a, led the evening prayer with a great crowd and with a flame of holiness.

These are his holy words

“Now all the sins are forgiven—snow is already falling: ‘Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall become white as snow’ (Isaiah 1:18). Now everything turns white—all the sins! We are now 120 days after Rosh Hashanah, 30 days after Chanukah—everything turns white.”

“The women in Egypt were divided into three types. The women, instead of running to Ein Kerem, Bikur Cholim, Shaarei Tzedek, Har HaTzofim, gave birth under the bushes! The athletic ones would run out to the field to give birth under the bushes; they (the Egyptians) would come with dogs to search for them.”

“A woman went out weighing 100 kilos and came back 30 kilos—what is happening here, where is the child? (The mother answered)—there was no child; it’s such an illness—there is an illness like that, that they swell up and then become thin!”

“That cannot be!”

“The dogs began to dig, like the dogs in the Alps that dig and search for people in the snow. In the Alps, people are buried under the snow—snow avalanches! They slide into the depths, so they send special dogs that dig in the snow, with stretchers and hot drinks—hot coffee and hot tea—and lots of medicines to warm all those buried under the snow.”

“So there (in Egypt) the children were buried under the ground! Like Korach said: What’s the trick of being ‘on the ground’? (‘And the man Moshe was very humble, more than any man who was on the face of the earth’ [Numbers 12:3])—you’re humble, so you’ll be under the ground! Learn from me—I’m under the ground!” (And then indeed he was swallowed up by the earth...).

“So the children were swallowed up in the ground; they brought plows! Like the Rebbe says in Torah 9: they saw that the children were being swallowed up, so they brought more plows and more plows.”

“The Egyptians received ten plagues—the Plague of the Firstborn. Every woman had 80 children, all firstborn (firstborn to different fathers, because they were all adulterous, rachmana litzlan), all of them died! She came to Moshe and said: You said ‘the Plague of the Firstborn’—I had 80 children and all of them died! He said to her: What can I do that they are all firstborn... you know the reason!”

“So the women would flee under the bushes, under the trees: ‘Under the apple tree I awakened you’ (Song of Songs 8:5), ‘I made you as numerous as the plants of the field’ (Ezekiel 16:7). The children would sprout like mushrooms! Swallowed into the ground, growing—‘And they shall blossom from the city like the grass of the earth’ (Psalms 72:16), like the tzaddik; and so all the children sprouted—600,000 children, all of these received the Torah! They received the Torah.”

“And there were those who were not athletic enough to run to the field—they gave birth at home! They broke down the doors; they heard the cries of the children (the Egyptians): ‘Little foxes that ruin vineyards’ (Song of Songs 2:15). They took children of four, five—when the mother cries ‘Oy!’ they immediately call the commando, the KGB, the Egyptian commando, to break down the doors. The angels would enter through the windows. Every woman would pray for many months; therefore the angels came, took the children, and brought them across the Nile to the desert.”

“‘He made him suck honey from the rock, and oil from the flinty stone’ (Deuteronomy 32:13)—everything filled with oil, with milk! The entire desert filled with pools of milk! The children swam in pools of milk—pools of oil, pools of honey! This was the second type, who did not manage to run out to the field to give birth to the children; so the angels took the children and brought them to the other side.”

“The third type was neither this nor that: they did not manage to run to the field, and the angels did not arrive—what did they do? They put them in a place of stones, in a place of rocks, in a place where there were stones; there they placed the babies. The mothers did not give up! They went and cried, they said all the Tehillim; they began to cry under the pyramids, under the stones, and then: ‘The trap is broken and we have escaped!’ (Psalms 124:7). The trap broke, the stones broke, and the children came out alive.”