I’ll tell you one little story, a true story. There was a young woman, a frum girl, who was getting a ride in a taxi cab in Brooklyn and the taxi cab bumped into another car and together they bumped into a telephone pole. And the pole fell upon her and killed her. It crashed onto the cab and killed this woman.
Now I’m not capable of telling you anything, reasons, but I’ll tell you something about this girl. I know the story with her. Once there was a poor teacher trying to make a living and she was teaching a class of girls, forty girls. And one of the girls in the back of the room made a habit of mimicking the teacher’s voice – all the time, mocking her. The teacher was very much embarrassed, very hurt. Every day it was like a knife twisting in her heart. But what could she do? It’s her parnassah so she kept quiet. She was very hurt though, very much so, but she couldn’t do anything about it; she tried to forget about it.
But Hakadosh Baruch Hu doesn’t forget. And He warns us, if you’re going to do something like that, it’s very serious business; who knows what the result might be.
Now, we can’t explain anything. Don’t go out from this place and say Rabbi Miller says he knows this and that. We don’t know anything. Maybe she did teshuvah and maybe there was a mechilah gemurah – maybe it’s not like I’m presuming. But whatever it is, it’s absolutely true that the Torah warns us when it comes to ona’as devarim, even more than by cheating and stealing, it says you should fear Hashem.
