Now, for a thinking person, these little hints might have been enough. ‡ָיזƒמ¿רּƒב ‡ָימּƒכַח¿ל יַּ„ – A wise man, it’s enough one hint. You don’t have to tell them again. But when somebody is obtuse, he doesn’t take a hint, you have to tell it to him over and over; and each time you tell it to him, you have to make it more and more open and finally if he doesn’t take the hint, so you give it to him. People can save themselves from yissurim if they’ll understand the first hint.
But the German-educated Jews were so dumb – their heads for so many years had been stuffed up with gentile ideas so they couldn’t listen. They didn’t learn. Some of them learned that they have to leave Germany. But that’s all they learned; so they came to America and they assimilated even more; they intermarried or some converted to Christianity. They didn’t learn a thing.
And so the lessons became worse. We have to study: why is it that the Jews were now enslaved more than in any previous time? Never before had there been such a gezeirah of such killing slave labor. And you can be sure that there were some Jews – not enough, but there were some who looked back now and recalled that the Shabbos had been destroyed in many places in Europe. Yes, there were some Jews who understood that because Jews profaned the Shabbos, that’s why they were forced to work seven days a week at killing labor.
When I came to Slabodka in 1932, every half hour a busload of Jews left for Kovno to go to work on Shabbos. But by 1938 every five minutes a bus left full of Jews! Working on Shabbos! It was unheard of not long ago. But now every five minutes a busload of Jews was going to work. And because so many Jews now had chosen voluntarily to work on the Shabbos, so therefore they were now put to killing labor seven days a week without any rest at all.
