A chassid by the name of Reb Gershon Ber described the extent and depth of a tzaddik’s Torah knowledge. Reb Gershon Ber himself was a Torah genius and in his times was considered one of the greatest minds in the Chabad-Chassidic community — someone who understood the deep, abstract concepts of chassidic philosophy on the highest level.
He said, “If I would compare myself to the great chassid Reb Hillel Paritcher and compare the depth of my understanding to his, I would have to compare myself to a cat. I don’t mean,” he explained, “that as far as I am from the level of a cat, that is how distant I am to him. No. Reb Hillel Paritcher’s depth is so incredible that compared to him, the cat and I are of equal distance from him.”
He continued, “But if I would compare the level and depth of Reb Hillel Paritcher to that of the Tzemach Tzedek (who was the Rebbe at that time), I would also compare Reb Hillel to the cat. And I don’t mean that as distant as the cat is from Reb Hillel Paritcher, that is how distant he is to the Tzemach Tzedek. The depth of Torah knowledge of the Tzemach Tzedek is so incredible, that compared to him, Reb Hillel Paritcher and the cat are of equal distance to him.”
Indeed, one of the most striking qualities of a tzaddik is his breadth of knowledge. His mind encompasses the entire Torah and all its branches, as illustrated briefly in the story told of the Rebbe the Tzemach Tzedek and his son, Shmuel, the future Rebbe Maharash, respectively the third and fourth Rebbes of Chabad.
When the Rebbe Maharash was a child, his father, the Tzemach Tzedek, would give him spending money which he would always spend on seforim (holy books). There was no bookstore in the small shtetl of Lubavitch in those days because there weren’t enough people to support one. Instead, a bookseller would travel from village to village and from city to city selling seforim, and everyone knew that once every few weeks or months they would have the opportunity to buy Torah books.
When the bookseller came to the town of Lubavitch on this particular occasion, young Shmuel went to his father and said, “I have no money to buy new books; could you please give me my spending money in advance so I can buy some new seforim?”
His father said, “Tell me, the books that you already have... do you know them? You should first clearly know the ones you already possess!”
As they were talking, a carpenter happened to be in the process of building a new bookcase for the Tzemach Tzedek, because the Rebbe himself had just bought a few cartons of seforim. The Tzemach Tzedek was then sitting in his library where there were thousands of seforim, and his son turned to him and said, “Father, do you know all of these books already?” His father said, “Test me.” The little boy pulled out one book at random — a Torah book on Hebrew grammar (dikduk) that is not commonly studied — and opened to a certain page. He turned to his father and asked what was on that page. The Tzemach Tzedek then proceeded to say every single word written on that page verbatim as if he were reading it straight from the book. The boy pulled out one sefer after another, and each time the Tzemach Tzedek was able to repeat every passage his son requested by heart.
As is known, a tzaddik’s depth of Torah knowledge is so phenomenal, it is superior even to the greatest Torah scholars.
Indeed, every word of Torah and every single sefer that he ever studied is clearly “in front of his eyes” to be accessed at will. A tzaddik’s ability to absorb, comprehend and fuse with everything he studies is so definitive, that his relationship to this knowledge is on a completely different level from that of the average Torah scholar.
