Counterfeit Pleasures | Rabbi Menachem Feifer

I once heard a beautiful quote from the Rosh Yeshiva, R’ Shmuel Berenbaum זכר צדיק לברכה. Someone was discussing the explosive growth of Torah in America, and R’ Shmuel said, I predicted it right from the beginning. People said, Torah will never grow in America. They used to say in Europe, אפילו די שטיינער זיינען טרייף. In America, even the stones are not kosher. I knew it’s going to flourish, because I saw that in America, the culture is to run after pleasure, and what pleasure is there in the world greater than a blat Gemara? You know, we have to know that we have the greatest pleasure there is in the world, and that is the pleasure of learning the heiliger Torah. When we realize that, when we realize that all the other pleasures in the world are just a fleeting moment and they're gone, it'll be easier to control ourselves and protect ourselves from those pleasures. A story is told of a fellow who got a phone call one day, and someone tells him, I have a way you can make a lot of money in a very short amount of time. The fellow was curious. He went to meet the person in his office, and the man says to him, I have just perfected the perfect counterfeit $100 bill. The fellow starts laughing, gets up, he says: forget it. There's nothing to talk about. He says: Listen, I'm not telling you to take my word. Here. He opens up two attache cases, each one with a half a million dollars. I want you to take out $100 bills from anywhere in the cases, give it to your driver. Let him go to banks, financial institutions. Let him see if they pass the inspection. And the fellow goes out and a half an hour later, he comes back with a shopping bag filled with $20 bills. And he says: Boss, not one place caught it. The banks tried pens, they tried lights. It passed every test. So the fellow looks at the guy selling the bills and says, So what's the deal? He says: You wire in a half a million dollars into my account and you walk out with $1 million. He says: You have a deal. The fellow punches a few numbers into his phone and money gets wired into the other fellow’s account, and he walks out, feeling like a million dollars. He takes a few steps down the street, and all of a sudden, he hears screeching tires. Police jump out of a car and they throw him against the wall. And they say: What do you have in those attache cases? One guy holds a gun and the other fellow breaks open the locks and sure enough, they see the money. And they say: We've got him! We got him! The counterfeiter! The famous counterfeiter! We finally found him. He hears what's going on. He races off from the scene. One of the police starts chasing. The fellow turns the corner, runs down the steps into a subway, jumps over a turnstile, goes down the steps, jumps into a car of a subway. He's gone. He comes home 20 minutes later, his heart is still beating 20 times faster than normal. His wife opens the door and she says, What just happened to you? You’re white as a ghost. He says, I just saved my life. I lost a half a million dollars, but I just saved my life. He starts telling her the story, and as he's in the middle of his story, she says: Oh, I know that story. I read it in the Wall Street Journal. It's a scam. He says: What's the scam? The fellow who sold you the money, he wasn't selling you counterfeit bills. The bills were genuine $100 bills. He has two fellows hired, actors. They are dressed like police. They stop the person with the money, they scare him by throwing him against the wall, the fellow always drops the money and runs away. Then they take the money and bring it back to the boss. And the fellow says: I can't believe it. I thought that the money was counterfeit and the police were real. It was the money that was real and the police that were counterfeit. There are so many people that spend their lives running after counterfeit pleasure. We have the real pleasure in life. Someone who's tasted what it means מתיקות התורה the sweetness of the דבר השם, he understands. The rest of it is fake, it's shallow, it's meaningless, it's false, it's counterfeit. Grab on to the real pleasure in life.