Printed fromChabadElPaso.com
ב"ה

Rabbis' Blog

Greeting the King

Today is the first day of the Jewish month called Elul, the time to prepare for the High Holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur through personal introspection and increasing our Torah study and Mitzvah observance.

Yesterday I read a beautiful story of a boy who had the opportunity to be blessed by the Rebbe in honor of his upcoming Bar Mitzvah. As was standard practice, the Rebbe inquired about his studies and was surprised that in addition to Talmudic topics, he already studied some Chassidic philosophy, specifically the famous discourse about the month of Elul from the Alter Rebbe, Rabbi Shneur Zalman, the founder of Chabad, entitled “Ani Ledodi.”

This foundational text is an entry point for most Chabad youngsters into the fascinating world of Chassidism. The core question of the discourse is why mystical Jewish teachings compare the mundane days of Elul to the solemn and hallowed days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. The answer comes in the guise of a story about a king who is always in the royal palace far away from his subjects. Once in a while, the king chooses to go out to the fields and meet the common folk on their turf. There he is informal and joyous, everyone can approach him, and he is ever so gracious and giving with a beaming smile.

Likewise, the Alter Rebbe concludes, during the month of Elul G-d is close to us, similar to the closeness of the High Holidays. However, in Elul, G-d is like the smiling king in the field as opposed to the formal king in the royal palace we experience on the High Holidays.

When the Bar Mitzvah boy mentioned this discourse, the Rebbe asked, “Did you learn about the king in the field?”

“I did.”

“Did you ever meet the King?” the Rebbe asked, and after a brief pause continued, “Every time you say a blessing with the words “Blessed are You, L-rd our G-d,” you are meeting the King in the field.”

With this, the Rebbe anchored the centuries-old analogy to modern-day reality. The benevolent King of all kings is not a theoretical concept only accessible to scholars and mystics in the context of spiritual ecstasy. Simply drinking a glass of water brings the opportunity to encounter G-d face to face, so to speak, informally and joyously.

So as we begin the important task of preparing ourselves for the awesome divine coronation on Rosh Hashanah and to merit atonement on Yom Kippur, let’s be more mindful of the small yet powerful opportunities we have to connect with G-d on a personal level, specifically in the mundane and regular aspects of life.

Here is a link to a guide on how to make the proper blessings before eating food.

Let’s go greet the smiling King!

 

My Bubby

 WhatsApp Image 2023-08-11 at 3.02.04 PM.jpeg

On Monday evening, my grandmother, Mrs. Devorah Greenberg, passed away in Israel, surrounded by her children. As I grieved for the loss of my “Bubby,” the tributes pouring in from around the world described a true “woman of valor” whose legacy many wish to emulate. While she never held a leadership position or even a job, how she lived every day of her life and what she left in this world is being hailed by so many as legendary.

Born in 1938 in Soviet Russia under the terrifying anti-religious communist oppression on the eve of World War Two, her early life was marked by starvation, flight, and terror. Her family fled the Nazi onslaught and toiled to remain faithful and observant Jews in the hostile environment. Her father Rabbi Aharon Chazan was a heroic warrior in the underground network of Jewish schools, synagogues, mikvaot and even had a Matzah bakery operating in his home throughout the year to provide thousands of Jews with Shmura Matzah for Pesach.

During the funeral, her younger brother related a story that expresses how she absorbed and embodied the same level of Jewish commitment and sacrifice her parents lived with. The children were forced to attend the atheistic and antisemitic public schools, even on Shabbat, not to be seized by the government and placed in orphanages. However, every week they came up with another gimmick on how not to violate the sanctity of the day. When my grandmother’s eldest son entered the first grade, one of the Soviet teachers commented that surely the next generation of the Chazan family was more Sovietized and would not give the teachers the same “grief,” to which his teacher replied, “he is even more fanatic than his uncles and aunts!”

They miraculously emigrated to Israel in the winter of 1966, and as they settled in a tiny apartment in Bnei Brak, their home became a beehive of non-stop activity. Their family grew to include 17 children, guests were a constant presence and all Chabad activities in the area operated from there. And while my grandfather was making a living and coordinating the activities, Bubby kept it all anchored with her quiet grace and charm. That every one of her children committed themselves to be the Rebbe’s emissaries throughout the world is the strongest testimony to her passion and love for Judaism - and was her greatest joy. We always joked that the sun never set on her real estate as evidenced by the clock in her dining room with all her children’s timezones.

The fact that many of her grandchildren were born and raised in America and did not speak Hebrew as children, had all the makings of a “generation gap” between us, but those rules did not apply to her. We all loved and adored her and she found a way to express her love for us. She was thrilled with every opportunity to feed and care for us and when I finally learned to speak Hebrew and Yiddish, we spoke plenty.

She often reminded me why my birthday was so memorable for her. Although she had left Russia twenty years earlier, her first trip to New York happened in the spring of 1986 when I was born so she came to help my parents. Although I was not the first grandchild, it was a monumental milestone for her because she was finally able to see the Rebbe to whom she had submitted every fiber of her being.

This week’s parsha begins with “Behold, I set before you today a blessing and a curse.” The blessing comes when we heed the Torah and observe the Mitzvot and the curse comes as a result of the opposite. We alone must make the choice and reality proves that the voice is not always an easy one.

Bubby’s life was filled with many choices. Targeted by Hitler for extermination and Stalin for assimilation she contended with issues most of us will never encounter in our lifetime, but she made the right choices without sophistication or fanfare and always with a joie de vivre. She was not a visionary nor did she claim to know the secret to Jewish continuity, but she had the herculean strength of character to overcome life’s challenges through following the truth of Torah and her legacy speaks volumes for it.

I will miss her terribly but I know that she truly lives on in the many lives she continues to inspire throughout the world by nurturing her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren as a Bubby should. And I hope to emulate her example of making good choices in life with simplicity and true faith as she did.

 WhatsApp Image 2023-08-11 at 3.02.30 PM.jpeg

 

How far we must go

Monday will mark 79 years to the passing of Rabbi Levi Yitzchok Schneerson, the Rebbe’s father, who served as the chief rabbi of Dnieper, Ukraine for several decades.

In the spring of 1939, the communists arrested him for his unrelenting struggle to keep Judaism behind the Iron Curtain alive. He was jailed, interrogated, and tortured for many months and finally banished to the remote town of Chile, Kazakhstan for five years. The isolation and malnourishment took its toll and two months after moving to the larger city of Almaty with its fledgling Jewish community, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak passed away at the age of 66.

In the early 1920s, when the Soviets unleashed their war on Judaism, many prominent rabbis and leaders fled to the free world to reestablish their academies and continue studying and teaching Torah in peace. The previous Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchok, remained there and created the most intricate and sophisticated network of underground Jewish activism to ensure the millions of Russian Jewry would not be lost to our people forever. In 1927 he was banished from the Soviet Union but remained in touch with his thousands of students and followers there and continued to support their heroic activities.

On the ground, however, the last remaining prominent rabbinical figure was Rabbi Levi Yitzchok, and throughout the 1930s he stopped at nothing to make Jewish observance more bearable for all Jews.

To appreciate the extent of his sacrifice it’s important to realize that he was a brilliant scholar in Jewish law and mysticism and had authored thousands of pages of original Torah teachings. It is quite plausible that if he would have secluded himself in his vast library and interacted only with local Jews who sought his teachings and counsel the authorities would never bother him. Instead, he chose to endanger his life and scholarly legacy to confront the powerful evil regime to benefit Jews throughout the country who were not technically his rabbinic responsibility.

Here is one example of this. As all factories in Russia were owned by the government, it was their policy that set the standard for the matzah production, but Jews would not buy the matzah for Pesach without proper rabbinic supervision.

The authorities instructed Rabbi Levi Yitzchak to endorse the government baked matzah but he refused unless his handpicked supervisors were installed in every bakery and answered solely to him. To this end he traveled to Moscow and explained his position to President Mikhail Kalinin who then gave him exclusive authority on the matzah production.

That year tens of thousands of Jews had kosher matzah for the holiday, but the enraged officials arrested the heroic rabbi days before Pesach. As a result, he spent the rest of his life in tremendous suffering and isolation, without books to study or fellow Jews to interact with. Decades of his tireless work of transcribing volumes of Torah teachings were lost as well, but his efforts played an essential role in keeping countless of our brothers and sisters connected to our heritage for generations to come.

Rabbi Levi Yitzchok teaches us the sacrifices we should be willing to make for the spiritual benefit of others. Even if it may negatively impact our own spirituality, nothing should stand in the way of reaching out to the furthest places, literally or figuratively, to ensure no Jew is ever lost to our people.

We encounter these choices more often than we can imagine. So let's be inspired to prioritize the spiritual needs of others and realize the impact this can have beyond our imagination.

 

Looking for older posts? See the sidebar for the Archive.