On yud tes Kislev 5753, the Rebbe on the balcony asks for something no one can figure out… By Levi Liberow
To talk is cheap, we do it all the time. But there are conversations that just remain etched in your memory for a long time after.
I don’t know if the conversation I’m about to describe can be called a debate, but it was a candid talk between two people who came from two different perspectives on a subject.
On one side was myself, a boy who grew up in a family in which the Rebbe being Moshiach was a topic we spoke about all the time, we debated with our neighbors on it, and — I apologize for using cliches, but I have no better term to describe it — we simply “lived” with it.
My friend, then my chavrusa, was a boy who grew up in a Lubavitch community which didn’t emphasize this topic much. He was exposed to the idea, but seems to have never delved into it deep enough. Things that to me where a given were not so to him, to say the least.
So when in the course of one of our few conversations, I told him that the Rebbe was b’chezkas Moshiach, he wanted me to do some explaining.
So we went through the Halacha in the Rambam about b’chezkas Moshiach, and we “got stuck” on the very first term, ya’amod melech.
“How could you say the Rebbe is a king?” he asked. “King here means leader” I answered, “because it’s impossible to establish a halachic king without a navi and Sanhedrin.”
“Ok. but how can you say the Rebbe is the leader now, after gimmel Tammuz,” he asked. “The Rebbe continues to lead us,” I answered.
“But that’s in a spiritual way” he asked. “Doesn’t the leader need to be present to do what leaders do — to simply direct their people when they have questions?
And I didn’t have a ready answer.
I never thought of it in this way.
I was silent for a minute or two, maybe more, I don’t remember exactly. But I did some more thinking than usual.
For the first time in a long while I needed to think about things so simple to me and my peers in our “comfort zone.”
And then I came to realize something very important, perhaps the most important factor of hiskshrus in the present time.
***
I was recently reading a study that a professor made on the Rebbe’s teachings on Moshiach. in his introduction he makes a very interesting observation. “You might think” he writes, “that the Rebbe is repetitive in his talks and his writings, that there is lots of redundancy.”
“But I discovered in my work that every time the Rebbe returns to a subject, he adds another dimension to it; sometimes a small nuance, sometimes something more obvious, but the Rebbe never says the exact same thing twice.”
What I told my friend in that conversation, is that the Rebbe is our melech, even now, because everything that happened in the last two-and-a-half decades that requires the Rebbe’s leadership has already been addressed.
The Rebbe was sent to the world in a game-changing generation. Communication technology, for example, is something that has come to exist in the Rebbe’s generation and the Rebbe has taught us how to approach it.
Could someone familiar with the Rebbe’s opinion on TV seriously say that he is at a loss with understanding how the Rebbe would want us to approach proper internet usage in a Jewish home?
And most importantly: since the day the Rebbe told us that he did all he can to bring Moshiach and handed the responsibility over to us, the Rebbe spent the next year directing us on how to do it, he gave us all the information and guidance available on how to succeed in this mission - “der Rebbe hot altz bavorent”.
***
Chof Zayin Adar Aleph is a day that needs to strike a chord in the heart of every chassid. It’s the day the Rebbe suffered a stroke while davening at the Ohel and ever since we haven’t heard the Rebbe communicating with us in speech.
Just weeks before, on gimmel Sh’vat, the Rebbe spoke about the Frierdiker Rebbe’s speech being impaired, and thus his ability to communicate his life-mission of teaching Chassidus. The Rebbe assured us that in this generation, what the Rebbe called “the ninth generation” since the Ba’al Shem Tov, this won’t happen.
But it looks like it did.
In second thought, did it really?
We sometimes stop talking because we can no longer speak;
And sometimes we stop talking because we have no more to say. ■