Whenever we go through a slump — whether it is from boredom, failure, or depression — we’re forgetting how to live a meaningful life. A trap we fall into is thinking that someone or something outside of ourselves can give our lives meaning.
Our story took place two hundred years ago in the city of Teveria in northern Eretz Yisrael. In those days, the Jewish settlement there began to flourish. At first, Jews from Sefardic countries moved there. They slowly began to breathe new Jewish life where before there was only a spiritual wasteland.
A yungerman, a visitor it seemed (from the style of his beard), had his smartphone out to capture a moment he wished to preserve. The bachurim saved him from his phone and swept him up in the revelry. * I too had my smartphone out, broadcasting live the only sign of Jewish life literally for thousands of miles to the west and hundreds to the east…
מב. תרגום מקטעים משיחות ליל שמח”ת קודם הקפות תשנ”ב (1) 42. Simchas Torah, Tishrei 23, 5752 – September 30, 1991 (1)
An answer of the Rebbe (written in 5730) to someone who asked why it is the Chabad custom to use Esrogim from Calabria and not from Eretz Yisrael, which would support the Yishuv in Israel?
If the Sukka represents G-d’s love for the Jewish people, wouldn’t the Baal Shem Tov, the great champion of Ahavas Yisroel, want to beautify his Sukka in every way possible? Why then did he rely on leniencies?
From the position advanced age, R’ Pinye Korf has a unique perspective on today’s bachurim. On the one hand, he has been serving as mashpia in American yeshivas for nearly fifty years. On the other hand, he is one of the few left from the previous generation who learned in Tomchei Tmimim in Samarkand. He was one of the founding students of the yeshiva in Brunoy under the influence of the legendary mashpia, R’ Nissan Nemenov.
I sat with Rabbi Abba Dovid Gurevitch for a fascinating talk about the different Succos holidays he celebrated at various stages in his life. R’ Gurevitch is in his late eighties and is brimming with riveting accounts interwoven with Chassidic history as well as kiruvim from the Rebbe. Talking with him took me back twenty-five years to when I was a young bachur when I sat in a spacious succa in the backyard of the Gurevitch family in Tashkent and heard fascinating stories from him about the harsh conditions under communist oppression.
There are Chabad Houses that seem to churn out moving stories that sound like they were taken from stories of the holy Baal Shem Tov recounted on motzoei Shabbos. The following story comes to us from far away, from the Chabad House for Hebrew-speakers in Melbourne, led by the shliach, Rabbi Dudu Lider.
Undeterred by the KGB, he sat down and wrote this impassioned audacious letter to Leonid Brezhnev, the secretary-general of the Communist party. It was a furious confession that opened with three words he would have been reluctant to utter just two years before:
It’s important to remember that the mitzva to teach a child Torah is the father’s obligation. It’s a Biblical mitzva as it says, “and you shall teach your children.” Being that this is so, the father is granted special abilities to accomplish this.
October 27, 2019