Several weeks passed after my father was admitted to the hospital, and with the festive Tishrei season quickly approaching, we weren’t sure if he would be discharged in time for the holidays. A week before Rosh Hashanah, the doctors still couldn’t say, and every day we were getting more and more anxious. With only a few days left, my mother wrote another letter to the Rebbe, and she asked me to deliver it to his office the next morning.
At the time, I was only fifteen years old, but I can still recall bringing the letter to the office of the Rebbe’s secretariat and placing it on the pile of mail that would soon be brought in to the Rebbe’s office. I still felt uneasy — as all of us were — so about two hours later I decided to go back to 770 to see whether there might be an answer already.
As I walked into the building, I saw Rabbi Leibel Groner, one of the Rebbe’s secretaries, walking out of the Rebbe’s office with a pile of mail. “The Rebbe just gave me an answer for you,” he informed me. The Rebbe had written his reply on the letter I had delivered.
I hadn’t read my mother’s letter before, but now, when Rabbi Groner showed me the Rebbe’s reply, I saw that my mother had written that we were “all feeling anxious at the thought of my husband not being home for Rosh Hashanah.”
The Rebbe circled the word “all” — “kulam” in my mother’s Hebrew — and then I saw that in the margins of the letter, he had added the traditional Rosh Hashanah greeting to be “inscribed and sealed for a sweet new year.” In other words, this applied to “all” of the people my mother had referred to in her letter, especially, of course, my father.
We took this as an indication that my father would be home for the holidays — and that is exactly what happened. He was home with us for Rosh Hashanah, and thank G-d, he went on to have a full recovery.
Rabbi Zushe Feldman has served as an educator in Oholei Torah in Crown Heights for over forty years. His son, Rabbi Mendel Feldman, is a Chabad emissary in Halifax, Nova Scotia. They were both interviewed in November 2025.
