With G-d’s help, and in the merit of my holy forebears, I have remained faithful, regardless of my shattered physical condition, to the principles governing communal activity that I was taught by my Rebbe--the great self-sacrificing leader and mentor, my father, of blessed memory. With self-sacrifice I fulfill his holy testament, by disseminating Torah study inspired by the awe of heaven, by furthering authentic Jewish education, and in general by working for the public welfare.
One day a few weeks ago, as I was reading the mail, I came across a very stern, threatening letter. Its writer, representing a certain organization, warns and threatens in ominous tones that if I continue with my communal activities, dire measures will be taken against all my institutions.
I do not believe that it takes an unusually lively imagination to picture the smile of amused scorn that such a letter can arouse in an individual who has tasted the full weight of an overstuffed czarist gendarme’s arm, and who has tasted the most gruesome tortures of the Yevsektsia.
The Previous Lubavitcher Rebbe, Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, was a remarkable diarist, whose voluminous memoirs are interspersed throughout one of his many work, Likutei Diburim, from which the following reminiscences are excerpted, translated by Rabbi Uri Kaploun:
On my fifteenth birthday my late father [the fifth Chabad Rebbe, the Rebbe Rashab] introduced me into his communal activities as his personal secretary. That was on the twelfth of Tammuz, 5655 (1895). My father outlined for me the 140 years of communal work that the Rebbes of Chabad had conducted in the past and in the present.
Our first patriarch--the Alter Rebbe, author of the Shulchan Aruch--began his communal work at the age of eleven. My father recounted the story as follows: “The Alter Rebbe’s son, my revered great [great] uncle R. Moshe, records in his memoirs an incident he had heard about from an old chasid called R. Moshe [Yitzchak] from a village near Yanovitch called Ivanski. One day, when R. Moshe Yitzchak was at the regional fair in Liozna, he saw and heard the eleven-year-old ‘prodigy from Liozna’ (as the Alter Rebbe was called) standing on a wagon in the marketplace and addressing a large crowd. He told them that they should leave their merchandising, and create alternative means for earning their livelihood--farming and handicrafts. R. Moshe Yitzchak promptly left town, as did hundreds of other families, and settled in the village of Ivanski.
He recalled: ‘At about that time refugees arrived in our region, wanderers from Prague and Posen, and through the idea publicized by the prodigy from Liozna entire families were settled in agricultural work in his father R. Baruch’s estate, that was called The White Wall.’
My father went on to describe for me the Alter Rebbe’s fifty years of extensively ramified communal work; the ensuing periods of his successors, the Mitteler Rebbe and the Tzemach Tzedek; the communal activities of my grandfather, the Rebbe Maharash; the bitter plight of Russian Jewry during the last ten years of the reign of Czar Alexander III; and their tragic disappointment in his successor, Czar Nicholas II.
Throughout his account, my father highlighted the superhumanly self-sacrificing toil of the Rebbes of Chabad for the sake of the public good. He pointed out that only with resoluteness, free from vacillation and compromise, can one be a really earnest worker in this field.
Then, having concluded his precious four-hour-long account, my father wished me Mazel-tov on the occasion of my entry into communal work. My young heart aflame, I promised that I would place myself at his dis-posal, and that with every fiber of my life I would resolutely fulfill (with G-d’s help) whatever tasks were entrusted to me for the public good. My father thereupon gave me my first directives as to how to learn and adapt myself to become useful in the serious business of communal activity.
The Rebbe’s early education bore the fruit of dedication to Judaism and the Jewish people which continued throughout the Previous Rebbe’s life. He concludes this passage by describing his life’s work as follows:
The fact that in the course of my life I have fulfilled the first principle of communal work--to obey, soldier-like, the directives of those who conduct that work, resolutely, without compromise, resisting partisan influences, and unintimidated by warnings and threats--has made of me an earnest public worker, both in matters of the Torah and Yiddishkeit and in matters of Jewish livelihoods and self-respect.
I was not deterred by being hounded for twenty years, nor by frequent arrest, torture and beatings at the hands of the czarist gendarmes. I was not deterred when my life was endangered by persecution at the hands of certain criminal members of the Russian Poalei Tzion party of those days back in 1906; nor was I deterred by the frequent and painful arrests of 1921-6, nor by the threats of a death verdict at the hands of the ugly Yevsektsia in 1927.
