Slice of LIFE SPECIAL FEATURE
In honour of the Rebbe's 30th Yahrzeit, on 3rd of Tamuz - 9th of July
Susan Handelman
Shortly after the Rebbe's passing in 1994, Bar-Ilan professor and author Susan Handleman, authored this piece, discussing her experience with the Rebbe. This article first appeared in the Wellsprings Journal, Summer 1994 and subsequently in Lubavitch International Magazine and is being reprinted here with permission from Lubavitch.com. Susan Handelman is also the author of The Slayers of Moses and Fragments of Redemption.
The Talmud (Sanhedrin 58a) relates that when Rabbi Eliezer became critically ill and close to death, he took his two arms, folded them across his heart, and said to his disciples: "Woe is you. My two arms are like two scrolls of the Torah that are rolled and closed up. Much Torah I learned and much Torah I taught: much Torah I learned, and I did not absorb from my teachers even as much as a dog could lick from the sea. Much Torah I taught, and what my students absorbed from me was but as the drop of ink the quill takes from the ink well."
I begin with this story because of my feeling of utter inadequacy in trying to convey who and what the Lubavitcher Rebbe was, and what he meant for me. I would not be the Jewish woman I am today were it not for him. Yet all that I learned from the Lubavitcher Rebbe and everything I could say about him are only like those few small drops of water which convey nothing of the vastness and power and life of the sea. Yet water gives life, and even a few drops can revive a thirsty person. The Rebbe's life was dedicated to reviving the Jewish people, to giving them life and connecting them to the source of life — to G-d and Torah.
None of us, I think, can ever really grasp or describe his true greatness; he was another order of human being. On the one hand his life was entirely given over to the Jewish people; he was intimately involved in the lives of hundreds of thousands of people who spoke and wrote to him for guidance about their most personal problems; yet he was also a man apart. I can only relate here a few personal stories of my connection to him in the hope that from these few fragments, the greater whole might be glimpsed.
I grew up in suburban Chicago in the 1950s, a typical third-generation assimilated American. Like many of my generation, I fled from Sunday School and the Temple to which my family belonged, and could see nothing true or compelling in what seemed to be the hollow rituals that most of the congregants hardly understood. Being Jewish in that milieu was a vaguely uncomfortable and perplexing experience, but not any obstacle to full immersion in the non-Jewish culture which surrounded us and swept us along with it.
What power took me out of the deep galut [exile] in which I lived –not just geographically, but intellectually, spiritually, and emotionally? Of course, the Torah promises that ultimately each and every Jew will be returned from exile and redeemed. But it was the Lubavitcher Rebbe who could not wait placidly for that redemption, who reached out to every Jew wherever she or he was found, to the furthest corner of the globe. Among other reasons, this was — I believe — because the Rebbe felt the pain of every Jew and of the Jewish people in every second of galut. And because the Rebbe also saw the sparks of the divine everywhere, waiting to be uncovered.
And so, eventually, the Rebbe reached me, and helped take me out of my exile too. In the late 1960s, when many of my generation rebelled in extreme ways, the Rebbe understood us; he sensed that our restlessness came from a spiritual discontent. Instead of chastising us, he sent us his best Chasidim to found Chabad Houses, to teach us, to live with us, to love us. I think that was what was really behind the development under the Rebbe's leadership of the extraordinary international network of Chabad institutions from Hong Kong to Paris to Katmandu. He felt our pain, he intuited our yearning. And he saw us not just as products of late twentieth-century America, but under the light of Jewish eternity. We were princes and prophets and sages; each Jew was royalty; each Jew was precious; each Jew was the emissary and reflection of G-d in the world.
Perhaps that is what is meant when Jewish sources speak of the soul of a tzaddik (righteous, holy person) as an all-inclusive soul: the Rebbe had a soul that intuited and was connected to the pain and joy and greatness of the soul of every Jew. And that was what he taught his Chasidim. He made of each Chasid a "rebbe," made each Chasid feel that responsibility and love for every Jew, made each Chasid reach out beyond him or herself, made each Jew sense her or his own greatness, her or his holiness. Those who were forgotten by everyone else, he remembered. He sent his emissaries to find and comfort and strengthen Jews in small forsaken towns from Alaska to Australia. To those who were abandoned by everyone else, he reached out — to drug addicts, prisoners, cult members.
I first encountered him through his emissaries at the Chabad House at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where I was attending graduate school. I then spent six months living in the Lubavitch center in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in close proximity to the Rebbe. By the time I came to Crown Heights in 1976, private audiences with the Rebbe had become very restricted. When he had been younger, he would meet with people all through the night. In my time, he was in his late seventies and would meet with people "only" until midnight or one in the morning. I never had an extended private audience with him, but I had many small encounters, and received answers to the letters I wrote, and comments about essays I published.
Everyone speaks about the Rebbe's eyes, the depth and penetration of his gaze. In his presence one felt immediately purer, truer, closer to G-d. One knew what mattered and what was important in life. When my mother came to visit me in Brooklyn, perturbed about my affiliation with this group of Chasidim, I took her to the alcove by the Rebbe's office on the day she was to leave. People who were going on a trip would stand there and as the Rebbe would emerge to pray the afternoon prayer with the yeshiva students, he would give blessings to the travelers. He turned and looked at my mother and said softly in Yiddish in his mellifluous voice: fohr gezunterheit ("travel in good health"). All of a sudden my mother was crying, tears streaming down her face. "I don't know why I am crying," she said. "I'm not sad." Something in his glance and voice had penetrated to the depths of her soul.
Another friend came with me to one of the Rebbe's special gatherings for women — a secular, radical feminist. She passed closely by the Rebbe, and tears, too, came into her eyes, from some, unknown depth. "He looks like what I imagine Moses must have looked like," she said.
When I first came to study in Crown Heights, I struggled very hard with the issues of Judaism and feminism. To work these conflicts out, I wrote an article called "The Jewish Woman — Three Steps Behind?" and gave it to the editor of one of the Lubavitch women's magazines called Di Yiddishe Heim ("The Jewish Home"), which was a modest Yiddish/English publication. Before the article was published, I had occasion to write to the Rebbe for a blessing for a sick uncle. The Rebbe would receive — and personally read and answer — around four hundred letters a day. And probably equally as many telephone calls with questions and requests for blessings would come in each day from around the world. How, I wondered, did he find time and energy for all this, especially amidst all his other responsibilities?
The Rebbe's secretary called me back to read me the response the Rebbe had written on my letter: the Rebbe promised to say a special prayer for my uncle, and then the Rebbe added the words, "I enjoyed your article in the forthcoming Yiddishe Heim" I was surprised; how did the Rebbe know about an article which had not even been published? The editor told me that the Rebbe had such a deep desire to support the efforts of Lubavitch women, that he personally took the time to read and make his own notes and corrections on all the manuscripts for this journal. I subsequently wrote several articles for the magazine, and as a favor, the editor gave me back my typescripts with the Rebbe's notes and corrections.
As an English professor who has taught college writing, I was amazed at the Rebbe's editing of my English. (He read and spoke many languages fluently.) He not only deepened the Torah concepts, he took out excess words, amended punctuation, spelling, and syntax, with careful attention to each detail. I wish I would give the same attention to correcting my own students' papers as he did to my manuscripts.
