Story
A Melody of Love of a Higher Order
By Tzvi Freeman
“The place of the baal teshuvah in the World to Come,” our sages tell us, “is a place where the most righteous cannot enter.” The Zohar explains the reason why: “Because they are drawn to Him with a love of an entirely different order.”
Straddling the Vorskla River in Central Ukraine is the city of Poltava, birthplace of some of Russia’s most notable writers, artists, and thinkers. In the times of the Rabbi Shmuel of Lubavitch, (r. 1866–1882), a young chasid lived there who they called “the child prodigy of Poltava.” From a young age, he was known for spending many hours in profound contemplation of chassidut.
But it was a cold, detached contemplation. “He thought so deeply,” Rabbi Shmuel was purported to have remarked, “he forgot the One he was thinking about.”
His story is not often told, only gathered from the rumors whispered here and there. As much as he was enchanted with the intellectual beauty of Chabad, they say, he eventually fell into yet greater fascination with the explosion of ideas, arts, and high culture in mid‑19th century Russia. The tefillin, the tallit, and the holy books soon gave way to the works of Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy.
It was drama and theatre that grabbed him most, and he soon found his talent as a satirist and actor. This was the era of Alexander Ostrovsky, the father of Russian drama, leading into the age of Chekhov and Stanislavski, when Russia would give the world the foundational elements of acting that hold to this day. The young prodigy excelled at all this, given his chassidic background, his powerful, melodic voice, his keen sense of nuance, and access to the wellspring of profound emotion held within the human soul.
Eventually, he found himself performing on the grand stage before the aristocracy of St. Petersburg.
Then came the day when he was given a part most suited to him. It was a satirical role, a parody of an elderly Jew retiring at night, saying the bedtime Shema, reviewing his day, and crying over his sins. As any professional Russian actor of the time, the prodigy of Poltava spent many days rehearsing, immersing himself into the role.
The problem was that he knew this role all too well. Even more troubling was that he knew that he did not really know it all. And he knew this was the one thing he could not fake.
He knew what it meant to make a reckoning with oneself before retiring to bed. It meant to come face‑to‑face in brutal honesty with who you are and what you have done with your life. He had witnessed in his youth one night how his own father, imagining his son was fast asleep, sat for an hour and trembled in agonizing sobs as he reviewed his day.
But he knew that this was not his piece of cake. His was the world of the mind, not the heart—at least not his heart. The heart of his audience, the heart of those who loved and admired him, any heart other than his own.
The time of the premiere performance was nearing, and he was a true actor, an artist, not just one who plays a part, but one who lives it on stage. He had to ask himself, “But if I were such a chasid, if I did actually care, if I made such a self‑reckoning of where my life has taken me, what would that be like?”
He tried. He felt as a man about to perform surgery upon himself, and he could not lift the knife.
They say a true artist is one who performs better before an audience than in rehearsal. And it was indeed upon the stage of that premiere, that he was first able to break through. There, his childhood memories finally returned, the pain of leaving behind his beloved parents and friends surfaced, the futility of it all—for what had he gained? Where was this heading? Why had he been such a fool?
At first, his audience was enthralled. Eventually, however, it became apparent that this was not an act anymore. He was pulled off stage. The director, infuriated, ordered him to never return.
And he did not. He travelled from St. Petersburg to Lubavitch, poured out his soul to his rebbe, and pleaded for the guidance he needed to do a complete teshuvah.
Several years later, a certain rebbe from Poland visited Rabbi Shmuel. He mentioned that he had passed through Poltava on his way to Lubavitch and there had observed a young man in the ecstasy of his prayer, singing a melody he had never before heard.
“It was obvious to me,” he observed, “that this young man has been to the gates of hell and back.”
When asked how he could tell, he replied, “I could detect in his melody the ‘power of love of a different order.’”
To this day, we do not know the name of this prodigy, this actor, this baal teshuvah. Neither do we know any of the deep insights he surely must have taught. But we sing his melody. It is a melody of a different class. It has awakened many to teshuvah, with a power of a different order.
It is fueled by a soul that caught fire at the gates of hell.
