It was an amazing lesson, and one I have shared many times. Besides the advice about not wasting money, with his sensitivity to the nuances of even a single word, the Rebbe was teaching how careful we ought to be to ensure that our words are not misunderstood in a harmful way.
In 1975, while still a yeshivah student, I was sent to Australia with a group of my peers on a two-year mission, to learn and teach in the Yeshivah Gedolah in Melbourne. Before we left, the Rebbe called us into his office to speak with us.
In addition to speaking about our task in Australia, the Rebbe also had some instructions for us before we got there. To get to Australia, we would be traveling around the world — through Europe, then Israel, Iran, Hong Kong — and although all these places were only stopovers, the fact that we were on a mission meant that each place had a special significance, and should be treated as such. To take one example, for every stopover on our itinerary, the Rebbe gave us some of the local currency to distribute to charity — except for Iran, which he didn’t have, so he gave American dollars instead.
This was still in the days of the Shah, before the takeover of the country by Ayatollah Khomeini, and for the Jews of Tehran it was a boom time. The local community had long led an insular, shtetl-like existence, but now that they were earning more money than they knew what to do with, they were starting to look around. Although they had been brought up with a very traditional Judaism, when we visited we learned that they were starting to drift away.
“Please ask the Lubavitcher Rebbe to send emissaries to Tehran!” the local rabbis — known as “chachamim” — asked us. “The people are going off track, so we need his shluchim.”
We sent a report to the Rebbe about each place we visited, and we included this request in our report on Tehran.
But Iran was one of the few places in the world where the Rebbe did not want to send shluchim. He sent several yeshivah students, for a few months at a time, but declined to send a couple to move there permanently. Once the revolution broke out in 1979, it was clear that Iran was indeed not a feasible place for Chabad shluchim.
Once in Australia, I would write an Aerogram letter home every Thursday night, and I asked my parents to hold onto them so that I would have a record of everything we were doing in Australia. When I came back home, after the two-year mission was over, I was shocked to find my letters with the Rebbe’s handwriting in the margins!
That was when my father revealed to me that whenever I had written something that he thought the Rebbe would be interested in hearing, he would mark the relevant part and pass on those pages to the Rebbe. He explained to me that the Rebbe preferred to get his information from indirect sources, rather than relying on official reports that might embellish things or gloss over certain faults.
One of the stories that my father showed the Rebbe was from the first Rosh Hashanah I spent in Australia. I was only used to being in 770 with the Rebbe on Rosh Hashanah, so it was with a heavy heart that I came to pray that day in the Chabad shul in Melbourne. When they began auctioning off the opportunities to be called up to the Torah, which I had never seen before, I thought that raising money like this was out of keeping with the spirit of Rosh Hashanah and I became withdrawn.
But when it came time for one of the winning bidders to go up to the Torah, he didn’t take the aliyah for himself, and instead pointed toward the back of the shul. There sat a simple and unassuming fellow who eked out a living as a barber. In his wildest dreams, he had never imagined that he would be honored to go up to the Torah on Rosh Hashanah, and at first he was convinced that there had been a mistake. But he was who the buyer had been bidding for all along.
I included this story in my letter home, and my father decided to show it to the Rebbe. When I came home, I discovered that the Rebbe had written: “Thank you, thank you, for the nachas.”
For the Rebbe, hearing about one Jew doing a favor for another Jew — that was nachas.
Rabbi Levy Wineberg has been serving as a Chabad emissary in Johannesburg, South Africa, since 1983. He was interviewed in December 2019.
