THE BARBER’S SURPRISE
RABBI LEVY WINEBERG
My Bar Mitzvah was on Shabbat, at the very beginning of 1967, with the celebration set to be held in a local Crown Heights shul the night after Shabbat. On the Thursday night before, I went with my parents for an audience with the Rebbe.
The first thing that struck me during the audience was the respect the Rebbe gave me when he asked: “What have you accepted upon yourself to learn and say over at your Bar Mitzvah?”
I told the Rebbe about the pilpul and the ma’amar — the Talmudic discussion and the chasidic discourse — that I had been preparing to deliver. The Rebbe tested me on both, and then he proceeded to give a blessing to my parents and to myself.
But I was taken aback at the way he had put the question: What did you accept upon yourself? I had simply studied the material that my father gave me to study! The way the Rebbe phrased the question made it as though my speech was my own doing. It had the effect of bolstering the self-esteem of a young Bar Mitzvah boy.
Now in those days, every Motzaei Shabbat, my father would teach a half-hour class live on the radio. The class had two segments: fifteen minutes dedicated to the study of Ta n y a, the seminal work of Chabad philosophy, and fifteen minutes reviewing the Rebbe’s latest Torah teachings. Although the Tanya segment could be prerecorded, since the second segment came from the Rebbe’s most recent talks, it had to be broadcast live. And since my Bar Mitzvah was being celebrated in Crown Heights, it was impossible to get to the radio station in Midtown Manhattan and back in time. Instead, together with the studio technician, he came up with what was, at the time, a pioneering solution. He would link up the radio station to the location of the Bar Mitzvah and broadcast directly from there.
Since the Rebbe also paid for a portion of the expenses of the radio broadcast personally, he was literally my father’s partner in the show. And so, in addition to relating this plan, my father also asked the Rebbe during the audience whether he could mention, in the broadcast, that the class was being delivered “from the hall where we are celebrating the Bar Mitzvah of my son Levy.”
The Rebbe listened to all this intently, his head slightly tilted as he took in every word. “It is all good,” he said at the end, “but don’t use the word ‘hall.’”
In general, the Rebbe was against people splurging on Bar Mitzvahs, and even on weddings. Hearing that my Bar Mitzvah was being held in a “hall,” might give someone the impression that we were at the Waldorf Astoria, rather than the hall at Young Israel of Eastern Parkway. So the Rebbe was concerned that this might normalize spending a lot of money on a Bar Mitzvah. Quoting the Talmudic dictum, he added: “The Torah is sparing with the money of Jewish people.”
continued on reverse
[email protected] | myencounterblog.com | © Copyright, Jewish Educational Media, 2024 ערב שבת פרשת שלח, כ׳׳ב סיון, תשפ״ד Erev Shabbat Parshat Shelach, June 28, 2024 ISSUE
