Bottled Up Emotions
Rabbi Nechemia Vogel
My father, Reb Nosson Vogel, had connected with Chabad chasidim in London in the early 60s, but it was when he traveled to visit the Lubavitcher Rebbe in 1965 that he was totally captivated by him, and became a chasid. My father subsequently founded the Lubavitch Boys’ Grammar School in London, which eventually morphed into today’s Yeshivah Gedolah.
When I was eleven, in 1966, my father took my older brother and me to New York for the holiday of Sukkot to meet the Rebbe. For my father, the yardstick to measure how much we wanted to go to the Rebbe was whether we would come up with our own money for the ticket — and we did.
During our private audience with the Rebbe, my father told the Rebbe that our trip had been scheduled during our school break so that it wouldn’t come at the expense of learning Torah, which gave the Rebbe great satisfaction. Then, when my father mentioned that we had paid for our own tickets, the Rebbe smiled broadly and opened the drawer of his desk to give us each a fifty-dollar note. “I want to participate in paying for your trip,” he told us.
My second audience was in 1971, on my own, as a sixteen-year-old yeshivah student. Beforehand, I prepared a note with some questions for the Rebbe. One thing on my mind was my younger sister Hensha (Eliane) who was nine years younger than me. She was profoundly autistic. As an older brother, I felt that there was something I ought to be doing for her, at least spiritually. “What can I do to help my sister?” I wrote to the Rebbe.
“You are a yeshivah student,” the Rebbe answered after reading my note. “Go deep into your studies of the Talmud and Chasidut. By learning Torah, and by delving deep into it, you will reach the depth of your sister.”
The Rebbe was pointing out that my sister had a depth to her, something more than meets the eye. I could connect to that depth in her, and have a meaningful effect on her, but the way for me to access this depth was through studying Torah.
The answer took me by surprise. I was hoping for something miraculous, expecting the Rebbe to suggest reciting special Psalms in her merit, or to give me some out-of-the-box instructions. In order to accomplish something unusual, surely I needed to do something unusual.
Instead, I understood that the Rebbe was really telling me: You are a yeshivah student and your purpose in life right now is to study Torah. You don’t need to go outside of your core mission in order to help your sister. To this day, I see this as a general lesson in life. Anything we need to accomplish, even in extraordinary circumstances, can be accomplished in the context of our life mission — or shlichut, in Hebrew.
At the same time, I was never to forget my responsibility to my sister. When I came back to the Rebbe a year later and didn’t mention Hensha in the note I handed to him, he immediately commented, “You didn’t write anything about your sister! How is she?”
