On the day of the audience, as is customary, I fasted and immersed in the mikveh before the morning prayers, and again that evening. That night, when the appointed time arrived, I entered the Rebbe’s room.
The Rebbe asked me to please hand him a letter from the yeshivah faculty. Every student was supposed to bring a sealed envelope with a letter from his yeshivah testifying to his academic and spiritual progress as they saw it. I was caught off-guard, as I hadn’t planned on speaking to the Rebbe, but I started to mumble an answer — one of my teachers had planned on giving me the letter in New York, and I had forgotten to ask for it — and the Rebbe let it go.
The Rebbe then read the note I had handed him, and looked over at the pile of letters on his desk. My letter was supposed to be at the top of the pile. He took the wad and thumbed through it like a deck of cards, but it wasn’t there. Meanwhile, one of the secretaries began opening the door — the audience was already inordinately long for a boy of my age.
“At any rate,” the Rebbe started, looking up at me. He then referenced my letter from memory, including the specific illustration I had spelled out, and responded to my questions with instructions and blessing for success.
The audience seemed to be over so I began to reverentially back out of the room. But the Rebbe looked up at me again, and added with a warmth that was palpable, “May Hashem fulfill all your heart’s desires for the good.” I immediately sensed that the Rebbe was referring to the requests for blessings for each of my family members that I had originally intended to submit, but did not.
My second private audience was in 1980, once I was engaged. It was a beautiful experience, in which the Rebbe blessed me and my wife-to-be to have a home that radiates the light of Torah. Some time after our wedding, I mentioned to my wife that I had found something a little odd.
The Rebbe began the audience by telling us, “Since you both speak Yiddish, I will talk to you in Yiddish.” I wondered why the Rebbe had said that; Yiddish was my first language, and the school my wife had attended in Montreal taught in Yiddish. I compared notes with some friends, and the Rebbe hadn’t opened with this introduction for them.
It was then that my wife revealed something to me. “Before our audience,” she said, “I had been afraid the Rebbe would ask me a question.” Her Yiddish wasn’t as good as her English, and so she was worried that she wouldn’t answer perfectly and would be embarrassed. She became preoccupied with this fear, and it threatened to overshadow the joy and excitement that would normally accompany one about to receive the Rebbe’s blessing for one’s marriage and future life.
But then, she said, we came in and the Rebbe said those words: Since you both speak Yiddish, I’ll speak in Yiddish. Just like that, the fear drained away from her, and she was able to melt into the moment.
Some people might chalk up these stories to the Rebbe being a seer, a mind reader, but it is much deeper than that. For the Rebbe, the Jewish people are all one great spiritual body. The heart or mind of that body is able to feel and to remember what is important to a young boy visiting him in the middle of the night. And he could feel the tension of that girl, and then say the right words to relax her in the most natural way. That’s a Rebbe. If it’s important to you, if you struggle with it, then the Rebbe feels it too.
Rabbi Moishe New is the rabbi of the Montreal Torah Center Bais Menachem Chabad Lubavitch. He and his wife Nechama have been serving as Chabad emissaries since 1981. He was interviewed in August 2023.
