Rebbe: The Life and Teachings of Menachem M. Schneerson, the Most Influential Rabbi in Modern History

by Joseph Telushkin

Suddenly, the Rebbe started to meditate aloud, as he offered perhaps the clearest exposition he ever expressed on how he saw his role in Jewish life. “Reb Yehuda, let me tell you what I try to do. Imagine you’re looking at a candle. What you are really seeing is a mere lump of wax with a thread down its middle. So when do the thread and the wax become a candle? Or, in other words, when do they fulfill the purpose for which they were created? When you put a flame to the thread, then the wax and the thread become a candle.” The Rebbe’s

shifted into the chanting cadence in which the Talmud is studied: “The wax is the body and the wick [the thread] is the soul. Bring the flame of Torah to the soul; then the body will fulfill the purpose for which it was created. And that, Reb Yehuda, is what I try to do—to ignite the soul of every Jew with the fire of Torah, with the passion of our traditions, and with the sanctity of our heritage, so that each individual will fulfill the real purpose for which he or she was created.”

and sending him out with one final thought: “I have given you the match. Only you can light your own candle.”10

“Death ends neither a relationship nor a life.”18 Even after the body dies, “the relationship continues [because the soul is still alive. Therefore] we know that when we do good, we bring joy to our loved ones.”

Rebbe has bequeathed to the Jewish world, it is this one: to love one’s fellow.

commandments. The Gaon of Vilna, perhaps the most influential rabbinic figure in the non-Chasidic world during the last three centuries, thought that the study of Torah was Judaism’s most fundamental requirement.

Baal Shem Tov (1700–1760), the founder of Chasidism: “Just as we love ourselves despite the faults we know we have, so we should love our fellows despite the faults we see in them.”

of fear. Many people of extraordinary capabilities

held back by fear, fear of challenging others, fear of rejection, fear of being laughed at or of appearing to be naive or foolish.

Him).14 Underlying the Rebbe’s campaigns to teach Jews to observe commandments was his assumption that if a Jew enjoys studying Torah, putting on tefillin, lighting Shabbat candles, praying to God, and performing acts of charity and kindness, five of the activities most commonly promoted by Chabad, he or she will want to lead a Jewish life.15 But if a Jew does not experience Judaism on a meaningful basis, to ask him or her to perpetuate the Jewish people in essence to spite Hitler will not guarantee Jewish survival or a healthy Jewish psyche.

Even though a task will not be easy, each of us must do what we know we were put on earth to do.

Since time is finite, the only way we can carry out all that we need to do is to utilize whatever time we do have to its full capacity; this means giving our entire focus, our full concentration, to whatever we are doing at that moment. Therefore, while working on one task, “we must regard anything else we have done before and anything that we are planning to do later as totally insignificant.”

While you cannot tell them to do anything, you can teach them to do everything.”

saw America as perhaps the first society in which there was a hope of carrying out Judaism’s universal mission: not to make the whole world Jewish but to bring the world, starting with the United States, to a full awareness of One God, Who demands of human beings moral behavior.

“I learned from this episode that a person can totally disagree with another opinion without feeling that the other opinion has to be silenced. Confidence in your idea means that you don’t have to make other people wrong for you to be right. Unfortunately, there are many people, among them many religious people, who don’t

have this attitude.” Jacobson noted his appreciation that he learned this strong belief in tolerance and the need for a free press from the Rebbe and that he learned it at an early age.

father was a believer that you let someone speak and then argue the point. You know, we Jews are smart people; we don’t have to be afraid to hear another opinion.”

“What is a Rebbe good for?” When Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi was Hillel director at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, he brought a group of students to meet with the Rebbe in Brooklyn. At the conclusion of the Rebbe’s opening remarks, one of the students, intending to be blunt rather than disrespectful, asked him: “What’s a Rebbe good for?” To this day, Reb Zalman remembers his feelings at that moment: “I could have sunk through the floor in embarrassment.” However, the Rebbe didn’t seem offended at all and responded to the query directly: “I can’t speak about myself, but I can tell you about my own Rebbe [his father-in-law]. For me, my Rebbe was the geologist of the soul. You see, there are so many treasures in the earth. There is gold, there is silver, and there are diamonds. But if you don’t know where to dig, you’ll only find dirt and rocks and mud. The Rebbe can tell you where to dig, and what to dig for, but the digging you must do yourself.”23

Maimonides’s Mishneh Torah, one that he quoted often: “Throughout the year, a person should always regard himself as if he were equally balanced between innocence and guilt, and should regard the whole of humankind as if it were [also] equally balanced between innocence and guilt. Therefore, if he performs one sin, he tips his balance and that of the entire world to the side of guilt and brings destruction upon himself [and, by implication, to the world]. [On the other hand,] if he performs one mitzvah, he tips his balance and that of the entire world to the side of merit and brings deliverance and salvation to himself and others” (Laws of Repentance 3:4).7

students: “Science cannot contradict religion. Religion is true and science is true, therefore there cannot be any contradiction.”

In short, the more deeply you value what is yours, the more you will value the achievements of others.7

Again and again, he preached the practice of goodness, and ahavat Yisrael, the love of one’s fellow. One reason, I suspect, had to do with the fact that he came to leadership less than a decade after the Holocaust. If the Holocaust had shown the evil of which human beings are capable—underscored, as the Rebbe noted, by occurring in what was arguably the world’s most academically and culturally advanced country—the Rebbe wanted to remind human beings of the good of which they are capable. If

absence of God human life becomes devalued. And in the aftermath of the Nazis who had done everything to devalue Jewish life, he wanted all Jews to appreciate that every life has infinite value. And what could illustrate this more dramatically than his commitment to reach every Jew and every Jewish community in the world? Every town. Every village. No matter how remote. No matter how minuscule. The infinite value of every life. In all of Jewish history, nothing of this magnitude had ever been attempted before.

Holy Days, an in-depth look at the life of a Chasidic family, notes a comment she heard from Sheina Konigsberg (a pseudonym), a member of the Lubavitch community in Brooklyn: “These labels—Orthodox, Conservative, Reform—have no real meaning to us. As far as we’re concerned, a Jew is a Jew; nobody’s relationship to God can be conveyed by a label.”