Monthly Archives: July 2023

One of the questions Chabad educators and chasidic mentors grapple with is whether, and to what extent, we should be teaching young students the Chabad practice of extended, introspective prayer, while reflecting on the teachings of Chasidut. Prayer in this manner is understood to be a critical part of a person’s “inner service” – for developing a love and awe of G-d, for internalizing concepts like divine unity, and for refining one’s character.

Click here for full-color print version

There are those who claim that today’s students should be receiving precisely the same education as they did in the days of the Rebbe Rashab. After founding the Tomchei Temimim yeshivah network in 1897 as the fifth Chabad Rebbe, he trained the students there to devote themselves to the discipline of prayer, and even wrote a pair of treatises with detailed guidance on the matter. Others contend that declining spiritual standards mean that our generation is no longer suited to this kind of prayer. Furthermore, the Rebbe was not commonly known to focus on the subject and so they surmise that there is no need for chasidic educators to emphasize the art of prayer.

When I traveled to the Rebbe shortly before the High Holidays of 1966, this debate was raging. So I decided to put the question to the Rebbe.

That year, I had taught a group of gifted, teenaged students who excelled in nigleh, that is in their Talmudic and Halachic studies. Occasionally, I would also speak with them about prayer, and many of them indeed began to engage more deeply in the “service of the heart,” as it is called. In the note I wrote for the Rebbe before my audience, I explained my ambivalence: Some of the students who became more involved in this form of prayer were not sufficiently serious about it, and over time, their newfound interest waned. Meanwhile, they had also become somewhat distracted from their regular Talmudic studies, which meant that they were left without being fully invested in either discipline. And so I asked, “Maybe at their age, we shouldn’t be speaking with them about prayer?” (more…)

My parents, Judith and Howard Alter, met in Israel; my mother a survivor of the Holocaust from Czechoslovakia and my father an American. They had three children in America but then my father was diagnosed with malignant melanoma. He had surgery in the summer of 1971, and they thought he was cured, but the next summer it came back and didn’t go away. He died on December 15th, which was the 10th of Tevet, 1972, at the age of forty-seven. My mother was thirty-six, and I, the oldest of three, was sixteen.

Click here for full-color print version

We lived in Far Rockaway, and I attended the Yeshivah of Flatbush. Though my family had no significant connection with Lubavitch, before my father died, he had gotten it into his head that he wanted to meet the Lubavitcher Rebbe to get a blessing from him. It was really important to him, and so they tried calling the Rebbe’s office and using some other channels of people they knew to make the connection. But, the message came back that the Rebbe was not able to have a private audience with my father, and he would send someone over to our house instead.

This dismayed my mother very much, and it still bothers her to this day. Nevertheless, whatever the reason, my dad did not end up meeting the Rebbe.

The man sent by the Rebbe came over to check the mezuzahs of our house, and he also asked my mother whether she would keep the laws of family purity. She had not been keeping them, and she began to at that point.

The timing of this story worked out well because I must have learned something about mikveh at school at around that time and I came home one day and asked my mother whether she went to mikveh.

“Yes, I do,” she was able to honestly answer. (more…)

I moved to Toronto as a Chabad emissary in 1975. Beginning years before that, the Chabad community there had been bringing groups of people on annual trips to New York to visit the Rebbe. So about a week before I took up my position there, Rabbi Zalman Aaron Grossbaum – who had been running Chabad activities in Toronto for about a year – brought a large group to Crown Heights. The visitors enjoyed an entire program, and the highlight was a farbrengen – a chasidic gathering led by the Rebbe – which put the group on a real high.

Click here for full-color print version

After Rabbi Grossbaum came back to Toronto and sent the Rebbe a report about this inspirational trip, he got a call from the Rebbe’s secretary. In response to the report, the Rebbe had written a note: “What were the practical results?” He wanted to know what kind of lasting impact the trip would leave on its participants. So Rabbi Grossbaum called each and every one of them for feedback, and found that many of them had been motivated to take on various aspects of Jewish life, which he was then able to report back to the Rebbe.

Over time we succeeded in establishing a beautiful community in Toronto, with many individuals who became close to Judaism and to Chabad in particular. By the early 1980s, the Rebbe no longer gave private audiences, and had not yet started receiving individuals in person for the weekly “Sunday dollars.” So, for the people who came on these trips, the one opportunity they did have to connect with the Rebbe was at the farbrengens. They were able to see the Rebbe and say l’chaim with him, but since it was in a public setting, they did not always feel that the Rebbe was paying any special attention to them.

One year, I brought a group to attend a farbrengen held on Shabbat. On the following Sunday morning, as we prepared to depart, I brought the participants to the foyer at the front of 770, in the hopes of receiving a blessing from the Rebbe before leaving. As we waited, the Rebbe’s car pulled up and he entered the front hallway. He nodded at us, gave us a brief blessing, and then went into his office. (more…)

As a yeshivah student of marriageable age, I decided to consult with the Rebbe. The next time I had an audience with him, during a visit from Montreal in 1958, I presented a few matchmakers’ suggestions I had received. Surprisingly, however, the Rebbe didn’t approve of any of them. Instead, he turned to me with a suggestion of his own.

Click here for full-color print version

I thought he was about to present the name of a prospective partner for me. Instead he began speaking to me about two works by the Alter Rebbe – his Shulchan Aruch, Code of Jewish Law, and Likkutei Torah, a collection of chasidic discourses. Both of these works needed some revisions, the Rebbe explained: They had mistakes, certain sections of the Shulchan Aruch had been deleted by Russian censors, and others were missing source notes. “My suggestion,” he concluded, “is that you undertake to do this work.”

“I’ll be very happy to do it,” I replied.

“And which would you like to do first?”

In an audience the year before, the Rebbe had instructed me to study Likkutei Torah five times, and thank G-d I had managed to learn it very thoroughly. “I think I already know Likkutei Torah a little,” I told the Rebbe, “so I would prefer to choose Shulchan Aruch.”

The Rebbe agreed, and I went back to Montreal to work. For every law the Alter Rebbe wrote, I would write what the sources of that law were, from the Talmud down through the later Halachic authorities like Maimonides, the original Code of Jewish Law, the Magen Avraham, etc. I did this for a few chapters, and then came back to the Rebbe to see if he approved of the way I was doing it. (more…)