The Road to Crown Heights

The Rebbe looks at the bleachers from his chair, eyeing us long distance. I’m holding sweet Kiddush wine in a paper cup, the kind they give you at the dentist’s to rinse out your mouth. I’m supposed to wait until the Rebbe looks at me, then say “L’chaim” (“To life”) and drink the wine. But I can’t tell whether the Rebbe  is looking at me. Thousands of other eyes parked inside 770, headquarters of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, compete with mine to hold the Rebbe’s gaze.

The Rebbe has resumed speaking. Apparently, he’s given up hope of making eye contact with me. I try to prepare myself for another hour of uninterrupted talk in Yiddish, a language I don’t understand, with the exception of  a few words, such as “meshugana,” “schlep” and “oy,” none of which, I assume, figure very prominently in the Rebbe’s Torah talks.

As I peer at the Rebbe, my mind wanders. The Rebbe is wearing a wide-brimmed fedora hat made by an Italian company called “Borsalino.” He wears it with the brim bent down on the sides starting at about the ears and curving down above the eyes like an awning. Most Hasidic men in 770 shape their Borsalinos as the Rebbe does. Some hats, however, have a more straight-out-of-the-box look. I wonder what moves some people to strike out on their own and disregard the Rebbe’s shaped-hat example. Is it rebelliousness, individualism, laziness?

Most of my fellow students at Yeshiva Tiferes Bachurim in Morristown, NJ, for newcomers to Orthodox Judaism, don’t wear such expensive hats, which can only be acquired from the exclusive Borsalino hat dealer in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. I got my hat from the discount hat store up the street from 770. Hey, it’s a hat.

The long farbrengen (gathering) comes to an end. The Rebbe will now give dollar bills to all who man Mitzvah Tanks – mobile Jewish outreach centers – to hand out to those in attendance. The Rebbe distributes dollars to encourage the giving of tzedakah, charity. Typically, a Hasid would keep the dollar the Rebbe gave him and give two of his own to tzedakah.

Then someone in the bleachers makes the surreal announcement that the Rebbe wants to give dollars to the Morristown students to distribute. I walk along the edge of the stage toward the Rebbe, hundreds of eyes on me and my hat.

The Rebbe hands me a stack of fresh dollar bills. As soon as I exit the stage, a 770 student says to me, “Give me the one on the top and the one on the bottom.” I comply. Later one of my Morristown fellows explains to me that the 770 student wanted the dollars the Rebbe had touched, leaving me and those to whom I handed out dollars with the untouched, less holy bills. Another lesson learned.

Crown Heights was obsessed with the Rebbe. It was 1987. The Rebbe had been the leader of Chabad-Lubavitch since 1951, which, in the meantime, had grown into a worldwide movement. The Rebbe was the reason we drove in from Morristown once a month when he would lead an approximately three-hour farbrengen. But some of us had not yet developed a full appreciation of the Rebbe, and other pursuits demanded our attention. One of those was lunch.

On Shabbat, most Crown Heights inhabitants would eat a meagre lunch, or no lunch at all, following the morning prayer service, which ended at 12:45, then prepare their place in 770 for the 1:30 farbrengen. Fortunately, my favorite families – one of the Morristown students would set us up with families in Crown Heights for Shabbat meals – ate a full lunch before heading to the farbrengen.

Shmuel Dechter, a Morristown alumnus and the head of my most frequently visited family, was orderly and practical. So it wasn’t hard to imagine that Shmuel wouldn’t be found among those who ran home like maniacs for semi-lunch then returned in time for the start of the farbrengen.

I would arrive at the Dechter’s door on Mongomery Street after the morning prayer service, where Shmuel would greet me with his vaguely Long Island accent. A Long Beach football player and surfer turned United Lubavitcher Yeshiva fourth grade Bible and Talmud teacher, Shmuel would be wearing his black kapote (Think Prince Albert coat draped over the frame of a committed Jew.) and black hat – a sensible Roche, much nicer than a Crown Heights discount hat but not as pricey as a Borsalino.

In the dining room of the apartment the Dechters rented from the owner of the pharmacy around the corner, Shabbat lunch waited: hot matzoh ball soup; huge, Conehead-size bowls of potato salad and other delectables; and a sticky, brown cholent (Imagine stew on steroids.). D’vora Leah, Shmuel’s wife and the creator of that afternoon’s feast, welcomed me, while the Dechter’s three attractive little children greeted me with disinterest.

Then it would be time for the actual eating. Eating, a Shabbos ritual, has its own eating rituals. Between the fish and meat courses, for instance, Shmuel would make sure everyone’s palate was cleansed with a little vodka, declaring “L’chaim” to the men at the table, who would answer the same, then down their shot glasses. But that left, somewhere in Crown Heights, a Lubavitcher lacking a l’chaim, someone whose knowhow and creativity made an essential contribution to the spirit and delight of our Shabbos. That is why, after the preliminary l’chaim, Shmuel would call to the kitchen: “L’chaim, D’vora Leah!”

The next time the yeshiva traveled to Crown Heights for Shabbat, a month later, I visited a Lubavitcher family I hadn’t dined with before, the Lapines. Chaim Dovid Lapine was born and raised in Texas, but his family moved to my hometown of Kansas City when he was in junior high school.

            Pessa Leah LaPine, Dovid’s wife, joined the Kansas Citians at the dinner table. She hailed from a small Texas town, El Campo, and spoke with a disarming drawl that softened her forthright opinions about Crown Heights. She was clearly frustrated with the community schools her children attended, cautioning, “They come out illiterate in three languages!”

            Her alarm about a dangerous situation in her neighborhood roused her to action. She told us that she kept seeing the same children on her block playing in the street by themselves. The children would be alone for hours. Finally, she called the city’s Child Welfare Administration to come and investigate, which infuriated the parents. She said, in her defense, that given the parent’s neglect, calling the CWA was the least she could have done. Pessa Leah didn’t accept the New York, Big City status quo: She resisted. Pessa Leah was spunky.

Despite the lure of the Dechter’s and Lapine’s Shabbat tables, over time I made seeing the Rebbe my priority. Learning his discourses in the yeshiva, hearing miracle stories about him and seeing his majesty up close convinced me that I could make better use of the limited Shabbat hours in congregation with him and the Hasidim, which required skipping Shabbat lunch with a family.

And then I learned a startling secret: The Rebbe held farbrengens every Shabbat, not just once a  month. Equipped with this knowledge, some of the older and more dedicated Morristown students had been making the trip to Crown Heights each week. I felt a lure to join this band of mysterious travelers, and I did.

 Shabbat suddenly became a 770 thing. I entered the synagogue at 8:30 am and didn’t see sky until sometime after 4:30 when the farbrengen was over.

As the last mourner’s prayer of the Shabbat morning service in 770 ended, I slipped away to the 770 kitchen, toward the front of the synagogue, to eat something before the three-hour farbrengen began. It was now 12:45, 45 minutes to farbrengen. The 770 stewards provided some minimal nourishment for the morning-straight-to-farbrengen crowd. I loitered near the kitchen, the door of which was almost always shut, hoping that a bowl of D’vora Leah Dechter’s potato salad would magically appear. I eyed the tall, bulging, brown paper bags lined up against the wall outside the kitchen, grease spots running up and down. The bags contained kichlach. A kichel, a humble “pastry,” is pretty tasteless in its “deluxe” version; here, plain and sugarless, it was little more than a mouthguard.

            The real prize for the pre-farbrengen crowd was the cholent, which was doled out from the kitchen to a hungry line. Meatless with some potatoes and beans, the 770 cholent featured light brown chunks of something indefinable floating in it. Fortunately, those brown blobs were edible and tasty.

The Rebbe enters the shul from his office on the floor above at approximately 1:30 and walks swiftly to his red velvet upholstered chair on the stage.

“… Ahmain!” The Hasidim respond resoundingly to the Rebbe’s blessing concluding his first discourse. The assembled begin singing: “Eimosai ko-osi mar l'ch'sheyofutzu mayonoshecho chutzo …” (“When will the Messiah come?” [The Messiah responded:] “When your wells of Torah will overflow to the outside ...”)

The Rebbe, dressed in silk kapota and Borsalino, presides over the gathering from behind a long, covered table. Mostly older Hasidim, with their white beards and emotionless faces, sit on the stage to the Rebbe’s right and left and behind him. On the floor below the stage, in rows of wooden benches, sit the married men. On the bleachers, farthest from the stage, in three sections encompassing the Rebbe, we stand, shoulder to shoulder, the students and guests. The two women’s sections, behind tinted glass, constitute the balcony, in front of and in back of the Rebbe.

Kapotas, reserved for married Hasidim, separate the men from the boys, who wear navy blue or dark gray suits. Beards hang like stalactites from most chins, in different shapes, sizes and stages of development.

While the Hasidim sing, the Rebbe once again makes l’chaim by eye contact, moving his head and shoulders as he looks around the room, me included – well, I’m 90 percent sure he was looking at me.

All the while, the Rebbe keeps tabs on the loud singing. Without a pause from making l’chaims, the 86-year-old Rebbe swings his right arm, causing the Hasidim to sing louder, like a man turning up the volume on a radio.

The song comes around to the beginning: “Eimosai ko-osi mar l'ch'sheyofutzu mayonoshecho chutzo.” The words we sing refer to a letter the Baal Shem Tov, the originator of Hasidism, wrote describing his ascent to Moshiach’s chamber in Heaven. There he asks Moshiach when he will come. Moshiach answers: when your (the Baal Shen Tov’s) esoteric wisdom will spread out far and wide – the objective of every Chabad House from Toledo to Taipei.

The Rebbe, sitting squarely in his chair, turns his full attention to the singing. He claps; his hands blur. The song whips around louder and faster: “Eimosai ko-osi mar l'ch'sheyofutzu mayonoshecho chutzo …”

Then, unexpectedly, the Rebbe bolts from his chair and stands before us, singing and clapping with great joy and fury. My eyes take in the Rebbe, who looks like he’s expanding upward. Everyone clamors to see and be with the Rebbe. Those sitting stand. Those standing climb on tables. Everywhere Hasidim bounce on their toes: on bleachers; benches; tables; and the floor, all eyes fixed on the Rebbe.

And then it’s over. The Rebbe sits down again. 770 decompresses.

After the farbrengen I walked over to “1414,” the dining hall at 1414 President St., up the street from 770, where mostly students with nowhere else to go late Shabbat afternoon went to dine.

I sat down with some Morristown guys. Surveying the available food, I asked about the pan of cholent in the kitchen and was told it had been there since last night.

“Don’t eat it,” someone said.

“Is it spoiled?” I asked.

“Rats,” came the reply.

Right then, as if to drive home the point, a fat rat appeared on the window sill.

The baked chicken, which didn’t merit a special warning, was pretty good – greasy, but I liked it that way.

I returned to Morristown with some of the mystery travelers following the end of Shabbat. We rolled onto the yeshiva driveway. It looked different. I had begun to see it objectively, almost more as an outsider than as a participant. In a way, it had become secondary to Crown Heights. I had been studying in Morristown for two-and-a-half years. Certain things, such as ditching Rabbi Greenberg’s Talmud class every morning, told me it might be time to say, “Zei g’zunt” (“Be in good health.”).

I moved to Crown Heights in the spring of 1989. I took up residence in one of the apartments the yeshiva rented in 701 Empire Boulevard for its monthly stays. Feeling lonely in Crown Heights where I hardly knew anyone, it was comforting to see my Morristown friends the last Shabbat of every month.

Now that I lived in Crown Heights, seeing the Rebbe became a more frequent, more familiar occurrence. In the Dollar Line, though, he wouldn’t look at me as he handed me the dollar, focusing, instead, on the next person in line. I wanted to connect with the Rebbe, but he apparently didn’t feel the same about me. Then suddenly, on Shavuot, the holiday commemorating the giving of the Torah, the Rebbe acknowledged me, as G-d had recognized the Jewish people at Mt. Sinai.

After the major holidays, the Rebbe would give a little wine for a blessing to everyone in attendance, continuing a tradition dating back to the first Lubavitcher Rebbe in 1786. Alternating between two lines, the Rebbe, standing, would pour wine from his Kiddush cup into the standard 770 paper cups, then replenish his Kiddush cup from a big pitcher.  The spectators, mostly yeshiva students, would accompany the wine distribution with singing, which the Rebbe would frequently exhort with a swing of his arm. This took hours.

But to earn our wine, we first had to go on a little trip. As the Rebbe’s representatives, we would hike on Simchat Torah, Passover and Shavuot to another Jewish community in Brooklyn – or, for the ambitious and fit, to a community in Queens, Manhattan or the Bronx – to impart some Chabad philosophy and holiday cheer. On the return trip that Shavuot, a downpour tested my spirits. It rained so hard that the ink in my cheap hat began to leak and roll down my face. While I walked on, I mentally reviewed the Rebbe’s discourse that had been given out in 770 in honor of Shavuot. It was a particularly difficult one, and, as rain and hat dye fell, I struggled to understand it.

            I line up to receive wine from the Rebbe, my hat, lower pantlegs and socks still wet. As he pours a bit of wine into my cup, the Rebbe looks at me. I wonder, is the Rebbe acknowledging my review of his discourse in the rain? He must be, I think, as I head down the hill to 701 Empire.

Most of the guys were in the kitchen studying when I got back. Each of us had transferred  our wine from paper cups to little, round, transparent plastic bottles about the size of a thimble. The objective was to mix the wine given by the Rebbe from his Kiddush cup with regular Shabbat Kiddush wine to create “Rebbe Wine.” We all had our little bottles stored in the refrigerator, somehow marked to distinguish one from the other.

Chaim Reichman pulled his head from the fridge and, holding my thimbleful of wine, remarked in wonderment, “Look how much wine the Rebbe gave Moshe!” It was the first time I had noticed.

Chaim, from Philadelphia, was a really intelligent guy, a graduate of Carnegie Mellon in physics.  He was one of the sharpest students in Morristown; more significantly, he took to heart the teachings and living example of the Rebbe. Chaim couldn’t understand why the Rebbe gave me more wine than he gave him.

“The Rebbe is encouraging Moshe to come closer to the Torah,” suggested another student.

I accepted the rather patronizing explanation in silence. The Rebbe, I assured myself, knew the real reason for my “Rebbe Wine” bonanza.

The Rebbe seemed to know a lot about me. He acknowledged me when I did well, expressed displeasure when I did poorly. Then there was the time I thought I had let G-d down; but the Rebbe, apparently seeing things differently, indicated that I was still in the ball game. That assessment capped a week in which he endorsed my religious service, then I went off the reservation.

The week began when an old friend came to visit. Steve Devorah, who grew up in Kansas City and now lived in Orthodox Baltimore, was in town to explore a prospective marriage match. He stayed with me in my new basement apartment, which I shared with a fellow Lubavitcher newbie from Worcester, Mass., splitting the rent of $400.  I took Steve to my favorite Shabbos hosts and to prayer and the farbrengen in 770.  He left me Sunday morning to meet his date at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan.

That Sunday happened to be Rosh Chodesh Elul, the first day of an important month of reflection and action, preceding the High Holy Days. Inspired, and with nothing else to do, I studied Chumash, The Five Books of Moses, there in the apartment. My study of the rational  part of the Torah, usually a struggle to stay awake, that morning filled me with joy and excitement. That evening, after Steve returned to Baltimore, I joined yet another line to receive a dollar from the Rebbe. The Rebbe, acknowledging me with a smile, seemed pleased with my learning revival. I was, I must admit, pleased with myself.

The new spirit stuck with me as the week proceeded. I had plans to see Paul Simon perform for free in Central Park on Thursday. As the day approached, I had misgivings about going to the concert and potentially tarnishing the new feeling. I visited Yashaya Friedman, a recently married friend. I brought Yashaya and his wife, Emunah, some chocolate-covered almonds from the local candy store and that day’s Newsday, which I re-named “Noseday,” to their delight. The Friedmans didn’t know it, but as I visited, I held final arguments in my mind as to whether I would attend the Simon concert. In the end, a classic Talmudic question won the day: How could I miss seeing Paul Simon?

As I 1entered Central Park, I realized that I wasn’t going to get close enough to actually see Paul Simon. His music, which reached my ears weekly, sounded like a band playing in someone’s backyard 10 blocks away.

As I strained to hear a song from Graceland, somebody backed into me and called out dramatically, “Hey, you got ink all over me!” Another person nudged me on my right side. They both disappeared. I grabbed my right, front pocket. My wallet was gone.

I left Central Park and took the subway back to Crown Heights. As I rode the Four Train, my eyes alighted on a pretty girl, a Torah offense. I was really angry with myself now. Why did I go to the concert? I asked myself in vain.

The next night is Shabbat. The evening service ends. The Rebbe looks out from the platform on which he prays and, as Moses before his flock, eyes a sea of Jews. The sea splits as it always does, leaving a path for the Rebbe.

It seemed that the Rebbe always looked at just one person as he made his way through the prayer hall Friday night. It was like some sort of raffle prize without tickets. And it always went to the deserving, such as a former Morristown student I knew, a successful restauranter, generous giver of charity, especially to Chabad, and careful observer of the Mitzvot. He had won the Friday night raffle more than once.

 I stand on one side of the path, not being able to fully banish the thought that I squandered something good I had been given. Then the Rebbe does the last thing I expect him to: he looks at me.

One night the following spring the Rebbe looked at all of us – straight in the eye. I had returned to Crown Heights with an arranged date from Manhattan’s South Street Seaport. As the driver pulled up to Machon Chana seminary to let her off, we saw a number of seminarians on the porch reading Psalms, an activity often reserved for an emergency. We were both alarmed something had happened to the Rebbe. The truth, less dreadful that we imagined, yet somehow more shocking, would reveal itself to us in dozens of renditions, retellings and video subtitles in years to come.

While my date and I were away from Crown Heights, talking seaside over a Coke and a beer, the Rebbe made the shocking statement that he had done all that he could to bring Moshiach and was now handing the job to us. The announcement came at the end of a year-and-a-half in which the Rebbe persistently spoke of Moshiach: his coming; perceiving him; fulfillment of prophecy about his arrival; how current world events heralded his coming. And now he was telling us it was all for naught: The Jewish Nation was still in Exile.

 

 

****

 

            It was the end of winter, the joyful month of Adar, 1992, the month when the Jews, led by Esther and Mordechai, thwarted the evil Haman and his plot to destroy the Jewish people. Actually, it was the first of two Adars, that being a leap year when an extra month is inserted into the calendar to make up the difference between the lunar and solar cycles. The Rebbe had earlier submitted that any evil should be nullified within the 60 days of the two Adars – as one part of an unkosher substance is nullified when it is mixed into 60 parts of a kosher substance. I was coming home from work and stopped off at 770 for the evening prayer service.

After the service, the Rebbe gives out dollars. I’m in a line comprised of yeshiva students and Crown Heights residents. I reach the Rebbe, who rests his arms on a lectern, as his secretary, Rabbi Leibel Groner, slides a constant supply of dollars across the lectern to the Rebbe to keep pace with the line. He hands me a dollar. I snatch it. And then he gives me an unusual look. I can’t place it at first. It’s a look of … sympathy.

I left 770. Outside I overheard people talking about a local tragedy. A Lubavitcher woman had been killed in Crown Heights earlier in the day. The community was marching to the local 71^st police precinct to demand better police protection, then from the police precinct to the house of the victim.

I caught up with the marchers at the precinct station building and walked with them to the house. I saw the murder as a public affair. Angry at this attack on my community, I marched dutifully with my brothers. But then I began picking up tidbits of conversation around me about the murder. I inferred the victim’s identity. I began to beg G-d: “Please, don’t let it be her. Not her. Please, don’t let it be true.” We turned on Lefferts Ave. And then we stopped at the Lapine’s house. Pessa Leah had been murdered by an intruder.

They said she had resisted her assailant, a person with a history of assaulting Hasidic women. She knew, they said, she would have become forbidden to her husband, a Kohen, if she had not resisted.

The next day I returned home from the burial. I sat down on the thin carpet in the basement  I cried for my friend, Pessa Leah Lapine, a Jewish girl from Texas, who fought falsehood and ugliness with honesty, humor and spunk.

At the end of the seven-day Shiva morning period the Rebbe speaks about the death of Pessa Leah. Lapine. No one, the Rebbe included, can comprehend what happened, he says, why G-d let this happen. This death was made even more incomprehensible by the fact that the victim was a young woman, a mother of young children who need and long for their mother.

Pessa Leah publicly sanctified G-d’s name with her death, the Rebbe says, an attainment Yoseph Caro sought but could not achieve. Instead he wrote the Code of Jewish Law, a monumental achievement but not as great as sanctifying G-d’s name.

“The Jewish people have found themselves in Exile,” the Rebbe says, “already for more than 1,900 years, and Moshiach has still not come … We have already completed all of the service of the Period of Exile and all of the Torah initiatives … and still the Redemption hasn’t come in actuality! … And on top of that we add a terrible occurrence: a Jewish woman with small children must give her life to sanctify G-d’s name!”

A little over three weeks later, I was participating in a night learning program in a neighborhood synagogue, headed by Rabbi Mottel Shusterman. To the general  population of Crown Heights, Rabbi Shusterman was known as the Rebbe’s Torah reader for almost 38 years. To the Chabad newcomers participating in the night class, Rabbi Shusterman – whether teaching a Torah law in his thick Yiddish accent or describing what it was like trying to stay ahead of the Communists in Stalinist Soviet Union as part of the Lubavitcher underground – was like a zaide (grandfather).

Someone walked into the shul with a bulletin: The Rebbe had fallen at the Queens gravesite of his predecessor, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn.

“This is not good,” Rabbi Shusterman said, sounding deeply worried.

One of the students pointed out the report was that the Rebbe had only fallen.

“This is not good,” Rabbi Shusterman repeated, shaking his head.

The next day we found out what really happened: The Rebbe had suffered a stroke.

Cown Heights would spend the next two years waiting to see the Rebbe, seeing the Rebbe, then waiting for the next chance to see the Rebbe. The stroke rendered the Rebbe speechless. So, as he had declared a year earlier, now it was up to us. Bereft of the Rebbe’s instruction, Hasidim looked to the Rebbe’s published statements, especially those of the past two years regarding Moshiach, for guidance.

The community fractured over the issue of whether the Rebbe was Moshiach. I remember being in a class taught by a respected Crown Heights mentor and teacher of Hasidic philosophy, who when asked whether the Rebbe, post-stroke, could still be considered Moshiach, answered, “He can’t be Moshiach like this.”

That was not the predominate opinion in Crown Heights, judging from the occasions when the Rebbe and his Hasidim communed in 770. As a curtain was pulled back, the Rebbe would appear on a specially made balcony at the west end of the synagogue.

The throng, looking up at the Rebbe, would sing (in Hebrew): “Long live our master, our teacher and Rebbe, the King Moshiach, forever!”

The Rebbe would respond by waving his left hand, the side the stroke didn’t affect.

Two year passed, and then, devastatingly, the Rebbe suffered a second stroke. Three months later I was in Baltimore for an arranged date on Sunday. I was in a motel room where I had stayed for Shabbat. The phone rang, waking me up. It was the man who had arranged the date.

“Moshe, this is Avi,” he said. “The Rebbe died last night. We’re driving to Crown Heights. You can see her another time.”

I arrived at 770 and waited outside. Finally, they carried out the casket, made from the desk in the Rebbe’s office, out 770 and down the steps to the Eastern Parkway service road. They placed the casket in a car and drove off slowly to allow people to follow along in fulfilment of the Mitzvah to accompany the dead. Sad and angry, I karate kicked a police barricade, splintering it. I looked over at a policeman, who had witnessed my performance. His face said, “These people are crazy.”

I got a ride to the cemetery in Queens. We weren’t allowed inside the gate. But we were all familiar with the gravesite: the Ohel, a roofless, stone, structure where the Rebbe’s predecessor was interred, which Hasidim, especially the Rebbe, had been visiting since the previous Rebbe’s passing in 1950. The Rebbe would be buried next to him. On my way back to the car I passed an unmarried friend from Morristown, who said, “Now I know what I’m going to name my first son (Menachem Mendel, the Rebbe’s name).”

 

***

 

Many years later I was involved in the Chabad-Lubavitch program JNet, in which people are paired up to study Torah on the phone or on Zoom. I had split up with my first study partner. But procrastinator that I am, months – maybe a year – had passed and I had neglected to look for a new one.

One day I was walking down Kingston Ave, passing 770 on the side. All of a sudden, a wiry, manic 770 student I had never seen before rushed up to me and blurted out, “Do JNet!” then ran off. How did someone who had never met me know that I was standing on the sideline where JNet was concerned and picked the perfect time to accost me on Kingston Ave.? There was no earthly explanation: a message so mysterious could have been arranged only by the Rebbe.

I called JNet and got a new partner. He was just what I had been looking for: someone experienced enough to study Hasidic discourses but not too knowledgeable that I couldn’t teach him anything.

My knowledge of the Rebbe tempered my surprise at this act of long-distance (or maybe not-so-long-distance) intervention. This was the same Rebbe, after all, who, at a large gathering, would embrace with his eyes everyone he could reach. He would find you out of thousands, focus his attention on you alone: “To life.” You would respond in kind, uplifted by the exchange, this reminder of who you are.

            You would leave 770. You might not see the Rebbe again for a week or two. But you would carry his picture in your wallet, and he would hold your soul in that internal contact list in his head and in his heart. He’d keep his eye on you from the window. Until you saw him again.