It's Your Move, Take It!
Tech Tribe Dispatch #194
💡 Think:
Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, in his youth, was once traveling across the Pale of Settlement. His father, the fifth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Sholom Dovber Schneersohn (known as the Rashab), asked him to help a certain Jew in a specific town with various matters. When Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak had finished the task, he returned to his father and told him he had done everything requested and helped the other Jew.
“I did him the favor with great diligence,” said Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak.
“You didn’t do him a favor,” responded the Rashab. “He privileged you to do a favor, by making you a conduit for the blessings coming to him to enter this world.”
The Rashab illustrated by way of a story about his father, Rabbi Shmuel Schneersohn, the fourth Lubavitcher Rebbe.
* * *
In the 1880s, the Russian empire, in the thralls of its descent and eventual collapse, was wracked by violent antisemitic pogroms.
Rabbi Shmuel Schneersohn was summoned to a gathering of Jewish leaders in S. Petersburg. At the gathering, he came out forcefully in an approach ending the violence against the Jews of the Pale.
At the time, the philanthropist Baron Horace Günzburg, chairman of the Society for the Spread of Enlightenment among the Jews of Russia, led an opposing faction of largely secularist Jewish leaders.
“Lubavitcher Rebbe!” he told Rabbi Shmuel. “You’ve opposed all of our efforts to bring reform to the Jewish community in the past. We’re not pawns on a chessboard to be played with at your whim. Why should we listen to you now?”
Rabbi Shmuel replied with a line from the Megillah, in which Mordechai exhorted Esther to take action,
“For if you remain silent at this time, relief and rescue will arise for the Jews from elsewhere, and you and your father's household will perish; and who knows whether at a time like this you will attain the kingdom?”
“G-d will take action to save the Jewish people,” Rabbi Shmuel said. “The only question is if you want to be on the side of history that stood up when called upon, or if you remain silent and someone else will become the conduit for salvation while your name is lost to the sands of time.”
* * *
“Know my son,” the Rashab concluded. “The good to others will come in to this world, the question is only if “you” that is, your body, “and your father's household” your soul, will take advantage of the opportunity to rise and reach transcendence through doing the good needed for others.”
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