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Moving On: Life Without Rabbi Schneerson
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12726 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1994 |
2,697 Words |
| Author
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Joe Fox
Joe Fox is a free-lance writer who lives in New York City. He
has worked extensively in the area of public affairs, most
recently developing public relations programs for Los Angeles'
Community Redevelopment Agency. |
PROFILE It is a dream she has often. In it her beloved rebbe (rabbi) returns. She talks to him, asking for guidance and seeking answers to her questions. Should she go to seminary and get her teaching degree? Or should she get married? Simple questions, but nonetheless monumental ones to her. The rebbe looks in her eyes and speaks to her, about to give her the answers she so desperately needs. Then he disappears, vanishing into silence.
The next day she tells her friends about her vision. Others have had them, too. One recounts how the rebbe promised in a dream that her mother who had cancer would recover. She did. Another talks about a dream in which the rebbe told her not to take a job out of town. She didn't, and two weeks later she met her husband.
So the stories go. For a fleeting moment, their rebbe lives again, kept alive through discussion, memories, and dreams. This is a comfort. A small one measured against the enormity of losing their beloved leader, but a comfort nonetheless.
On June 12, 1994, the grand rebbe of the ultra-Orthodox Lubavitch branch of Hasidic Judaism, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, passed away after a lengthy illness. To the hundreds of thousands of Lubavitchers worldwide, the passing of their 92-year-old leader left a vacuum of seismic proportions. As their religious leader, Rabbi Schneerson had played an integral part in the day-to-day lives of his followers.
"The mail would come in every day by the sackful," says Rabbi Yehuda Krinsky, who served as one of the rebbe's secretaries and is now the executive administrator of the worldwide Lubavitch movement. "People looked to the rebbe for guidance on matters ranging from choosing a wife to choosing a doctor."
"He was always there for us," states Lubavitcher Chaim Zirkind. "When he looked at you with his piercing eyes, he would be able to look into your soul. It was as if you were the only person in the world who mattered."
Compounding the loss of this fatherly, Sorbonne-educated leader was the almost unanimous hope that Schneerson was the messiah. When the rebbe died, so did the dreams of many who longed to see the messiah's coming.
"It was," says follower David Siegal, "like getting four out of the five numbers in the lottery. We came so
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