The Rabbi’s Indirect Care

R. Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the last Lubavitcher Rebbe and leader of the Chabad movement, who died twenty years ago, was one of those people who inspire among his followers and others outside his circle an unusually deep devotion and respect, and in The Tablet Susan Handelman, one of the others outside, helps explains why.

He had a gift for indirect pastoral care, for one thing. The father of one of the rabbi’s biographers, Joseph Telushkin, had been his accountant and suffered a serious stroke.

He lay for several days in the hospital in a coma. Twice a day the family received calls from the office of the Rebbe on the Rebbe’s behalf, asking about Shlomo’s condition. Joseph was with him when he finally awoke from the coma. A few days later, Joseph received a call from the Rebbe’s secretary, Rabbi Yehuda Krinsky, telling him that an accounting issue had come up and the Rebbe had directed: “Ask Shlomo.”

Joseph protested that his father was still extremely sick and disoriented, and couldn’t possibly answer. Krinsky said that they had tried to remind the Rebbe of that, but the Rebbe again insisted on asking. So, he went back to his father’s room and posed the question. He writes [in Rebbe] that his father

looked at me, puzzled, said the answer was obvious and told me. At that moment, I realized what the Rebbe had done. He had made a calculation and asked my father a question that he knew he would be able to answer. Sitting in his Brooklyn office at 770 Eastern Parkway, dealing with macro issues confronting Jews in the world, he had the moral imagination to feel the pain of one individual, my father, lying in a hospital bed, partially paralyzed, and wondered if he would ever again be productive. And so the Rebbe asked him a question, and by doing so he reminded my father that he was still needed and could still be of service.

Handelman writes that, as Telushkin told her the story over dinner, “I saw tears well up in his eyes. The tears told so much more than the words, about the Rebbe’s way of reaching into the depths of souls.”