“Like Driving Home From 770”

This past summer, Lubavitch of Philadelphia invited the Jewish community of the Delaware Valley to experience Farbrengen. Blending footage of a Yud Shvat Farbrengen projected on a large screen with live interspersed narration on the stage, Farbrengen: An Inside Look brought the audience inside the Farbrengen, imagined what it might have been to be there, to stand on the bleachers, hear a sicha, hold up a l’chaim – and, finally, pondered what it means to look back today on special moments from years ago.

Distilling the Farbrengen into segments, the program introduced the audience not only to Farbrengen as a whole but to its parts as well. First they saw a room filled with chassidim waiting for the Rebbe to enter, then they saw a sicha, a niggun, a ma’amar, a l’chaim, each of which asked it own questions, each of which gave its own answers. All the while what they saw on the screen was accompanied by narration on the stage, which not only filled in some of the blanks – What was the meaning of the words in the song? Why did the chassidim stand up for one of the Rebbe’s talks? – but also tried to understand what it means to remember something from the past, to make it present.

Farbrengen, of course, was more than just a sum of its parts. A person standing inside Seven Seventy heard a niggun, saw the crowd stand for a ma’amar, stood on the bleachers, said a l’chaim, but it was the whole of the experience, the journey of emotions, that is what he would remember simply as Farbrengen. So, while an entire Farbrengen far surpassed the time available to the program, the journey was kept intact, inviting to audience to learn what it meant to wait for the Rebbe to walk in, hear a sicha, sing a joyous niggun, stand for the ma’amar, the Rostover niggun, hold up a l’chaim, another sicha, U’foratzto.

Working with JEM, archival footage from the early ‘70s (the Lameds) was sifted through to find those rare shots that tell the story of Farbrengen from a new, refreshing angle. Here the camera is positioned inside the aisle through which the Rebbe enters; here we see a cup of l’chaim lifted above the crowd; here we see a young boy standing for a ma’amar. The footage was then carefully edited by Lubavitch of Philadelphia to give the viewer, in most cases someone who was never by Farbrengen, a panoramic view of the moment, so that he or she could see the Rebbe, the chassidim, the moment they spent together. And to make their viewing even more immersive, an English translation by Rabbi Manis Friedman was newly recorded and heard by the audience simultaneous to the sichos and the ma’amar.

But, did the program succeed? Did the audience leave the Farbrengen as something in the past or did it touch them as something in the present? In the end, these are the defining questions.

The positive feedback was overwhelming. Take for example this report from Rabbi Yossi Kaplan, a shliach in Philadelphia’s Chester County, who spoke afterwards with someone who came with both his father and his son. “My friend told me that on their way back home,” Rabbi Kaplan says, “all they spoke of was what they’d just seen and what the Rebbe had said. None of them had ever been to Farbrengen, but on that night it was as if they were driving home from Seven Seventy.”

Now, in honor of Yud Shvat, Lubavitch of Philadelphia is offering this program to all Chabad Houses and communities. Please contact Bentzi at [email protected] or visit legacyevenings.com/farbrengen for further details.