New Book Intrigues Reporter

By COLlive reporter

Liel Leibovitz, a senior writer for the online Tablet Magazine, writes how the new book “Early Years: The Formative years of the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson” has been sitting on top of his cluttered study.

“Looking down at me like a bemused elder on an errant boy, is a large black-and-white photograph of the late Lubavitcher Rebbe,” he says about the book authored by Rabbi Boruch Oberlander and Rabbi Elkanah Shmotkin.

He called the publication “a gorgeous and exhaustively researched new book documenting his early life, and as we wade in political, cultural, and theological divisions that threaten to undo our commonalities, it’s worth taking a moment to look up to this great teacher.”

“That may seem like a strange choice for an unobservant Jew like me,” he says. “But the Rebbe transcends such distinctions—that was his genius. Like all masters who’ve set out to reveal life’s hidden layers to a species too solipsistic to notice them, the Rebbe, too, delivered his wisdom in subtle ways that are difficult to define.”

“The Rebbe’s means of communication were designed to address what he, having narrowly escaped the horrors of the Holocaust, considered to be the key challenge of our time—namely, our ability to strip each other of agency and reduce each other to statistics, or worse,” he writes.

Leibovitz points out that the Rebbe’s medium was Ahavat Yisroel and it was inherited from his father, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Schneerson, of blessed memory.

It was in his own childhood home, that the Rebbe “learned that the personal wasn’t political: Ahavat Yisrael came first and foremost and burned brighter than any disagreement or distinction,” Leibovitz points out.

“Years later, the Rebbe would become known for sending emissaries all around the world and instructing them to erect Chabad houses, where all Jews would always be welcome for a chat and a meal.”

Leibovitz concludes the article by asking “How good are we about following the Rebbe’s example?” Myself, not too terrific… But the man in the photograph in my study urges me to do better, and the least I can do is try.”

The book is available at JEMstore.com