The Courage It Takes to be a Chossid

By Rabbi Shimon Posner – Director of Chabad of Rancho Mirage, California

Jew is a noun, quips Meyer Preger; chosid is a verb. He’s right. And he’s paraphrasing what a venerable chosid who evidently pronounced an R as a Y as in “a chosid is nit kein potyet, er gayt ayain un er geit ayous.” A chosid is not a portrait; he goes in and he goes out. When I was in Morocco, I often heard Laibel Raskin [1] quote him. And what they’re both saying is that being a chosid is not a label, it is a dynamic. So we fluctuate between being a chosid and falling short.

Except….

A chosid is someone who has not attained and has little hope of attaining his/her goal, of becoming selfless and purpose-driven. Until a certain point, the chosid thought that he is really attaining: I’m frum! I’m Shomer Shabbos! I’m gezhe! I’m yichus! And let’s not forget: I’m a baal teshuva! And then he begins Tanya and well no, he hasn’t arrived, he hasn’t plateaued at all, he hasn’t achieved, he has far to go and that dose of reality comes as a surprise, a shock, and, if not handled carefully, a disappointment. (The pronoun is, of course, not gender-specific.)

Will I ever have full control over thought, speech and deed? Honestly, I’m still in an intimate relationship with my other side and I’m not ready or able to really call it off. So I look at myself with real humility, perhaps for the first time in my life and see that all I can do is struggle.

And that takes courage. And that separates the men from the boys. My mother taught me, shortly before the yenne machlah took her, that her generation, the first-generation children of Jewish immigrants, questioned their parents: Why don’t you serve milk with meat? Why do you have to use different dishes for Pesach? The parents, by and large, didn’t know why. They were kids when they came over, a much younger demographic than the Poles, Italians, and Irish who came about the same time. And precious little leadership came over with them and what leadership came was overwhelmed and muted by the heady allure of rags-to-riches success that was happening all around them in astonishing numbers. One author described the situation that the immigrants had the small tradition (recipes) but not the Great Tradition (Gemara). So the parents didn’t know much, but what little they knew they kept as best they could and when their children asked why, they answered, “I don’t know.”

And that, my mother taught me, took enormous courage. Because what they were saying is “I don’t know why we do it but I know that it’s important and maybe one day you will find out why we do it. But if I don’t do it than you won’t know about it and you will never find out and something will be lost.”

It takes courage to be a chosid, a courage borne of humility. It’s hard. My uncle, Gershon Mendel Garelik [1] told me of a chosid who had a special relationship with the Rebbe. This chosid once saw the Rebbe outside of 770 and approached. In his hand was a Tanya open to a certain page, I don’t know which, with the bottom of the page facing the Rebbe and the top of the page facing the chosid. “Ober Rebbe, vos darf dos zein azei shver?” Why does it have to be so hard? If my uncle heard the Rebbe’s answer, he didn’t share it. Instead, his eyes had an intense yet soft downward gaze. He sympathized with the chosid, maybe empathized with him, too.

It’s hard to always know that you could have done better, and that what you did do well should not be the laurels of today that become the handcuffs of tomorrow. That there is no place for self-satisfaction. My other uncle, Uncle Zushie Posner [2], told me that once when he was farbrenging a fellow traveler, he introduced himself as “I’m a  baal teshuva.”

“No, you’re not!” said Zushie, “You aren’t a baal teshuva! You’ve probably never even CONTEMPLATED teshuva! You used to not put on tefillin and now you put on tefillen.” He was describing a dynamic, not a label.

Except…

When someone chooses this constant state of never-arrived over the blissful, blitheful pronouncement of here-I-am, when he resolved that this gehennom is better than that Gan Eden, maybe he has earned a label an identity of a chosid. And least for now..

My mother, my father’s brother-in-law, my father’s kid brother. They each gifted me something worthwhile. Now they are no longer here.

I am. And my grandchildren are. (A guy showed up in shul with a T-shirt “who are all these kids and why do they keep calling me dad?”) I hope to tell them what I’ve heard, what I try (do I really try?) to learn. Chosid is a verb.

[1] If you’re bent out of shape by the lack of titles, please see Toras Menachem, vol. 10, page 250.
[2] You probably got the idea by now, but if not, see footnote 1.