The Final Resolution – Part 3

By Rabbi Shmully Hecht – Yale/New Haven

For Part 1 and Part 2

… So here I was in this honky-tonk G-d-forsaken place a few hundred miles from civilization, marooned by the ignoble rabbinical civil servant. Thumbs down. Game over, Hecht. The sky was gloomy and dark. The rain dribbled down, gradually tapering off. Final scene in a dark comedy. The prospects were ominous. Where was I anyhow, I thought. A one-horse town. Average IQ-80. Lame farmers in overalls bearing loaded rifles. Scattered chicken coops beside barns crammed with famished donkeys too frail to ride. The sticks of hickville America. The bush!

The director returned to his campers as if nothing had transpired. Back to business. Got a camp to run. A full camp. One less camper, a single child, the absent young lad – No worries! Life goes on. Rabbi Hecht has friends in high places and doesn’t lack Chabad rabbis’ numbers on his speed dial. He’ll land a spot for his son. I gazed into the void of the deserted rustic surroundings. Rural Morbidity. Wasn’t water a sign of blessing. Bring on the rain, Oh Lord. Flood the joint. Yes, I thought, I’ll have this resolved. But what about the myriads of parents in similar predicaments who can’t. Abandon the widow, the divorcee, the single dad, the penurious families with nowhere to turn and no one to consult?

The Hechts embraced Lubavitch three generations ago. We navigate the Chabad educational labyrinth well, including a couple of dozen mosdos under our own belt. Rabbi JJ Hecht OBM and Rebbetzin Chave Hecht, may she live and be well, frankly pioneered Chabad camping. Camp Emunah started in 1953. It was the Rebbe’s first camp. And it was Rabbi JJ that secured the first campgrounds for Gan Yisroel in Ellenville, NY in 1956.

Your author seeks no pity. I do have serious concerns though for contemporary Lubavitch newcomers. What did we tell them when we invited them to their first Shabbos dinner? Has the unconditional love simply vanished with the passing of time? Do we arbitrarily neglect the assurances presented when we first inquired of their Jewishness? The oath we made that there was no better home than the community of Chassidim. Shame on us. We ought to bury our faces in the sand and seek clemency for misleading them.

Must our brethren endure three generations, only to start negotiating a bunk bed in the American countryside? The audacity to have fabricated truths to our fellow travelers. Blatant lies. We are preoccupied building summer camps in third-world countries and publicizing the number of orphans we feed around the world, yet simultaneously abandoning Lubavitch recruits that forfeited their past to join our ranks.

Every day in Lubavitch, a family is being turned down from a Chabad institution. All too often with no alternatives. Zilch. Children are indefinitely home confined for summers and in many instances through entire school semesters. Many of them have perished in our own neighborhoods. Literally succumbed to the plague. Hashem Yeracheim.

This backcountry road was an abominable crime scene. My offspring was the victim. I was the witness. “Thou shall bear witness,” is a biblical commandment. Withholding testimony and suppressing credible evidence is not only shunned upon, its frankly a biblical violation. The local crime scene was one of mass casualties. The global figures are in the thousands, not to mention the perpetual aftermath and long-term consequences. Lubavitch was the perpetrator. Culprits from the top down. You and me. I refer to hierarchal, self-appointed, elected and volunteer actors. Board members and old-guard statesmen from the apex of Institutional Lubavitch. No one is immune or exempt. No names for now. Hopefully, we won’t go there.

Not all Lubavitch is culpable. Not even a majority. But a plentiful minority that has psychologically fractured our communities. A dent that cannot simply be yanked out of your car door with a heavy magnet by an autobody-scammer in a Costco Parking lot. I’m speaking of infractions that permanently maim young lives and families. Again, from the ranked leaders to laypersons. A painful communal incision with agonizing consequences. At my locality, the prey of the day was breathing. Just barely. The offender was indifferent and had his defenses lined up. The witness was in shock. Gradually becoming fully cognizant of the causes and remedies. The public opinion attorneys and PR machine would have a field day with this one. “No room in camp, make your own camp. Don’t blame Lubavitch. There is no “Lubavitch.” You are just as much Lubavitch as we are. Cast not thy blame on this single camp struggling to kick off the summer program. We have no duty to admit more children than we can handle.”

*

Speaking of Lubavitch. Have we drawn a complete blank on the etymology of the term? An idyllic hamlet on the banks of the Dnieper in the region of Mogilev, the Russian village was settled hundreds of years prior to Chabad emerging in its midst. Lubavitch was an oasis of the holiest Jews seeking refuge from the big cities and cosmopolitan noise, way before Alter Rebbe visited its forested woods to study with his childhood tutor Reb Yisochor Dov. Literally the size of a campsite it was first settled by a handful of families including one certain chossid Reb Mayer whom the Friedeker Rebbe describes in his memoirs as one of its pious founders. “He held a deep affection for his Jewish and non-Jewish neighbors and was compassionate to the animals and birds.” To admire a bird. John Audubon? No, a mystic in Lubavitch! When is the last time we noticed a bird?

Through the early pioneers, the Rebbe finds pertinent meaning in the Mishnah, “He who finds favor in his fellow, finds favor in his creator.” In His eloquent prose, the Rebbe chronicles the life of an inconspicuous cobbler Reb Binyomin, another spiritualist of the highest order. When a local band of thieves raided the town and attempted to murder a thirteen-year-old girl in her home, Reb Binyomin incapacitated them with the mere utterance of some occult phrase known only to the kabbalistic shamans of old. With the abstract lyric, he saved the innocent girl’s life. After a fire raged through the town and its denizens commenced the reconstruction, Binyomin erected a house of study and prayer before rebuilding his own domicile. All by hand. Years later, in preparation of his death, he gathered the burial society and pledged the newly constructed lodge to the wayfarers and needy, the orphans and destitute. The Friedeker Rebbe makes special mention of the fact that there were no eulogies when Reb Binyomin died. No eulogy would have done him justice.

Luba-Vitch. The town of love. Genuine affection. The settlement of the town by the Mittler Rebbe in the second generation of the emergence of Chabad, included a mere 110 families. For 102 years plus two months, through the lives of four Rebbeim, Lubavitch served as the epicenter of Chabad activities and leadership. Hundreds of thousands visited. The modern global movement that now dots the globe having reached millions of Jews and endless non-Jews was initially cradled in a wooded homestead. One square mile. There was one common virtue among its inhabitants and hence the namesake. Love.

Biblical Yoseph was sold by his brothers into slavery. There was however one sibling unaccounted for. Binyomin did not partake in the iniquity that brought our ancestors down to Egypt. The sages tell us that it was precisely for this reason that the Beis Hamikdash was built in his portion of the land of Israel. The Lord’s abode can only exist in a place free of conflict. Historical strife, family enmity and sibling rivalry cannot coexist with supreme holiness. Perhaps Binyomin the cobbler of Lubavitch was the reincarnation of Biblical Binyomin. The Rebbe did proclaim 770 as the Beis Hamikdosh of the exile, conceivably a reconstruction of the prayer shed in the town of Lubavitch, the house Binyomin built with his hands and then bequeathed for the local strangers and orphans.

Oh, the places we roam, and their impact on posterity. Ancient Athens: Home of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Renaissance Period Italy: Landscape of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Botticelli. Colonial Philadelphia and the Constitutional Convention: attended by Washington, Hamilton, and Madison. The Gettysburg address, New England transcendentalists, New Orleans Jazz, Nuremberg trials, The ICC at the Hague, San Francisco beatniks. Where do we come from where do we go. Chabadniks! Certainly, Chabad denotes intellect, yet we hail from Lubavitch, the village of love. Lest we ever forget.

*

I was once reprimanded twenty-five years ago by an elder Shliach. We disagreed on a novel matter and couldn’t come to terms. He could not contain himself. He went on a rampage, lecturing me condescendingly. I took it well. (At the age of thirteen, I often rode the B46 CityBus down Utica Avenue to school. I was the only white kid on the bus. It was the 1980s and racial tensions were high. I learned a lot on those daily rides and am forever grateful to my parents for putting me through the ordeal. I can take a scolding from an elder Chossid.)

In his final reproach, he said, “Shmully we’re going to throw you out of Lubavitch.” What an oxymoron I thought. I chuckled at the man thirty years my senior and replied, “My dear friend, wherever I go, goes Lubavitch.” To each place a chossid journeys, chassidus shadows in tandem. Wherever a tamim roams, there you shall find the spirit of Tomchei Tmimim. On every road a Lubavitcher treks, Chabad will flourish. The insignia is branded on our foreheads and cannot be expunged. To our graves and beyond.

I gave the Rabbi a pass. Perhaps he had a rough day, was losing his mind, or suffering from the early stages of dementia. Every single one of us that has fallen prey to the current chinuch crisis must make amends. We carry a torch blazing privilege and responsibility. There is no immunity in Chabad. The Rebbe empowered us regardless of title, ancestry, pedigree, or resources. We shall recompense for we took the oath. In the final accounting will all be held accountable. You included Shmully Hecht. You have in essence self-denied your child a place in summer camp. Thou shall locate or create a replacement, share the collective burden, and rectify the current dilemma. You own it as much as any of us.

*

The car was in park. The windshield wipers flashed back and forth. Was I to simply to drive home or go down swinging? My son glanced at the boys moving from the shul to the dining hall. They were having a blast. No one does summer camp like Chabad. For our own children and the world at large. No one comes close. It prints indelible impressions on the campers and staff. Pulling out of that parking lot in forfeiture would be utter dismay. Like a bad stock trade. When you’re down get out. Sell at a loss and move on. Doubling down is a fool’s error. Move the funds elsewhere. Sitting around waiting for a market bounce only aggravates the pain and financial damage. You will ultimately blow the account.

Torment and heartbreak. The summer clock was clicking rapidly. At this point each hour was a day, every day a week. In due time the summer would segue into fall. A saga of vanished time. A lost season in the life of an adolescent. Add it to the annals of Chabad history. Perhaps Kehos should publish the names of the children that have fallen to this plague and post the register over the desks of our bureaucrats. Let them invoke the names of these children prior to their daily prayers and only then commence their daily chores. No need to insert your pennies in the charity box. Save the cash, Rabbi. Lubavitch will survive without your donations. Just recite the list of names, proclaiming them vociferously to our father in heaven. Every day. Where are these children today? Visiting our Chabad houses to occasionally put on tefillin is where they are.

*

On Yud Beis Tammuz, I telephone a Head Shliach to assist our Vaad in placing a child in summer camp. The boy was the son of one of his appointed Shluchim. The Head Shliach is highly respected. Front seat at the Kinus conferences. National and International. Highly respected and rightfully so. Our call lasted four minutes. I wouldn’t have taken more of his time and the buses were leaving to camp the next day. He skirted the issue, told me to check all the facts, and politely excused his inability to help. He maintained that he was busy dealing with “the existential problems of Lubavitch.”

I told him the child was in the Shluchim Online School and every single one of his classmates was going to camp. If we didn’t act now, the child would be the only one home for the entire summer. In a small city with no alternatives-where Lubavitch sent the family and crowned them with Shlichus. I questioned the senior Shliach whether there was anything more “existentially problematic in Lubavitch” than this child’s life. Silence. I respectfully hung up.

The Vaad Hachinuch ultimately placed the child in camp. Rabbi Yisroel Mochkin of Camp Gan Yisroel Montreal opened his heart and his camp. “Get him to the airport now and on the bus tomorrow,” he said. And we did. The kid is having a blast. Won best camper first month. L’chaim.

(If you are having trouble placing your children in camp, Yeshiva or seminary, you can email Rabbi Yacov Barber of the Vaad Hachinuch: [email protected])

*

The car was in Park. I considered revving up my engine with a little rumble and a gradual jump. Keep it in neutral, crank it up and get it pepping like a roadster. Then lay my foot down on the accelerator and dig it in hard. Drop your heal on the accelerator like lead, Shmully. Don’t ease up. What would grandpa have done! Turn the headlamps on and shine em right through that dining room window, muddling everyone’s sight for just a moment.

A UFO? Lightening? State Police? Search and rescue? Counselor, I can’t see my soup, I got a gleaming light in my eyes and there’s a ripping engine blaring into our sacrosanct oasis. Have the townies arrived to raid the camp? Local hunters about to steal our kids? A pogrom in Chatzi Kadur Hatachton? But counselor oh counselor what’s that noxious smell of gas? And there’s a high beam glittering right through the picture window, and I can’t see. The entire parking lot is now blinded by pockets of intense smoke spewing out of the tailpipe and it seems like we have everyone’s attention. Keep the metal on the pedal and highball it. Jazz the motor as the car starts revving back and forth, gunning up and down in its place. Get your seat belt on son. Tighten up and get a grip. Move that gearbox back from neutral to park back and forth incessantly as the vehicle stutters in its place.

Louder, rowdier, pump the engines and get the RPM to 8000. Nail it hard until the lights start flashing on your dashboard and the car is practically swinging to and fro like the stationary horse on the steel spring we used to ride in the playgrounds. Now pump up some music. Blast it until the local Mayor/sheriff/gas station attendant storms out onto his porch in his disheveled cowboy hat and ragged bathrobe, dragging his scuffed hunting boots whilst firing warning shots from his sawed-off shotgun, as he treks toward the camp eager to make an arrest and take someone down to the basement of city hall in his putrefying outhouse. The music is blasting. Hakafos Nigun, Napoleans March. We shall overcome.

The times they are a changin… move it into first gear Shmully, and peel out of that deplorable place as you burn the rubber so savagely, they can read the words Michelen on the remaining blacktop for three generations. Rip down the decrepit single-laned bituminous road and race out, barraging the scree and pebbles right back at em, just short of doing physical damage to the Rebbes camp. Turn the lights off in the car as we sprint down the country road at 80mph, engines roaring. Let the wild geese choke from fear, the goats smack their heads against the barn doors and the deer run so fast that they trample the foxes and sprint head-on with a few and maples and elms. The modern sacrifices of Chinuch rejection on the altar of backcountry America. Barrell out at breakneck speed with a vow to never return. Not until surgery is done. Locally and globally.

We are on the lam now. Father and son. Victim and witness. Living evidence of a chinuch scandal. We are in retreat. Alas, we have seen the promised land. No, we could not enter. You have been called upon. Your allotment has been denied. Your birthright has been refused. Others beat you to it. Try Motel 6. Wounded but survived. Many have perished on this road before. This is my son on the road least traveled. We shall only return when we have rectified the colossal injustice.

No. I took one more good look at the fella, imprinted his face in my mind, said a chapter of Psalms under my breath as a good omen and kept the car in park!

No plan B just yet. But something was fundamentally wrong in the setup.

The Rebbe came to the shores of this wonderful country in 1941. The medina shel chesed, as he often referred to it. A country of kindness. During the first decade of the Rebbe’s arrival, he seldom left New York, having returned once to France to escort his mother Rebbetzin Chana Schneerson back to the United States and visiting the Friedeker Rebbe occasionally in Morristown during the 1940s. Short of these trips, the Rebbe left Brooklyn only three times. All three were to visit Camp Emunah and Camp Gan Yisroel. The facts speak for themselves. Three trips unrelated to family were all to visit the Lubavitch camps. The boys’ camp and the girls’.

At the Shavuos Farbrengen in 1956 prior to the Rebbe’s first visit, the Rebbe quoted chapter 23 in Tehillim where Dovid Hamelech proclaims his faith in G-d, “Mizmor Lidovid Hashem Royee Lo Echsor. A song to the Lord, my shepherd I lack no gain. Binois Deshe Yarbizaini Al Mai Menuchos Yinahlaini. In green pastures, I lie down, on still waters he guides me.” This would be the reference used to describe summer camp; the place the Rebbe referred to as “a camp in the external sense, a Yeshiva in the internal.”

Camp would protect our children from the trials and tribulations of city summers and enhance the lives of our children by imbuing them with spirituality twenty-four hours a day in a sheltered environment. During the three visits, the Rebbe inspected the campsites and commented on every single spiritual and material detail. The grounds, the bunks, the lake, the dining halls and even the playgrounds. The Rebbe advised on the safety and living arrangements, even leaving tips for the staff as his personal contribution to the mosdos.

For the Rebbe, camping in the new world was going to serve as a spiritual oasis unparalleled by our other vital institutions. Camp was going to mold our children into chasidim and stimulate us to love others the way the chasidim of Lubavitch loved each other and the strangers. The bucolic destinations caught the Rebbe’s personal attention and were to replace the pastoral countryside of rural Lubavitch. The Rebbe invented Lubavitch camping. Camp mirrored pastoral Lubavitch where G-d was felt in the air, consumed in the water, and drenched in the soil. Hither Lubavitch could replicate its spiritual magic in the new world of America. First visit 1956, second 1957, final in 1960. The specifics of these trips and farbrengens held in Gan Yisroel and Camp Emunah have been published down to the details.

During that summer eight years ago, I had thrice struck out at camp. The Rebbe visited camp three times. Perhaps a message, I thought. An ironic Chazaka in opposing plain site.

In the final talk in Gan Yisroel in 1960 the Rebbe elaborated at length on the significance of the bicentennial of the passing of the Baal Shem Tov. The Baal Shem Tov states that the supreme spiritual enjoyment of his life was teaching children and escorting them to and from their studies. The holy Baal Shem Tov not only taught children but delivered them to and shepherded them from cheder. “Who is the wise one, he who learns from everyone,” says the Mishnah. The Baal Shem Tov explained that learning from everyone doesn’t exclusively allude to positive messages, an impossible feat considering the actions of many. Undesirable behavior and odious conduct of others must also be observed. To replicate positive action is tantamount to acknowledging negative ones to avoid. This is the ultimate key to wisdom. We mustn’t ignore bad behavior for only a fool pretends it doesn’t exist.

The Rebbe continues with a commentary of the Maggid of Mezrich on the verse in Ovadia that “the house of Eisav will be for straw.” Good soil is often formed by burning the chaff. The smoldering helps reduce nitrogen tie-up, as microbes decompose the residue, resulting in nutrient release from the combustion. The process increases mineralization rates through its impact on soil microorganisms. Hence better crops.
My hope was that the evening’s events would never recur again. If anything, we had observed the straw of Eisav and our experience would yield a superior harvest.

The Rebbe continued with a story the Friedeker Rebbe conveyed of his father the Rebbe Rashab, who once visited Vienna and entered a store to buy clothing and basic essentials for a young girl. He then traveled to a faraway suburb and visited a widow with two daughters. The Rebbe Rashab dropped off the items and returned home. It turned out that the widow had delayed the wedding of her daughter due to the lack of these necessities. There it was, thousands of kilometers from home in Lubavitch that the Rebbe unshackled this widow from her crisis. The love of Lubavitch knows of no geographical bounds in time or space. The Rebbe Rashab didn’t send an emissary. He went shopping himself and visited the needy family, assuring them the wedding would go on. One must envisage the joy of that widow and the bride. Have we considered where the descendants of that marriage are today? We too are thousands of miles from the town Lubavitch. Yet so close at heart.

But there was no room in camp! Aha… no room! Thank you.

The Rebbe continued with a story of the Baal Shem Tov who once convened his young students for study. A Ukrainian peasant rode by with his horse and buggy and got stuck in the mud outside the beis medrash. The gentleman poked his head into the window of the seminary and pleaded with the boys to exit the building and extract the wagon from the sludge. Observing the size of the wagon and the unsurmountable task of lifting it, the children replied that the task was an impossible one. The coachman replied in his native language “Madjes da, nia chuthshis” Able you are, alas, you don’t want to.” The Rebbe encouraged the children to hearken to the message that the Baal Shem Tov relayed to his young disciples, expounding on this simple adage of the Ukrainian gentile. All too often we excuse ourselves of menial tasks by claiming that we can’t accomplish them, when all it really requires is the honest desire to do so.

I finally put the car into drive and silently left for home, still wondering where my son would spend his summer.

To be continued…

To email the author: [email protected]