To the Guy Who Offered Me a ‘Lemon’

Mr. Gershon Wachtel is a virtuoso pianist and motivational speaker who has performed all over the world. He was interviewed by JEM in his home in Jerusalem in May of 2019.

On an absolute lark, in the summer of 1972, I decided to go to Israel. I was a twenty-two-year-old public school music teacher from Niagara Falls, so this was a pretty way-out thing to do. My family, who was completely secular, didn’t even believe that I would go through with it.

But I was dead set on going, and I ended up enjoying it very much, even staying on past the summer. One day, I was walking through the Tel Aviv central bus station when some yeshivah student came up and asked me if I wanted to do something.

“Alright,” I agreed, “how much will it cost?”

“Nothing,” he said, and the next thing I knew, he placed a kind of lemon in my one hand and some branches in the other. He instructed me to say some words and put the lemon and the branches together and then he began shaking them back and forth with me.

“What is going on here?” I thought to myself in embarrassment. And yet, somehow, that was the start of my Jewish observance. That student in the bus station might have gone home wondering what he had accomplished, but by helping me perform the mitzvah of lulav and etrog, he got the ball rolling.

When I got back to Niagara Falls, I began reading everything I could about Judaism, Israel, Jewish history – anything. I began taking Hebrew lessons from an Israeli, who told me about the Chabad House in nearby Buffalo. There I joined a Torah class led by a rabbi with a thick, straggly beard named Heschel Greenberg. We were just learning the plain text, without any deep explanations, but I was completely inspired. It felt real.

A month or so later, I heard about some people going to New York for a weekend event called “Encounter with Chabad,” and I jumped at the opportunity. It was during this event that I saw the Rebbe for the first time, while he was speaking at a public gathering on Shabbat. Shortly after, I sent the Rebbe a letter to introduce myself, through Rabbi Nosson Gurary, the campus rabbi in Buffalo.

From that very first letter, I felt that I could approach the Rebbe without any pretenses, in a natural, honest way. I wrote that I was a musician and that I enjoyed all different kinds of music, including music that wasn’t Jewish at all. One such piece was called the S. Matthew Passion, written by the composer Bach, and it was based on a part of the New Testament.

The Rebbe sent his response to Rabbi Gurary, who translated it to me: “A song like that,” he wrote, “is like a cross; it isn’t something you should play. It may be a beautiful cross, but nevertheless it’s still a cross.”

A few years later, I had become quite involved with Chabad of Buffalo, and I happened to know that Rabbi Gurary was looking to purchase a “Mitzvah Mobile” – an RV equipped with Jewish essentials – for their outreach activities. Even though I had just quit my teaching job and had no livelihood at the time, I decided that if Chabad needed it, then I would buy it.

To give a sense of what money was like back then, the monthly payments on the Mitzvah Mobile were going to be $225.52 over seven years, and, as a teacher, I had been making $115 a week before I quit. That means it was close to two weeks’ salary, but I had a little money saved up, so I got a couple of cosigners together, and we went through with it.

At a public gathering not long after that, I went over to the Rebbe’s table to symbolically present him with a key to our new Mitzvah Mobile. The Rebbe was smiling from ear to ear, giving me many blessings, and it felt as though the gates of heaven were open. Making that financial commitment at that time was, for me, a real act of sacrifice, and I had the sense that the Rebbe was telling me that I would be rewarded for this act throughout my life.

As it happened, only a few months later, I met my wife and we decided to get married. Before the wedding, we met with the Rebbe for a private audience.

We took a train into New York City from Buffalo and when it was our turn to enter his office, the Rebbe was all I saw the entire time: When I replay that audience in my mind’s eye, I don’t remember any of the books on the walls, nor the furniture in the room.

After we handed him our wedding invitation, the Rebbe asked me, “What are you going to do after the wedding?”

After the wedding ceremony? I thought to myself. I had no idea what he meant. “Go home?” I proffered.

“No…. Are you going to work? Are you going to learn Torah?”

“Oh,” I said. “I want to make a bunch of money so that I can afford to learn in yeshivah for two years.”

Now the Rebbe smiled. “It’s hard to make a bunch of money,” he told me. “Do you have a gimmick?”

“As a matter of a fact, I do,” I answered, and I went on to tell the Rebbe how I had started recording piano music for gymnasts to perform to, and was selling a three-record set – the “Gold Medal Series,” I called it – although I wasn’t making any money off it yet.

He began asking me how I made the records: “Do they dance, and then you put the music to it later?” That wasn’t exactly what I did.

“Do you make the music on your own, and then they dance to it?” The questions surprised me, because neither of those ways was what I did, and so again I answered “No.” What I did was something in between: The gymnasts would work on a move and I would compose something to match it, and then again for the next move, until eventually we would put it all together. This way the routine and the music were really created at the same time.

To my surprise, the Rebbe continued to ask about the kind of music I played, whether it was quick, slow, and so on. I was just a nobody from Niagara Falls, but he seemed genuinely interested in what I was doing.

“I’d like to see the records,” he said.

“I gave a set to your secretary,” I replied.

“Then I have to pay you for it. How much are they?”

“Twenty-five dollars.”

The Rebbe handed me a twenty and a ten-dollar bill from his drawer. “You can give the extra five dollars to charity,” he said, before giving us a blessing for the wedding.

Subsequent to that audience – almost immediately after the wedding, the phone started ringing with work offers, and business took off. After I put an advertisement in a gymnastics magazine, people would call from all over the world with requests for me to record music on a cassette tape and mail it to them, and then they would create their dance routine to that.

People also needed me to compose new music or travel to different places to play live. I had never set out or planned to do any of these things, but it so happened that both of these new ideas were precisely what the Rebbe had suggested in that audience when he was asking about my work. Somehow, for the next six years, I made a living making gymnastics music, doing all of the things that I had told the Rebbe I didn’t do.