By Dovid Zaklikowski for COLlive and Hasidic Archives
The synagogue at 770 Eastern Parkway, headquarters of the Lubavitch movement, was never beautiful. The simple benches, worn tile floors, and unadorned lighting have been constants since the building’s purchase in 1941.
One does not expect a boiler room to be beautiful, the Rebbe’s chief aide was said to have once told a visitor. Yet it serves an essential function, without which the larger structure would be uninhabitable. Just so, he concluded, did the Torah study and good deeds performed in this unpretentious building bring light and warmth across the globe.
Still, the unpolished atmosphere in the sanctuary sometimes led people to treat it with disrespect. The Rebbe, to whom Jewish law was very dear, never forgot that a synagogue must be a dignified, clean place. He would personally pick up papers from the floor, pointing them out to others only when he could not reach them himself.
One Shabbos in the spring of 1961, the Rebbe delivered a Chassidic discourse and a talk on Pirkei Avos, Ethics of Our Fathers. Why do the sages tell us to “judge every person favorably”? the Rebbe asked. Does it matter what we think privately about another person? “G-d knows exactly who is right.”
It matters, the Rebbe said, because our thoughts do affect those around us. Just as speaking ill of someone strengthens the negative traits within them, positive thoughts can “evoke the merit in the other.”
At the end of the gathering, the Rebbe turned to some practical business and put his own words into action. Someone had hung up large posters advertising a fundraising dinner for Oholei Torah, in the sanctuary. “It is nice,” the Rebbe said, “and a good thing–for a newspaper. But in a synagogue?”
Since the event would benefit the education of children and promote the dissemination of Chassidism, there was room to discuss whether the posters could be hung outside the synagogue, and perhaps this is where the event organizers had become confused.
But within the sanctuary was not the right place, the Rebbe said, recalling that during the lifetime of the sixth Chabad Rebbe, the Rebbe Rayatz, “They hung up a large poster [in the synagogue] and the Rebbe instructed that it should be taken down.”
Nevertheless, the Rebbe concluded, they should wait until after the holy day ends “to tear it down.”
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