Dear Friends,
Forty-nine years ago, on the 9th of Kislev 5726 (December, 1965), in a miraculous sequence of events, my father and his family left Soviet Russia. The first thing my grandfather, Rabbi Moshe Wishedski, did when he reached Israel was to write to the Rebbe and inform him of this miracle. Among other things, he wrote: “I brought my two sons (my father and his brother – Z.W.) and they are like one of the Temimim.” ‘Temimim’ is the name given by Chabad to Yeshiva students. They are called ‘Temimim’ because in Chabad the goal is that the Yeshiva boys be not only Torah scholars, but that their whole essence should change in the Yeshiva, making them into Temimim, i.e. complete and straight in their service of Hashem, as well as in all their ways and deeds in this world, like Yaakov Avinu who is called in the Torah “Ish Tam.” (a whole man).
So my grandfather was excited to write to the Rebbe that he had brought his two sons with him. They had not been with him all the time, because since age 9-10, he was a prisoner in the Gulag in Siberia, spending 7 years there. They also did not learn in Yeshiva, because in Czernowitz in the 1950’s there was no Yeshiva, and, anyway, they had to go out to work in order to support their mother and siblings. And in spite of all this, in spite of Stalin and the Yevsektsia, “They are like one of the Temimim.” Here they are: pure and whole like any other young men who have been raised in the Holy Land and have attended a Yeshiva.
My grandfather and grandmother were not the first to raise a fine family in spite of the difficulties, the exile and the trials of the times. The first was Yaakov Avinu, as is told in this week’s Parasha.
“And Yaakov left Beer Sheva and went to Charan,” it says in the Parasha. Yaakov left the Holy Land, left the home of his righteous father and the atmosphere of holiness that pervaded the home of his parents, Yitzchak and Rivka, and went to Charan. He came to live in a rather unpleasant and contaminated place, and, above all, he went to live with his dear uncle, Lavan the Aramite, who did everything possible to make life difficult for him.
“That which was mangled I never brought you – I myself would bear the loss, from me you would exact it, whether it was stolen by day or stolen by night. By day scorching heat consumed me and frost by night.” That is Yaakov’s description of his twenty years with his father-in-law. And still, in spite of everything, he created an exemplary family – 12 sons and a daughter who became the twelve tribes of Israel.
How? How did Yaakov manage to protect his children from being influenced by Lavan and their surroundings? How, in such a terrible place, far away from Avraham, Yitzchak and Rivka, did his children turn out so whole and pure? How did my grandparents manage to raise an exemplary family in Soviet Russia, “like one of the Temimim”?
The Rebbe says that the one and only answer is to be found in a verse in Bamidbar (23:9): “It is a nation that will dwell in solitude and not be reckoned among the nations.” They raised their children with much stubbornness and clarity – with the clear notion that we have only one way, a single, paved path, the path of Torah and Mitzvot.
This is the message for us today, as well. We must make sure to give our children a Jewish education; send them to Jewish kindergartens and schools that are imbued with the spirit of Hashem’s Torah as we received it from our fathers and forefathers – and with uncompromising fear of Heaven.
Then, we too will be able to present our children and say, “they are like one of the Temimim!”
Shabbat Shalom,
Zalmen Wishedski