I listened today to a speaker who was facing a diverse and varied audience. He opened his speech with the following sentence: “Amongst you there are men and women, religious and non-religious, Americans and Europeans. You are different from each other, but you have one thing in common: you all live close to a Chabad House.”
I find something else that everyone there had in common: Their local Shaliach will not be there this coming Shabbat, will not serve as Chazan (cantor), will not read the Torah for everyone; for on this Shabbat the Rebbe’s Shluchim gather together in the Rebbe’s court for the largest Jewish conference in the world – the International Conference of Chabad-Lubavitch Emissaries – “Kinus Hashluchim.”
Two years ago, the central speaker at the Kinus Hashluchim was the Chief Rabbi of Britain, Lord Dr. Jonathan Sacks. He summed up his monumental speech with the following words: “…How can you redeem a world that had witnessed Hitler? And the Rebbe did something absolutely extraordinary; he said to himself: if the Nazis searched out every Jew in hate, we will search out every Jew in love.”
I recalled these words of his this week, when I received the news of the horrific massacre in the Shul in Har Nof. The picture of a Jew, adorned with his Tallit and Tefillin and lying in a pool of blood, reminded us all of the Nazis and the Holocaust. True, the government and the army have to do what they have to do, and they will indeed do it. But we too – the rest of the Jewish People, in Israel and all over the world – have what to do. To every place where our enemies will bring hatred, we will bring love. To every place that they will, G-d forbid, bring death, we will bring life. And to every place where they will cut down prayers and Tefillin, we will pray even more. Because that’s what we’ve always done; that’s how we survived in the past, and that’s how we will survive in the future as well.
The Shluchim are gathering this week in order to recharge themselves so that they will be able to continue to disseminate love and life, Tefillah and Tefillin. For only this way will we be able to always say, proudly and joyfully, even when we are hurting badly – “Am Yisrael Chai!” The Jewish People lives on!
Shabbat Shalom,
Zalmen Wishedski