How Did Chassidus Become Accessible to Everyone? | The Rebbe Rashab's Revolution

00:00 Today we’ll talk about the great revolution brought about by the Rebbe Rashab, whose soul is in Eden—the fourth, the fifth in the Lubavitch line. It was a revolution in Chassidus and in spreading Chassidus throughout the world in a remarkable way. Around this time, on 20 Cheshvan, is the Rebbe Rashab’s birthday. Today we’ll discuss several aspects of the revolution he brought about. The Rebbe Rashab lived in an extraordinary period. He was born on 20 Cheshvan 5621, in 1860, as we said, and passed away in Nissan 5680, in 1920. If we think about it, those were very, very fateful years for the Jewish people—in Russia and in Europe—times of enormous upheaval. Russia was the main center of Chabad, and the great revolutions there took place during the Rebbe Rashab’s lifetime. They were also bound up with tremendous upheaval for the Jewish people: pogroms on the one hand, and on the other, the spiritual state of the Jewish people. Various groups arose in that period and changed the landscape in many ways. There was a struggle for the survival of Judaism, and sadly, many young people were lost to the Jewish people and went in different directions. In that period, it was the Rebbe Rashab who fought Hashem’s battle on many fronts. Today we’ll discuss a few fundamental aspects of the Rebbe Rashab’s life whose fruits we still see today, and also their connection to this time—which is no coincidence. As is well known, one of the foundations of Chassidus revealed to us by the Baal Shem Tov is that these things are no coincidence: the period, the time, the days, a birthday, the day a person was born, and the weekly parsha at that time. So there is also a story here, a remarkable story. The Rebbe heard it from his father-in-law, the Frierdiker Rebbe, who was the Rebbe Rashab’s son. The Frierdiker Rebbe told it to the Rebbe at a certain

02:43 Shabbos meal. Over the years, the Rebbe developed the story, told it and returned to it year after year, each time bringing out its deep, inner meaning. It is a story with remarkable significance for the Rebbe Rashab’s influence on later generations. Today, of course, we’ll touch on only a few of the main points connected with what we’re discussing: to understand the remarkable innovation, the special message the Rebbe Rashab brought to Chassidus, and how it affects our lives today—what it means in our daily lives, in our own time. The story goes that when the Rebbe Rashab was five or six, it was his birthday—20 Cheshvan, as we said—and his grandfather, the Tzemach Tzedek, was still alive. To put the years in perspective, as we said, the Rebbe Rashab was born in 5621, in 1860, and the Tzemach Tzedek passed away in 5626, close to Pesach—in 1866. So they were together in this physical world for only six years, the Rebbe Rashab and his grandfather, the Tzemach Tzedek. The story is that in one of those years, when he was five or six, the Rebbe Rashab went in to visit his grandfather on his birthday, to receive a birthday blessing. When he came in, they spoke about the weekly parsha, and the Rebbe Rashab burst into tears. This little boy of five or six burst into tears. His grandfather asked, “Why are you crying?” He explained that the melamed in cheder had taught them the weekly parsha and told them that Avraham Avinu had merited a revelation from Hakadosh Boruch Hu: “And Hashem appeared to him.” Hakadosh Boruch Hu had appeared to Avraham Avinu. The child cried and said, “Why did Avraham Avinu merit that Hakadosh Boruch Hu appear to him, while I don’t? I want that too. Why doesn’t Hashem appear to us?” And then the

05:09 Tzemach Tzedek answered him: when a Jew—or, in another version, a righteous Jew—at the age of ninety-nine decides that he must have a bris milah, he deserves to have Hakadosh Boruch Hu appear to him. On the face of it, this is a short, simple, interesting story. Of course, it has two parts: the question and the answer. There is the child’s question: “Why did Hakadosh Boruch Hu appear to Avraham Avinu but not to us? I want that too.” It wasn’t merely a question out of curiosity; it came with tears. In other words, it touched his heart. And then there is the Tzemach Tzedek’s answer: Avraham Avinu merited this because of his bris milah, because he circumcised himself. The Rebbe spoke at great length about the remarkable lessons in serving Hashem that we can learn from this. Sometimes, when an ordinary person hears a story like this, he says, “Wow, what a tzaddik.” These are stories about tzaddikim who, even as small children, already had a special holiness and righteousness. Here is a five-year-old child crying not because he is missing a candy or because he had a quarrel with a friend, but because Hakadosh Boruch Hu does not appear to him. It shows an extraordinarily high spiritual level in the Rebbe Rashab. But the Rebbe did not accept leaving it at that. This story must be relevant to all of us. First of all, because it was told to us. The Rebbe had a principle: if this story was passed down from Rebbe to Rebbe, there is a reason. We don’t have all the information about everything that happened to the tzaddikim. Just as we see in the Torah: it doesn’t tell us everything the Jewish people went through during their forty years in the desert. The Torah includes only the stories and events that teach a lesson for future generations. Torah comes from the word hora’ah, “instruction,” and when the Torah tells a story, it has chosen stories that are meant

07:23 for generations to come—stories from which we live and draw lessons and guidance for daily life to this very day. The same is true of stories about tzaddikim. Stories that tzaddikim told, and stories about tzaddikim that were passed down from generation to generation until they reached us, are not here by chance. There is special Divine providence here, and a special lesson meant for us. So a story about a tzaddik is not just meant to tell us how great that tzaddik was. It comes to teach us a way to live. Especially since this story happened when he was below the age of education according to halachah, at the very young age of five or six. At that age, halachah applies to the Rebbe Rashab too: he was a child. Right? You cannot look at him as the Rebbe at that stage of his life. He was a child, with all the rules the Torah sets out for a child. The fact that we were told this story in precisely this way is meant to make us stop, reflect, and see what we can learn from it for our own lives. And as we said, what do we learn from the Rebbe Rashab’s question, asked to the point of tears: why doesn’t Hakadosh Boruch Hu appear to us? And what do we learn from the answer the Tzemach Tzedek gave him? On the face of it, the answer seems to say: yes, this was something special. It was Avraham Avinu, who had a bris milah at the age of ninety-nine. We have a bris milah at eight days old. But that too is puzzling. Heaven forbid that we should say our bris milah is less important than Avraham Avinu’s. On the contrary, a bris milah at eight days old has a special advantage, as it says in the Midrash about the debate between Yitzchak Avinu and Yishmael. Yishmael argued that he had his bris at a later age, when he could already choose, when he was already able to

09:15 understanding, he was bar mitzvah, while Yitzchak did it without even knowing what he was doing. And yet, as Yitzchak explained, the Midrashim and Chassidus teach that there is a particular advantage to a bris at eight days old, because then the bond and the covenant are much deeper. So what exactly is the answer here? There is a particular point the Rebbe once dwelt on, a point with a special lesson for our generation. It is something truly remarkable. This is what the story teaches us: a young child can reach a level where spiritual matters touch his very soul, where spiritual matters make him cry and make him happy. That is astonishing. After all, it is well known from the seforim and the Rambam’s writings that when educating children, you cannot educate them through spiritual concepts. The Rambam writes this in his halachic work, in Hilchos Teshuvah in the Mishneh Torah, and also discusses at length in his introductions the different levels of serving Hashem. He explains at length that a child cannot understand or grasp a spiritual concept. Tell a child about the World to Come, spiritual worlds, spiritual reward, love of Hashem, closeness to Hashem—he is not equipped for it. He does not grasp it; it does not speak to him, because he is a child. That is not a fault or a problem. That is how it is supposed to be. A child is a child, and his understanding is that of a child. Since his mind has not yet developed, he understands physical things: what is sweet, what is sour, what makes him happy and what does not. The way to bring a child to observe mitzvos and learn Torah is through physical things: promising him prizes, giving him things he will receive, like sweets. The Rambam explains at length how one speaks to a child to awaken his desire to learn Torah and observe mitzvos. That is the normal path. As he develops and grows, one moves on to more spiritual things, until one reaches the point where you can ask

11:29 him to learn Torah for its own sake, to love Hashem and seek no benefit at all, neither physical nor spiritual. That is the highest level of serving Hashem, the love of Avraham Avinu. That is the usual path. And since that is so, the Rebbe Rashab, as we said, was a child. So seemingly, physical things would have held his attention, not spiritual ones. Yet here we suddenly see a child crying: Why doesn’t Hakadosh Boruch Hu reveal Himself to me? If I learn in the Torah that Hashem revealed Himself to Avraham Avinu, why doesn’t He reveal Himself to me? What really happened here? How could this be? The Rebbe dwelt on this and explained that there is something special here that is happening specifically in our generation. The Rebbe Rashab began a special period in the history of the Jewish people. If we speak of the Rebbe Rashab’s time as a historical period, then it is known from what is written in the seforim that during those years the teachings of Kabbalah began to develop in the world. The world’s preparation began; the world started moving into the atmosphere of the days of Moshiach. We are drawing very close to the time of the Geulah. Throughout this entire period, over the last hundred-plus years, we have been in a process: the world has been moving closer and closer to the time of Moshiach, to the era of the Geulah. That means that everything momentous we see happening in the world—from the great wars to the drastic changes in technology and in every other area—is part of this. After all, what the Zohar says is well known. The Zohar says that in the six-hundredth year of the sixth millennium—precisely the period we are talking about, particularly the period of the Rebbe Rashab, from the year 5601 onward—the floodgates of heaven and the springs of the earth would open. The Zohar says that Divine wisdom would burst forth in the world in a special way and, on a different level, the wisdom of the world would also burst forth at that time and to the same extent. We can actually see how, during those years, if

13:56 we go back roughly 150 years, there was extraordinary development in every field of knowledge in the world. Along with it came the development—of course, on an entirely different level—of the wisdom of the Torah, which is the main thing. The revelation of the inner dimension of Torah in a form that can be studied, understood, and brought down into everyday life began with the Baal Shem Tov, the Alter Rebbe, and Chabad Chassidus. With the Rebbe Rashab it gained tremendous momentum, as we will discuss now. So we begin to understand that this is not just a little story from history, a nice story that tells us something great about the Rebbe Rashab. It is a story that tells us about the opening of a new era. A new era was beginning. With the Rebbe Rashab, a new era begins in the reality of the world, in creation, and in the education of Jewish children. Now, because the world is moving toward the Geulah, the light of the Geulah is beginning to shine in the world, in the soul, and among the Jewish people. This opens a new channel: a Jew, even a young child, can suddenly feel a pull, a thirst, a connection, an understanding. He has this point within him that responds to matters of G-dliness, to spiritual matters. It is a revolution, but that truly is the revolution. That is the reality of our time. In fact, we also find that the Zohar says explicitly, in the words of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, that before Moshiach comes there will be a generation in which even young children—ravya in the language of the Zohar, which means young children in Aramaic—will be filled with Divine wisdom. The wisdom of Kabbalah will reach even children. So when the Rebbe Rashab, a five-year-old child, cries and says, “Why doesn’t Hakadosh Boruch Hu reveal Himself to me as He did to Avraham Avinu?” this is not, as we said, a story about the Rebbe Rashab. It is a story about the era. It tells us that a new time is arriving.

16:01 We need to start looking at our children, at the younger generation, in a completely different way. Today, children really have the talent, the sensitivity, the ability, and the understanding to respond to spirituality, to light, to G-dliness, to a connection with Hakadosh Boruch Hu. They are looking for it; they want it. And today we can see firsthand that especially in this latest generation, our children, the younger generation, no longer buy into superficial things, things that are only for show. They want truth, they want depth, they want the inner dimension. They are searching for it, and when they sense it, just the opposite happens: they latch on to it; it lights them up. This is one of the remarkable changes in outlook we see in our generation. People whose thinking is still stuck in the previous generation cannot understand it. Why? What is happening to our generation? What is this revolution? They start thinking the opposite: “Our generation is caught up in nonsense. There is no one to talk to in the younger generation.” Yet we see the opposite. When you look with open eyes at what is really happening, beneath the surface, you discover that our younger generation is just the opposite. They do not want us to sell them fairy tales. They do not want us to speak to them in pretty words wrapped up in colorful packaging. They do not need any of that nonsense. They do not need things that are just lip service. On the contrary, they want depth; they want the inner dimension. They want us to speak to them from soul to soul. This is a revolution that began in that period. The Rebbe spoke at a farbrengen in the later years—if I am not mistaken, it was in 5751, around 20 Cheshvan, on Shabbos Parshas Vayeira, in 1990. The Rebbe spoke then about this story of the Rebbe Rashab. Remarkable—a remarkable sicha. Why did the Rebbe Rashab cry? Why doesn’t Hakadosh Boruch Hu reveal Himself? With that crying, what happened

18:13 What happened with that crying? He cried as a child. After all, the Tzemach Tzedek answered him, and you might think that was the end of it. No, it did not end there. Let’s look at the life of the Rebbe Rashab and see what he devoted his life to over the roughly sixty years he lived in this world. We notice two broad, central things in his life. The first is Chassidus, as with all the Chabad Rebbeim. The Alter Rebbe developed a distinct approach within Chassidus itself. We know that the Baal Shem Tov revealed the foundations of Chassidus. The Maggid developed them further, and the Alter Rebbe took them in the direction of Chabad. Chabad is an acronym for Chochmah, Binah, and Daas. He took the foundations of the Baal Shem Tov’s teachings—the profound principles the Baal Shem Tov revealed about how a Jew lives with faith, love of Hashem, awe of Hashem, joy, and Ahavas Yisroel; the most fundamental aspects of a Jew’s relationship with Hakadosh Boruch Hu, with another Jew, and with the Torah. But with the Baal Shem Tov, these were presented more as feelings, as very deep but abstract ideas. The Alter Rebbe brought them into Chochmah, Binah, and Daas, developing a system with explanations. These are the Chassidus texts of the Chabad Rebbeim: the vast sea of the Alter Rebbe’s maamarim, beginning with Tanya and continuing with the dozens upon dozens of volumes of his maamarim; then those of his son, the Mitteler Rebbe; his grandson, the Tzemach Tzedek; and his great-grandson, the Rebbe Maharash. And here we see a particular innovation of the Rebbe Rashab: the way he taught and wrote his Chassidus was so orderly, so organized. His writing is smoother and more understandable, with analogies, examples, and explanations. Every subject, every topic, has

20:29 a particularly well-defined structure. The Rebbe Rashab’s books are marked by tremendous clarity and tremendous depth. Along with that depth, they have clarity and order, a beginning and an end. Entire topics in Kabbalah, in the mystical dimension of Torah, receive tangible explanations, with examples and analogies that anyone can study and understand. That is one thing—a particularly significant hallmark of the Rebbe Rashab’s life. So much so that there was an expression, which the Rebbe quoted in the name of the Frierdiker Rebbe, that chassidim used to say: the Rebbe Rashab is like the Rambam of Chassidus. We know what the Rambam did. One of the wonderful things about his teachings is that he brought order to the vast sea of the Talmud. He took the Oral Torah, which was “longer than the earth and broader than the sea”—how does the verse put it?—and organized it, arranging it into laws, with a beginning and an end, and so on. The Rebbe Rashab did something similar with the inner dimension of Torah. He organized, clarified, explained, interpreted, and divided it up in a way that lets you connect with even the deepest topic and know exactly where it belongs and what its details are. The second thing we see in the Rebbe Rashab’s life, something especially prominent and well known, is his founding of a yeshivah for young people. Until the time of the Rebbe Rashab, Chassidus was studied mainly by older people, because the study of Kabbalah, the mystical dimension of Torah, has boundaries about who may study it and who may not. There had always been concern that young people were not yet ready or suited to it. First they had to fill themselves, as the halachic texts put it, “with bread and meat.” That means first studying halachah and Gemara, filling themselves with the revealed dimension of Torah, and only then, at forty or older, beginning the inner dimension of Torah. In this, the Rebbe Rashab brought about

22:35 a revolution—a real revolution. He was the first to found a yeshivah for young people, what is known today as the renowned Chabad yeshivah, Tomchei Temimim. The Rebbe Rashab founded it. When did he found it? At the wedding of his only son, the Frierdiker Rebbe. He founded this renowned yeshivah in 5657, 1897. It was on 18 Elul, the birthday of the Baal Shem Tov and the Alter Rebbe. That was when the first yeshivah for young people was founded. The Rebbe Rashab explained that its purpose—even though there were many yeshivos, and there was no shortage of them in Russia at the time—was to be a special yeshivah whose students would be Temimim, complete in Torah. They would study both the revealed and the hidden dimensions of Torah. Every day there would be dedicated times: several hours at the beginning of the day and several hours in the evening to study the inner dimension of Torah, Chassidus. During the main hours of the day they would continue studying the revealed dimension of Torah, Gemara and halachah, and so on. This was a remarkable innovation developed by the Rebbe Rashab. It began with the yeshivos in Lubavitch, the town of Lubavitch in Russia, and from there spread and developed across the countries of the world—the Chabad yeshivos around the world. Now notice, the Rebbe said something remarkable. That child who cried at the age of five—what was he crying about? Why doesn’t Hakadosh Boruch Hu reveal Himself to us? Although the Tzemach Tzedek gave him his answer, that a righteous Jew, Avraham Avinu, had nevertheless merited such a revelation, here was a child crying because he wanted Hakadosh Boruch Hu to reveal Himself to him. That crying became a foundation of the Rebbe Rashab’s life for all his days. That desire for us to merit Divine revelation, for it to be revealed to us—the Rebbe Rashab put that crying, that desire,

24:47 that yearning, that thirst into his teachings of Chassidus. He sat down and wrote books of Chassidus that, if you study them, live with them, contemplate them, and immerse yourself in them, give you the ability to draw close to the Divine light and feel the presence of Hakadosh Boruch Hu in your life, in everyday life, in a truly real and tangible way. So that itself is a response, an answer: every Jew truly can see Hakadosh Boruch Hu today as well, through the books and maamarim of Chassidus, through the Chassidus texts that the Rebbe Rashab developed and explained. You can draw close to Hakadosh Boruch Hu in the most tangible way. And the fact that he was a small child when he cried—that was the cry of a child. It brought about this revolution: young people too, children and young men, can now also develop that cleaving, that bond, that connection, that understanding and depth in the inner dimension of Torah. We can raise a child today to feel the desire to understand, draw close to, and connect with Hakadosh Boruch Hu. And all of this, of course, depends very much on the atmosphere at home. We all know how powerfully the atmosphere at home influences a child. If, at the Shabbos meal, a child hears his parents talking about what is going to happen, about politics, honor, money, and so on, then of course he sees that as the reality of life. But when the atmosphere at home makes a child feel that what matters there is Torah, mitzvos, the life of the soul, and G-dliness, then a child today, in our generation, wants that. He is ready for it; he is capable of receiving it. We can help make that his life and his purpose in life. That was the innovation brought about by the Rebbe Rashab. It began when he was a child, and through that crying he brought it about for generations, that he

26:57 He did, in fact, provide an answer by founding the Tomchei Temimim yeshiva for young people. He developed a way of studying the inner dimension of Torah that everyone could understand. Now, if so, let’s talk about the Tzemach Tzedek’s answer. He wasn’t telling him that it was beyond his reach. We can now understand the Tzemach Tzedek’s answer in a completely different way. When the Tzemach Tzedek told the Rebbe Rashab that a Jew who decides at age ninety-nine to have a bris deserves to have Hashem reveal Himself to him, he wasn’t saying, “Wow, that’s something only Avraham Avinu could do; it has nothing to do with us.” On the contrary, what the Tzemach Tzedek was trying to explain was that a bris is needed. What’s needed is something that costs you dearly, something that involves a certain pain—not necessarily physical pain, G-d forbid. But there has to be something... What does it mean that Avraham Avinu had a bris at age ninety-nine? It means he broke out of his fixed patterns and rose to something higher. At ninety-nine, he was told: a bris is needed. You need to do something more to go beyond your limits—something that hurts, something that isn’t so pleasant. And precisely that connected him to something beyond nature, beyond reason and understanding. It connected him to the higher divine light, as Chassidus explains regarding the power of a bris, and then he merited to have Hakadosh Boruch Hu reveal Himself to him. Every Jew, to one degree or another, can have a bris in the circumstances of our lives today. Having a bris means going a little beyond our limits, beyond our nature, beyond what I’m used to, what’s easy and comfortable for me, and rising above selfishness. When a person is willing to leave their comfort zone, to go beyond their constraints and limits and rise to something higher, that is what makes us a vessel truly able to connect

28:57 with the teachings of the inner dimension of Torah, with Chassidus, and to have the divine light shine in our lives. And this is what the Rebbe Rashab represents at this time. It’s very interesting, as the Frierdiker Rebbe also pointed out in his time, that 20 Cheshvan, the Rebbe Rashab’s birthday, is exactly one month before 19 Kislev, the Rosh Hashanah of Chassidus. That means we’re entering a thirty-day period, just as we speak of the month of Elul as thirty days of preparation for Rosh Hashanah. As Chassidus explains about the month of Elul—“I am my Beloved’s and my Beloved is mine,” the King in the field—these are thirty days of preparation for Rosh Hashanah. So too with the spiritual Rosh Hashanah of Chassidus, 19 Kislev: the Rebbe Rashab was the one who called it the Rosh Hashanah of Chassidus, and he was born exactly thirty days before it. This teaches us that during these days, each of us needs to begin the inner preparation for the wonderful revelation associated with 19 Kislev, with the Rosh Hashanah of Chassidus: to connect with the study of Chassidus, to study what Chassidus teaches us, to try to draw closer to it—to the light of the inner dimension of Torah—to understand it, internalize it, and live with it. And may we have the desire and longing for the revelation of G-dliness, for the highest and most complete divine revelation, which, with Hashem’s help, will come soon with the arrival of Moshiach Tzidkeinu: “The glory of Hashem will be revealed, and all flesh will see that the mouth of Hashem has spoken”; and “Hashem will be King over all the earth; on that day Hashem will be One and His name One.” Amen, may it be His will.