1319 - Elul 19 – Chabad history

00:00 Well, do you make Chabad for Yut Elul, for the nineteenth day of Elul? That is the day that the previous Lubavitch Rebbe entered for the first time to 770 Eastern Parkway. Now, everybody has heard Lubavitch World Headquarters that, uh, the number is-- you don't even have to say Eastern Parkway, you just say seven-seventy, everybody knows what seven-seventy is. They don't even know what is Eastern Parkway . So, by the way, the, uh, people that figured out, and the Rebbe has used that terminology too, I heard the Rebbe say this also, is that the w- numerical value of seven hundred and seventy equals the words of Peratzta. One of the slogans of the Rebbe was the verse that talks about the blessing that God gave to, uh, Jacob. He told him, "Uperatzta yama vakedma," that you shall burst out to the east, to, uh, to the west, to the east, and to the south, to the north. And one of the, uh, uh, slogans was that Hasidic teaching and the philosophy and the enthusiasm should, uh, burst out and spread out and engulf basically the whole world with its passion, with its, uh, special devotion and fervor. You know, what Hasidic teaching and Chabad teaching has, and that is the numerical value of seven-seventy. So, um, it is of, of significance that went into, uh, seven-seventy. There is-- The Rebbe published a whole booklet, uh, uh, which he gave a talk, uh, talking about the Beis Rabinu Sheb'Bavel, that is the rabbi's house in Babylonia, which

01:53 is from the Talmud, which states that basically a wh- house of worship and a house of, uh, prayer and a house of, uh, study and a house of where good deeds come from has a very, very special level. It's not just an ordinary home. It becomes like a sanctuary. It becomes like a s-miniature Beit HaMikdash. Like, we also say that all synagogues are considered to be a Beis Mikdash M'at, a small and a miniature kind of a sanctuary. Now, we have to understand that that was a synagogue which eventually went through many transformation until it became a huge hall downstairs, but it started off very, very small. When the Rebbe, the previous Rebbe came to this country, there was only a handful of people that would come. Uh, they would look for a minyan sometimes when they started out. And you can only imagine what transpired over the years in which, you know, there was never space later on. As big as they made it, it was always packed, it was always jammed. Never worried about a minyan . And, uh, well, you know, now you have a minyan going from, uh, morning through, uh, it's twenty-four/seven basically. It's functioning. It's a, uh, continuous functioning synagogue. But that's why it was significant. But as you know that the-- one of the challenges that the previous Rebbe had was to change the mindset of the people over here. People were very much, um, you know, foreign. They didn't believe the idea that America could become a

03:37 place of, of study, of religious, uh, service to Hashem, to yeshivas and everything, as they had it in, in Europe. I mean, this was something that the people didn't believe can happen over here. And one of the first things that the previous Rebbe said is that America is no different, which means that we're going to, uh, work hard to change the people's perception. And the Rebbe, with the help of the, uh, the, the Rebbe, the present Rebbe, the previous Rebbe, they went and they established, you know, educational institutions, uh, uh, various, uh, kinds of- Camps ... outreach and camps, et cetera. All, all services and also social services and, and, uh, uh, to help people in, in all kinds of different ways. And the biggest challenge in the olden days was actually was financing all this because people, A, uh, within the Chabad community were not affluent at the time. Most of these people came from Europe, and they were struggling just to survive. Um, and one of the challenges was to get some funding to-- I mean, today, by contrast, if you look at the funding and the, uh, amount of, uh, uh, philanthropy that's going on, and even amongst, uh, Chabad followers, some, you know, thank God, have made it, and some of them are pretty well off themselves, so they can support their own causes. But also, uh, we l-learned how to, uh, raise the conscience of other people who are not even Chabad, who don't identify themselves being Chabad, but yet

05:28 they are able to realize and understand that, uh, the important work that Chabad does to preserve Yiddishkeit, to make sure that there will be a, a next generation, that there will be, um, you know, the tradition will be transmitted and keep on going, you know, from generation to generation. So going into seven-seventy, uh, which remains till today, gave it sort of this, uh, stability that now when the Rebbe, they bought the house and the Rebbe went in there. And when the Rebbe went into the-- previous Rebbe, the first time- Uh, in seven seventy, which was as mentioned, the nineteenth day of Elul in the year Taf Shin. That was in nineteen forty. And first he went into the, uh, synagogue. The synagogue at the time consisted of that one building. If you-- They have replicas today of seven seventy throughout the world and in Israel and in all over the place, they have replicas. That's the main original building, which has th- several floors, three floors and a basement. Um, the shul was on the first floor. So first the Rebbe went into the first floor, and he says that a prayer to God. He prayed that the prayers that we will do over here should be prayers that come from our inside, that we should really mean what we pray, and that they should be sweetened with true inner service to Hashem. And then he went into the, uh, uh, dining room. Now, I'm assuming that this was already went up, uh, because the

07:15 dwelling place was the second floor. This was on the first floor, was the shul, and there was some offices over there, but the actual living space of the previous Rebbe was on the upper floor. And they installed a, uh, an elevator over there later on. Was difficult, uh, so they have an elevator in there too. But, um, he went into the, uh, room, uh, dining room. He sat down and, um, he, uh, gave a talk to the people there. And that talk he discussed the concept, uh, why we don't do the blessing of the new month of Tishrei. There is a printed, uh, Sicha, doesn't go through here. You know that every month of the year, the Shabbos, before the month, we do a special prayer in the synagogue. We call that Shabbat Mevorchim. We call it the Shabbos that we bless. Because the Shabbat that precedes the new month, we do a special blessing for that month. We bless that the month should be for life, for peace, for happiness. We give all the blessings. And we do that on Shabbat because we're basically trying to announce the upcoming month that it's coming. So that's when most of the people gather in shul. That's the most fitting time to do the reminder and to do the blessing for the upcoming month. We do that for every month of the year, with the exception before Rosh Hashanah, we don't do the Shabbat Mevorchim. So like next week's Shabbos, when it's gonna be the Shabbos before

08:50 Rosh Hashanah, we're not gonna do that special blessing for the, for the month. And there is various reasons, uh, given, uh, for that. Uh, one of the reason is because we don't wanna make a public announcement about the upcoming High Holidays because we don't want the Satan to find out that the High Holidays are coming and that Rosh Hashanah... You know, how do we trick the Satan, who is an angel, who know-- That's another, whole another discussion. But the-- Later on, the, uh, explanation came forward that, um, even though we don't bless that month, which means in the shul, but that's actually blessed by God Himself. Matter of fact, the-- that blessing that God gives us before the Rosh Hashanah is what gives us the power later on to go ahead and bless all the other months. So we have the special blessing on the Shabbos before Rosh Hashanah. We are not missing anything, rather we don't do the blessing, but rather Hashem does the blessing. We can all imagine that as much as we, as human beings can do a blessing, we're limited, and we're just limited human beings. If God does the blessing, that's beyond anything that we can imagine. So it turns out that the blessings we get before Rosh Hashanah are even greater and more powerful, more profound because they come from Hashem Himself. But that was a talk that he gave at that particular time. And, um, um, and, uh, I guess from then the rest is history. That became,

10:35 uh, seven seventy, and that became the, the, the nerve center, I guess, for all the activities throughout the world. And the, the Rebbe would m-- often say and speak about the fact that, um, this was a, a, a place of holiness in which, of course, the Rebbe attributed everything to his father-in-law. Rebbe would always say, "My father-in-law, my father-in-law." He never attributed anything to himself individually. And, um, the Rebbe said, "This is a place where my father-in-law for ten years," because from nineteen forty through nineteen fifty, in which, uh, the passing of the, uh, previous Lubavitcher Rebbe. Um, so you think about it, it was just shy of ten years because, uh, if he came in the month of Elul, um, and, uh, he passed away on Yahrzeit in the third of Shevat, so it's about nine and a half years that he lived. And the previous Rebbe didn't have an easy life, uh, and, um, with all the, with all the, uh, tzoros that he had from es- especially back home, uh, from the, uh, Bolsheviks and all the battles over there, and then, then with the Germans, and then traveling until, till he finally came to the United States. So one can, uh, just understand that these last ten years of his life were basically years of, of, of, of some sort of peace and being able to fully be active without But his health took a turn towards the end to the worst. I mean, he was, uh, uh, semi-paralyzed. He couldn't

12:16 speak. He couldn't, uh-- It was very difficult. He passed when he was seventy, but he was still a, still a young man, relatively. I mean, he didn't have any... It was just like, um, all the, the, the, the, the, the, the, uh, troubles that he had to, um, you know, go through, uh, until he came. So the Rebbe himself in his talks, I mean, the Rebbe, he was Rebbe for about-- for just, like, thirty years. His father, uh, his father passed away in, um, in 1930, so, uh, I mean, 1920. So he had from to thirty to forty to fifty. That was his thirty years. And the Rebbe sort of divided up these thirty years into ten, uh, segments, ten pieces, and showed how they each one represent a different, um, a different part in his, uh, service. But, uh, he definitely was the, uh, symbol of, uh, total self-sacrifice and, uh, standing up for Yiddishkeit, for Hashem, for the Torah. Um, when I first came to the area, uh, I went to visit, uh, with the Rabbi Soloveitchik. Uh, he was the-- You must have heard, the great, um, rabbi and scholar from the famous Soloveitchik family. He was the head of Maimonides, and he was, um, a yeshiva university, and he was just a, uh, an outstanding scholar and leader and, uh, um, I went to visit him. Uh, he was already, uh, must have been in nineteen, uh, eighty-three or something like that, eighty-two, eighty-three. I'm not sure exactly. He was frail

14:05 and, you know, he's-- he was shaking when he spoke. I'm not sure if he had Parkinson's or something, you know. But he was, uh, he, uh... It was hard for him, but we came to visit him at his house, and he was, um, very, um, accepting to us, and he was, like, very warm and, you know. We were Chabad. This is Maimonides, mainly. It was modern Orthodox. He became the leader of modern Orthodox, but he was very, very, uh, uh, kind and, uh, reached out to us and- He wasn't threatened. And he, and he... No, but he, yeah, and he, he told us something very interesting. He says that he was in, uh, in, in, in, in Berlin, um, at the time. I guess he was studying at the time. And when the previous Rebbe came out of, uh, when he came out of Russia, uh, he was, uh, he was a student there. There was a-- The chief rabbi, I believe some of the details are a little vague, but it was a Rabbi Hildesheimer was, like, the chief rabbi and, and he told him, the chief rabbi told to Rabbi Soloveitchik, he says, uh, he says to him, you know, he was a young student then. He says: "Would you like to come with me? I'm going to go visit now the hero, the one and only hero who stood up against the Bolsheviks, against the Russian government to continue Yiddishkeit. He's, like, the champion of Mesirut Nefesh. He's, like, the star who

15:35 really was able to overcome and made it through and came out." And this was, like, a big, um, very prestigious. So he said he went along together with the, with the chief rabbi at the time. He went to visit the Rebbe and, and the previous Rebbe was in a beautiful hotel over there, a suite, and it was... So he said something to the effect that Rabbi Hildesheimer asked him, you know. Look, he was, like, uh, a little bit taken aback. Like, he, he went, like, in the most fanciest hotel. It's like a five-star. I say, you know, those were, like, reserved for, I guess, uh, for the top echelon , for the, uh, high rollers. I mean, uh, the-- I guess the general people would stay in a four-star hotel or something less. And here the Rebbe is coming out, so he sort of said, "Wow, you know, you, uh, you come out and you're in a..." And he, he, he quoted the Rebbe at the time. The Rebbe told him that, uh, the law is that when one comes out of prison, uh, so even a Chaloma, there are certain laws. You know, one's not supposed to take a haircut. One is not supposed to, uh, do certain things because of the honor of the holiday and during Chaloma. But there's an exception made for one who was incarcerated and didn't have a chance to, so to beautify themselves for the, for the Yom Tov and for the upcoming holiday. So something to the

17:03 effect, if I remember correctly, uh, being incarcerated and being in all this service, so in honor of Hashem, in honor of them, has to come and beautify himself. So that was something that he, he experienced, you know, at that time. He related to us, um, that. But anyways, that's the ninetieth day of Elul, is the day that he came into seven seventy. And im yirtze Hashem, from there, we will merit to take all the shuls, it says they're gonna fly, are going to, uh, with Mashiach, they're all gonna fly, uh, to Eretz Israel. They're all going to Israel to make one big Beit Hamikdash over there. And, uh, it says all the shuls and all the- ... all the shuls and all the, uh, study halls, uh, Yiddishkeit, will all, will get up and come to Eretz Israel. And, um, hope that it happens very soon in our days.