This Friday was “Yud-Shvat” the 10th of Shvat which is the yartzeit of Rebbe Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn (1880-1950) who was the 6th Rebbe of Chabad-Lubavitch. He is known as the Rebbe of Mesiras Nefesh (self-sacrifice) because of his fearless dedication to the furtherance of Jewish life under the Communist regime at great personal peril. He was a prolific writer, his many works are filled with stories, nostalgia and inspiration.
But what I want to share with you today is a story of this Rebbe’s youth that has to do with the study of Mishna. (Mishna is the skeleton Hebrew text of the Jewish Oral Law, later elaborated much more extensively in the Gemorah/Talmud).
When he was a youngster, his father encouraged him to learn Mishna by heart and would give him a small Russian coin for each Mishna he mastered. After some time and lots of study he collected a small sum, quite a bit for a little boy. He had a kind heart and was especially sensitive and thoughtful. He decided to take his purse to the market on marketdays and he would lend (without interest, of course) small sums to struggling businesspeople, who needed a little “capital” to get started on market-day.
Once this business-venture got him into serious trouble. In fact it landed him in the local jail! A police officer got into a scuffle with a butcher, who got his loan that morning from Yosef-Yitzchak. The youngster stuck up for the integrity of the butcher and that got the Russian police officer upset. Turns out the police officer was a greedy and unscrupulous-type, and was after a calf that the butcher intended to sell. The boy ended up in jail together with the bound-calf, and kept his sanity and calm because he kept repeating to himself the Mishna texts that he remembered by heart.
Today we’re going to study some Mishna together in memory of Matt’s grandfather who passed away this week. The intials of the selected Mishnas spell the name “Efraim” which was his Hebrew name. May our study be a merit for his soul, because in Hebrew the 4 letters of Mishna can be rearranged to spell “Neshoma” which means soul.