by Rabbi Shlomo Galperin
In my Brooklyn synagogue this week I heard two stories of the Rebbe, half a century apart, yet with a similar message.
The first story I heard from Rabbi Ephraim Piekarsky who was teaching a Chassidus class. He has a special gift of clarity and explanation, even with abstract and lofty concepts. In middle of the class he shared this story (that I never heard before): Once when the Rebbe was a young child his mother took him to the Black Sea. It was common for Russian families of that region to go to the seashore in summertime to cool off. The Rebbe was wearing a large, heavy-knit yarmulka (kippa) and a Jewish man approached him and said, “Little boy, it is so hot out, take off the yarmulka!” The little boy responded, “I am not allowed to.” To which the man replied in Talmudic jargon, “I will take the sin on my shoulders.” But the little boy said, “What difference would that make?”
The second story was told by Rabbi Hillel Zaltzman for a MyEncounter interview. See the segment here online. This was Samarkand, Russia in the late 1960’s. There was some question if there should be an organized outreach effort also among the Sephardic/Bukharian Jews or not. This was a time of secrecy and fear, all Jewish efforts were fraught with danger. One of the Chabad community got permission to emigrate, and they told him to ask the Rebbe if such outreach to the Sephardic community was appropriate or not. The common code then for the Rebbe was “Zeide” (grandfather) and regarding this specific question the code was: does he only like yellow/beige shoes (symbolic of Ashkenazim) or also brown-black shoes (a symbol for the Sephardic community). The Rebbe’s response came a few weeks later. “Zeide does not see the difference, between beige shoes and brown shoes, he likes both shoes.”