This Monday, the 20th of Cheshvan, marks the anniversary of the birth of the fifth Lubavitcher Rebbe (1860-1920), known as the Rebbe Rashab. He is most known for having founded the first organized chassidic yeshiva in 1897 and delivering deep discourses in chassidic philosophy. His son and successor, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchok, related the following charming story about his father:
When the Rebbe Rashab was four years old, a tailor bought a dress to his mother – Rebbetzin Rivka – that he had sewn from material she had provided him. At one point, little Sholom Ber innocently pulled a piece of cloth from the original material out of the tailor’s pocket and, as children are wont to do, started running around the room with it. The tailor was very embarrassed – since he was supposed to return any leftover cloth – and explained that he had intended to return it but had forgotten to do so.
After the tailor left, Rebbetzin Rivka told off her son for embarrassing the tailor. Realizing what he had done, young Sholom Ber burst into tears.
A few weeks later, the boy asked his father, who later became the Rebbe Maharash, how a person could make up for embarrassing his fellow. His father asked him why he wanted to know, but the child didn’t want to repeat what he had done. His father apparently mentioned the incident to his wife, and she asked her son why he hadn’t told his father the story.
Little Sholom Ber replied, “It was bad enough that I embarrassed a fellow Jew; should I have transgressed even more by telling rechilus and lashon hara?”
Clearly, the young boy hadn’t intended to sin and almost no one had witnessed the tailor’s embarrassment. Nevertheless, realizing that he had embarrassed someone moved the boy so deeply that he cried bitterly and didn’t want to tell his father about the incident. Even at his young age, the future Rebbe Rashab could not bear to speak negatively about a fellow Jew.
Among chassidim, particularly Chabad chassidim, the point of telling stories about Rebbes or other tzaddikim is not primarily to glorify them. Rather, the point is to learn practical lessons from them. Since the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe repeated this story and since the Rebbe Rashab acted the way he did (paving the way for all of us), it is evidently possible for us to reach his exalted level of ethical sensitivity and to educate every young Jewish child to do the same.
Many years after this story, the Rebbe Rashab declared, “Just as donning tefillin is a Torah commandment for every Jew…so too it is an absolute obligation for every Jew to think half an hour every day about the Jewish education of children and to do everything in his power and beyond his power to ensure that the children are influenced to proceed upon the path in which they are being guided.”
This statement applies to one’s own children and grandchildren, as well as the children of Jews who, for whatever reason, have not given their children a true Jewish education. It is our solemn halachic obligation to ensure that these children, too, receive a proper Torah education. If they do, we will have raised a generation of Jews committed to Hashem and His Torah, which will help reveal Moshiach.
(Based on teachings of the Lubavitcher Rebbe)