The Torah greats of every generation, Shmotkin said, have always had the creativity to “extrapolate from the treasures that we have carried for so many years and to find therein the application and the guidance that talks to the minds and hearts of the current time”. The rebbe combined psychological acumen with interpretation of talmudic sources and Kabbalah to offer guidance.
And just as Shmotkin, who is now 27, found support in the writings of the modern Chasidic master, so he hopes the book will contain useful tools for a wider audience.
As an example of one letter that made a particularly strong impact on him, he recites the response to a troubled American college student in the 1960s. But he was only to discover the exact background to the letter from a rabbi who knew it and had got in touch after Letters for Life had been published.
The correspondent had been an Ivy League student so wracked by inner turmoil that he was considering taking his own life. In despair, he had written to the rebbe.
The rebbe responded that ”the answer to your letter is in your own letter”, Shmotkin explained. In two and a half pages the student had poured out his frustrations with his family, with his career, with himself but, the rebbe had observed, there was not one word about his role “to give” – to contribute to others.
“You are much too wrapped up with yourself, with your own emotions and feelings and aspirations…” the rebbe said. “You must get away from yourself, and begin to think of others. It is time to begin an active participation in society; to give, and give generously. The opportunities are many, and the need is great.”
Author: Levi Shmotkin (chabad.org)[Missing Credit]
In Kabbalah, the sun and moon stand as symbols of giving and receiving – the one diffuses light and the other receives and reflects it – which mirror the pattern throughout the cosmos. And just as we take to fulfil our needs, so we must give in return. “Plants need soil and water, and sunlight, but everything also has something it contributes and gives to the environment. The trees give oxygen, a bee takes nectar and gives honey,” said Shmotkin.
The rebbe’s advice struck home. The student, Shmotkin learned, went on to become a highly respected professor. When the rebbe died, the professor wept “like a baby”. When asked by a friend why he was so grief-stricken, the professor explained that “the rebbe saw me in my darkest moment in my life and he understood what I needed to break out of the darkness was not a pat on the back… but actually to challenge me to radically shift my entire way of thinking.”
The rebbe’s letter ended on a note that only resonated with Shmotkin after October 7. It had originally been written some 15 years or so after the Shoah when so many young Jewish lives had been cut short; and in the rebbe’s view “it is upon us who are still here today to continue to live, not only for ourselves but also for all those who have perished before their time”. If we choose to live proudly as Jews in a hostile world, we perform a “double duty”, living for those who were denied the possibility to live out their Jewish lives.
The rebbe’s wisdom became apparent in the way he could apply a talmudic teaching. As a student, Shmotkin had studied the ruling by the second-century sage Rava that a person could not incriminate themselves in a legal case.
But the rebbe saw in that a principle relevant to everyday life. Yes, Judaism asks us to be introspective and try to correct our faults. But the rebbe warned against being too harsh on ourselves.
If we were to become paralysed by a sense of our own inadequacy, then that would be no good. “We sometimes see our strengths and our accomplishments in a greater light than they are, they seem inflated to us,” Shmotkin said, “but perhaps more often we see our faults and our weaknesses in a totally disproportionate metric from the truth.”
If the rebbe became modern Judaism’s greatest revivalist, the letters illuminate how he was able to touch lives. “He continuously tries to impress people that they are bigger than they are,” Shmotkin said, “that they are connected to the Divine Being in ways they maybe not have realised, they are connected to others in ways they have not realised, they have a role in this world they may not have realised.”
Letters for Life – Guidance for Emotional Wellness from the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Levi Shmotkin, Ezra Press is out now
Top image: The Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson
