Rabbi's Blog

Dear Friends, 

I went to sleep in a dormitory in Brooklyn one night, and when I woke up the next morning, I was a grandfather!

At least, that's how it felt.

This past Shabbos, I had the extraordinary pleasure of reuniting with eighteen former yeshivah classmates in New York, for a Shabbos at the Ohel, marking forty years since the historic events surrounding “Hey Teves” - the battle over the ownership of the Chabad library that began in 1985, and the judge's historic verdict in 1987. It was a formative experience that we all witnessed and lived through together.  

For a few precious hours, the decades melted away. We were young students again, reliving the extraordinary events that shaped our lives.

One of the central messages the Rebbe emphasized during that period was that the life of a tzaddik (righteous individual) is essentially spiritual, and therefore eternal.

Forty years later, the continued vitality and extraordinary global growth of Chabad, more than three decades after the Rebbe's physical passing, are a powerful testament to that truth.

On Sunday, after the Shabbos together with my classmates, Ahuva joined me in NY for a two day vacay. During two of our New York site seeing stops I discovered unexpected connections to this week's Parshah.

We visited the 9/11 Memorial Museum, an experience that was profoundly moving on many levels. Among the many stories of tragedy and heroism, one in particular captured my imagination.

As the Twin Towers collapsed and Lower Manhattan descended into chaos, hundreds of thousands of people found themselves trapped, with roads, bridges, and tunnels closed. Many fled toward the waterfront, desperately seeking a way out.

Then came an extraordinary radio announcement from the United States Coast Guard, calling on all available boats to assist in the evacuation.

And they came.

Ferries, tugboats, fishing vessels, private boats. Ordinary captains and crews, many of them civilians, turned their vessels toward the smoke and destruction, risking their own safety to rescue complete strangers.

What followed became the largest maritime evacuation in American history, with an estimated 300,000 to 500,000 people transported to safety in less than nine hours. It even surpassed the famous evacuation of Dunkirk during World War II.

The interviews with some of these boat captains were especially touching. Their message was remarkably simple: If we could save even one life, it would all have been worthwhile.

And suddenly, I was thinking about Noach and how thousands of years earlier, Noach had built a Teivah, an ark, to save life from a devastating flood. But there was something particularly remarkable about these modern-day arks. Noach was commanded to build an ark to save himself, his family, and the creatures entrusted to him. These New York boat captains, however, voluntarily sailed directly into danger to save people they had never met.

They weren't simply seeking shelter from the storm. They were becoming a shelter for others. They had transformed their boats into arks of compassion.

Our next stop was Ellis Island, a place I had long wanted to visit.

For millions of immigrants, including countless Jews fleeing persecution and poverty, Ellis Island represented the gateway to a new world. Among the exhibits, I was particularly moved by photographs documenting the establishment of a kosher kitchen for Jewish immigrants, and even a Passover Seder.

We've all heard stories of Jewish immigrants who supposedly discarded their tefillin into New York Harbor, believing their religious traditions had no place in the New World. But these photographs told another story. They spoke of Jews who had crossed turbulent oceans, leaving entire worlds behind, yet remained determined to carry their Jewish identity into the future.

Ellis Island, too, was a kind of Teivah—a gateway through which people emerged from the turbulent waters of the Old World, carrying the seeds of new beginnings.

The Baal Shem Tov offers a profound interpretation of G-d's instruction to Noach, Bo el haTeivah—"Enter the ark." The Hebrew word Teivah also means "word." Enter the words of Torah and prayer, he teaches, and discover a spiritual sanctuary amid life's turbulent waters.

Among those who escaped war-torn Europe was the Rebbe, who arrived in America with the Rebbetzin in 1941. He would go on to dedicate his life to building spiritual arks across the globe, reconnecting Jews with the timeless words of Torah and prayer.

But the Rebbe's vision went beyond building sanctuaries in which Jews could find refuge. It was about inspiring them to venture outward, to reach those who were spiritually adrift, and to bring them aboard.

In that sense, the mission of Chabad combines both dimensions of the Teivah: preserving the spiritual treasures of our past while sailing toward others to help secure their future.

And then came one final encounter.

On our flight home from JFK to Fort Lauderdale, I found myself seated beside an Israeli couple. As we prepared for takeoff, I asked the husband if he would like to recite Tefilas Haderech, the prayer for travelers. I handed him my phone, and he read the prayer.

We began chatting. When he learned that I was a Chabad shliach, his face lit up. He told me that he had lived in New York for forty years, that he loved Chabad, and that, in his words, "Chabad is the only future of the Jewish people."

Then, with unmistakable pride, he produced a treasured photograph of himself receiving a dollar from the Rebbe, sometime around 1989 or 1990. More than thirty-five years later, he was still carrying that moment with him.

I thought about our reunion. I thought about Ellis Island. I thought about those heroic boat captains on 9/11. And I thought about Noach's ark.

Here was a man carrying a treasured encounter with the Rebbe across the decades, just as earlier generations had carried their Jewish inheritance across the oceans. And here we were, thousands of feet above the earth, having just entered the Teivah together through the words of a simple prayer.

Perhaps that is the enduring message of Noach's ark. The purpose of a Teivah is not simply to survive the flood. It is to preserve life, to reach out to others, and ultimately to build a better world when the waters recede.

Forty years after Hey Teves, the Rebbe's message of eternal spiritual life was sitting right beside me.

Alive. Vibrant. And still taking flight.

Good Shabbos and Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Ruvi New

Dear Friends, 

A week and a half after October 7, as part of a delegation of 25 Chabad Rabbis (including Rabbi Eli Schlanger OBM), I visited Kibbutz Shefayim, just outside Tel Aviv, which had become a temporary home for survivors from Kfar Aza.

I will never forget the scene.

In a large outdoor area were circles of chairs everywhere. From a distance, it almost looked like a picnic—families and groups sitting together in the Israeli sunshine.

But as I got closer, I realized what I was looking at.

They were sitting shiva.

Circle after circle. Family after family. People mourning parents, children, siblings and friends murdered just days earlier.

I approached one man who had just begun sitting shiva for his mother. I wasn't sure what one could possibly say. So I said to him in Hebrew, essentially, “We came just to be with you—to sit with you where you are.”

His response has remained with me ever since:

“I don't need you to be with me in the dark place where I am. I need you to lift me up. Lift us up.”

Three years after October 7, those words feel more relevant than ever.

This week's Torah portion, Bereishis, describes the sun and moon initially as “the two great luminaries.” Yet shortly afterward, one becomes the “great luminary” and the other the “small luminary.”

It brings to mind a childhood story about the Rebbe Rashab (Sholom Dov Ber) and his older brother, Reb Zalman Aharon. Although Reb Zalman Aharon was older, his younger brother was taller. So he dug a hole and had his brother stand inside it, making himself appear taller.

Their father, the Rebbe Maharash, told him: “That's not how you become taller. If you want to be taller, stand on a chair. You don't make yourself higher by lowering someone else.”

There is a profound lesson here for this moment.

The explosion of antisemitism since October 7 demands that we expose it, confront it and defend ourselves against it. But there is also a danger that we become so consumed with documenting the darkness that the darkness itself begins to define our Jewish identity.

Our response cannot only be to expose their darkness.

It must be to increase our light.

Perhaps the rise in antisemitism is also a call for us to become more luminescent Jews—more visible and unapologetic in our Jewishness, more passionate about Torah and mitzvos, and more determined to bring Jewish values of holiness, goodness, morality and compassion into the world.

The Torah's first model of gadol—greatness—is the “great luminary.” True greatness means becoming a maor, a source of light. If we possess light, our responsibility is to radiate it—to illuminate others until they, too, can shine.

The Torah calls upon the Jewish people to be “a light unto the nations.” That mission is not suspended when the world becomes darker.

Perhaps that is precisely when it becomes most urgent.

Three years after October 7, we certainly need to remain vigilant about antisemitism. But let us become at least as passionate about pro-Semitism—about what we love, what we believe, what we contribute, and the light Judaism asks us to bring into the world.

And perhaps there could be no more appropriate time for that message than Shabbos Bereishis — the Shabbos when we begin the Torah again from its very first word: Bereishis, “In the beginning.”

After everything we have experienced these past three years, the Torah invites us not only to remember, but to begin again. A new cycle. A new opportunity. Not to allow October 7 to define us by what was done to us, but by what it awakened within us.

And significantly, the very first chapter of that new beginning speaks about creating light.

Perhaps that is our Bereishis three years later: to begin again—and to shine brighter.

That man at Shefayim taught me something I have never forgotten.

Sometimes love means sitting with someone in their darkness.

But sometimes the greater gift is to bring them light.

Don't come down into my darkness.
Bring me some of your light.
Lift me up.

Three years after October 7, perhaps that is our calling as well:

Don't merely expose the darkness.

Become more luminous.

Good Shabbos and Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Ruvi New

Please see the video recap of my post Oct 7 trip to Israel here.