When Neighborhood Youths in Crown Heights Pulled Off Yarmulkes

By Rabbi Shimon Posner – Director of Chabad of Rancho Mirage, California

Drama enough the story of the kidnapped, enslaved, imprisoned boy who becomes the superpower’s leader. But the Rebbe teases out from the story so much more. Yosef didn’t merely stay true to his ideals in a hostile land (no small feat) but changed (albeit temporarily) the zeitgeist of the superpower to be consonant with his father’s home. And this meant the world to his father: the dynamic between Yosef and Yaakov takes on the ethos of a chosid coming back to his Rebbe.

My grandparents R’ Sholom and Chaya Posner came to America about the time the Frierdiker Rebbe came for the 1929 visit. As a welcome to this country, the neighborhood kids would mock or pull the yarmulke off the head of my father, R’ Zalman Posner, then just three-years-old. R’ Chatche Faigen advised that the Frierdiker Rebbe was now seeing women and children, seemingly a new practice. My grandmother went in (I figure my grandfather was off shechting) holding my father by the hand and my uncle R’ Laibel Posner zg”z in her arms.

As she walked into the room she was already crying. “How can I raise Yiddishe kinder in azah shvereh land, in such a hard land?!?” she managed to get out in between the tears. She looked up and the Frierdiker Rebbe was smiling, laughing perhaps. She felt abandoned by that laughter, hurt that her pain wasn’t being reckoned with.

And then the Frierdiker Rebbe started speaking, in a serious tone. “It is takeh a shvereh land, but here you shall raise yidddishe, chassidishe kinder.”

She often told that story, and when she was no longer encumbered by short-term memory, she would retell the story and tell it again 5 minutes later, reliving the moment in its intensity and full-spectrum emotion. And she would end off, “Ober ich hob nisht gelozt de brocho zitzen. Ich hob iss durch-ge’arbet” (But I didn’t let that brachah twiddle its thumbs, I worked it to its max and let it work on me).

Year later, the Frierdiker Rebbe moved to America, 770 Eastern Parkway became the epicenter, and according to the story I hear told, the Frierdiker Rebbe was sitting near the second story window and my father and uncle Laibel were (playing stickball, I believe) in the driveway (where the Rebbe’s car would pull up in the later years). The Frierdiker Rebbe watched them and sighed, “Zeh nor, vi de aidelkeit fun Sholom iz oisgegossen auf zeir penemer!” (Sorry, I just can’t translate that).

My uncle Laibel’s son-in-law Mutti was raised in the USSR during the bad old days and his family was able to emigrate and came to America to see the Rebbe when he was eight years old or so. As was the custom, on the way to Mincha, the Rebbe gave the children coins for the pushke. But the top of the pushke was high up and the little boy couldn’t reach. So the Rebbe lifted the little boy up to help him do the mitzvah.

American Jewry invested tremendously in their children’s future, that their children be better than them, be better educated than them, better earners than them, more accepted than them. And they vehemently questioned my grandmother, “Why do you insist your children be just like you!?!”

“Don’t steal my dreams,” she answered with a broken heart, “I want them to be better than me.”

Yaakov was able to feel whole from the missed years with his beloved Yosef when he held Yosef’s boys close. In a Jew’s child lies a dream. Through them, the Rebbe sees that the chosid has done what needed to be done — and did it well. Manifest destiny come full circle. The chosid has come home.