The One Where I Give a Shout Out to Ithaca and Try to Pay Tribute to the Rebbe by Baring My Soul.

BS”D

Tomorrow is the 18th yartzheit – the anniversary of the passing – of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, known to most people simply as “the Rebbe”.

The Rebbe is someone to whom I owe a lot, for a lot of different reasons. His   philosophy and movement, his energy and life’s efforts, the leaders he shaped and empowered and sent to literally every corner of the world, have benefited me in ways that even I can’t fully grasp. The scope of the Rebbe’s accomplishments, influence, existence – even and especially in these 18 years since his histalkus (passing) – is beyond the ability of words to qualify, let alone quantify.

So, obviously, it’s really, really overwhelming to try to write about him. Which is kind of ironic, because every post in this blog is based on the teachings and philosophy of Chabad Chassidus, the school of thought and religious-spiritual practice of which he was – is – the leader.

So instead, I think I’ll write about me. And by “me”, I mean the insane(ly awesome) journey I’ve been on for the past several years. Because the Rebbe served as the bridge between crazy-sketchy-ungrounded-antisocial-hippie-in-the-woods-of-Ithaca Ani, and crazy-less-sketchy-and-antisocial-more-grounded-hippieish-chossid-in-Brooklyn Ani. And I feel like the best way to even begin paying tribute to the Rebbe is to give you a first-hand (but largely “nutshelled”) account of the seriously miraculous transformation(s) that took place for me as a result of the Rebbe’s life’s work.

Let’s not front, I would totally still put my hurr in a paper towel tube. But in a less anti-social-sketchy-ungrounded way.

 It all started at the end of my freshman year at Ithaca College. As is the experience of many college students, I was, essentially, existing in a state of crushing existential despair and anxiety. I felt like I had literally no grasp on reality and no clue if life, and therefore the deep-seeded despair and anxiety I was dealing with, had any purpose or meaning. To this day, I don’t know how my group of friends, who were so unbelievably fantastic to me, put up with my sketchy, insecure, semi-emo tendencies. (If any of you four are reading this, I’m seriously eternally grateful, and I look back with a lot of regret and embarrassment on how difficult I must have been to deal with. [Even though we still had some awesome times in that crazy period – Jimmy Johnson and giant slip-n-slides, anyone?]).

Now, it’s not like I was feeling or being this way to get attention. From a psychological point of view, I was carrying around some legit baggage from family issues and having spent the bulk of my adolescence being obese (no pun intended). And knowing what I know now about the workings of the soul, the root and foundation of this despair and anxiety was the fact that I was a soul stuffed into a body and mind that had no conscious awareness of, or connection to, its Source, Father, Mother, True Love – G-d.

So the darkness and confusion followed me home from Ithaca, continuing to suffocate me and constantly threatening to impair my ability to function like a normal human being. Until one day in June, when a tiny, singing pinprick of light inside me managed to get my attention. For a few precious milliseconds at a time, it was able to silence the roar of panic in my head. And for whatever reason, it made me decide that I needed to know once and for all if there was a point and purpose to anything.

So I laid down on the floor of my bedroom, and just started talking.

“I have no idea what You are, or if You even exist.”

Who am I talking to?

“But I don’t think I can live without You anymore.”

And very unexpectedly, with those few simple words, something in me cracked open.

In a good way.

I was suddenly absolutely flooded, overwhelmed, crippled, by a sense of peace and certainty that there was an order to the universe, a Divine Orchestrator, and that It was involved, loving, and infinitely good. It was exactly like the Torah teaches us: G-d promises its creations, “Make Me an opening the size of a pinhole, and I will make you an opening like a grand chamber.”

And that pinprick had just became a huge ol’ chamber.

“Light From Within” by Marc Adamus

And now I’m going to majorly summarize. Because I’m afraid of boring you, and it’s impossible to tell you in a linear way exactly what occurred between that moment and my encountering Judaism, Chabad, and the Rebbe. (I do want to give a shout out before I nutshell it up to GG, who walked the “Path to Enlightenment” with me daily. Once I even threw up on it. Don’t ask.).

For the next two years, I pretty much lived like a hermit up in Ithaca. I needed a lot of time to myself to integrate, and to truly become healed by, this radical knowledge I had gained access to. Because it wasn’t like BOOM – a burst of shiny white light and then I was magically normal and no longer in pain. It was (is) a legit living energy, a truly transformative Being and Reality I had come in contact with, and because It and Its effects were (are) real, it took a lot of time to integrate with my own reality.

By the end of those two years, I had achieved a beautiful degree of emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual health – and I was starting to feel really antsy and ungrounded. I was spending all my time meditating and praying and reading spiritual books and seeing the G-dliness in every thing and circumstance and having really crazy intuitive experiences – which was not a bad way to be living, let me tell you. I mean, not only was I light years and lifetimes away from the hell I had inhabited before my soul remembered itself and its Source,  I was also in a near-constant state of peace and bliss.

But I still felt a certain nagging emptiness. I felt like there was something more my soul needed. A path to anchor it to the world in order to do the work it was sent to do. It was so indescribably pleasurable flying around in the clouds all the time, but an even deeper part of my soul was crying out for solid ground. So I began to ask G-d to send me my anchor.

Enter the Rebbe.

Through a series of fortuitous encounters, I ended up in a Chassidus class with a Chabad rabbi. And you know what his class was about? One of the Rebbe’s teachings on the statement, “One hour of good deeds and growth in this world is more valuable than all the spiritual pleasures of the World to Come”: that the soul comes into this world to be in this world,  not to escape it. That being anchored in this world in order to refine it is far more precious to the soul and G-d than all the unbelievable spiritual bliss available up there in the clouds.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

Me getting married at 770, the Rebbe’s headquarters, with the Rav who did my conversion and the rabbi whose class changed my life foreva.

And by “history”, I mean “another two years of more grueling work and refinement, integrating this whole new set of teachings and energy into my life, striving toward actualizing a life of Torah and Chabad Chassidus, before I completed my conversion to Judaism and proclaimed myself an official Chabadnik”.

But this time, the work was in the context of this world, of being solid and anchored and healthy and productive, of building meaningful relationships instead of isolating myself from people. And the Rebbe’s teachings, blessings, and light are what paved my way, and continue to pave my way, to the balanced, mature relationship I have with G-d and Its purpose in waking my soul from its slumber, in Its promise to wake all human souls from their slumber.

The Rebbe and his Chassidus are my anchor, my bridge between the shimmering airiness of the spiritual worlds I was lost in and the often dark, often heavy realities of this world. Because he showed us that in truth, the two worlds are one, and it’s our mission to reveal that Unity here below.

So on the occasion of the 18th anniversary of his physical passing from this world, I’d like to wish my Rebbe, l’chaim – to Life.