There are people whose memory plunges into oblivion. There are people who history remembers only because of a certain event or discovery, and there are those who "heard about it but remind me for a moment who it was?" But there are those who, even 29 years after leaving our physical world, are present in our lives as if nothing had changed. The Lubavitcher Rebbe is like that.
On the Hebrew date of 3 Tammuz, the Rebbe's day of revelry is celebrated all over the world. Perhaps the fact that it is enough to write "Rebbe" without specifying who it is, already says it all. And perhaps the fact that the entire world, not just the Jewish one, marks the date already says even more. Nonetheless, he is a man who has been awarded the Medal of Freedom of the United States, that the Education Day of the world's greatest and most powerful power will be dedicated to his inspiration, and that figures such as Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan have testified that he influenced their world.
It sounds almost unreliable. In an era in which committees are mainly formed and the hot potatoes – in education, infrastructure, values and environmental protection – are rolled over to whoever comes after us, there was one Rebbe who managed to create a voluntary infrastructure with more than 5,000 families of emissaries in more than 110 countries, who are there only to give. Just to be an address for everything you need.
Why? Because there was a Brooklyn rabbi who "heard" the distress and need, and decided to act. A rabbi who heard the hunger cries of millions of children and worked with the first-ever African-American congresswoman, Shirley Chisholm, to develop the food voucher program for the poor. A rabbi who heard the cry of the youth looking for values, and created frameworks and actions aimed at them. On the Rebbe's day of revelry, it is customary to light a soul candle and send a note to Zion in the Queens neighborhood with requests for blessings. I'm sure he doesn't stop hearing our prayers and requests either.
Rabbi Yosef Aharonov is the head of Chabad's mission in Israel
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