Parshas Acharei Mos–Kedoshim

On Sim­chas Torah 5667 (1906) the Rebbe spoke very strongly⁴¹ against rolling up one’s beard. He told the tomim Shmuel Katz­man, “You should obey this with kab­balas ol. ” And to the tomim Shmuel Yitzchak Beuder, a maskil [in­tel­lec­tual chos­sid], he used dif­fer­ent words.

Years later, when the Rebbe was in Ros­tov, he again spoke about this is­sue (not rolling, but… ).⁴² “ Nu, these days [not rolling the beard] is truly a mat­ter of mesirus ne­fesh , ” he said, “and to con­tin­u­ally de­mand mesirus ne­fesh is very hard to do. ”

41. In the original: gekehrt di velt. ↩
42. The Rebbe spoke against removing the beard altogether. ↩

My zeide once vis­ited a very poor rel­a­tive of the Tzemach Tzedek in Niezhin.

“Why do you re­main silent?” my zeide asked.

“I sent a pidyon once with a chos­sid trav­el­ing to Lubav­itch, ” he an­swered. “The Tzemach Tzedek took the pidyon, but made no re­sponse. And when the chos­sid pre­pared to re­turn home he asked the Rebbe, ‘How shall I an­swer him?’ The Rebbe replied, ‘Look, there are many poor peo­ple. Ap­par­ently, this is how it’s meant to be. ’”

“Nu,” the man con­cluded, “what more can I do?”

(My zeide’s nar­ra­tive in­cluded their names.)

My zeide passed away at four in the morn­ing on erev Shab­bos Kodesh, the fifth of MarChesh­van, 5679 (1918). We stood there through­out the night as he turned from side to side, hold­ing his yarmulke on his head, not let­ting it fall. As his soul de­parted my fa­ther cried out to us, “The crown of our head has fallen,”¹⁹ and so he wailed in an­guish for six hours un­in­ter­rupt­edly.

May his merit guard us and all Is­rael.

19. Eichah 5:16. ↩