By Dovid Zaklikowski for COLlive and Hasidic Archives
The famed mashpia (mentor) of the yeshivah in Kfar Chabad, Rabbi Shlomo Chaim Kesselman, was deep in a Chassidic farbrengen gathering with the students, when a recent émigré from the Soviet Union entered the room.
At the encouragement of the mentor, he told them a little about what it was like to be an observant Jew under the Communist regime.
He put on tefillin daily in secret, he said, but since he left his home before daybreak, he had to bring them with him to work.
“If they would have seen me, I would have been fired, which would have brought many other issues.” He would therefore go into the bathroom (a small shack with a hole in the ground), place a plank of wood over the hole, and put on tefillin.
Rabbi Kesselman was very moved by the man’s self-sacrifice and the tough – though uneducated – choices he had to make on a day-to-day basis. But not everyone present had the same response.
One of the attendees, shocked at the praise Rabbi Kesselman was heaping on the man, objected, “But it is prohibited to put on tefillin in a bathroom!”
The mentor turned to him, while the Jew, who had placed his life in danger for the sole purpose of connecting to G-d as his ancestors had done for thousands of years, sat nearby.
“Tell me,” the rabbi asked, “when someone has a bathroom in his head, are they allowed to put on tefillin?”
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They don’t make mashpi’im like they used to
There will always be manipulaters and people looking for the negative. No matter what you do