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CLERGY CORNER: The Rebbe and a Phoenix

Posted on 05 July 2019 by LeslieM

By Rabbi Tzvi Dechter

Saturday we mark 25 years since the ‘Rebbe’ — Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson — passed away.

One of the signs of a great leader is where others might have seen a spiritually dry person, a Rebbe saw the potential or the creation of the most beautiful and inspiring garden. He encouraged us to love him/her to pieces, embrace him with every fiber of our being, open our heart to him, cherish him and shower him with warmth and affection. He wanted us to appreciate him, respect him and let him feel that we really care for him, to see in him or her that which he or she may not be able to see in themselves at the moment. He wanted us to view him as a great human being and, you know what, he will become just that. 

Story: It was 1973 when the widow of Jacques Lipchitz, the renowned sculptor, had come for a private audience with the Lubavitcher Rebbe shortly after her husband’s sudden passing.

In the course of her meeting with the Rebbe, she mentioned that when her husband died, he was nearing completion of a massive sculpture of a phoenix in abstract, a work commissioned by Hadassah Women’s Organization for the Hadassah Hospital on Mt. Scopus, in Jerusalem.

As an artist and sculptor in her own right, she said that she would have liked to complete her husband’s work; but, she told the Rebbe, she had been advised by Jewish leaders that the phoenix is a non-Jewish symbol. How could that be placed, in Jerusalem — no less!

I was standing near the door to the Rebbe’s office that night said Rabbi Krinsky (my brother-in-law’s grandfather and secretary to the Rebbe), when he called for me and asked that I bring him the book of Job from his bookshelf, which I did. The Rebbe turned to Chapter 29, verse 18, “I shall multiply my days like the Chol.” And then the Rebbe proceeded to explain to Mrs. Lipchitz the Midrashic commentary on this verse which describes the Chol as a bird that lives for a thousand years, then dies, and is later resurrected from its ashes — clearly then, a Jewish symbol.

Mrs. Lipchitz was absolutely delighted and the project was completed soon thereafter. True to his nature, the Rebbe discerned the positive where conventional wisdom saw only negativism.

How fitting, retrospectively, this beautiful metaphor of life … returning from the ashes. In his own divinely inspired way, the Rebbe had brought new hope to this broken widow. And in the recurring theme of his life, he did the same for the spirit of the Jewish people, which he raised from the ashes of the Holocaust to new, invigorated life.

May his memory be a blessing, and may we truly see the good in every one, thus making the world a better place.

Rabbi Tzvi Dechter is the director of Chabad of North Broward Beaches, located in the Venetian Isle Shopping Center at 2025 E. Sample Rd. in Lighthouse Point. For all upcoming events, please visit www.JewishLHP.com.

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