Rabbi Yoseph Yitzchak Schneersohn became leader of the Chabad movement in 1920, the year that Lenin and his Communists finally consolidated their control over Russia. Jews had hoped for some relief. The civil war had seen the Petliura massacres, in which the one of the White Armies fighting the Reds deliberately targeted the Jews as enemies and murdered about 100,000 of them, aside from the rape and pillage that always accompanied their visits to Jewish areas.
Let us each in our own, less than perfect and so very human way, further that turning towards the deepest of things.
Now that was over. But what followed was not much better.
Lenin was an evangelizing atheist. He would tolerate no rival for the allegiance of his subjects, and he did not hold himself responsible to a Supreme Power. He set about demolishing organized religion. (READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin: Our Political Leaders Have Been Revealed)
Lenin’s government had a special section, the Yevsektsia, dedicated to wiping out the practice of Judaism. Yevsektsia stood for yevreiskaya sektsia, the Jewish section. It was run by Jewish Communists, Jews who hated their heritage and now took action to destroy it. These betrayers of their own now made their way forward in the party. They used their inside knowledge to help Lenin dismantle the traditional community structures that had seen the Jews through many prolonged difficulties under the tsars.
Rabbi Schneersohn set himself to organizing an underground network to resist. Through a network of utterly dedicated followers they strove to maintain education, observance, and morale in the face of relentless persecution by the regime and its secret police.
It was dangerous work. It led to the gulags or death. The danger only increased when Lenin died and Stalin took over. Eventually, in 1927, the secret police imprisoned the rabbi and interrogated him under torture and resolved to execute him.
But the news had escaped the control of the torturers, and soon telegrams were arriving in the Kremlin from all over the world. Senator William Borah, a conservative Republican and chairman of the Senate’s Foreign Affairs Committee, joined with Senator Robert Wagner, a liberal Democrat, in petitioning the Russians, as did the Coolidge State Department. Other European governments expressed their concern, including Weimar Germany.
This week marks the ninety-seventh anniversary of the date that the rabbi was notified that he was going to be set free and expelled from Russia, a date still celebrated today by those who identify with Chabad. When the first stage of his liberation came to pass, and he left Leningrad by train, hundreds of his followers came out to bid farewell, not caring that they were under surveillance and might well be arrested and made to disappear for attending.
The rabbi addressed the people as he got on the train:
May God be with us as He was with our ancestors; may He not forsake us nor abandon us … Only our bodies went into exile, but not our souls … We must proclaim openly before all that with regard to any matter of our religion — Torah, mitzvahs, and Jewish custom — it is not subject to the opinion of others, nor can any oppressive force be used against it.
And that message of where the ultimate power lies, thrown down in challenge in the rail station before Stalin’s secret police, still rings out today, decades after Stalin’s empire crumbled. The rabbi moved first to Latvia and then to Poland, and that is where he was in 1939 when Hitler invaded, kicking off World War II and the horrors it brough, including the deliberate massacre of a full third the world’s Jewish population. The rabbi was in the chaos of Warsaw. Bombed and now occupied by Nazi troops.
There, too, the hand of freedom reached out to him. The American government prevailed upon the Germans to send someone to escort the rabbi to safety, and within a few months, he had arrived in New York.
The rabbi was ever grateful to all that America had done on his behalf. On the other hand, he warned his followers not to be beguiled and to think that the self-sacrifice our religion requires of us would not be required in America. In this respect, he told his flock, “America is no different.”
With the resurgence of antisemitism, and with the Left’s selling it as something America must embrace, we can see what the rabbi meant. Religion is not meant to go to sleep when times are good. That is a formula for decadence and corruption and civilizational collapse.
It must always be vigorous and intelligent. It must make us always aware that the great biblical cry for liberty, “Let my people go!,” is only half the verse, which concludes “that they may serve Me.”
Our freedom depends on our allegiance to the deepest of all things; it is not just a blank check to do whatever. Forgetting about the purpose of freedom endangers freedom itself. Our Constitution itself cannot survive indifference to the deepest of commitments, our commitment to the source of our own souls, who is the Source of all beings. As John Adams presciently declared: “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”(READ MORE: The Lies of the Biden Presidency Are a Problem)
With the failed assassination of Trump in our minds, talk about God’s governance are suddenly on many peoples’ lips. There is a widespread recognition that we need a new mindset, a new sense of shared purpose, shared citizenship, shared humanity.
In his speech accepting his nomination, Donald Trump publicly recognized God’s providential hand in sparing his life, and refrained from using the attack on his life as a weapon with which to bash his political foes. It came as a great relief to a troubled nation, a relief not totally diminished by the rambling and combative statements that followed later.
Let us each in our own, less than perfect and so very human way, further that turning towards the deepest of things. It is the core of our freedom, as individuals and as a nation together. It’s the message Rabbi Schneersohn brought to our shores, made only clearer and more powerful for having survived the cruelties and persecutions of the twin horrors of Communism and Nazism.
Let’s not wait until we must suffer the cruelties of tyranny ourselves. It’s time to find our soul as a nation once more, renew our spirit and be living examples of liberty. Its power draws people’s souls if we only will show what it really means to us. Rededicating ourselves to the One who upholds us all, we cannot fail.
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