The Rebbe Who Loved Me

And what is a rebbe — a rabbi with sidecurls?

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Hardly.

A rebbe has been compared to a geologist, one who points out where to dig beneath the earth to find the diamonds and precious stones. He’ll tell you where to dig and what you’re likely to find, but you must do the digging yourself to find the treasure within you. “I don’t have your treasure,” he’d say. “You have it, not me.”

I met my first rebbe when I was fourteen, at a retreat for Jewish teens. We had been told a famous Hassidic rebbe would be joining us. I was expecting someone imposing, in a shtreimel — the furry sombrero-like hat Hassids traditionally wear, and a long black formal frock coat, a bekeshe. Instead he walked around in a white shirt and pants, slouching a little, or sitting, leaned to one side on a flinty elbow. He was bony and thin with a pear-shaped head and deep-set aristocratic eyes — like the old Jews Rembrandt painted. To my 14-year-old eyes, he looked ready to keel over, but he couldn’t have been more than 60.

I was attending a Shabbaton, a weekend convention whose purpose was to draw Jewish teenagers nearer to the Torah’s traditions. Although I attended an ostensibly Orthodox high school and observed Shabbat and kept kosher, I was on a trajectory toward assimilating into the American mainstream. Yeshiva was no match for…