When I was still in college and traveling around Europe, I felt like my soul was radically open to new opportunities and possible life transitions. I was reading, exploring, and even praying like never before. Walking in solitude around foreign countries, I felt like a “lonely man of faith.” From train to train, museum to museum, and coffee shop to coffee shop, I searched for the meaning of life.
At one point, I found myself alone in the rain late at night in Venice during Carnival; there were no open hotel rooms for miles. I couldn’t even find a dry gondola to sleep in. I was scared, alone, and in an existential crisis. All of a sudden a Chabad rabbi came up to me and said “You like a Jew. Come with me!” He led me into his home, fed me, and gave me a mattress to sleep on right next to a mikvah (spiritual bath). Here’s the thing: I didn’t look like a typical Jew! I’m 6’3 with blond hair and was wearing a hat that night. But this holy fellow saw my pintele Yid – the very spark of my Jewish soul!
I think back to this moment all the time. This rabbi wasn’t looking to fundraise with me, wasn’t recruiting me to enroll in some program, and he wasn’t trying to make me a member of Chabad. To the contrary, he had the deepest and most humble spiritual goal: to help a struggling soul through an act of kindness. More than the physical uplift he gave me, he lifted me spiritually.
I’ve also wondered what this moment meant for me in my interaction with other Jews. It’s quite simple: we must take care of all people, but we also need to have unique commitments to our biological and covenantal families.
This is what the Holy One said to Israel: My children, I have lacked for you nothing – what do I seek from you? I seek no more than that you love one another and honor one another, (Eliyahu Rabbah 26).
The Sefat Emet taught that we can’t simply make a token individual contribution and be finished with our charitable work. Rather, we must continue to build our shared purpose and mission as a people. Only then do we merit the Divine Presence (Parshat Terumah).
On a spiritual level, the Alter Rebbe taught that we need each other to bring blessing down to the world:
All Jews are interconnected and all are children of One Father, and therefore we are called brothers, since each person’s soul has its root within God, and one is only divided from the other in the physical sense…For the foundation of the service of God is to elevate one’s soul to its root and thereby draw down spiritual sustenance for the Jewish people, which is not possible to do if we are divided (Tanya, Chapter 2).
Today, as an Orthodox rabbi myself, I spend a good part of my time and energy supporting Jews who are on their own spiritual journeys. I owe a lot to that humble servant who found me that night in Venice. He didn’t just give me food and a mattress: he gave me a model of spiritual hope that sparked my own passion to serve and help my fellow Jew.
Rabbi Dr. Shmuly Yanklowitz is the Executive Director of the Valley Beit Midrash, the Founder & President of Uri L’Tzedek, the Founder and CEO of The Shamayim V’Aretz Institute and the author of seven books on Jewish ethics. Newsweek named Rav Shmuly one of the top 50 rabbis in America.”
