3067 —התמדה בשליחות, הערך הנצחי של כל מאמץ

B"H, 29 MarCheshvan, 5715.

Brooklyn.

Blessing and greeting!

In reply to your special delivery letter, in which you write that you have been in... for some years now and see no hope of a good future as it should be, because the youth have little connection with the observant community, and the older people grow weaker, etc.

This is actually a question you should have asked of those in your town, and not asked in New York. For knowing the established rule that outreach does not return empty, how is it that after five years of work in the town the situation is as you describe in your letter? I reckon that one of the causes of this is that unfortunately you looked at... as a temporary post (job), and each time you barely wait for the summer to be able to think about and seek another town. It lies in human nature that something one considers to be for only a few months does not call forth interest and the use of one's powers, for one thinks, "Soon we are leaving here."

The saying of my father-in-law, the Rebbe, of blessed memory, is known: one must learn from the Mishkan. When they were in the desert there were places where they stayed only a day or a night, and even so they set up the Mishkan with all its details just as they did in the place where they stayed 18 years. This is a moral for every Jew in conducting himself in his activities for the service of G‑d and in fulfilling his mission from G‑d in this world: one must not look at the calendar and the clock and make reckonings that if it is for 18 years, very well, and if only for a day or a night, why bother. For just as the Holy One, blessed be He, is eternal, so all of a Jew's activities bound up with the Holy One, blessed be He, are also eternal. Even if within a few minutes the Jew is already occupied with something else, the activities remain forever and ever, as explained in Tanya, ch. 25.

As regards practice: as far as I know, your husband, the rav, may he live, has quite energetically sought other positions, both this past year and in earlier years. The fact that nothing suitable has come about must serve as proof that both of you must still accomplish in... in the mission of the Creator, blessed be He. And when the Holy One, blessed be He, gives a mission, He also gives the means for the person concerned to fulfill the mission, and "none among us knows how long." But it stands to reason that the more you try to fulfill the mission properly (the mission of every Jew, and especially of a rav and rebbetzin, may they live, consisting of spreading Torah and Judaism), the sooner you will be able to move to a place with more advantages than... May G‑d grant you success in doing this with joy, in keeping with the directive of the Baal Shem Tov for all Jews and in all matters, "עבדו את ה' בשמחה" ("Serve G‑d with joy").

With blessing.

Publisher's notes

Set up the Mishkan (אויפגעשטעלט דעם משכן): See also below, letter 3314.