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Monday, January 9, 2012

Rethinking the Significance of "Rebbe Stories"

I just watched this video account by Jerry Levine of his "encounter with the Rebbe".

In general I'm not one for miracle tales, nor for "Rebbe stories" in general. Not because I don't believe in miracles, but because I do not believe that miracles display the true greatness of a Rebbe. To me the greatness of a Rebbe, and especially the greatness of my Rebbe, lies in the mystic transcendence transmitted in his teachings.

Jerry's story is not a classic miracle story, in the sense that no unexplained change in the natural order of things occurs, but it certainly does point to some kind of transcendent insight on the Rebbe's part.

But what really grabbed my attention though was the insight pointed to by Jerry himself:

Rather than think of this story in terms of the mystical statement it makes, we need think of it in terms of what it reveals abt the Rebbe's concerns and agendas.

He entirely transcended the mundane concerns anyone coming from a practical / rational perspective, would expect him to address. Instead, he addressed himself to an apparently irrelevant - or solely mystical concern. Only once that issue had been satisfactorily been dealt with did he address the more practical issue with understated simplicity.
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