Why are you Running?

The Jewish world he knew, wracked by war and poverty and fragmented by the heresies of Communism and Haskalah, is long gone. And yet, a century later, the Alter still lives.

His worldview has been perpetuated in places like France, where a prime disciple, Rav Gershon Liebman ztz”l, founded a veritable empire of mussar that continues to this day, and in the United States, where Rav Yechiel Perr, who heads Far Rockaway’s Yeshiva Derech Ayson, has long been a leading exponent of the teachings of the mussar movement generally and of its Novardok school in particular.

Through Rabbi Perr’s rebbetzin, who is the Alter’s great-granddaughter, Rabbi Perr became his scion, too. And as we sit in his office a few days after the Alter’s hundredth yahrtzeit on the 17th of Kislev, he notes a seeming disparity. “Rav Yitzchok Orlansky, who was the Alter’s talmid, told me that at age 18, he was present at a Shabbos Shuvah derashah the Alter delivered in Petersburg. It lasted four hours, and, he recalled, ‘Mir hoben azoi gelacht az mir hoben gehalten bei di zeiten — we laughed so much we had to hold our sides.’ I’ve also heard the Alter described as someone who was lo pasak milsa d’bedichusa mipumei — he always had a humorous line at the ready, and that he was such a baal regesh that he’d become frozen to the spot, transfixed, when he heard music playing.”

Yet the Alter also exemplified extremism, teaching that one must go all out in breaking bad middos, in rejecting the emptiness of materialism and honor-seeking, and in developing trust in Hashem. It’s how he lived and what he expected of his students. “Az m’kehn nit ariber, muz mehn ariber — When one can’t go above, one must go above” was just one of his many sayings that roused talmidim to overcome adversity — whether posed by one’s own nature or by Russian Communists — and indeed, to rise above.