My Personal Rebbe, My Personal Tzaddik  

INgeneral, if one of my chassidic patients brings me to meet his rebbe, the rebbe will want to ask me about the case and to hear my diagnosis and treatment plan before making his own assessment. If there is more time, I’m sometimes asked to list my ruchniyus resume in addition to my medical credentials: Where do I daven? What seforim am I learning? Did I know the Bostoner Rebbe ztz”l during my time at Harvard Medical School?

But at my first meeting with Rebbe Yissachar Dov of Lelov-Piotrkov years back, the Rebbe immediately smiled at me as I entered his private room and asked me if I’d like to learn with him. He flipped through the pages of Rebbe Aharon of Karlin’s Beis Aharon, which happened to be on his shtender and which opened my mind to a world of chassidus that until then I had only visited but had never really been zocheh to live.

Ninety minutes later, after we’d delved into the most central chassidic topics of hiskashrus and dveikus, the Rebbe closed his sefer and told me to return and learn with him whenever I was in the area of his beis medrash on Rechov Bar Ilan in Jerusalem.

“And what about the patient?” I asked, my mind still floating in a bewildered haze, having seemingly traveled back in time to a generation where a rebbe still had time to teach strangers one-on-one about the fundamentals of avodas Hashem.