It’s a chassidus best known for its stirring melodies, but those tunes were the souls of the rebbes who wrote them. Today’s Modzhitzer Rebbe, Rav Chaim Shaul Taub, is the next link, leading his flock for the past decade with a combination of his Ponevezh-trained, brilliant analytical mind together with the heart of a Modzhitz niggun.
The Rebbe — Rav Chaim Shaul Taub — has led the chassidus for the past decade with a combination of his Ponevezh-trained, brilliant analytical mind and the heart of a Modzhitz niggun; now it’s Chanukah again, and within Modzhitz’s special Maoz Tzur, I can still hear the Rebbe’s Selichos of three months ago — it is said that the last day of Chanukah is the final reprieve for the judgment of Rosh Hashanah. Perhaps that’s why there is no derashah before Selichos in Modzhitz, none of the customary words of inspiration and introspection, no mussar seder.
“In Modzhitz,” an elderly chassid told me before Selichos in the Bnei Brak beis medrash (where the chassidus was transplanted 20 years ago after five decades in Tel Aviv), “hearing the Rebbe reciting ‘Ashrei yoshvei veisecha’ is enough to stir our hearts to teshuvah.” Minutes later, as I watched the leader of this holy flock pouring out words of the tefillos, it seemed as if the entire Modzhitzer shul had been transformed into a solid block of kedushah.
In Modzhitz, the chassidim tremble in fear of Heaven like everyone else, but here, it’s accompanied by song. Here, pious Jews — chassidim in spodeks and clean-shaven Litvaks in Borsalinos — give expression to that awe through niggunim crafted by the tzaddikim of the dynasty, from the first Modzhitzer Rebbe, Rav Yisrael Taub, to the current Rebbe — a venerated rosh yeshivah and also a mechaber of song in his own right.
It would be difficult to imagine the world of chassidic music without Modzhitz. The founder of the Modzhitz dynasty, Rebbe Yisrael Taub of Modzhitz (known as the Divrei Yisrael), once commented, “People say that the world of music is closely connected to the world of teshuvah — but I say that they are one and the same.”
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