The One Who Answered

I once read a four-word advertisement that changed the direction of my life.

It wasn't addressed to me.

I wasn't the person who placed it.

And by the time I read it, the man who answered it had been gone from this world for decades.

Still, somehow, I felt that he had answered me too.

The advertisement was painfully simple:

A Jew needs help.

No explanation. No compelling photograph. No fundraising campaign. No description of exactly what had happened or why the reader should care.

Just a need.

And a telephone number.

Almost no one answered.

One man did.

The Advertisement

The story took place in Brownsville, Brooklyn, in the middle of the twentieth century. A local congregational rabbi was no admirer of Chassidim. In fact, according to the account preserved on Chabad.org, he openly mocked them and was particularly critical of Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, the Sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe.

Then life became personal.

The rabbi's brother was diagnosed with a serious illness and needed a large amount of money. The rabbi wanted to help but could not provide what was necessary. He considered asking his congregants, but the amount was too great, and he knew they had families and financial responsibilities of their own.

So, desperation led him somewhere unusual.

He placed a classified advertisement in the Morgen Journal, a widely read Yiddish newspaper.

Four words:

Ah Yid darf hilf.

A Jew needs help.

Then he waited.

Imagine the vulnerability contained inside such an advertisement. Somewhere in a newspaper filled with news, commerce, announcements, advertisements, and ordinary human affairs was one small sentence announcing that another human being had reached the edge of what he could manage alone.

Anyone could read it.

Almost everyone could continue turning the page.

And apparently, almost everyone did.

Except one person.

Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn—the very Rebbe this rabbi had criticized—responded.

He did not first ask whether the person requesting help was a Chassid. He did not ask whether the rabbi had spoken respectfully about him. He did not calculate whether helping someone who had opposed him would produce sufficient gratitude.

According to the story, the Rebbe called and offered to provide the full amount that was needed.

The rabbi later stood before his congregation and publicly apologized.

He had discovered something about the man he had judged from a distance.

The Rebbe had seen four words:

A Jew needs help.

Apparently, that was enough.

Who Answers?

When I first encountered this story, I was going through a difficult period of my own.

Perhaps that is why it entered me differently.

There are stories we read and admire. There are stories we repeat at the Shabbat table. There are stories that make us smile for a few minutes before life resumes.

And then there are stories that somehow find us at precisely the moment we need them.

This one found me.

I kept thinking about the advertisement.

What kind of person answers a request that vague?

There was risk in responding. The need might have been enormous. The situation might have been complicated. Once you make the call, you can no longer pretend you did not see the plea. You have crossed the comfortable distance between knowing that someone needs help and becoming personally involved in helping him.

Most of us understand the first position.

Someone needs help.

We feel bad. We hope things improve. We may even whisper a prayer.

But leadership begins somewhere beyond sympathy.

Leadership answers.

And here was the leader of a generation responding to an anonymous classified advertisement because somewhere, somehow, a Jew had announced that he needed help.

That detail overwhelmed me.

A person carrying enormous communal responsibilities still possessed enough room inside himself for the suffering of someone he did not know.

And not merely someone he did not know.

Someone connected to a rabbi who had criticized him.

That was when something opened inside me.

I Wanted to Know Him

I remember thinking:

If this is how a Chabad Rebbe sees another Jew, I want to know what he knows.

I wanted to understand the Torah that could produce such a person.

I wanted to understand the inner world from which that response emerged. What does a person have to believe about Hashem, about another Jew, about responsibility, about himself, to see four words in a newspaper and refuse to turn the page?

My curiosity became thirst.

I began surrounding myself with Chabad Chassidut. I learned. Then I learned more. Ideas that had once seemed abstract began becoming personal. The inner architecture of the human being, the Divine soul, the animal soul, Divine providence, purpose, joy, struggle, responsibility—the teachings were not asking me merely to understand Judaism differently.

They were asking me to understand myself differently.

Within weeks, the issue that had been weighing so heavily upon me disappeared.

But something much more important remained.

Direction.

I had entered the story looking for strength.

I emerged wanting to become strong enough to give strength to someone else.

The Other Side

At that stage of my life, I was still very much on the receiving end.

I needed encouragement. I needed guidance. I needed people. I needed Hashem's kindness in ways I understood then and in many more ways I would understand only later.

There is humility in needing.

We usually prefer the other side.

We want to be the person writing the check, not the person who needs it. The person giving advice, not asking for it. The person standing beside the hospital bed, not lying inside it. The person answering the telephone, not desperately hoping it will ring.

But perhaps Heaven sometimes educates its future givers by first allowing them to receive.

Because receiving teaches things that abundance cannot.

It teaches how difficult it is to ask.

It teaches how long five minutes can feel when you are waiting for an answer.

It teaches the dignity contained in the way help is offered.

It teaches the difference between someone solving your problem and someone making you feel that your problem matters.

Most importantly, it teaches what another human being looks like from the side of need.

I did not know then what opportunities Hashem would eventually place before me. I did not know whom I would be asked to help, what responsibilities would arrive, or what resources I might someday be entrusted with.

But I knew something about the direction in which I wanted to travel.

I wanted to move from receiving toward giving.

The School of Leadership

We often misunderstand leadership because we encounter it from the outside.

We see the speech. The title. The institution. The followers. The influence.

But perhaps leadership is revealed most clearly when nobody important is watching.

A classified advertisement.

A telephone number.

Four words.

A person in trouble.

And someone who answers.

The Sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe did not know that decades later, a man he would never meet would read that story during a difficult period of his own life.

He could not have known that answering one person's advertisement would eventually answer questions in another person's soul.

That may be one of the great mysteries of goodness.

We almost never know where it ends.

One act of generosity reaches the person who receives it. Then perhaps it reaches his family. Someone hears the story. Someone repeats it. Decades pass. Another person encounters it during the dark season and discovers a direction for his own life.

The original giver may never know.

He does not have to.

The light had already begun traveling.

When My Turn Comes

That story taught me something I could not yet fully articulate when I first encountered it.

To become a leader, one must first learn to follow.

To become a giver, it may be necessary to understand the humility of receiving.

To recognize another person's desperation, it helps to remember what it felt like when you were waiting for someone to recognize yours.

Perhaps that was part of what Hashem was teaching me during those years. I thought I was simply going through difficulty. Perhaps I was also attending school.

The curriculum was vulnerability. The classroom was life. And one of my teachers was a Rebbe I had never met, answering an advertisement placed decades before I would ever need its lesson.

I began that chapter of my life needing someone to give me strength.

Then I encountered a man who taught me what strength was for.

Not to become untouchable.

Not to become important.

Not even merely to survive.

To become the person who answers.

Because eventually, if Hashem blesses us, the roles change.

One day we are the person placing the advertisement.

One day we are the person reading it.

And perhaps the real school of leadership is everything Hashem teaches us between those two days.

I cannot know every request that will eventually reach me. I cannot answer every need. No human being can.

But that was never the lesson.

The lesson was what happens when another person's need finally enters the territory of our responsibility.

Do we turn the page?

Or do we answer?

Years ago, four words were placed in a newspaper:

A Jew needs help.

Only one person responded.

Decades later, I read about the man who did.

And I decided which side of the advertisement I wanted to spend my life trying to become.