Here’s My Story: When The Ice Burned

Rabbi Moshe Avrohom Smith

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Growing up in Brownsville, Brooklyn, I used to attend a small yeshivah in Crown Heights, on the corner of Bedford Avenue and President Street. One of the teachers there was a Lubavitcher, and I liked him and his way of doing things very much. On Shabbat afternoons, we would study Maimonides and Tanya, the classic work of Chabad philosophy, together. I learned that Lubavitch has a distinctive prayer book, that they have specific customs relating to their tzitzit and tefillin, and around the time of my Bar Mitzvah, I decided to adopt these customs and become a full-fledged Lubavitcher.

A couple of years later, my mother, Mrs. Freydel Smith, passed away. It was on the 25th of Sivan, 1955, and I was only fifteen years old. Shortly after, my father went off and remarried, and I had nowhere to live. There was a small empty room upstairs above my yeshivah, and I moved in there, living in the building all by myself, although later a few Crown Heights families also took me in. My yeshivah served lunch to the boys each day, but the Lubavitcher yeshivah on nearby Bedford and Dean had breakfast and supper, so I would go there to eat twice a day.

On Shabbat, I would go to Chabad Headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway for the prayers. In those days, the entire synagogue consisted of the one small sanctuary on the first floor of 770: The men would be in the synagogue, while some of the younger yeshivah boys prayed in the hall that led into it. But because I was an orphan, the Rebbe had me pray inside, at his own table. And so for a few years, until the congregation moved into the expanded downstairs synagogue in 1960, I would pray right next to the Rebbe.

If the Rebbe came in and did not see me at my place, he would send his secretary, Rabbi Leibel Groner, to get me. Rabbi Groner would then go out to the hall and tell the other boys to make room for me to come to the front of the synagogue.

On Simchat Torah, the hakafot dancing would be held in the courtyard outside 770, which had just been turned into a large sukkah for the preceding holiday of Sukkot. One year, I was standing on a bench, against the back wall of the sukkah, watching the Rebbe dance with a Torah scroll. As he came near, I stretched out my hand, trying to give a kiss to the Torah — but I couldn’t quite reach.

When the Rebbe saw me, he stopped dancing, stretched out his arms while holding the scroll’s wooden handles, and leaned forward on the tips of his toes, so that I could touch the Torah. That was the kind of attention the Rebbe gave me, and I have never forgotten it.

It was around this time, when I was still a young yeshivah student, that the Rebbe told me something that left a tremendous impression on me.

It was during a personal audience — a yechidus. While making an emphatic gesture with his hand, he told me: “One need not be concerned with the yetzer hara” — the Evil Inclination that tempts a person to do the wrong thing. “Because whenever we pray anew and study Torah anew, we get fresh power to overcome the yetzer hara.”

The power we get from Torah and prayer, in other words, is like spiritual ammunition. If you study and pray every day, you have the power to knock away the yetzer hara and any negativity it brings. There’s nothing to be afraid of.

I’ve tried to live with this idea for my entire life; it’s my ammunition for being an ehrlicher Yid, a good, upstanding, faithful Jew.
At one point, I switched to the Lubavitcher yeshivah on Bedford and Dean. There, I began to make a weekly melaveh malkah — the special meal held in the evening after Shabbat is over — for the other boys in the dormitory. Each week before Shabbat, I would go over to 770 to arrange for one of the older yeshivah students to come over and lead a small chasidic farbrengen at these meals.

When I wrote to the Rebbe to inform him that I was doing this, he sent back a reply, through his secretary, thanking me and wishing me well. “For this good news,” he added, “I am going to give you a present.” It is customary to tell stories about holy tzadikim at a melaveh malkah and, fittingly, the Rebbe’s present was a story of the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of the chasidic movement.

“The Baal Shem Tov loved light,” began the story. So, one winter’s night, when it had become dark in their synagogue, the Baal Shem Tov asked his students to bring more candles to light up the room.

“We don’t have any,” the students informed him, and they went to see whether any of the neighboring houses did. But soon they came back and reported that nobody else had any extra candles or lamps.

As it was wintertime, the Baal Shem Tov instructed his students to find an aizlichtel — the Yiddish term for icicle or, literally, “ice-candle” — hanging from the roof outside and take it inside. Then, they should light it.

“He Who said that candles should burn,” declared the Baal Shem Tov — referring to G-d, who created and decided the nature of all things — “can make it so that ice should burn.”

And that was what they did. The students went outside, broke off an “ice-candle,” lit it, and it miraculously burned, and gave off light.

That story was the Rebbe’s present for my melaveh malkah.

Years later, once I was already married, I had another exchange with the Rebbe involving candles, this time during a personal audience. I had seen, in a certain book, that Jewish women have followed a number of different customs about how many Shabbat candles to light. The common custom is to light at least two, in honor of the Torah’s commandments to “remember” and “guard” the day of Shabbat. But some say that you should light five, or seven, or ten, and so on.

“I’d like for my wife to light a lot of candles,” I told the Rebbe. “Which number should we pick?”

The Rebbe recommended lighting the regular number of candles, two, and then continuing to add in the future, following the custom to light another candle for each child that is born.

“The number of candles one commits to light has the status of a vow,” explained the Rebbe, meaning that one will become obligated to continue lighting that same number each week. “On occasion, you might be in a hotel,” — or some other place away from home — “and you won’t be able to light a large number of candles.” It would be easier for my wife, that is, to stick with the basic custom.

The Rebbe then made an additional recommendation. It is customary for candles to be lit on the lectern from where the prayers are led. “You should be the one to light those candles,” suggested the Rebbe, and in that way, I would be able to achieve the spiritual effect of those extra Shabbat candles.

Rabbi Moshe Avrohom Smith was a kindergarten teacher who taught the Alef-Bet to children in Crown Heights for nearly fifty years. Currently residing in Deerfield Beach, Florida, he was interviewed in December 2025.