Secrets of the Rebbe’s Chozrim

by Yossi Krausz – Ami Magazine

The Rebbe delivers a Ma’amar.

Childhood experiences and teenage encounters often form a chain, leading a person to his destiny. Such has been the case with Moscow’s chief rabbi.

There is a wealth of Torah from the Rebbes of Lubavitch. Go into a bais medrash or turn on a computer with a digitized library. You’ll find a plethora of sefarim from the Rebbes. One of the works treasured by chassidim is the 150 volume Yiddish language set of Sichos Kodesh, known in Hebrew as Toras Menachem, which records the sichos of the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, zt“l.

The sichos were lectures given by the Rebbe on a continuous basis, and they contain his teachings and explanations that have influenced so many of his chassidim. But what may be fascinating, even to those who have never looked inside the sefarim, is how they were written.

Many of the sichos were delivered on Shabbos; the Rebbe would speak up to five hours on a Shabbos, giving his insights and ideas to eager crowds of chassidim. Obviously, no note taking or recording was possible on Shabbos. Those talks were preserved through a collective act of memory on the part of the advanced students of the Rebbe.

Rabbi Simon Jacobson, the head of the Meaningful Life Foundation and publisher of the Algemeiner Journal, was one of those advanced students. His written versions of the Rebbe’s sichos form a large part of Sichos Kodesh. He kindly came to Ami’s offices to discuss, in his contemplative and analytic way, the work that was done by the talmidim in recording those Torah thoughts.

He told us that the type of remembering, repetition, and transmission that those talmidim used to compose the mammoth work has a long tradition in Judaism, in essence leading back to the very giving of the Torah at Sinai.

And the methods they used to remember the sichos, he said, have lessons that can help every one of us in his or her daily life.

THE SECRETS OF THE TORAH’S TRANSMISSION

In Lubavitch, there are special names for those who remember and transmit a rebbe’s Torah thoughts. There is the chozer, someone who orally repeats the words of the Rebbe, for later audiences. And then there is the maneach, the person who writes down those words for posterity.

What’s really the job of a chozer?

Rabbi Jacobson told us, ”For 1,500 years, all of us were chozrim, from Moshe Rabbeinu down to Rabbi Yehuda Hanassi, when Torah was transmitted orally. What did Jews do in the desert? They didn’t have sefarim, or even pens. They memorized everything they learned. They used their heads and they listened.

“It was a science to absorb, memorize, and review”.

“We know that after the Churban there was time of danger to the transmission and the Oral Torah was eventually permitted to be written down. The heter was that Torah was being forgotten. But the concept of oral transmission is the fundamental Jewish way of learning. Even today, you need a teacher relationship to really learn and understand Gemara.”

The idea that an oral link to a teacher is the best method of learning was appreciated by non-Jews, as well, Rabbi Jacobson said.

“Socrates, for example, said that the downfall of civilization was when people began to write on tablets, because they were putting the knowledge on stone instead of in their minds.

”Today, with all the blessings of technology, we can rely on machines like tape recorders to help our memory. But comes Shabbos and Yom Tov and all technology stops, bringing us back to Torah shebaal peh. We have a little memorial of what things were once like.“

The idea of oral transmission of the Torah did not stop with the writing of the Mishna or the Gemara.

Rabbi Jacobson said that Rashi didn’t write his own chiddushim. ”He wrote what he had been mekabel.

“This was also Torah shebaal peh. The same is true of the Amoraim. How did they extract so much information from a Mishnah? They had it b’mesorah. They learned it from the Tannaim. The Rambam explains this all in his preface to Mishneh Torah.”

The masters of the deep parts of Torah especially utilized this idea of oral transmission.

“The Arizal basically did not write and his student, Rav Chaim Vital, wrote it all down. The Baal Shem Tov did not write much and his Torah was recorded by his talmidim. They retained it. They probably didn’t even take notes. They just remembered what the rebbi said.

”This became what would eventually be known as a chozer, in the chassidic lexicon,“ said Rabbi Jacobson. ”The Alter Rebbe’s chozer was the famous Reb Pinchos Reizes, although it is unclear when the term ‘chozer’ actually began being used. Other chozrim for the Alter Rebbe were his son, the Mitteler Rebbe; his son, Reb Moshe; his brother, the Maharil; and the Tzemach Tzedek, a little later. There is a list of all of the chozrim through history, written by the previous Rebbe.

“The chozer listens, absorbs, and reconstructs. He then repeats the maamar or shiur. The maneach takes that and writes it down. Some chozrim were also manichim, but some were not. The two

skills, of remembering well and writing well, are separate, and the same person who has one may not have the other. I happened to do both.”

Rabbi Jacobson said that this work of the chozer and maneach is almost unknown.

“We’ve become so reliant on machines,” he told us, “that we don’t realize that most divrei Torah of the Alter Rebbe come from chozrim and manichim. He reviewed some of it, but a lot of it not. Sometimes the Mitteler Rebbe would write that the content is correct but the language is not. Sometimes, the various manichim disagreed about the language.”

CHOZRIM AND MANICHIM IN CHASSIDUS

To understand the task that the chozrim and manichim had, it’s necessary to know how the sichos and maamarim in Lubavitch were delivered.

Rabbi Jacobson recounted some history:

“The Baal Shem Tov would speak very succinctly. His Torahs were written by his talmidim. The classics are Toldos Yaakov Yosef, Ben Poras Yosef, Degel Machaneh Efraim.

”The Maggid from Mezeritch acted similarly.

“The Alter Rebbe wrote his Shulchan Aruch and the Tanya, and also began delivering maamarim. Chozrim would review them. Manichim would write them. There sometimes were several versions of a maamar

”The Tzemach Tzedek took a thousand maamarim and made the sefarim Torah Or and Likutei Torah.

“The Mitteler Rebbe also wrote a tremendous amount, even more than his father. He wrote so quickly that when he got to the bottom, the ink was still wet on top. He wrote so enthusiastically that when he fnished the paper he kept writing on the table. In his kesavim you see that the last lines are only half lines.

”The Tzemach Tzedek also wrote a great deal.

“The Rebbe Maharash instituted what is called ‘hemshech maamarim.’ This means not just one maamar, but many strung together over a period of time.

”The Rebbe Rashab had long hemshechim. There is one that extended over six years. He wrote it before he said it.

“The Rebbe continued that tradition. However, he wrote much less Torah. Though he wrote a lot of letters, he did not write much formal Torah or many maamarim. He spoke a tremendous amount, and could have a farbrengen for seven hours. He also spoke many more times than his predecessors. They only spoke on special occasions. (He also farbrenged every Shabbos mevorchim, following his father-in-law’s request.)”

A farbrengen wasn’t only Torah. Rabbi Jacobson described that it was singing, a l’chaim, and the warmth of chassidim coming together. Even during his father-in-law’s lifetime, the Rebbe farbrenged on Shabbos mevorchim. Not many of those farbrengens were recorded, Rabbi Jacobson said, because he wasn’t Rebbe yet. But there are some. One, from 1948, was given when a chess master, Rashevsky, came for Shabbos.

“The Rebbe would often speak about what a person’s personal lessons should be, so he gave a whole talk about chess and avodas Hashem. It focused on the ‘dark’ against the ‘white’ and conquering the yetzer hara. He explained each piece as representing something else.

”In the early years, the farbrengens were shorter. In the ’80s they become more frequent and very long. After Rebbetzin Chaya Mushka’s passing in 1988, they became much shorter.“

THE STRUCTURE OF THE SICHOS

To understand the structure of the farbrengens, it is necessary to frst answer a question: What is the diference between a sichah and a maamar?

”A sichah was more informal,“ said Rabbi Jacobson. ”A maamar was more formal. It started with a pasuk and went from there. Maamarim were easier in a way, because they had more structure. A sichah was more of a free-for-all.

“The term sichah did not originate with the Rebbe. The word sichah probably wasn’t used by the Alter Rebbe; he’d just call it a vort. The Rebbe Rashab defnitely used the term sichah. There is a collection of his sichos called Toras Shalom.

”The Rebbe would say that a maamar is like a formal dissertation. It usually starts from Torah that exists from a previous Rebbe, and is built from there. There is a story that Reb Hillel Paritcher once disagreed with the Alter Rebbe about a maamar. Someone told him that the maamar itself came from the Alter Rebbe. Obviously the Rebbe knew what he had said. He answered that when the Rebbe said it, it had to be accepted like by Har Sinai, but now we have to look at it with seichel.

“The maamar was more like ‘Shechina midaberes mitoch grono [The Divine Presence speaks from his throat].’ It was on a higher level. The Rebbe would tie his hands with a handkerchief during a maamar. It was a minhag, a way of grounding the experience. Reb Avrohom the Malach (son of the Maggid of Mezeritch) once almost expired from hearing a maamar from the Alter Rebbe, and the Rebbe gave him a bagel to ground him.

”A maamar started with a niggun. The Rebbe’s demeanor would change. Everyone would rise. The Rebbe would say it in a special niggun. In 1965, he said that he was not always ready to say a maamar on Shabbos, so he would say it like a sichah. It was called maamarim k’ayn sichah, or a ‘smuggled maamar.’ On formal occasions, like 19 Kislev and Rosh Hashana, he still said maamarim.

“Farbrengens consisted of a few sichos and one maamar. On occasion, he said two maamarim. On one occasion, he said three.”

Rabbi Jacobson described the detailed structure of a farbrengen: They began on Shabbos at 1:30 p.m. The Rebbe would make Kiddush, eat some mezonos, and say l’chaim. Then there was a niggun. Then he would begin a sichah. A short sichah would be 20 minutes. A long one would be an hour-and-a-half or two hours. He would conclude the sichah with a bracha. Then there would be another niggun, maybe another l’chaim. The niggunim would usually last from three to five minutes. Then the second sichah would begin.

“Everything had a lesson in avodas Hashem. ‘Torah iz lashon hora’ah [”Torah“ means ”teaching“]’—that was the Rebbe’s most common statement. Usually, the frst sichah would be about the parsha, and the second one would be about the general time of the year—for instance, Purim or Rosh Chodesh. Sometimes, on rare occasions, there’d be a third sichah about something like bein odom l’chavero.

”After the second sichah, there’d be another niggun and then usually a maamar k’ayn sichah. It would start with a pasuk and it was more formal, like a maamar.

“In those cases, the Rebbe would give a full, formal maamar. Then, he’d frst have the chassidim sing the maamar niggun, and he’d close his eyes and the chassidim would stand. Most Shabbosim didn’t have formal maamarim.

”The next sichah would be a Rashi sichah; he instituted this after his mother passed away. In it he asked questions on Rashi. He also would ask a bunch of questions on the Zohar. Later, when he started the daily Rambam lesson, he would ask questions on the Rambam. From Pesach to Rosh Hashanah, he asked questions on Pirke Avos.

“He asked questions without giving the answers. Then there would be a niggun, and then he would say the answers. From time to time, he would address questions that people had asked on what he had said the week before. At times, he’d speak about Eretz Yisrael, usually at a later point in the farbrengen. Sometimes he’d talk about other current events. Sometimes college students would come and he’d talk about lessons in avodas Hashem from science.”

The weekday farbrengens usually began after seder in yeshiva at 9:30 p.m., and usually included a formal maamar.

THE MEMORY GROUP

The Rebbe generally did not write notes, though he certainly did prepare some concise notes. There is a video of a farbrengen where the Rebbe opens a siddur, and sitting there is a list of topics that he wanted to touch on.

“He once said by a farbrengen that he had been asked whether he prepared his speeches. He answered that, according to halacha, you have to review something four times before you say it for students, and he said that the Rebbe Rashab wouldn’t even lein the haftorah, which he certainly knew, without preparing four times. So the Rebbe said that he defnitely would prepare, but that from time to time, a nice thought would occur to him spontaneously, and he would say it. You sometimes could see that the farbrengen was a free fow.

”So it was left to the chozrim and manichim to record his words. And I was fortunate to be a part of that.

“Of course, I became part of that more than twenty years after the Rebbe frst assumed leadership, on 10 Shvat 1951. I was born in 1956.

”In every generation, including the generation that I grew up in, there were famous chozrim. Rav Yoel Kahn was coming to America by boat, when the previous Rebbe passed away. The Rebbe told him to stay in America and ultimately Rav Yoel became the main chozer.

“There were always chozrim, and they weren’t necessarily picked by the Rebbe. They emerged. After a farbrengen, people would gather and discuss it, and some people just excelled at remembering it. Maybe some were appointed, but even Reb Yoel wasn’t. It wasn’t like the Rebbe said, ‘Become a chozer.’ Some were just naturally good at it and ended up flling the role. Reb Yoel became the head of the chozrim and started to write. He also had other people working with him. As time went on, more and more bochurim in the yeshiva became involved in chazarah, and some were very good at it.

”As a young bochur, I was always intrigued by the process. I started getting involved in 1976, when I was 19. I started by writing my own notes, which were okay for someone with no experience. Then I started getting involved with the group that did chazarah, and slowly but surely I became good at it. There weren’t many people in this group, and I became one of them.

“When I started getting involved, I was also working on Sefer Halikutim, an encyclopedia of the Tzemach Tzedek’s Torah, which helped me tremendously in the chazarah process.

”I started flling in pieces of sichos and adding, and I therefore rose through the ranks. Rav Yoel wasn’t writing any more. He acted more like a senior adviser for the rest of the group. He had several helpers, about 20 all together over the years. I learned tremendously from him.

“In 1978, the Rebbe had a heart attack and gave sichos from his room for a few months. I worked with Reb Yoel on those sichos. The doctor suggested that the Rebbe shouldn’t farbreng on Shabbos, so he started farbrenging on Motzei Shabbos, when he could use a microphone and there would be less exertion. That lasted a short while before he changed it back. (Usually nothing doctors told him would last. He’d listen for a short while and then go back to the old way. He even spoke from his room on Motzei Simchas Torah, the day after his heart attack, against his doctor’s wishes. He spoke for about 15 minutes, with a maamar.) That’s when I really got involved with chazarah and fnding the sources and the sefarim that the Rebbe would quote in the sichos.

”In 1979, the previous maneach, Reb Dovid Feldman, went to Israel on shlichus to Eilat. I emerged as his replacement and became the main writer, in addition to being a chozer. I started writing at the end of Chanukah, 1979.

“Our group would gather after the farbrengen on Shabbos. The farbrengen on Shabbos ended about 6:00 p.m., and we’d usually chazer twice right away. An hour after Shabbos, we’d gather in 770. Reb Yoel or I would say over the Torah and we’d argue about it. These gatherings were open to anyone who wanted to come. We’d go through the entire farbrengen in order and make notes. Then the real work—writing it—would begin. I’d usually spend all of Sunday morning looking up the mareh mekomos and then start writing in the afternoon. (On Yom Tov, he ended well after tzeis, and we would say hamavdil and write under the table, with pen and paper we’d prepared from before Yom Tov.)

”In chassidus we know that ‘yesh ayin yesh [Transition involves three stages: an entity, a state of void, and a new entity.]’. You frst have to get to complete confusion before you get to clarity. That’s a rule in all writing and gathering information. It usually took three or four days of heavy work to fnish the hanacha. This was before word processors; we wrote with typewriters. Reb Yoel sometimes looked it over; sometimes he didn’t. Sometimes those who would look it over remembered things I missed. There were others who were good at havanah and understood things I didn’t. There was someone else who wrote mareh mekomos (sources). Then we argued it out and I turned the fruits of our discussions into a fnal draft. I was the fnal say. I did this from 1979 until 1992, when the Rebbe had his stroke.

“During a six-hour farbrengen, there were five hours of the Rebbe speaking, so the task was great.

”The Rebbe’s pace of speaking was about 20 double-spaced typed pages in an hour. So a farbrengen with about four hours of speaking would come out to about 80 pages—with no repetition.“

The farbrengen was printed and distributed to subscribers within the week.

”We frst did everything with typewriters. In the early ’80s we switched to word processors. In 1984, we got a fax.

“Maamarim, even ‘smuggled maamarim,’ were always written in Hebrew, even if they were said in Yiddish. Sichos were written in Yiddish. I wrote both, but I primarily wrote the sichos.”

EDITING

Rabbi Jacobson told us that if they were lucky, the writing was just the beginning.

“We had the opportunity to ask the Rebbe anything we wanted. We couldn’t say, ‘We missed five minutes. What did you say?’ But, we could ask him to explain his words. We could clarify things that weren’t clear. We’d get answers within minutes. He considered it a priority.

”Sometimes, he actually edited. For example, I prepared the sichah on Pesach 1984, where he spoke about the takanah to learn Rambam every day. He edited that personally because it was a special hora’ah. When it wasn’t edited it was called ‘Hanacha bilti mugah (unedited transcription).’ When it was edited it had the Rebbe’s name on the frontispiece.

“I merited that the Rebbe literally edited thousands of pages that I wrote, and I got to study him.

”I once got what seemed like a compliment from the Rebbe. The Rebbe looked over one of my frst hanachos, in 1980, and wrote, ‘Word for word. Mamesh [exactly] like a tape.’ What he really meant was that it was not edited and therefore not publishable. The remembering was done well, but the writing was not. I learned from experience.

“Part of my initial problem was that I had to get over the heiligkeit [holiness] of the Rebbe’s words. I was scared to tamper with his words, but I had to get over that and edit them because the writing couldn’t be verbatim. That took experience and time.

”In general, he was a brutal editor. I loved when he tore apart what I wrote because it taught me a lot.

“The Rebbe would use the word ‘mavhil’ for something shocking He used it when he wanted to express amazement, meaning, ‘How could you even write something like that?’

”The Rebbe didn’t like when I wrote a sentence with the words ‘nisht nor’ (‘not only this, but even this’) and would replace it with the word ‘b’nosef’ (‘additionally’). There’s very little grammatical diference, but the Rebbe preferred that way when speaking about holy things.

“He had sensitivity to certain things and deliberately left some things gray and ambiguous. He felt that it was important to let people fgure some things out for themselves.

”He never used words like ‘bad.’ Rather, he used ‘not good’ as a lashon nikiyah [clean language].

“This editing even happened in some ads I wrote for Chabad in the New York Times. I wrote one for Chanukah that mentioned ‘whispering fames’ and thought it was poetic. The Rebbe crossed it out, because the Chanukah menorah is supposed to be pirsumei nissah (publicizing the miracle)—not whispering. There are many such examples of his integrity with words.

”I once wrote up a sichah, and sent it to the copy editor. He forgot to work on it and just sent it to the Rebbe. We got back a note from the Rebbe that said, ‘I dedicate a certain amount of hours to editing. Either I fx your mistakes or I’ll make comments on your corrected work. You decide.’

“The Rebbe once received a sichah that someone else had written quickly and lazily. The Rebbe wrote back a very sharp note, and marked some edits on the paper. At the end he wrote, ‘After all the patches, it still has that look.’ I always keep that expression in mind.

”The Rebbe was a great editor. He was very good at it.

“From 1987 and on, the Rebbe began editing a lot more. Since we wrote better, he had more time to edit, since he didn’t have to focus on the technicalities. Also, technology was better, and more people were getting the sichos, so he felt the need to edit more.

MEMORY

Remembering a five-hour talk would seem like a Herculean challenge. But Rabbi Jacobson says that there are secrets of the trade.

”You do need some amount of talent from Hashem. But, there are things that can be done to boost memory.

“The whole process of remembering is really counterintuitive. You’d think the key to memory is having a better mind and more understanding. In truth, retaining is much more important than understanding. Someone who is busy understanding cannot retain that much information. You have to just listen.

”Listening to remember has to be done like a child—with total simple acceptance of the words without allowing the mind to take over and process. That’s the best way to absorb and retain. You have to just be a mekabel, and not let your self get in the way.

“This requires a tremendous amount of bittul to the person speaking. You have to really respect the person that’s speaking in order to listen like that.

”This idea is not just an academic one; it is also a secret of human relationships: Listen with respect before passing judgment.

“When you absorb properly, you can work on it later and come to understanding.

”People need to respect the fact that you can’t just grab knowledge. You have to let it sink in frst and then come to understanding.

“A few more pointers: You have to know the speaker’s style and adjust accordingly. You may have a mental map of what the speaker would say, but you have to be ready to take a ‘turn’ when the speaker veers.

”Another thing is to review immediately. I reviewed in my mind, starting immediately after the Rebbe stopped speaking, in between the sichos.”

When Rabbi Jacobson asked us whether we understood his point, our rejoinder was that we merely were trying to absorb what he was saying. And in what he said, there was quite a lot to absorb.

2 Comments

  • Wow!

    So illuminating!I learned a lot. Avrohom Baruch Pevzner was a Chozer of the Rebbe Rashab and once he took the time to “process” the maamar during its reciataion and compare it to a prior one and the Rebbe Rashab told him that he noticed that he had a “Machshava Zara” during the Maamar and that he no longer needed to stand opposite him when he said Maamorim.

  • Nice article, very well written!

    BS”D
    This is an amazing article! I learned a lot about listening for sure :)