Prisons are hopeless places. With colored TVs, weight piles and Congressional Fair Acts and such, prisons are hopeless places. Go back in time, then they were cellars, one small, barred window. Rats. Other prisoners: who fit in there fine. Who belonged there. People weren't expected to survive prisons then.
A saintly figure, a Rebbe, gets thrown in to prison. For treason. He's been sending money to Jews in the Holy Land, a colony of Turkey. The enemy of Imperialist Russia. The Czar threw the Rebbe in prison. The Peter-Paul Fortress. Trumped up charges are all it took. The Rebbe was expected to never come out. His movement was expected to never survive.
The Rebbe came out and with his freedom came a new respect for his teachings, from the Jews and from the Russians alike. Teachings that the Almighty watches over every person, all the time. He was awarded honor from the Czar. For six generations his successors were jailed though, and then the Czar was imprisoned, too.
Now the Bolsheviks are gone. The Peter-Paul Fortress remains intact. A tourist site. Jews go there too, hoping to see where the Old Rebbe was held. Where history was made.
This past Thursday and Friday we celebrated his release from prison. For two-hundred years Chassidim have dressed their Shabbos best on this day and called it a Rosh Hashanah. The Old Rebbe's book, the Tanya, is being written up in newspapers as if it's just hitting the market. For those who've never seen it, it is. And Chassidim are jealous of these people who have never seen the Tanya - they see it as something new.
Chassidim tell of the Alter Rebbe's doubts before he was thrown in the slammer. Doubts, would he get out? Self-doubts even, did he deserve too? Hindsight is a very good thing for people who have been good. For people who have done good.
One day I'll get to Leningrad, (whoops!, it's S. Petersburg again) and see the Peter-Paul. I want to see where the Alter Rebbe faced his interrogators. Where he faced his doubts. I'd like to do it on the day of his release, 19 Kislev. Or maybe on his yahrzeit. Or maybe his birthday.
But I want to do it when the local Jewish school is there. When those hundreds of kids have an outing to the Peter-Paul. I want to hear their teachers tell them the story of the Alter Rebbe in Russian, even though I don't speak a word of Russian. And I want to hear the kids saying altogether now, word for word, the way kids in school and camp all the over do: Shema Yisrael.
ב"ה