Encounters with the Rebbe

About this book

The men and women who sat with the Rebbe carried something out of the room that those who had not sat with him did not carry.Joseph Ciechanover, the senior Israeli defense official, said this near the end of his life. He had spent twenty-eight years as one of the conduits through which others were introduced to the Lubavitcher Rebbe. He had watched the line being drawn many times. He knew which side of it he was on.This book is a documented anthology of encounters with the seventh Rebbe of Chabad. Israeli prime ministers and American senators. Nobel laureates and bestselling novelists. Soviet émigré physicists and Harvard graduate students. A bereaved daughter of a murdered father. A widow on Friday night. An eight-year-old boy who expected toys. A New York City police detective who came along because he was driving the senator.Inside: Begin at the curb outside 770 two days before the Oval Office Sharon at the threshold of leaving the IDF in August 1970 Lieberman on the way to the Senate oath on the first of January 1989 Wiesel on the question of whether he could still cry Sacks crossing the continent by Greyhound bus for a three-hour appointment Swados the novelist, whose interview was reversed mid-meeting Weinreb, identified by name across a telephone line he had called anonymously Bennett the Catholic driver, who stopped at St. Patrick's Cathedral on the way back across the bridge What distinguishes this book is the discipline. Every encounter is documented at a specific evidentiary tier, named visibly inside the chapter. Contemporaneous footage. First-person published recollection. Named oral history. Compiled later narrative. Single-witness oral tradition. The reader is shown what the record contains and what it does not.Forty encounters across forty years. The form is older than this Rebbe and will continue after him. What he did with it across his nesius is the documented content of this book.