For the Beis Yisroel, it didn’t matter if you were a scholar, a cab driver, or a child who knew nothing of Shabbos

Photos: ArtScroll/Mesorah

I’d never met Rebbe Yisroel Alter, the Beis Yisroel of Gur, as he passed away close to 50 years ago. Yet the passage of time actually made this biography project easier — because the Beis Yisroel, with his immeasurable impact on a nation still reeling, was such a complex personality, such a nuanced story, that it’s only now we can marvel at the precision of a Divine plan that planted him at that juncture in history. With the release of The Beis Yisroel, maybe we can still feel the impact

My friends sometimes make fun of me (which is what good friends do), mocking the fact that I breathlessly claim how each new book is different than any of the previous ones I’ve written and I have never been so inspired/moved/determined/motivated.

It’s an okay joke, but it’s also really true that every story awakens parts of a person they didn’t know existed, pulling them into a different dimension.

I never saw the Beis Yisroel — Rebbe Yisroel Alter of Gur — who was niftar in 1977 when I was just a year old, though we did have a connection which I only learned about two years ago, when I was unsure whether or not this project was for me.

I asked my father for his opinion, and he told me a story.

On a visit to the Holy Land, my father went in to the Beis Yisroel with a kvittel. The Gerrer Rebbe scanned the paper, a smile playing on his lips.

“Drai techter — three daughters?” he asked my father.

Seeing an opportunity, my father suggested that if the Rebbe would bless him with a son, surely it would come true.

The Rebbe nodded. “You will have,” he said.

A year later, I was born, and then it was back to sisters again, five of them in total, bli ayin hara, and no brothers.

In Ger, like in most Polish chassidic courts, wonder-stories don’t impress anyone: As the Kotzker Rebbe said, playing on the words we say in Maariv each night, “Osos umofsim b’admas bnei Cham” (literally, “Who wrought us signs and wonders in the land of Cham”), as “Signs and wonders are appropriate for the children of Cham.”

The story above would be seen as nice, but not much more than that. For stories to be worth anything, they have to obligate.

There are enough such stories, but — in the style of Polish chassidus — they do not obligate in an overt way, and they are not the sort of stories that a teacher can tell students and then neatly sign off with “what we see from here, kinderlach, is the importance of…”

The Lev Simcha, Rebbe Simcha Bunim Alter, the Beis Yisroel’s brother who succeeded him as Rebbe, gave expression to this.

Not long after the Lev Simcha assumed the mantle of leadership, a chassid came in and told the new Rebbe about how his son had been learning in the Gerrer Yeshivas Sfas Emes, and he had developed a serious illness. The Beis Yisroel had assured the father that there was no reason to worry, and the bochur had recovered, showing no signs of having ever been ill.

“I am happy the boy is fine,” the Lev Simcha responded, “but that is not a moifes. If you want to know the real moifes my brother did, it is that he took bochurim and turned them into fiery talmidei chachamim and ovdim — that was his moifes.”

To make a sick person healthy is necessary, of course, but it is not the goal. The goal is to come a bit closer, to work a bit harder, to reach a bit higher