Permission to Author

Last Shabbos, a friend caught me after davening. He had read the latest article, and he wanted to register a complaint. You keep doing this, he said. Every piece points to where things break down. You then trace it back to the underlying cause, and then you stop. You name the problem, you gesture at the depth of it, and you never tell us what to actually do to resolve it. Where are the steps?

He was right, and I couldn't fully tell him why.

Sitting with it afterward, I realized there were really two reasons. The first, on the more practical side, is that it doesn't work to turn these essays into a manual. A step-by-step guide would be long, technical, and joyless to read, and it would work against what the writing is actually for: opening up the conversation, raising a question people can sit with and share insights discovered along the way.

But to be fully honest, there is a second thing holding me back that is much less technical.

Over the past couple of months, whenever I'd sit down to write a new article, I'd start intending to introduce some of the steps, or at least point toward them, and when pen met paper I found I could not. Not because the steps don't exist. I've spent years working them out, and so far they've held up.

The holdback is that the whole thing rests on a single question I cannot answer with any certainty, one I don't even know who to bring to.

Do we have permission to author a Shlichus?

Do we have permission to author a Shlichus?

To understand my question, notice what actually happens when someone goes out on Shlichus. Before he knows where he is going, before he knows anything about the conditions waiting for him there, he already knows what his job will be. He is going to build a Chabad House. The mission arrives pre-defined. The way a Chabad House looks, the programs it runs, the rhythm of its year, all of it was set long before he got there, and when he arrives he gives himself fully to that exact mission. He never sits in the author's seat. That his Shlichus might be something unique, shaped to him and to this place, is not even a question he thinks to ask. He is an operator of an existing playbook.

His own personality comes through, of course. He runs things with his warmth, adds a program, adjusts one that isn't landing. But all of it happens inside a model that predates him. He is not deciding what Chabad means in his corner of the world. He is carrying forward, faithfully, a definition he received.

And this holds even where you would least expect it to. There are Shluchim for whom the inherited model produces almost nothing, no perceptible traction, no visible fruit, and still they hold to it with mesirus nefesh. They do not conclude that the model has failed them and that something else is needed. They stay inside it.

Which forces the question the other way. Maybe this is exactly what Shlichus is. Maybe the Shlichus has already been authored, and our whole task is to adhere to it, with Bittul, regardless of the outcome. "Eved Avrohom Anochi."

And then, as I was sitting with this very question, a friend forwarded me an article by Rabbi Zvi Drizin, written in response to my first piece. There I had framed the pioneer's orienting question as "How can I make Chabad survive here." Rabbi Drizin suggested the real question sits a layer deeper: "Am I a Shliach of the Rebbe." For many, that is the whole of it. The avoda of Shlichus is accomplished in being the Rebbe's Shliach, in the gavra and not the cheftsa, in who you are rather than in what you accomplish.

And if that is true, the whole question answers itself. To author would be to insert the self into the one place it was never meant to go. The entire premise of Shlichus, on this reading, is that the Shliach recedes so the Meshaleach can be present. The self is not an instrument of the mission. It is the thing that has to get out of the way for the mission to happen at all. Authoring your own model would not be an advancement of that. It would be its reversal.

And yet I cannot sit comfortably in that answer, because it does not match what I have actually seen. For years now I have sat with Shluchim in the hardest parts of their work, and the thing I keep meeting, underneath the presenting problem, is a self that is unaccounted for. What happens is that the self gets set aside rather than nullified, and a self that is set aside does not disappear.

What happens is that the self gets set aside rather than nullified, and a self that is set aside does not disappear.

It keeps operating on its own, and it doesn't come through in its best form. It does not show up as vision or conviction or the person's real gifts. It shows up as insecurity. The need for validation. The territory guarded too closely, the decision made to settle an anxiety rather than to serve a purpose. The self that was supposed to be nullified is not gone.

If the inherited Shlichus model really is the whole of it, if faithful implementation is the entire task and there is nothing left to author, then we would have to say that Shlichus has arrived at its final form. That whatever ceiling we are hitting is not a wall to move through but simply the shape of it in its completion. And completion is not the language anyone uses when they speak about Shlichus. We do not talk about the work as finished. We talk about it as growing, with the greatest part still to come.

And when I listen for what that greater part might ask of us, I keep hearing the Rebbe's own words. Ker a velt. Tut altz vos ir kent. The sichas of Shlach Lecha, l'da'atchem, and the like.

The language is not the language of maintenance. It is the language of a demand to rise, to turn over a world, to do everything we are capable of and bring Moshiach. And the only honest response I can form to a demand like that is that it asks for something the operator era does not contain. It asks us to stop running the playbook and to lead.

It asks us to stop running the playbook and to lead.

And to lead, I have come to believe, means engaging the self that was set aside and authoring from that place.

And still I cannot be sure, because there is another strong possibility. We teach a child the alef-beis today the same way it was taught hundreds of years ago, knowing there are proven, more effective methods, and we ignore them on purpose. It is simply not our way. There are times when we hold to the received form for spiritual reasons even if it seems, from our perspective, counterproductive. And there are stories I have heard over the years that suggest Shlichus falls in that category. Stories about early attempts to build formal professional training into how Shluchim are prepared before they go out. In the ones I have heard, the Rebbe's response was to discourage it. I have no source to point to, but I have heard enough of them, running the same way, that I cannot wave them away.

If Shlichus means Bittul to the received model in that same way, then broadly suggesting that Shluchim need to author, even if it generates growth, even if it resolves the recurring problems, even if it creates more impact, might be encouraging the wrong direction. And better results would not change that.

So I hold both. I see the potential and I see how it could be unlocked, and I cannot tell you with certainty that unlocking it is what everyone is supposed to do.

I believe that gaining clarity on this matters far beyond the content of these articles. So for now, that is what I will share with you. Not steps or solutions, but the question:

Do we have permission to author our Shlichus?

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