“Dude, I know this is going to sound crazy, but I need to leave and head back to New York to drive my Rebbe from the airport to his apartment”

My 26 year old brain didn’t understand, did our President’s day ski trip just end? “…but we just drove 7 hours to Vermont. We’re skiing on fresh powder and drinking a plethora of Vermont IPAs…can’t someone else take him? Or he can just take an uber?”

“Bro, the Rebbe asked me to do it, I gotta go.”

You don’t usually hear the words Bro Rebbe in the same sentence but as I’d soon learn, that’s sort of how the Ostrova Biale Rebbe ztz”l rolls. I begrudgingly went with my friend Josh back to NY, a promise to have yechidus with him in return.

You see, this Rebbe isn’t your typical rebbe you imagine when you close your eyes. Sure he wears the typical garb, speaks Hebrew and yiddish and lives in Yerushaliyim. But he would travel for months to various locations, NYC, LA, Miami, Ukraine, etc at a moment’s notice and you’d never know where he’d go next. Whoever booked his flights quickly learned to never book a return ticket. And outside of Yerushaliyim, you never really found him in a shul either. An Airbnb there, a basement apartment here. He would often spend his weekdays at random cabins just to be in nature, learn, and have time to do hisbodedut.

But most importantly, his chassidim were not your usual chassidim either. Trade the black and white army for an eclectic mix of people who probably wouldn’t have had anything to do with each other if it wasn’t for him: Uman types, classic sefardim, YU grads morphed into neo-chassidim, Hebrew speakers and English speakers, even a batch of 6 ft tall Italian Persian brothers.

We didn’t live in the same communities or have much to do with each other day to day. But the second a WhatsApp message went out that the Rebbe was in town, we’d drop........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)