Chassidic story & lesson

The Song That Silenced a City^[1]

In the early days of his leadership, the Rebbe was known for his concise, piercing talks. One such moment began with a single line from the Mishnah in Tractate Shabbat:

“They go out with bells, and they are drawn with bells.”

To the Rebbe, this wasn’t just about animals and their harness bells. It was a vision: souls and angels ascend through song, and divine blessings descend through song.

One of his chassidim, aflame with this insight, repeated it in the city of Shklov — a stronghold of sharp-minded scholars, many staunchly opposed to Chassidic thought. They scoffed. “A mystical commentary on an ox’s bell? Ridiculous!” The murmurs spread until they became a roar of mockery.

Time passed. The Rebbe himself came to Shklov. By now, whispers of his brilliance had reached even his fiercest critics. They had heard the rumors:

The young Rebbe is a prodigy. Test him — if you dare.

The city’s great scholars resolved to challenge him, preparing a battery of complex questions. They summoned him to the grand beit midrash, determined to measure this “young Rebbe” against their intellectual firepower. Shklov’s scholars were ready. Sharp minds, sharper tongues. They would present their hardest Torah riddles and see if the tales of this Chassidic leader were true.

The next morning, the grand beis midrash swelled with expectation. Wooden benches groaned under the weight of students, elders, and skeptics alike. At the center, the Rebbe entered quietly, mounting the bimah.

No papers. No books. Only his calm gaze.

The Rebbe ascended the bimah. Every eye was fixed on him. He began to speak — but not as they expected. “You have asked for Torah… and answers to your questions. Instead, I will give you a song, the Mishnah says: Kol ba’alei shir yotzin b’shir v’nichnasin b’shir — all creatures of song go out with song and enter with song.”

Then, without another word, he closed his eyes and began to sing. The melody was unlike anything they had heard — deep, ancient, aflame with yearning and joy intertwined.

At first, the scholars exchanged puzzled glances. But slowly, the room changed. The chatter died. The air thickened with feeling. The song poured into them, unwinding their pride, dissolving the defenses they had so carefully built.

And then — a silence that was not empty, but full.

Something invisible shifted. The questions they had sharpened like swords seemed suddenly small, already answered by the torrent of spiritual clarity washing through them. In that moment, they understood the Mishnah’s hidden meaning: song could lift the soul higher than logic, and draw down a wisdom deeper than argument.

When the Rebbe’s voice finally faded, they were no longer opponents. They had been drawn upward — and something divine had been drawn down into their midst.

The great Reb Yosef Kolbo had wrestled for months with four relentless Torah questions. He had scoured the depths of his own learning. He had carried them to the geniuses of Vilna and Polotsk.
No one could resolve them. The questions sat heavy on his mind — unsolved, unyielding.

Then came the encounter.

It was during the above event when the Rebbe’s words poured forth with fiery clarity, the air thick with dveikus — deep attachment to the Divine. In that atmosphere, something shifted. Without anyone uttering a direct answer, the four questions melted away in Reb Yosef’s mind, their solutions standing clear before him as if they had always been there.

Years later, Reb Yosef would tell it simply:

“When those four difficulties were settled in me, I felt like a small child.”

The humility of that moment stayed with him for life.

The story was first told by the chassid Reb Avraham, who had witnessed it, to the Tzemach Tzedek in the year 1807. From it, the Rebbe drew a wellspring of teaching — delivering a profound maamar beginning with the words: “To understand the matter of the Ta’amim, the Nekudos, the Tagin, and the Otiyos.” He explained: the “accents” (ta’amim) and “crowns” (tagin) are not mere ornaments of the letters — they reveal the hidden, vital force of the intellect and bring it into clear, revealed understanding.

✨ The Takeaway

Sometimes an answer doesn’t arrive by a direct path. In the right moment, in the right presence, the soul’s gates open — and what was once impenetrable becomes as simple and luminous as a child’s truth.

[1] Sippurei Chassidim [Zevin] vol. 2 p. 231 Story #446