I come from a family of twelve children. My father is in the London diamond industry. Once a year, my father used to take one of us to New York to meet the Rebbe, of righteous memory. When I was eight, it was my turn to go to New York.
We had an audience with the Rebbe at two in the morning. As a kid, by that hour, I could get very cranky. "Just do me a favor," my father told me, "All it's going to take is one minute. Please behave for that time." I agreed to behave for that one minute.
When our turn came, we entered the Rebbe's office, and the Rebbe started talking to my father in Yiddish. We never spoke Yiddish at home, and I did not know the language. One minute passed, two minutes, three minutes, five minutes, and I was getting impatient.
I started looking around the Rebbe's room to find the box of toys. I figured thousands of kids came through this room, there must be toys somewhere. What was I going to do? I couldn't turn around to my father and say, "Dad, hurry up." I knew that if I would ask him if I could slip out of his hand the answer would definitely be no. As he was standing there, I did it very quickly, I ripped out of his hand. What was he going to do — start running after me in front of the Rebbe?
I started looking around the Rebbe's room to find the box of toys. I figured thousands of kids came through this room, there must be toys somewhere.
At the back of the room there was a filing cabinet. I opened the bottom drawer, thinking there had to be toys there. I look inside, just papers. I opened up the next drawer, just papers. The compartment had a third drawer, but I couldn't see into it, so I slammed the second drawer and stood on the papers in the first drawer. I looked in the third drawer, and I saw papers. I didn't even bother opening the fourth drawer. I couldn't find anything.
I continued to look around again and there were just books. You could imagine what was going through my father's head, trying to concentrate on the what the Rebbe was saying while he's got this lunatic kid running around in the Rebbe's room opening up filing drawers.
There was nothing exciting happening in the Rebbe's room, but outside the Rebbe's room they were doing construction. Construction is always exciting: tractors, noise and so on.
I opened the blinds and was about to open the window when the Rebbe called my name, Shimon. I opened the blinds and was about to open the window when the Rebbe called my name, Shimon. I quickly closed the blinds, closed all the drawers, leaned over the Rebbe's desk and said, "Yes, Rebbe."
There Rebbe was holding a dollar in his hand, and he asked my father, "Does he speak Yiddish?" My father told the Rebbe that I understood English.
The Rebbe, holding the dollar, asked me, "Do you know what this is?" I said it is tzedakah (charity). He smiled and asked, "What is tzedakah?" I said, "charity." He smiled and asked, "What is charity?" I said, "tzedakah." This went back and forth several times.
He asked me a question and I answered. I thought I was going to get a candy.
The Rebbe looked at me and said to me, "There are two types of charity: there's charity with money and then there's charity with your body, to care and to share with somebody else. I want you to know, sometimes sharing and caring for someone else is more effective than giving money to charity." The Rebbe gave me that dollar.
Normally when you go to a grandfatherly figure, they are always trying to tell stories, trying to get your attention. Here, the only thing the Rebbe could tell an eight-year-old kid was to share and care for someone else.
My father would remind me of this story throughout my life, and I would tell him that I had learned two things from it: First, that I would be a very lousy fundraiser, and second, I knew that I wanted to be a Chabad-Lubavitch emissary to assist others. I thought to myself, that has to be my calling.
From that time, I wanted to go to a place where there's no Jewish infrastructure, I wanted to build it from scratch.
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