The Rebbe’s letters of healing come to Bondi

An author whose book draws on the letters of the Lubavitcher Rebbe will visit Bondi this month, in an evening of growth and healing offered to the community targeted in the December terrorist attack.

Rabbi Levi Shmotkin, author of Letters for Life: Guidance for Emotional Wellness from the Lubavitcher Rebbe, will appear at an event hosted by Chabad of Bondi on Wednesday July 29. The evening will include a talk, a signing of a newly adapted Sydney edition of the book, and musical accompaniment by Chazan Menachem Feldman.

The book collects the letters written by Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who over the course of his life corresponded with thousands of people from every walk of life — believer and sceptic, scholar and beginner — many of whom he never met. As a teenager, Shmotkin has said, he struggled to concentrate, and it was the letters of the rabbi he had never met that steadied him.

Shmotkin’s visit carries particular weight this year. Chabad of Bondi was the community struck in the antisemitic terrorist attack at Bondi Beach, which targeted the “Chanukah by the Sea” celebration and killed 15 people. In the months since, the community has been both grieving and rebuilding, and Letters for Life — a book about finding a way through loss, fear and darkness — has been re-edited and re-released as a special Sydney edition. The evening is offered as a space for the community to gather around growth, resilience and healing.

The letters deal with the difficulties of the human condition — heartbreak, loss, fear, confusion and the feeling of being stuck — written by people in the middle of their struggles rather than scholars seeking theory. In one exchange, a college student wrote to the Rebbe in despair, pages of frustration about his family, his career and himself. The Rebbe replied that the answer was already in the student’s own letter: in two and a half pages, he had not written a single word about giving to anyone else.

“You are much too wrapped up with yourself, with your own emotions and feelings and aspirations,” the Rebbe wrote. “You must get away from yourself, and begin to think of others … to give, and give generously.”

If one idea held the book together, Shmotkin said, it was that people were usually bigger than they thought they were — more connected, more capable and more needed than they realised. He said the advice had not dated, arguing that it ran against much current thinking. “While there’s a strong focus today on emotional health, the Rebbe consistently emphasised that true emotional wellbeing requires expanding beyond self-absorption,” he said.

The book has drawn attention beyond Chabad circles. Rabbi Dr Tzvi Hirsch Weinreb, executive vice-president emeritus of the Orthodox Union and a trained psychologist, called it “an immensely valuable source of the guidance we seek”, written by someone with “phenomenal insight into the soul and psyche of humanity”.

The event and the Sydney edition were made possible by sponsors from across the Bondi community. Doors open at 6:45pm, with the program beginning at 7:15pm.

Tickets are available through Humanitix.