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Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi was arrested on Thursday night,
25th of Tishrei, 5559 (1798). A contingent of imperial soldiers,
under the command of a high-ranking officer, placed the Rebbe
in the closed, black coach designated for prisoners accused
of treason against the Czar, and set out on the several-hundred-mile
journey from Liozna to Petersburg.
On the following afternoon, when the clock showed six hours
before candle-lighting time, the Rebbe requested that the
coach stop for Shabbat. The officer refused. There was a loud
crack, and the coach ground to a halt: an axle had snapped.
Unperturbed, the officer sent to a nearby village for a wheelwright
to make repairs.
When the coach was fit to travel on, one of the horses fell
dead. The officer sent for another horse. Four horses pulled
and strained, but could not move the coach forward a single
inch.
At this point, the officer turned to the Rebbe and asked
if he would allow them to travel to the nearest settlement
to spend Shabbat there; the Rebbe refused. “Can we at
least move the coach off the roadway?” The Rebbe agreed,
and the horses easily pulled the coach to a shady spot on
the side of the road. There, a mile from the village of Saliba-Rudnia,
near the city of Nevel, the Rebbe and his “imprisoners”
spent Shabbat.
Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak of Lubavitch (Rabbi Schneur Zalman’s
great-great-great-grandson) related that the old chassid Rabbi
Michael of Nevel know chassidim who could point to the exact
spot where Rabbi Schneur Zalman spent his Shabbat at the roadside.
Rabbi Michael himself went to see the place; years later,
he would speak of the experience with a fervor and awe usually
reserved by chassidim for the deliberation of a sublime concept
of Chassidic teaching. “Along both sides of the road,”
Rabbi Michael recalled, “were old, broken trees. But
one tree stood out from the rest: tall, majestic, its leafy,
far-spreading branches shading the spot where the Rebbe spent
that Shabbat.”[1]
Adapted from the teachings of the Lubavitcher Rebbe by
Yanki Tauber
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[1]. Likkutei Dibburim, vol. I, pp. 75-76.
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