Translation by Yehoshua Siskin
About a month ago, I joined the Greenberg sisters' WhatsApp group in order to work with them on documenting and filming their story. This is a group of seven sisters, all Chabad emissaries, who carry out their mission in five countries: Israel, the United States, France, Germany, and Ukraine. The story was broadcast yesterday, but it is difficult now for me to disengage from this unique WhatsApp group.
Alongside the elections that grab our attention here at home, I received updates through the group on a number of events and developments in other parts of the world: the snow storm that rampaged through Texas and compelled the sister living there to prepare meals for the hungry and to rescue stranded tourists; the grave corona situation in France that confined Megillah reading to individual homes and small groups; the anti-Semitism in Ukraine and the efforts to help childless Holocaust survivors there; the sister in Germany whose husband died suddenly and who is now running a prosperous Chabad house and has taken upon herself responsibility for an entire community. I asked the sisters to film and document their activities in real time, but they did not always manage to do so due to their packed schedules.
In a Zoom meeting with all of the sisters, I asked them what they recommend to ordinary women who are tired at the end of an entire year of the corona. "They should go out as emissaries with a mission -- and then they will not be tired," answered Sternie from Germany with a smile. But it seems to me she may have been speaking in all seriousness: when all our actions are done for the sake of others, when we live with the consciousness of being on a mission -- that is what gives us strength to cope with hardships. And this is what I discovered every time I heard that familiar WhatsApp ping and noticed that a new message from this group had appeared. Unlike my other WhatsApp groups, this group's messages were not about election polls or who the next prime minister might be, but concerned updates regarding lovingkindness and Jewish life. In order to have the awareness of an emissary, you do not need to go to Alaska and set up a Chabad house there. It's possible, in fact, to live with this emissary awareness right here in our own homes, between the kitchen and the living room, in how we treat our children and our next door neighbors.
