We Keep Losing Our Best Teachers to Yehupitzville

From the COLlive inbox: Why do we consider going to help a few Yidden a few thousand miles away more of a shlichus than staying to shape hundreds of Yidden a few blocks away?

By Sara T.

I am a proud daughter of Chassidishe parents who raised me in Crown Heights. I went to Bais Rivkah from kindergarten through twelfth grade, and came back for Sem Bais. This year, two years out of seminary, I’m starting my first year as a teacher. Chinuch is my passion. It’s also, I’ve come to realize, the most undervalued shlichus in Lubavitch.

Here’s the pattern I keep watching play out.

An incredible teacher starts in Bais Rivkah. The girls love her. She’s a role model, someone helping raise the next generation of Lubavitch girls, instilling values that last a lifetime — not just through what she teaches, but through who she is. I still remember the Tanya I learned from a teacher like this in tenth grade. There’s something so special about learning from someone who genuinely cares about what she’s teaching, and who is relatable enough to feel like an older sister rather than an authority figure.

And then, after a year, two years, maybe three, she gets married and leaves. Not just the classroom — she leaves for a random town near Nebraska, to reach maybe a dozen Yidden. Meanwhile, she leaves behind hundreds of hungry Neshamos in the schools of Crown Heights.

I want to ask, honestly: why do we consider going to help a few Yidden a few thousand miles away more of a shlichus than staying to shape hundreds of Yidden a few blocks away? Why do so many of these women feel that this is what the Rebbe would want, over remaining in chinuch as the teacher who is quite literally changing lives, one class at a time?

I don’t think it’s a question of who’s right. I think it’s a question of what we, as a community, communicate we value.

Is it Kavod? A Shliach and Shlucha get a send-off, a place at the kinus. A Morah gets a thank-you note at the end of the year, if she’s lucky. What if we gave our teachers the same Kavod we give our Shluchim? What if every Morah in Bais Rivkah were invited to the Kinus? Maybe that alone would help the girls in our schools understand, and feel, that what their teachers do carries the same weight in the eyes of the community as what a shliach far away does. Maybe it would give teachers a stronger sense of aAchrayis for the treasure they’re holding.

I don’t have the whole solution. I’m writing this because it is painful to watch women who my siblings, my friends, and I gained so much from, pick up and move on — seemingly blind to what they’re leaving behind. These are not small departures. Every one of them is a hole in a building full of girls who needed exactly what that teacher had to give.

What is Shlichus, really, if not bringing Neshamos closer to Hashem and spreading Chassidus? If that isn’t Chinuch, I don’t know what is. My dream is for the rest of Lubavitch to see it that way too: that chinuch is not a stepping stone on the way to real Sshlichus. It is Shlichus — arguably the Shlichus with the deepest, longest-lasting reach of all, because it shapes the very next generation that will go on to build everything else.

Until we start treating it that way, we will keep losing our best teachers to Yehupitzville, and keep wondering why.

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