The Tanya That Fought Typhus

Rabbi Meir Shlomo Yanovsky, the chief rabbi of Nikolayev, Ukraine - and the grandfather of the Lubavitcher Rebbe - was gravely ill.

It was typhus.

Highly contagious.

There were no real treatments.

He was quarantined in a hospital room - no visitors, no voices, just silence.

Back then, most who entered that isolation ward never came out.

Not just because of the disease itself, but because of the crushing loneliness.

No one to talk to. No one to hold your hand. No strength to keep hoping.

But one man didn’t give up.

His name was Reb Asher - a humble kosher Shochet, deeply G-d-fearing, and a close friend of Rabbi Yanovsky.

He couldn’t visit the room. He couldn’t even see his friend.

But he could stand outside the window.

And so he did.

Every day - for thirty days - Reb Asher came. Rain or wind, cold or dark, he stood outside that sealed window… and read aloud from the Tanya.

Not quietly. Not rushed.

He chose Chapter 11 of Iggeres HaKodesh, where the Alter Rebbe writes:

“No evil descends from above… it only appears that way, because we cannot grasp its immense good.”

Was Rabbi Yanovsky able to hear? No one knew.

But Reb Asher kept coming.

Kept reading.

Kept believing.

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Then the miracle came.

Rabbi Yanovsky recovered.

He later said:

“It wasn’t the medicine that healed me. It was his voice. It was the Tanya.

Each day, I would hear him from the window - and I felt strength come back into my soul.”

⸻

That’s the world the Lubavitcher Rebbe was born into.

A world where Tanya wasn’t just a book on the shelf -

but a lifeline in the cold.

A voice in the silence.

A soul that showed up for a friend, thirty days in a row.