The Breakfast Has Gone Cold

The first time I really met Shmueli, his breakfast was getting cold.

He was going over the Chabad calendar with his life partner, woman of valor (insert many more superlatives here) Adina, the kind of project that looks simple from the outside and turns out to be made of a hundred small decisions nobody else will ever notice. And somewhere in the middle of it, Shmueli stopped on every single ad placement. Not the design. Not the cost. Where it sat on the page, and who it belonged to, and what that person would feel when they opened the calendar and found their name exactly there.

He sat with it. He turned it over. The eggs went cold in front of him and he didn't seem to notice, because he was somewhere else entirely, thinking about a person he may have barely known, working out how a few inches of layout might land on someone's heart. That was not efficiency. That was not how you finish a calendar fast. That was a man who could not let a stranger's dignity become collateral damage in a production schedule. He finished the eggs, he was not wasteful, he was purposeful.

I learned so much about Shmueli in that one cold breakfast. He was unfazed by time because time was never the point (and then time was all he wanted). The point was always the person on the other side of the decision.

This Substack was always supposed to be about chinuch. I vacillated about whether to post this at all (for anyone with memories — shmulyaltein.com is a place to share them), whether grief belongs in a space built for something else. But the more I sat with it, the more I understood that Shmueli was entirely a man of chinuch, in title, in profession, and in every action and every interaction he had. He taught even when he was not standing in front of a classroom. He taught through the way he treated a stranger's name on a calendar page. There was no better fit for this space than him.

Shmueli was, by any measure, a tech whizz. He moved through systems and software the way some people move through a room they've lived in their whole lives, comfortable, fast, a few steps ahead. But the tools were never the point for him. The point was always whether something carried the human touch he brought to everything he did. He believed that real chinuch, real impact, came from a person showing up fully for another person, and no shortcut could replace that. He would not have wanted this letter to be efficient. He would have wanted it to be true.

He left us on 3 Tammuz. The Rebbe's yom histalkus. A man who stood for everything Detroit Lubavitch carries at its finest, fierce and devoted and entirely without pretense, and somehow the contrarian in him chose the least contrarian date imaginable.

And Shmueli was a contrarian. Gloriously, lovably so. He questioned everything worth questioning, pushed back with that sideways warmth that made you feel included in the joke even when you were its subject. He accepted Ol Malchus Shomayim with his whole heart and argued about nearly everything else. He did the hard thing when surrender was right there, available, dressed up as acceptance.

He never took it. Over twenty major surgeries. Clinical trials. Years of finding new reasons to stay, more Shabbos, more learning, more time with the people he loved. His wife and children. He was private about all of it. A man the community knew and loved without ever knowing the half of what he carried. (I certainly do not know much of what he carried).

There was a Pesach in Winnipeg. Egyptian geese, sand on the icy roads, conversations that sounded like nothing and were everything, because Shmueli had decided that moment was worth being fully inside.

There were Friday phone calls. Not enough of them. There are never enough of anything until there is nothing left.

For a long time we said tehillim for Shmuel Ben Brocha Tirtza. We said it so many times it became muscle memory, a name on the lips before the mind caught up.

Now the name is Shmuel Ben Yibodlu L'Chaim Tovim Avraham. The mind has still not caught up that the philosophical yet practical Shmueli is no longer a phone call away.

We do not eulogize in Chabad. So this is a letter, written through glassy eyes, about a man whose every meal went cold because someone else's feelings mattered more than his own schedule.

That was Shmueli. Earnest, honest, exacting about the things that deserved exactness, unbothered by the things that didn't. A smile that was rare enough to mean something when it came. A heart too full to fake what it didn't feel.

The world is quieter without him in it. He would be annoyed that we say it but too real for us to pretend otherwise.