The Dance of Giving and Receiving

My namesake, and how I learned to be both Mashpia and Mekabal

When I first became a rabbi, I had already spent years in the trenches of personal guidance. From an early age, it was clear to me that I came from a long line of Hasidic leaders, but the depth of that inheritance took years to reveal itself. I was called “Peretz Mochkin” before I even knew what that meant, before I had ever heard the teaching that would later define me: that in Hasidic life, there are two archetypes at play—mashpia (the giver, the influencer) and mekabal (the receiver, the vessel).

It’s a mystical framework. In the cosmic dance, the mashpia gives not just words, but energy, life force. The mekabal receives, not just passively, but with the intention to rise, to hold, to actualize what was given. Both are required. A true mashpia uplifts the mekabal into a state of readiness. And a true mekabal allows the mashpia to expand beyond himself.

As a child in Crown Heights, I would say my name, and people would pause. “Wow,” they’d whisper. “Has it been so long since he died?” They were talking past me, about my namesake, who died just a month before I was born. They saw his legacy. They didn’t yet see me.

He was a legendary mashpia in Chabad Lubavitch. But what did that really mean?

My grandfather, Reb Dovid Edelman, once told me, “He wasn’t just a Chassid of the Rebbe. He was a Chassid of three Rebbes: the fifth, the sixth, and the seventh.” That meant his soul endured across the most challenging chapters of Jewish life in modernity. From Tsarist Russia, the rise of Communism, both world wars, and the rebuilding after the Holocaust. He prayed for hours a day. He lived with joy, song, humor, and deep wisdom. But his power wasn’t only in what he gave. It was that he received, over and over, through suffering and transcendence alike. He was known to sing and share wisdoms for hours, and also listen intently to men younger than him share their own thoughts. 

To me, as a young man, it seemed like being a mashpia was a role you took on. You gave. You taught. You led. So I began to walk that path: helping my grandfather hand out matzahs before Pesach in Springfield, Massachusetts… putting on tefillin with strangers on the streets of Manhattan… traveling to Kazakhstan and South America and everywhere in between to do good, connect, uplift.

But something wasn’t working.

I gave and gave, but struggled to receive. I went into debt. I wore out my body. I built a family and a community in San Francisco with love and sweat, but I rarely let myself be held. After my sister passed away during the pandemic, it broke me. Suddenly I wasn’t sure if I could be a mashpia at all.

This week’s parsha speaks of the parah adumah, the red heifer. The ritual is cryptic and beyond rational logic. Someone who touches death, literally, is in the same room as a corpse, is considered impure. But there is a way back to life: a red cow, burned to ashes, mixed with spring water, and sprinkled by a Kohen.

The paradox: the person who was impure becomes pure. But the Kohen who performs the ritual becomes temporarily impure.

That struck something in me.

The Kohen is a mashpia. He gives purity. But in the act of giving, he absorbs some of the impurity. He too must cleanse. He too must enter the mikvah, along with his clothing.

Clothing in Chassidus represents our thoughts, speech, and action, the way we show up to the world. Our deepest essence may be pure, but our clothing gets stained.

This idea made me reevaluate my whole life path.

Yes, I had been a mashpia. But I had forgotten that the mashpia must also be a mekabal.

Through my work in plant medicine and spiritual counseling, I began to realize: I can only give authentically if I’m also receiving. When I hold space for someone’s pain, I carry a bit of that pain too. When I listen to trauma, it doesn’t just bounce off me. It enters.

The work isn’t to avoid that. The work is to ritualize my return. I must cleanse, through prayer, mikvah, Shabbos, Torah, family, and embodied practice, so that my giving comes from wholeness. Otherwise, I’m just burning out.

There’s a story of my namesake’s father, my great great grandfather Reb Yehuda Lieb, a Mashpia himself, who was a Chassid of the fourth Rebbe (Reb Shmuel). After long hours of private audiences, he would be drenched in sweat. A young man once asked him why. He said:

“When someone sits with me, I take off my clothing and put on theirs. I live in their story, their pain. But then I have to take off their clothing and return to my own. And that’s not easy. That’s what gets me sweaty” :)

That’s what it means to really be present: to enter someone’s story and to return to your own, over and over again. That is the cleansing of the clothing. That is the mikvah of the mashpia.

This was the most important shift in my rabbinic life: giving doesn’t mean always pouring out. It means entering into the full cycle of giving and receiving, so that both people are lifted.

It doesn’t erase the pain. But it turns the pain into light.

In this framework, healing journeys, whether with Torah, music, medicine, or silence, aren’t about fixing others. They’re about standing with them. Being in it with them. Singing with them. Praying with them. And in that space, helping each other climb higher.

When someone you guide is lifted, you are lifted too. When the mekabal receives light, the mashpia is renewed.

Whether you’re the giver or the receiver in this season of your life, or both at once, may you remember that even the mashpia must return to the mikvah. Even your thoughts, speech, and actions need tending. Not because they are impure, but because they are precious.

And when you return to your own clothing, your own soul-garments, may you find them cleaner, softer, and more alive.

With love,

Rabbi Peretz