Kfar Chabad Education Conference 5769

00:01 Friends. The hours outside the classroom, and the hours at home too—all the new technology today and all these things require constant supervision, every single moment. The early works of mussar also speak of sages who worried about their children all the time, every moment. What are they doing? What are they thinking about now? What are they looking at? What are they seeing? Sometimes these concerns keep a person up at night. How can you lie down to sleep when your child is at home? How do I know who he is associating with right now? What is he listening to? What is he talking about? If each of us does not take ourselves in hand and understand that our child’s spiritual health—our son’s or daughter’s—is no less important than physical health, and perhaps more so... When a child becomes ill, G-d forbid, his mother does not leave him for a moment. His father does not leave him for a moment. He worries: What is his temperature? Has it gone up? Has it gone down? What about his pain? If, G-d forbid, he is hospitalized, they will not leave him for even a moment. We must understand once and for all that there are spiritual illnesses. If Mexican flu is spreading today, may it not affect us or any of the Jewish people, everyone is concerned for themselves and worries, G-d forbid, that it might reach us too, including our older and younger children. We must know that this flu, this spiritual flu, is far worse, far more harmful, and claims many victims here and there. So our concern must begin with recognizing that, G-d forbid, we face danger. Today, no one is guaranteed anything. [unclear] the Rebbe’s young men, through the merit of their ancestors. But we must also know that we have to act. G-d forbid, we cannot rely on that entirely. And so every parent, every father and mother, every grandfather and grandmother, must—

02:57 We must think and recognize where we stand now. A spiritual epidemic is raging, and it could, G-d forbid, claim victims or bring terrible tragedies upon any household, even the most chassidic home. Most importantly, there is advice for this; there are remedies. The first thing is to care, to be concerned, to ask Hakadosh Boruch Hu, to ask the Rebbe for a blessing, and to pray that our children follow the straight path, the good path, the path of Chassidus. Beyond that, if something is happening, G-d forbid, we must take an interest and seek help. Consult teachers. There are educators, rabbis, pedagogues, and specialists in all sorts of areas. But this must wake us up. We see what is happening in the streets of Kfar Chabad right now, G-d forbid. There is no point in hiding it, and no reason to despair, but there is no point in hiding it. Children and young men can end up in a terrible situation. Each of us must take this personally. We are not talking about a stranger; we are talking about my brother, my son, someone in my own home. And not only about those children whom the illness has already touched, G-d forbid—and I hope to Hashem that they will return to the right path and recover immediately. It could spread further, G-d forbid. There is no point in sweeping it under the rug or throwing dust in people’s eyes. Children are children. They want to know and they want to learn, but at the same time they are open to all sorts of things that could, G-d forbid, cause them harm. Alongside this, we must also strengthen our children’s diligence and perseverance in learning Torah, in [unclear], and in Chassidus. [unclear] The child does not want to? You have to persuade him. Hire him a teacher; find him a friend to learn with. There are many possibilities. “I created the yetzer hara, and I created the Torah as its remedy.” Hakadosh Boruch Hu did not create the yetzer

05:38 hara on its own, without any remedy. He created the remedy for it. But what? We must recognize that we may, G-d forbid, be facing danger, and we must begin to address the problem before it grows, so we can avoid it. I said this a few weeks ago, and I will say it again, using the precise wording of the Alter Rebbe in Hilchos Talmud Torah. There is a halachah at the end of Tractate Yevamos that a woman may not teach young pupils. A woman may not teach boys who are learning Mikra, Chumash. Why? Excuse me. A woman may not teach young pupils, and neither may an unmarried man. Why? Because he is unmarried. He may not teach young children because their mothers come to the school to bring them there, and his being unmarried could lead to improper attraction. When we take this halachah from the Gemara and look at the Alter Rebbe’s words in Shulchan Aruch, in Hilchos Talmud Torah—when we take this halachah and begin to consider what it rests on—we see the following: Suppose there is one teacher who teaches well and is successful. There is no one like him, but he has one problem: he is unmarried. There is another teacher who is not as good, not as successful, perhaps not successful at all. His one advantage is that he is married. He has a wife. Halachah obligates us to choose the less capable teacher and not entrust the children to the unmarried one. Why? Because the children’s mothers bring them to school. What is this business of the mothers bringing the children to school? It is not a Torah-law obligation, nor a rabbinic-law obligation. It is only a custom that the mothers bring the children to school. So the question arises: Let the mothers stay at home. Let the fathers bring the children to school.

08:13 Then the children could learn with the better teacher. Yet in that same halachah, the Alter Rebbe writes that women bringing their children to school is a custom and a merit for them. “Through what do women earn merit? Through bringing their children to the synagogue to learn.” That is, through bringing the children to school. Fine, it is a great merit, but for its sake should we give up the child’s better education, the rabbinic mitzvah of teaching one’s son so that he succeeds and grows in Torah? We give that up. Why? Because the Gemara says so, and therefore the mothers continue to bring the children to school. We do not find another halachah like it, where a custom causes us to forgo a Torah mitzvah. But when we consider the root of this matter and see its deeper meaning, we can apply it to ourselves. The Torah says that the mother brings her child to school. Why does she bring him? She is busy, occupied at home; she has children there. She gets up in the morning, makes his sandwich, packs it for him with joy, walks him there, gives him a sweet kiss, and sees him off. Go, my son, go learn Torah. She plants in him a love for Torah and a connection to it. The sages did not want to give up that connection a mother gives her child. There is no good teacher? All right, next year he will learn with a better one. He will make up what he missed. But the sages did not want to give up that giving, that connection and that love of Torah, because it is the child’s foundation. It is the foundation of his education. It builds him. It is not only the learning—the understanding, the grasp, the sharpness, the memory—but the connection, the love for it. The connection to Chassidus, the connection to the teachings, to the words of the living G-d. That is what the mother gives the child the moment she brings him to the

10:24 To school, she passes on her love for it, her desire for it. And the mother—the child loves to do what his mother loves. That is what the Sages said, and we will not give it up. So, my teachers and friends, I am glad we have gathered this evening, and I hope this evening will lead to good results. We have work to do. Our role and our shlichus are to invest in children and young people, especially after the Rebbe turned the usual order around and said that the younger a child is, the holier he is. His soul is purer. Educators used to argue: Why burden a child with these things while he is still young? Wait until he is older. The Rebbe said that even while he is in his cradle, he should see pictures of tzaddikim and words of the living G-d, and should not see pictures of non-kosher animals, and so on. Who is a greater educator than the Rebbe? He understood that a child must be connected to Torah from the cradle, connected to spirituality, connected to the words of the living G-d. It is hard for me to speak, but I must. That is my role, my shlichus. Perhaps some people will not like hearing this, but imagine a mother bringing her child to school with half her hair uncovered, without stockings. Is that the love for Torah she is instilling in her child? Is that why the Sages made a concession and said the mother should bring the child to school and plant in him a connection to Torah? G-d forbid, she is only separating the child from Torah. What are we doing here? We are talking about taking a child and bringing him into school, into a place of learning. We take a small child and bring him in; we sanctify him. “The first of your dough you shall give as an offering to Hashem,” and our Sages interpreted “the first of your dough” to mean: from the very beginning, when the child is in his cradle, give an offering to Hashem, for he is holy. He has holiness within him; he has a Jewish soul.

12:45 Tanya—the entire book of Tanya speaks about the holiness of the soul, the holiness of thought, of speech and of action, spiritual holiness. That is the holiness of Chassidus. So how can we instill holiness in him when he himself sees things that have no holiness at all? They are the opposite of holiness, and he does not want to come close to it; it can be much worse than that. So first and foremost, we must set a personal example for our children. It cannot be that a father sits in the living room reading a newspaper and tells his child, “Study your lessons. Review the Mishnayos and the chapter of Tanya you need to prepare for tomorrow’s test.” The father looks at the newspaper while the child studies. What is he doing? Why should the child read? What is the child supposed to understand? If a child sees his father, his parents, looking at things on the internet or at other things that can defile a person in three clicks—forget it. How will a Chassidic child grow up? Only by a miracle. Of course there are children who do, but we may not rely on miracles. I am certain of that. A person may not put himself in danger. We are now in a situation of real spiritual danger. On the one hand, boruch Hashem, there is a strengthening, and [unclear]. There are [unclear] who will return, build lives, and so on, those who are waiting. But the spiritual danger is, I would say, no less than it was in Russia, and perhaps even greater. There is an enemy, and there is an attacker lying in wait. An enemy is visible. Russia was the visible enemy, but here it is the hidden attacker, the concealed foe. It is like cancer, which can take hold of a person without his even feeling it, until, G-d forbid, he becomes aware when there is no longer any way to put things right, or only through great efforts to somehow stop it. I think an evening like this, and another evening like it, and more evenings like these—and I hope that those

15:13 who organize these evenings will not be surprised, shaken or disappointed if a larger crowd comes or a smaller crowd comes. Do not let up. Know that this is the single most important thing for us: the education of our children, a holy education, an individual education, a pure education. A child who hears stories of tzaddikim and has pure faith in tzaddikim—then, if Hashem wills it, we will merit good generations, and we will go out to greet the Rebbe and say, “Here are the children we raised.” I know it is hard, very hard. I too, boruch Hashem, have children and grandchildren. I know it is hard because a person has to give up his desires, his yetzer hara, his freedom. It is unpleasant, and it is hard to abstain. But think of a woman who has not been blessed with children, may we never know such a thing. She is willing to undergo operations, all sorts of procedures—whatever it takes, even if they have to operate on her body—all so that she can bring a child into the world. For that child, that physical child, she is willing to sacrifice herself. Now imagine: we have already brought children into the world. Are we not obligated to sacrifice ourselves for them? To devote ourselves completely for their sake? I ask everyone here, especially the women of Kfar Chabad, and I am glad they came. They asked me whether people would be upstairs or downstairs. I said I wanted people here, inside my shul, to feel that they are partners in this evening—not that they came to listen to or watch some kind of show, some performance. We simply came to talk, to speak to one another: a general gathering of Chabad fathers and mothers, those who are here and those who could not come. We must begin to have an influence—on ourselves, on those around us, on our neighbors.

17:42 There is no need to be surprised, no need to be afraid. When you act on a shlichus of the Torah, only good will come of it. And someone says, “Why are you speaking to me like that? Don’t tell me what to do. My grandfather and my father and this rabbi and that one in my family sacrificed themselves in Russia.” But you—how can you walk around in a shirt like that, in Chabad, with half your hair uncovered? I asked her, “Are you observing Jewish standards of modesty?” This is Kfar Chabad. These are the Rebbe’s four cubits. This is the holiness of Kfar Chabad. We came here; people sacrificed themselves. The Rebbe devoted himself to establishing Kfar Chabad so that it would be four cubits of holiness, four cubits of purity. He did not want to establish a Savyon here, a place where everyone would have apartments and enormous buildings. But what happens? Spiritually, sometimes people come to the grocery store dressed in a way [unclear]. What am I supposed to do? I could stand in the grocery store all day and look—but am I allowed to look? I hate seeing it. Help me, help me. If you [unclear], bring light to [unclear]. It is possible to [unclear] peacefully. Of course, not in the way that is customary in other circles, and not with disrespectful language, but from the heart, in Chassidic language. Ahavas Yisroel is discussed in chapter 32 of Tanya, and these things will have an effect. And if sometimes that does not help, then you have the Rebbe’s chapters. And if that does not help either, then we will also [unclear] together. If I, insignificant as I am, can help with this, I am ready to help, because I know this is my shlichus and my duty. I will have to answer for it if, G-d forbid, the Rebbe’s honor is not upheld in Kfar Chabad. There is much

19:53 more to say about these things, much to elaborate on. But, my friends, I say it again, speaking especially to the women of Kfar Chabad: if we did not merit to go out on shlichus, we have a shlichus in Kfar Chabad. Our shlichus is to preserve the holiness and purity of Kfar Chabad, and to take that responsibility seriously. People come to me and say, “What? Should we bang on the table?” I say, “What are you telling me? I just came here to bang on the table.” At the same time, our ways are not the ways of [unclear], the ways of [unclear]. Not like that in public, not with shouting and laughter. We have the path the Rebbe taught us: with pleasantness and peace, but with appropriate firmness. Because this is not about a neighbor; it is about me. It is not about a woman next door; it is about me. When a person thinks he himself is in danger, he knows very well how to protect himself. I hope we leave this evening with good resolutions and do not wait for those who are here. We will meet again and again and again and again. And even when we cry out, it helps. It helps in Heaven, [unclear]. We need the Rebbe’s blessings, and it also helps in material matters. May Hashem help us succeed greatly, and may we go from strength to strength toward the coming of Moshiach Tzidkeinu. Amen.