Farbrengen of 22 Shvat 5765, Kfar Chabad

03:14 Speaker 1 As an introduction to our talk: this happened on the night of Shemini Atzeres 5752, before a sicha whose content we’ll mention shortly. The Rebbe said that everyone should say l’chaim and turn their cups upside down, with their tops facing down. Later, when the Rebbetzin heard that the Rebbe had said to turn the cups upside down, she did it too. She turned hers over, with the top facing down. What did the Rebbe speak about in that sicha? It really was the night of Shemini Atzeres 5752. We weren’t used to language like that. As in the picture, there’s no vav. The Rebbe spoke there about Moshiach: the numerical value of shliach becomes that of Moshiach with the addition of the ten powers of the soul. The Rebbe also spoke about the nossi of the generation being the Moshiach of the generation. I’m not interested in simple interpretations. Not [unclear], but rather, Moshiach is the nossi of the generation; he is the Moshiach of the generation. That was the content of the sicha that followed the Rebbe’s instruction that everyone say l’chaim and turn their cups upside down. But when we sat afterward and thought about it, we asked: What did the Rebbe want here? Ordinarily, the head is supposed to be above and the feet below. That is how Hakadosh Boruch Hu created the world: the intellect is above and the feet are below. But sometimes it has to be the other way around. The head specifically has to be below and the feet above; the intellect has to be below. And especially to receive the words of that sicha, the preparation was to have the head below. The Rebbetzin took that upon herself too: let’s put the head below and the cup on the table above. That is an important point in itself, this matter of respecting another person with confidence.

05:36 Speaker 1 And provided that... Sometimes we’re called upon to put our heads down. Now we’ll ask our esteemed Rabbi, one of the chassidim, Reb Chaim—I’m not used to this. I don’t know how things work here, but usually you sit at a chassidic farbrengen with chassidim. The Rabbi knows how he throws things out there. Now, you’re not like Rabbi Butman. Rabbi Butman, you throw out a line and that’s it, like a lecturer. You’re more like a chassidic farbrengen. You’ll be here until daybreak. Do it with a niggun, let’s say. Of course, I’m not—I’m not talking about Chaim; that’s how it’s gone already. You sit here with us for a few hours, until you feel you’ve reached where you wanted to go.

06:29 Speaker 2 That would take a few weeks.

06:34 Speaker 1 Invite us again. We’ll come back and talk at leisure. Boruch Hashem. We need some refreshments: hot drinks, cold drinks.

06:46 Speaker 2 Drinks. First of all, l’chaim.

06:49 Speaker 1 L’chaim!

06:50 Speaker 2 L’chaim.

06:51 Speaker 1 L’chaim. Looks like there’s some whistling here. Good. That’s it. L’chaim.

07:00 Speaker 2 I said that just now so it wouldn’t be only in the singular—singular and plural. And since I said it in the singular, that’s even permissible by law. According to halachah, you’re allowed to say it. I told Rabbi Butman that it doesn’t matter; that’s not the point. Soon we’ll start calling him “Rabbi,” even though it’s a false title.

07:21 Speaker 1 In a moment you’ll take the “Rabbi” away from me.

07:24 Speaker 2 But I was just saying: look, here’s a man standing up. First of all, he’s standing and talking. When a person stands and talks and has a microphone, he stops being a person altogether. He becomes an orator, one of those speakers. It’s a kind of creature. Now, Rabbi Butman speaks in all sorts of places, and when he speaks in all sorts of places, he’s a fine-looking Jew. You see a fine-looking Jew with a beard and so on. So he starts speaking like a fine-looking Jew. Now, he wanted to talk about what’s in the foot, but he didn’t spell it out. He only gave a distant hint. And that hint really didn’t help. So what came out was what came out. He gave a speech—not a very successful speech. He gave a speech in honor of the hint. Now, I’m not... First of all, I don’t like sitting up there with all sorts of rabbis. So I can’t give speeches like that, better or worse. I want to start with this. First of all, I want to talk about it. The only reason I’m standing is that I have no choice. I shouldn’t be standing, but for now...

08:37 Speaker 3 L’chaim. It amazes me.

08:45 Speaker 2 Now, first of all, I want to say something about this, because this is a farbrengen. A farbrengen isn’t what people call one. It isn’t history, or telling memories, or any of those things. That’s not what it’s about. A farbrengen has to be something significant. If there’s a farbrengen, fine; if not, there’s a speech. The purpose of a speech is for someone to talk. Then some journalist writes it up—usually things the speaker didn’t say or didn’t understand—and that’s what comes out. That’s a speech. Now, what comes out of a farbrengen? A farbrengen means that everyone there leaves with something, whether something big or something small. If someone leaves with nothing, it’s a sign that something went wrong somewhere, that there was a flaw in it. Because the point of a farbrengen isn’t—look, I sit in all sorts of places and this is how it goes. When someone leads a farbrengen, people want to hear what blessing he’ll give, what wise thing he’ll say. What does that have to do with it? It’s not about blessings or wisdom. The main thing is to speak in a way that doesn’t just enter the head. It has to reach at least the feet, so that a person starts moving from there. That was the purpose of a farbrengen. Now, if that didn’t happen, it wasn’t a farbrengen, or the farbrengen hadn’t started, or it ended too early. That’s the point. First of all, I want to explain this matter of l’chaim. Generally, Jews don’t drink in order to get drunk. How did they put it? A drunk is a non-Jew. A non-Jew gets drunk; a Jew doesn’t get drunk. A Jew can tolerate a little more drink, just for the aroma, yes, but no more than that.

10:33 Speaker 4 So he didn’t know.

10:34 Speaker 2 Yes. Why? Because it could be—I don’t know—but he still doesn’t get drunk, G-d forbid. Yes, even on Purim: if someone gets drunk on Purim, it has to be in a way that nothing improper comes of it. In other words, it has to be on a certain level. So why do we drink l’chaim? I want to explain. There are two things about l’chaim. One thing about l’chaim—you see, I’m not talking about memories now. The first thing about l’chaim is this: there are fluids in the body. Fluids in the body serve as a lubricant, as grease. Where do you put it? In the ears. Why? Because, after all, the ears are blocked, and people talk all the time. The whole world is full of speeches and sermons and rabbis and more rabbis and more rabbis, until it doesn’t—it just goes out. It doesn’t even come out through the nose; it never goes in at all. So that’s why you need it: the ears are blocked. Apparently there are a few yeshivah students here; we know how it is. There’s a mashpia and a rosh yeshivah and maybe even a mashgiach, and everything they say is as though it never happened, as though they’d said nothing at all. They say the same thing. There’s a dog barking, honking, chirping; there’s a dog croaking. So there’s a mashgiach talking. The rosh yeshivah talks, and it makes no difference at all. More to the point, it isn’t that they forget it; the question is whether it goes in at all. That’s why we drink l’chaim: simply to clean out the ears. The first purpose of l’chaim is simple: it’s an ear-cleaning agent. If anyone thinks it goes somewhere else, the grease’s job is to clean the ears so that something can get in and take hold inside. That’s one reason we drink l’chaim. Now, how much should one drink? Some people are so blocked up, with fifty years’ worth of rust, that they need to drink more for something to stir. There are people who—

12:25 Speaker 2 She says, look at a young man studying in a Chabad yeshiva. Among other things, he already has so many words of Torah inside him. There are animals, seals, that have a mechanism inside their ears that closes them off when they enter the water. The moment a seal goes into the water, its ears close from the inside. A yeshiva student, or any Jew who comes to a farbrengen, has plugs like that in his ears. The moment someone starts speaking, his ears close, and now the speaker can talk as much as he likes. He can talk, he can sing—it’s all vanity of vanities. Nothing happens. That’s one reason for saying l’chaim: simply to clear out the ear canal so that something can seep in. Well, there’s another aspect to this l’chaim, a more serious one. Every person has different levels. I would compare a person to a pipe. In this pipe, broadly speaking, there’s the level where I ordinarily find myself. I’m going about my everyday life, doing what I consider important. This is called the vital soul, the natural soul, the intellectual soul. It’s what a person lives with all the time. It’s what he uses to shop, to go to work, and sometimes to sit and study. That’s the intellectual soul. Now, above that, there’s a higher level, the G-dly soul. It’s above it. It’s the same pipe, but there’s some kind of blockage between them. And below it, there are all sorts of things—there’s a sewage pipe, too. There are all kinds of levels there. Now, in a person, the pipes generally aren’t completely blocked. Every so often something drips down from above, and sometimes something seeps up from below. That’s what a person has in his life. He tries to live. Even a person, if

14:23 Speaker 2 a person is sitting and working, it can happen that in the middle of his work, in the middle of his life, an idea about teshuvah suddenly occurs to him. Where did it come from? It dripped down from above. And sometimes a person is going along, just an ordinary decent person, and suddenly some lowly thought seeps into him. Where did that come from? From below. Now, between these pipes there are plugs. There are plugs. That matters, whether we’re talking about good or about bad. A person has to decide which plug he’s going to work on. Say there’s a party, just a party in Tel Aviv, for example. I mean, there are many decent Jews and good Jews in Tel Aviv, but Tel Aviv in general is a city of Philistines. That’s how I see it. In that respect, by the way, it is too. I keep suggesting: Why get into all kinds of politics about giving—giving the Arabs Shechem or Chevron? Better to give them a city of gentiles, a city of Philistines: Tel Aviv. They’ll gobble up Tel Aviv; it’s a city that suits them. They’ll be happy in Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv will be happy with them, and Jews can live in Chevron. Tel Aviv is a city of Philistines, and historically it was that way too. It’s a city of Philistines. Well.

00:00 Speaker 1 There’s a difference in both that saying and its translation. Before we start talking, we have to say that this is something we need to talk about. I saw it myself. Once, when the Frierdiker Rebbe came into a farbrengen, an older Jew was standing by the door and said to him, “I knew your father.” The Rebbe didn’t like that expression—“I knew your father?” He looked at the man and said, “Knew my father? You saw my father.” So there’s a difference in both the saying and its translation: between someone who tells the story and someone who felt it firsthand. As Rabbi Rubin[unclear] said, I saw the Rebbetzin many times. And when I say that, I’m not just repeating what someone else said—what the rabbi said about “you saw her, you knew her, you saw her.” I’m saying it about myself. When I try to picture my meetings with the Rebbetzin, to think about seeing her and about all the things I heard from her, I want to put something together, to feel it. Can I build a sense that I knew her? Can I come away with something more tangible? And my answer to myself is that everything I saw, and everything I thought I was seeing—I now realize that I simply wasn’t looking closely enough. Or perhaps I was looking closely, but I didn’t see what I needed to see. It’s well known that history isn’t written immediately after events take place; it’s written years later. You might think someone could write the history as it happens, but that’s not how it works. Why? Because no one person can take in the whole picture from every angle. You catch one part here, another part there. Years pass, and each person adds something. It’s like

03:18 Speaker 1 a stone in a mosaic, or a piece of a puzzle: everyone adds a piece, and then suddenly a new picture appears. Of course, the picture isn’t really new, but it seems new because we hadn’t seen it before. Each person didn’t exactly add something; they revealed something of what they had seen. Personally, the first time I had the privilege of seeing the Rebbetzin herself was when we arrived in America. It was 5714—that’s 1954—and we called on the phone. I think my mother spoke with her. I don’t remember exactly how the arrangements were made. We came to the house at 346 New York Avenue, on the third floor. We rang the bell, and a short woman opened the door. Naturally, my mother went in first, then my sister, then me—in order of age. We said hello. Well, neither my mother nor we realized that this was the Rebbetzin, that this was Chaya Mushka. We thought a woman who worked for her had opened the door. It never occurred to us that she would come to the door and open it herself. Although the apartment was small, there’s still something called, in English, noblesse oblige. Royalty comes with certain expectations. And when we entered the room, another Rebbetzin, Holstein[unclear], I think, was sitting there. That made us even more certain that the woman sitting there was the Rebbetzin, and the one who had opened the door worked for her. Of course, that impression lasted only about a minute, but that was who she was. You couldn’t tell. You couldn’t see it. The simplicity. There’s also something that has already been published: she told one of the household attendants, one of the young men who helped in the house, “We have in the family—well, we have a silver bowl

06:02 Speaker 1 that Holstein[unclear] gave us.” Holstein[unclear]—I don’t know whether it was Shlomo Holstein[unclear], but someone from the family, in any case. He gave us a bowl that had belonged to the Tzemach Tzedek. “But I,” she said, “am a simple woman. How could I use that bowl? Put it under the candles on Erev Shabbos? That’s out of the question. So I don’t use it. But I look at the bowl, and it connects me with the family.” It seems like a brief remark, made to a young man helping in the house. And she tells him, “I’m a simple woman”—too simple to use the Tzemach Tzedek’s bowl. Let’s not forget that the Tzemach Tzedek was her great-grandfather through three lines of descent. Her father, the Frierdiker Rebbe, was descended from the Tzemach Tzedek through both his father and his mother. The Frierdiker Rebbe’s mother, Rebbetzin Shterna Sarah, was also descended from the Tzemach Tzedek through another son. And yet what does she say? “I’m a simple woman.” On the other hand, “It connects me with the family.” It’s as though two opposites come together here: utter simplicity and the loftiest standing. And she said this to a young man in the house. I don’t know—perhaps this is something that, as the Alter Rebbe says in the introduction to Tanya, everyone who reads or hears something grasps it according to their own feelings and understanding. But I do think that this remark reflects both her simplicity and her exalted stature. Another time, one of the young men in the house referred to a rabbi who was a friend of his by his first name. Let’s say his name was Mendel. She told him,

08:37 Speaker 1 “In this house, I’m the only one who uses that name when speaking to my husband.” I also remember that I came to give a report around that time. I went in to see Rebbetzin Chana, and she invited me to her Pesach Seder. I was there for some time. That’s too long a story, but never mind. She couldn’t hear—Rebbetzin Chana couldn’t hear at all. There were pads of paper in the house; if someone wanted to tell her something, they would write it on a pad and show it to her. But when she asked a question and someone answered, the context helped her understand what that person’s answer was. In any case, I told her that my name was Sholom Ber. She said to me, “In my family, Sholom Ber was my father-in-law’s name, and we don’t call anyone by that name. I’ll call you Sholom.” And that was true of others named Sholom Ber who came to the house, including someone I remember from before me, Sholom Ber Oprovitch[unclear]. In the house, his name was Sholom. They didn’t use that name there. There’s something so vivid about that, isn’t there? A home that is a different kind of home, not a home like any other. But again, those are feelings. There’s a letter from the Frierdiker Rebbe. Rabbi Lipkin—I don’t know, perhaps there are people here who knew or remember him. Do you remember Berel Lipkin? She was standing there, and Berel Lipkin had... He traveled to the United States. He was present when the Rebbe Rashab passed away, and he wrote a book with many details about what happened at the time of the Rebbe Rashab’s passing. Afterward, he traveled to the United States around that time.

11:13 Speaker 1 Apparently, it was after the histalkus. When the Frierdiker Rebbe parted from him, he wrote him a very short letter. He went into the room, wrote the letter and gave it to him. He writes about it. The letter begins: “Emotion will hold back and slow the words.” That is what he wrote to him. He goes on to write that it was hard for him to speak, hard for him to discuss everything because of his feelings after his father’s histalkus, and so on. So there are matters of feeling. Chassidim, in general, know what feeling is. They know how to relate to it. But still, finding words for a feeling is difficult. They tell a story about Napoleon. In one of his battles, Napoleon was nearly killed. He went into battle and almost died. When he survived and returned to his quarters, one of his generals said to him, “Your Majesty, I think you had a narrow escape. I’d like to hear how you felt when you were close to death, when death was before your eyes. How did you feel?” The emperor said to him, “Who are you?” To him, a soldier—even a general—was of no consequence. So he told the generals, “Execute him!” They took him outside. “You ask me how I felt? I’m the emperor. How did I feel when my life was in danger?” They took him out to be executed and put the noose around his neck. The emperor said, “Stop. Bring him back.” They brought him back, and he said, “That’s how I felt.” Now he knew how he had felt. You can’t simply find words for how you felt. But we can still speak about it. We know that “those days are remembered and reenacted.” When they are remembered, they are reenacted. How that happens is different for each person, but they are remembered and reenacted. So we remember the days that were. Each person remembers.

13:47 Speaker 1 Yes, there are things that are hard to talk about. When, G-d forbid, we were sitting shiva for my mother, our home was across from 770. We didn’t know; no one told us. The Rebbetzin came in. There were several other women in the room at the time. There was one woman I didn’t recognize. She sat down on a chair. We didn’t speak; it was difficult, and she didn’t speak either. She sat there for about ten minutes. I remember exactly how long. As I said, there were a few other women there who spoke now and then. She sat toward the back. When she left, we realized she was gone. No one had recognized her; no one had noticed her. There is something in print about my uncle, Zalman Gurary. Zalman Gurary was very close to the household. He wasn’t just close; he was, as they say, the one who welcomed guests into the home. When the Rebbetzin was dealing with her heart condition and all the equipment, he brought in all the equipment. He could have brought the angel Gavriel or the angel Michoel—whichever angel was wanted—down here in physical form. And he spoke with her every day. I remember that even when he was here in Eretz Yisroel—he came a few times over the years—he called her every day. Two days before she passed away, she wasn’t feeling well, and he didn’t know. Afterward, when he found out, he asked her, “Rebbetzin, why didn’t you call me? Why didn’t you tell me you weren’t feeling well?” She told him, “I know you have a class at five in the morning. You teach a class in shul, and I thought that if I told you I wasn’t feeling well, it would”

16:20 Speaker 1 interfere with your class. That’s why I didn’t call.” There’s another story. Someone called, and one of the young men in the house picked up the receiver. He was speaking English to the caller, and afterward he told her it was Dr. Weiss calling from Chicago; he used to call every day. So she ran to the phone and spoke to Dr. Weiss. Afterward she told the young man, “Listen, I ran to the phone. Why? Because Dr. Weiss was calling from out of town, and the call costs him money. I didn’t want it to cost him any more, so I ran to the phone.” She told him, “Really, I could have known you were speaking to him. With the people in the house you speak Yiddish, and with him you were speaking English. But I learned from my father that you can be somewhere and not hear.” You can hear, or you can choose not to hear. For us mortals, these things are difficult. But I once thought about what chassidim say: What is a chassidishe farbrengen? One explanation of the essence of a chassidishe farbrengen is that one person is silent and everyone else listens. Listening to silence is much deeper, much more encompassing, than listening to speech. She knew how to listen even to silence, and she knew how not to listen even to speech. When we gather together and these days are remembered and reenacted, our submission and our task—as Rabbi Butman said earlier—are, essentially, to connect with the Rebbe. And the Rebbe said that this day is the day of our marriage, the day that connected me with you. That means the connection between us and the Rebbe is through the Rebbetzin. I don’t know; this is something I feel.

19:12 Speaker 1 For me, the Rebbe is Atzilus—if not something higher still. Higher still. The Rebbe speaks about what is written in a pan, a pidyon nefesh—[unclear]. Perhaps the Rebbe wants to take it even higher. In any case, Atzilus is something we cannot understand or imagine at all. Let’s move on. There are four worlds. Atzilus is the highest world, or, as we understand it, the highest level. Malchus is the very lowest level within Atzilus. But Malchus conveys the entire flow of influence from Atzilus. It brings it down below, and that was the relationship between the Rebbe and the Rebbetzin. May it be Hashem’s will that, as we gather today, we remember that these days are remembered and reenacted. May we connect with the Rebbe and remain connected to him. May we truly observe everything the Rebbe asked of us, and may we very soon merit to see the Rebbe here together with us in the true and complete Geulah.

20:30 Speaker 2 Amen.

21:07 Speaker 1 The honorable Gavriel [?].

21:12 Speaker 2 Before we turn to our rabbi: On Lag BaOmer 5742, before a sicha whose content we’ll mention shortly, the Rebbe said that everyone should say l’chaim, and do it with their heads down—turn their cups upside down. That was on Lag BaOmer 5742. When the Rebbetzin heard about it, when they told her afterward that the Rebbe had said to turn the cups upside down, there was a cup on the table and she did it too. She turned it upside down. What did the Rebbe discuss in that sicha? It was in 5742, and at the time these were [unclear]. The Rebbe spoke there about Moshiach. A shliach for the Geulah of Moshiach is ultimately [unclear]. What is a Rebbe? He also spoke about the nasi of the generation, the Moshiach of the generation. [unclear] Moshiach is the nasi of the generation; he is the Moshiach of the generation. That was the subject of the sicha, after the Rebbe had said that everyone should say l’chaim with their heads down. But when we sat afterward and thought about it, what did the Rebbe want here? Ordinarily, the head should be above and the foot below. That is how Hakadosh Boruch Hu created the world: the intellect is above and the foot below. But sometimes it is the reverse. Precisely the head must be below and the foot above. The intellect must be below. To receive the words of that particular sicha, the preparation had to be putting the head below. The Rebbe also showed what that means in practice: putting the head below and the sole of the foot above. That is an important point in its own right, a point about [unclear]. Sometimes we are required to put our heads

23:38 Speaker 2 down. Now we’d like to see how our guest, a chassidishe chossid... I’m not used to this, and I don’t know how things work here. But at a chassidishe farbrengen, people always sit together. The chossid is Rabbi Aziz Zaruk [?]. Now, you’re not like Rabbi Butman. Rabbi Butman, you’re still [unclear]. You’re like a chassidishe farbrengen: you’re here until daybreak. Do it with a niggun, a niggun. There is, for example, a Torah scholar who has sat here with us for several hours. We have the class that brought us to where you want to get.

24:27 Speaker 3 That takes a few weeks.

24:30 Speaker 2 All right, start. We’ll invite you again. I’ll speak again anyway. [unclear] spilled on my face. A drink. A drink.

24:45 Speaker 3 First, some water.

24:46 Speaker 2 Water.

24:49 Speaker 3 Water.

24:50 Speaker 2 Water looks like a shot. Good. That’s it. Enough.

24:59 Speaker 3 I said that just now so it wouldn’t be addressed to one person alone. I meant it for many people, and even though I said it in the singular, that’s permissible even according to halachah. What does this have to do with Rabbi Butman? I don’t mind; that’s not the point. Just wait a little and I’ll start calling him over for another glass.

25:20 Speaker 2 You’ll drink water with me, Rabbi.

25:22 Speaker 3 But as I was saying, look: a person stands up. First of all, he stands up and speaks. When a person stands up to speak and has a microphone, he stops being a person altogether. He becomes a speaker—a speaker, a public speaker. It’s a whole new creation. Rabbi Butman speaks in all kinds of places, and when he speaks in all kinds of places, he’s a fine-looking Jew. You see a fine-looking Jew with a beard and so on. In short, he starts speaking like a fine-looking Jew. Now, he wanted to talk about what was on his mind, but he didn’t say where he was going with it. He only hinted at it. And that hint didn’t really help. So what came out, came out. He gave a speech—not such a successful speech, but he gave a speech in honor of the hint. Yes, now I don’t... First of all, I don’t sit within the walls of all those rabbis, so I can’t write speeches like that. Not better ones, not worse ones. I want to begin at the beginning. First of all, I want to talk. The fact that I’m standing is only because I have no choice at all. I shouldn’t have stood up, but for now, uh—

26:35 Speaker 4 L’chaim.

26:36 Speaker 3 L’chaim, l’chaim.

26:40 Speaker 4 You’re egging me on.

26:43 Speaker 3 So. First of all, I want to say something about this. What is a farbrengen? A farbrengen isn’t what people call it. It isn’t history, or telling stories about memories, or any of those things. That has nothing to do with a farbrengen. A farbrengen has to be something important—if there is a farbrengen. If there isn’t, there’s a speech. The purpose of a speech is for someone to talk. Afterward, some journalist writes it up—usually things the speaker never said or never understood—and that’s how it comes out. That’s a speech. Now, what does it produce? What is a farbrengen? A farbrengen means that everyone there leaves with something. Whether he leaves with something big or something small, if he leaves with nothing, that’s a sign that something wasn’t right, or that there was some flaw in it. Because the point of a farbrengen isn’t for me to sit in all sorts of places and come away like that. If someone holds a farbrengen and people are waiting to hear what clever insight he’ll come out with, what wise thing he’ll say—that has nothing to do with insights or cleverness. The main thing is to speak. You have to speak in a way that doesn’t just go into the head; it has to at least shake the feet, so that we begin to move. That’s the purpose of a farbrengen. Now, if that didn’t happen, then it wasn’t a farbrengen, or the farbrengen never started, or it ended too soon. But that’s not the point now. I’m trying first to explain this matter of l’chaim. Heaven forbid, we Jews don’t drink to get drunk. After all, they say a drunk is a non-Jew. A non-Jew gets drunk; a Jew doesn’t. At most, a Jew becomes a little merry. Just enough for the aroma. Yes,

28:30 Speaker 3 but no more than that.

28:31 Speaker 5 Until he doesn’t know the difference.

28:32 Speaker 3 Yes, go on. Yes, it can be until he doesn’t know the difference, but he still doesn’t get drunk, plain and simple. Yes, even on Purim. On Purim, when someone becomes drunk, he needs to be drunk—he needs to become merry. It just has to be on a certain level. Now, why do we drink l’chaim? I want to explain just two things. One thing about l’chaim. First, I’m not talking about memories now. The first thing about l’chaim is that it has a function in the body. In the body it works like lubricating oil, like grease. Where do you put it? In the ears. Of course, because ordinarily our ears are blocked. People talk all the time; the whole world is full of speeches and sermons and rabbis and more rabbis and more rabbis. It doesn’t even go out through the nose—it never gets in at all. So for that, the ears need to be unblocked. Yes, there are some yeshivah students here, so they know this. There’s a mashpia and a rosh yeshivah and perhaps even a mashgiach, and everything they say is as though it never happened, as though they hadn’t said a word. Yes, that’s how it goes. A dog barks, a bird chirps, another creature croaks. And there’s also a mashgiach talking. The rosh yeshivah talking makes no difference one way or the other. That’s the point. It’s not that you forget it; it never gets in at all. That’s why we drink l’chaim: simply to clean out the ears. The first purpose of l’chaim is simple: it’s an ear-cleaning agent. If someone thinks it goes somewhere else, its function is to clean, to clean the ears, so that something gets in and takes hold inside. That’s one reason we drink l’chaim. Now, how much do you need to drink? For some people the blockage is like this—a big pipe with fifty years of rust. So they need to drink more for

30:20 Speaker 3 something to wake up. For some people... I mean, look at a student studying in a Chabad yeshivah. It’s not as though there aren’t plenty of words of Torah there. Sea creatures, seals, have a mechanism inside their ears that blocks them when they enter the water. The moment they go into the water, their ears close up from the inside. A yeshivah student, an Ashkenazi Jew who comes to a farbrengen, has those kinds of plugs in his ears. The moment somebody starts speaking, his ears close up, and now the speaker can talk as much as he likes. He can talk, shout, sing, and all of it is vanity of vanities. Nothing will happen. So that’s the first thing. You have to clean out the ear canal so that something can seep inside. Good. There’s another point to l’chaim, a more serious one. Every person—I would compare a person to a kind of pipe. A pipe, and in that pipe, broadly speaking, there’s the level where I am. I’m there in my ordinary daily life, and this is what’s important. It’s called the vital soul, the natural soul, the intellectual soul. That’s what a person lives with all the time. With it he buys noodles, with it he goes to work, with it he sits and studies. That’s called the natural soul. Above that there’s the G-dly soul, something more spiritual. It’s above it. It’s the same pipe, but there’s a barrier in between, and there’s something below it too. There are all sorts of things—a sewer carrying waste. Down there is all the filth. Now, in a person, the pipes aren’t completely sealed. Something drips through: from time to time something drips down from above, and sometimes something seeps up from below. And that’s what a person has in his life.

32:20 Speaker 3 He tries to live. Even a person who’s sitting or working—one day, in the middle of work, in the middle of his life, an idea of holiness can suddenly occur to him. Where did it come from? It dripped down to him from above. And sometimes it’s the opposite. A person is going about his business, an ordinary decent person, and suddenly some improper thought seeps into him. Where did it come from? From above. Now, between these pipes there are stoppers, there are stoppers. That’s why, since there’s good and there’s also evil, a person has to decide which stopper he’s working on. Take a party, just an ordinary party in Tel Aviv, say. There are many decent Jews and good Jews in Tel Aviv. Of course, Tel Aviv is a city of Philistines altogether—and I say that as an aside, too. I keep suggesting: why get involved in all sorts of politics and give the Arabs Shechem or Hebron? Better to give them a city of non-Jews, a city of Philistines: Tel Aviv. They can have Tel Aviv; it’s a city suited to them. They’ll be happy with Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv will be happy with them, and let Jews live in Hebron. Tel Aviv was a city of Philistines; historically, too, that’s what it was. It was a city of Philistines. All right, but that’s not what we’re talking about. It’s a city of Philistines, and the Philistines sit there and bring in, bring in all sorts of... uh, how do they put it? The city that never ends. Things keep coming in all the time. Yes. What happens in Tel Aviv? What happens in Tel Aviv? People come to a party and drink cognac, wine, what they call beer. And what happens? Before a person goes into the party, he opens the lower stopper, and when he goes into the party, the more he drinks, the more it rises and surges

34:15 Speaker 3 From above—from below, and it all churns until, in the end, everything he has inside comes out: all the drama, all the things he had forgotten, maybe even hidden thoughts. Now it comes out, and you see it in his thoughts, words, and actions, and all sorts of things. So that’s one kind. Then there’s the matter of people coming to a farbrengen and drinking. When they drink at farbrengens, they do the same thing: they open the stopper at the top so that something from above can pour into the soul. That’s the difference. That’s why we drink—to know which stopper to open. I want to tell you: I’ve been to all kinds of parties, including parties like that, and I’ve been to many farbrengens, real farbrengens, and I’ve seen people there nowadays. After people drank too much, they began drinking less and less. There was a time when people drank more. But I’ve seen people drink at a farbrengen, and drink seriously. What do I mean by drink? Drink. They don’t drink to fall asleep; they drink until they’re rolling around. I’ve seen people after a farbrengen who’d drunk so much that you could easily roll them along with your feet. They didn’t know, feel, or hear a thing. In other words, people drank seriously—not just a formal drink, “Look, I’m saying l’chaim.” That’s hardly drinking.

35:45 Speaker 6 All the way, all the way.

35:49 Speaker 3 But that’s not the kind—I’m going on. I’m not finishing now.

35:52 Speaker 6 There’s something else to say.

35:54 Speaker 3 All right. In short, in short, I’ve been to all kinds of farbrengens. I’ve heard people talk—people who were a little drunk, people who were drunk, and people who were so drunk they could barely speak. Look, I’ve heard at a farbrengen—and it depends on the setting—Jews who, during the farbrengen and sometimes even outside it, said all sorts of things without holding back. There were a few Jews I already knew; you knew them too. There were Jews like that who didn’t need to drink much to pour out all sorts of words. But here’s what I want to say: I’ve heard all kinds of things from people who drank and people who didn’t. Never at a farbrengen—and this is interesting; I’ve been to many, including places where people really drank—have I heard a filthy thought. Look, it isn’t only old Jews sitting at a farbrengen, people who might barely have a yetzer hara left. You could say, “Poor fellows, they’re old already; they have no strength.” But there are young bochurim there too, and a young bochur sits and drinks, sits and drinks. What happens to him? He talks about fear of Hashem, about love of Hashem, about all sorts of things, and nothing improper. Now I go to other places, where there are also old Jews and certainly young ones, and there the filth pours out—in actions, speech, and thoughts, from every direction. How does that happen? I remember once, many years ago, there was a farbrengen on the night of [unclear] in the orchard—the orchard in Lod, for those who still remember it. There was a farbrengen, and all sorts of people were drinking. I remember one Jew who sat there drinking. He wasn’t drunk. Reb Shlomo Chaim was sitting at the head then, I think, and he said about him—he wasn’t someone who could hold his drink well—he said to him, “He feels, he feels; he feels like dancing, he feels like talking, he feels…”

38:08 Speaker 3 …like dancing. But that Jew stood there and cried. What was he crying about? He cried bitter, visible tears. What was he crying about? [unclear]. He was already quite drunk; he didn’t know what was happening to him. But what had gripped him at that moment? I don’t know. He was a young man, not an old man who had already been through so much in life—a young man. So what was he talking about? These things. Where did that come from? I said before that when a person says l’chaim, and certainly while drinking, he has to have in mind which stopper he’s opening. If he opens the stopper at the top, there will be a farbrengen, and only good things will come out of it. But if he opens the stopper from below, there’s dirt and filth and everything that goes with them. So first of all, as I said, one should drink l’chaim to open the right places: to open one’s ears to hear, to open one’s heart so things flow in the right direction. And afterward, if something comes out after drinking, it may be wise or it may not. But sometimes a person drinks enough, and something begins to speak, to ring out from his soul. When something rings out from the soul, he may say wise things or he may not, but people hear it. L’chaim.

39:33 Speaker 7 L’chaim.

39:35 Speaker 3 That’s a niggun. That’s a niggun. That’s one—it’s a niggun.

39:41 Speaker 7 Together, together.

39:57 Speaker 3 Really, all farbrengens have one subject. One subject. It doesn’t matter where you start. It could be 19 Kislev, Chai Elul, uh, 22 Shvat, Beis Shmuel—all the farbrengens. After all, suppose a lecturer comes and says he wants money. He can begin his talk wherever he likes. He can start with Adam and Chava; he can start with [unclear]. Anything, whatever he wants. The point of it all is, “Give me money.” I mean, give me money. Fine, that’s the point, so it doesn’t matter where he starts; in the end that’s where he’ll arrive. The only question is which route he takes, and that doesn’t matter so much. Seemingly, at a farbrengen—why do we do it this way? To confuse the enemy a little. If you tell a person outright to get up and do something, [unclear]. So you throw him off, talking to him about things above and below, about spiritual things and lowly things, about [unclear] and practical matters. And amid all that, perhaps you can slip something in that will reach him right in the gut. You know what I mean by the gut? [unclear]. You know what I mean? The point is, we’re not trying to hit you in the head. We’re not trying to hit your legs. We’re simply trying to get something to settle inside. A person protects himself, as though he were wrapped in padding. He’s constantly standing guard so he won’t get hit. So you distract him, wave something over here, wave something over there, but the main thing is that it has to get inside. If it doesn’t get inside, nothing will happen. Then there’s been no—there’s been no battle, no impact; nothing at all has happened.

41:53 Speaker 3 So now, about the farbrengen. I want to—I do want to point to the Rebbe himself. Not because—well, partly because this is being held in honor of the occasion. So it’s fitting to mention him, partly out of courtesy and partly because of the subject itself. Look, there were Jews who knew the Rebbetzin better than I did. To begin with, they were good Jews, fine Jews, Jews each with his own qualities—a whole bundle of them. I don’t want to give eulogies of that sort. It isn’t appropriate; it’s too early, and besides, it’s better to do that in the usual way.

42:39 Speaker 8 Perhaps you could speak about the qualities of [unclear].

42:45 Speaker 3 But we won’t talk about that. Look at what people said about her, what they said about the Rebbe. All sorts of people spoke, and it basically came down to this: first, she was a modest person. How should a person be? I’m not talking only about what you might call a woman of a certain standing, a king’s daughter. Yes, truly a king’s daughter. She could have acted like a king’s daughter. Remember, a king’s daughter grows up as a princess. So how should a princess behave? Like the English princesses, competing over who has the biggest hats? A princess should be modest, as they say. She shouldn’t have to show that she’s a princess, but people know she is. Look, I’ve said many times: you see a hyrax puffing itself up, puffing itself up, certainly. It wants to be a big animal. You never hear of an elephant puffing itself up. Why? It’s big enough already; it doesn’t need to. A person like that doesn’t puff himself up. No one has ever seen an elephant do it. You see hyraxes doing it. It’s the same with a person who is a king. I’ve met people with real power in government, and people with the power that comes from money. A person who is very wealthy doesn’t need to wear earrings and gold rings. People know he’s rich. He can walk around in torn jeans, and everyone knows he could buy everyone around him. He doesn’t need to show it. This whole business of showing off is always a little person trying to be big. Someone who really is big doesn’t need to try. He doesn’t need to try anything. That’s a sure sign. When you see someone waving his tail around, it’s a sign that he’s a little creature. If he really is

44:33 Speaker 3 big, what does he have to show? To say, “I’m great, I’m clever, I’m this”? If he’s great and clever, he doesn’t need people to make a fuss over him. What people said about the Rebbetzin—about the fact that she opened the door herself. Fine, she opened the door herself. That’s what she did. There are also quite a few stories about the Rebbe in those days, about how he wore simple, kibbutz-style clothes. In the early years he dressed simply, and people really didn’t recognize him. I remember him walking down the street there, waving to people, saying hello to all sorts of people—to non-Jews, to Jews, to Black people. He would wave hello to them. So why? Because precisely since he was a king, was he supposed to put on an imposing face and stick out his chest? Is that what he was supposed to do? So everything people said about the Rebbetzin was meant to say that she was a decent person and that she lived up to who she was. It isn’t even a little bit of praise. It’s simply how it was. All right, now he wants some criticism. He already said—

45:42 Speaker 9 It isn’t over yet. It isn’t over yet.

45:46 Speaker 3 Chas v’shalom. Chas v’shalom, I said this is only—

45:51 Speaker 9 This is only the beginning.

45:51 Speaker 3 I’m trying to behave myself, to stay kosher. I think I’ve been caught here by someone who arranged for me to be nice and sympathetic and pleasant, and not say anything that offends anyone. Heaven forbid anyone should feel he’s being stroked the wrong way. Everyone should feel he’s being stroked just as he wants, and each person should feel tremendous happiness. It’s simple: when you want to stroke a person, you stroke him like a cat, in the right direction, and then he feels good. Right? Stroke him properly, and he feels good. You tell him: “Do you know what Kfar Chabad is? Every person in Kfar Chabad is a worthy soul. He’s a Jew, a kosher Jew, living in the village, in the Rebbe’s place, and surely he belongs there. He certainly deserves all the respect in the world. So every person here is surely an important, precious and respected person.” What can you say to that? Could anyone be offended by it? But again, I’m only saying good things, only good things and compliments. Every one of you is better than the next, more handsome than the next, cleverer than the next, more learned than the next. That’s also true, but now let’s get back to the point. What I want to say about the righteous Rebbetzin is that, in a certain sense—and perhaps it’s a little impertinent of me to say this—I think that among all the Rebbe’s chassidim, and he had many chassidim, I don’t think he had a greater chossid than the righteous Rebbetzin. And that is one of the hardest things. As you know, when a person grows closer to someone else,

47:54 Speaker 3 even when he feels that the other person is great, that closeness also brings a certain familiarity. There’s a difference between someone I call “Rabbi So-and-so,” “the great Rabbi So-and-so,” when I stand before him, and someone I know so closely that I call him by his first name. In these matters, there is the question of bittul, of self-effacement. Let me tell you two things about this. There was once a rabbi with a very sharp tongue. Once people were talking about how good it was that the chassidim always came to shul. He said, “It isn’t so good. Look, there are Jews who come to me once a year. They think I’m not of this world at all. What do they think I am? [unclear]. Then there are Jews who come to shul several times a year. They think I’m an angel. Those who sit here, who are in the Rebbe’s court, think I’m a great person, a holy person. The others think I’m an ordinary Jew. My wife thinks I’m a complete gentile.” In other words, the closer people get, the harder it is to maintain that sense of greatness. Now, one thing I want to tell you—something that speaks to the greatness of the Rebbe, and to the Rebbetzin’s greatness too—is that she remained his chossid. After they had been together for more than fifty years, that was something extraordinarily great on both sides. I remember that my mother, a”h, once saw a photograph. There was nothing particularly unusual about it. She wasn’t talking about the Rebbetzin. She said, “He was sitting there [unclear].” I don’t know if anyone remembers where it was. Most of you are young and won’t remember. He was sitting on the chair the Rebbe

49:57 Speaker 3 had told him to sit on, but he sat right at the edge of the chair, as far out on the edge as he possibly could. You could see it in the way he sat. So my mother said, “This shows what a great person the Rebbe is. Here is someone who has been with him for forty years, and he still sits beside him like that. It isn’t something he’s putting on. It shows what a great person the Rebbe is.” Now I’m saying this about his wife, where the relationship is the closest, the most intimate, the least formal—where you call a person by his first name. It’s a relationship of closeness in every sense. And our Rebbetzin, at home, sometimes called him by his name. Sometimes, when speaking to others, she would say, “My husband—my husband said…” [unclear] “My husband said such-and-such.” She didn’t say, “His Holiness the Rebbe, shlita.” Right? That isn’t how it’s done now. Heaven forbid, I don’t want to get into a dispute about “His Holiness the Rebbe, shlita, King Moshiach.” She didn’t say that either. I mention it because I need to calm all the cats here and stroke them—the black cats, the strange cats, all of them—so that I keep my promise to behave nicely and treat all the cats well. Now I want to return to the point, beyond the cats. She called him “my husband,” but she was his chossid with her whole heart, with her whole heart. To be so close and still have all that reverence—that is something difficult. You see, for someone to be a king to a person who [unclear]—that is a great thing,

52:04 Speaker 3 But there is something greater about having mastery over this than about someone who brings something to the tziyun. One person has a diamond in his hand; another brings diamonds. Now, the fact that the Rebbetzin herself understood this, despite being the Rebbe’s daughter and having grown up as the Rebbe’s daughter—she was [unclear], and she was a remarkable woman. The point is that she was his chossid. That was something very great. And it is great because—and this is what I want to tell you—the closer a person is, the more he comes into contact with holy places, the more he faces a danger: the danger that his heart will become desensitized. People used to say that after a sofer has worked for some time, he starts walking on the parchment of Torah scrolls. And after an undertaker has worked at it for some time, he starts walking over the dead. Of course, people do get used to things. But the fact that the Rebbetzin remained the Rebbe’s chossid all her life is something very great. It shows her stature, just as it shows the Rebbe’s stature. Now, how was she his chossid? She did not [unclear], and I want to speak a little about that. She did not [unclear]; she did not walk down the street wearing [unclear]. Enough about that. But there is a question: what does it mean to be a chossid? What does it mean to be a chossid? If someone is described as a chossid because he does this or that sort of thing, that is not a chossid. At most, it is something that looks like a chossid. It is the outward appearance of a chossid, but it is not Chassidus. They are just making what they used to call a “chuchle,” a figure. They make a figure out of the appearance

54:06 Speaker 3 of various things, and it looks like a chossid. So people think it is a chossid. It is not a chossid. A chossid is a matter of what is called an inner connection, and an inner connection does not have to come with noise and commotion. It does not have to be a spectacle, and I do not have to shout it. Because someone who truly has a connection to something does not need to shout about it. Let me give an example. People love one another. There is a lesser love and a greater love. What is the greatest love? Sadly, the greatest love is the love a person has for himself. But I do not have to do anything special for that love. I simply love myself. It is the most natural thing in the world. At least I am all right; what I am is not the point. The point about connection, love and closeness is that they begin when the thing is utterly natural to me. And because of that, I can give you a rule: when someone starts shouting something—no matter what it is—it raises a suspicion that his inside does not match his outside. Otherwise, he would not need to shout it. Someone once told me—and I am sorry that this is a sermon, but it is not my sermon, so do not attribute it to me—he said: “In Parshas Vayeishev there is the story of Yosef and Potiphar’s wife. Our Sages say throughout their writings that Yosef almost gave in to Potiphar’s wife, and that a miracle, from Above and below, kept him from doing so. The question is, where did our Sages get

56:11 Speaker 3 such an idea? Where does it come from? On the face of it, the verse keeps saying that Yosef did not want to; it says, ‘And he refused.’” Someone told me that the reason is the cantillation mark. On “And he refused,” there is a shalsheles. What happened? Yosef said, “No, no, no, no.” Now, when someone says, “No, no, no, no,” it is a sign that perhaps the answer is yes. A person whose answer is truly, absolutely no says “no” once, and that is it. When I say no three times, when I shout it and wave a flag, the more noise I make, the more reason there is to suspect that I do not mean it. Because if I meant it, then that would simply be the way things are. I do not need to shout or make a display of it. You do it naturally, without shouting. And that is why I am speaking about the Rebbetzin. I am not speaking about her to put a halo around her or to deliver eulogies, but simply to say this: What does it mean to be a chossid? It means to be deeply attached, with respect, without noise and with an attachment that cannot be severed. That is what it means to be a chossid. I want to expand a little on this point, on this way of looking at things. That is really the point. What does it mean? It means that this is how it has to be. From this we have to learn how to be a chossid. Being a chossid means I do not have to shout it. It has to speak from within me. I do not have to roar for it to come out of me. I do not have to wave

58:06 Speaker 3 things around for it to come out. It comes from within me. There is a story told about Shmuel Munkes, who said that in the Rebbe’s courtyard, there ought to be—well, at a shoemaker’s they hang up a shoe; at a blacksmith’s they hang up a horseshoe. What should they hang in the Rebbe’s courtyard? They should hang up a chossid. Because that is the Rebbe’s work. That is the Rebbe’s work. What I mean is, if someone looks at the Rebbe, that is all well and good. But what kind of chossid is he? What kind of chossid? This is something we have to look at. We have to take all the external things—not in order to stop doing them, but to push them inward, to the place where they truly belong, so that they reach the place within the soul they have not yet reached. That is where the work has to happen. Look, there is something—and I am sorry. I already promised to finish, but let me say just one thing. There are so many chassidim whose Chassidus is like this: you know how some medicines have a red label that says, “For external use only”? There are people whose Chassidus is exactly like that. For them, it is for external use. It is something I sell to others, sell on the street, sometimes sell to my students, sometimes sell to my children. I do not swallow the Chassidus myself, because I know it is poison. What I am saying is that the whole point of Chassidus is that I take it myself, that I mean it. That is the essence of it, the very essence of the matter, and everything begins there. That is what it can be, and what it must be.

1:00:17 Speaker 3 So the more it is... Once upon a time there was an expression that people no longer use. When they wanted to criticize someone among Chabad chassidim, they would chiefly call him a chitzon, an external person. What is a chitzon? Everything is in order: the bekeshe is right, the hat is right, the [unclear] is right, his socks are right. Inside, there is nothing. That is a chitzon. And what is something that is not external? It is inwardness. Inwardness is what is inside. It is not all those things, however many years they have been there. Because what is the essence of the matter? It is what is there inside, what is at work there, how it works within the soul. I say this to people about all kinds of things, including things a person cares about, things in the family and other things. When do you know that someone truly belongs to something? I say: picture a Wednesday afternoon. Why do I say Wednesday? It is a day with no Torah reading, an ordinary weekday. It is afternoon, I have finished work, and I am sitting and drinking a cup of tea. What do I feel? What is on my mind? That tells me what matters to me, because it shows where I really stand. Otherwise, I am thinking about all sorts of things in the world. But if I feel within me that sense of “On my bed at night I sought him”—what does “on my bed at night” mean? Imagine what—if you wanted to. This is not a definition. No book says that this is the definition of a chossid, and yet it is the very core of what a chossid is. That a person

1:02:20 Speaker 3 A person goes to sleep, takes off one sock, and as he thinks about taking off the second, it occurs to him that Hakadosh Boruch Hu rules—rules and reigns over all the worlds. [unclear]. Someone sitting in shul and doing this while he’s sitting there—that’s not it. That’s not [unclear]. But when a person wakes up in the middle of the night, jolted out of sleep, and the thought comes to him then—that belongs to Chassidus. That’s what it means for something to belong to Chassidus. It isn’t something external. Why do I live with it? Let me give an example. A person has a problem that truly troubles him, or someone he truly loves. He doesn’t have to sit down and prepare himself to think about his problem. It’s there. There were people who had a debt they needed to pay, and they didn’t know where the money would come from. They don’t want to think about it all day, but the moment they stop thinking about other things, it comes back to them. Why? Because it touches their very soul, and when something touches your soul, it comes to the surface. The same is true of holy feelings. If a feeling is genuine, how do you know? It comes to you not when you’re preparing to produce it, not when you set out to bring it about, but when you aren’t thinking about it, when you don’t even want to think about it. Something simply pops into your head. That, essentially, is the point. And this is what we call an aspect of Chassidus. I want—

1:04:09 Speaker 3 I don’t want to speak about this at too much length, and this certainly isn’t the right place to speak about it. Everyone here is surely a complete, perfect chossid; there’s no need to speak to them about this. Still, I wanted to say: what does it mean to be a chossid? A chossid isn’t defined by coming here, or by farbrenging with a friend, or by making certain expressions. That can be a kind of pretending, too. Where does a person face the test? Not during davening. I’m sitting here in the middle of an ordinary day, and something stirs within me. How much connection does that have to everything we’ve been discussing? Is there a chossid there when we’re alone—without a shul, without an aron kodesh, without davening, without avodah, without a siddur, without anything? If, after all that, something still stirs within him, that is what it means to be a chossid. That is a chossid who believes in hashgachah pratis. It touches his soul, his heart, his innermost self. Everything else may be good for all sorts of purposes; it’s excellent for selling, excellent for making a business out of it. But for oneself, for this matter of being a chossid among chassidim: “On my bed at night I sought the one my soul loves.” I’m lying there at night, barely opening one eye. When I open that eye, when I wake up in the middle of the night for whatever reason, do I think about what Hakadosh Boruch Hu wants of me? Beyond that, everything else... So I spoke a little about the Rebbe [unclear], because that quality was there: how to be adorned and refined in heart and soul, with all the [unclear], and how to be close while also preserving all—

1:06:18 Speaker 3 these things. That, too, is a great matter, and it needs attention. It’s not something to talk about just for the sake of a lecture. It’s a great matter. Somehow, how can I live with this—that when I learn Chassidus, I really care about the seder; when I daven, davening matters to me; when I put on tefillin, I care about tefillin? Thank you very much.

00:01 Speaker 1 Someone who isn’t doing well—those who know him know. Even a Torah scholar who lacks understanding: so what do you do about that? What can you really do? Where is the connection, and how do you make that connection? There are people whose job is to renew old things. You give them what you might call old shoes, and they sit and work on them until they look almost new. You give them a garment that’s a little torn, with a few patches, and they sew it up better—stitch it here, stitch it there—and make it new again. Now the question is: how do you renew a chossid? What I wanted to explain is that it’s harder. It isn’t so simple. For someone who hasn’t learned Chassidus, it’s easier: when he learns Chassidus, a new light opens up for him. A person discovers a new light and says, “Everything I’ve learned, I now have to learn again. Everything I thought I knew, I have to understand anew—all the things I’ve been involved with.” Everything has to be new. But what do you do with someone who has already learned? What do you do with someone who has already learned, already known, already heard, and already knows all these things? Ah, when my youngest daughter was two and a half, my wife taught her all ten sefiros by heart. Nu, what came of it? What came of it? She knew the ten sefiros by heart at two and a half. So, Yaakov, if you asked her what comes after Netzach, she knew what to say. Very nice. Very nice indeed. But what happens then? What I mean to say is: what happens with someone who learned this not at two and a half, but at twelve or at fif-

01:57 Speaker 1 teen? What happens now? What happens now? That’s the whole point. And I’m not talking now about something that belongs only to this time. It’s about being a normal human being. What is Chassidus about? What is the essence of Chassidus? Its essence isn’t saying this or that—that’s a nusach. Nor is it saying something else: nusach A, nusach B. Someone can be a chossid who davens Nusach Ashkenaz. There were even Rebbes who davened Nusach Ashkenaz. And someone else can daven Nusach Sefard, follow Nusach HaAri with all the latest corrections—and what is he? At the end of the day, a little worn-out rag that isn’t worth the space it takes up. So what is Chassidus about? The whole point of Chassidus—as people used to say in earlier generations—is that a chossid can be dead inside, and a misnaged can be alive inside. This has to be real. If a chossid is only called a chossid—that is, he merely bears that title, that label—if he’s identified by what he wears, by a crown or a shtreimel or the crease in his hat, and that’s how people know who he is... I get into a taxi, and the driver says, “You’re a Chabadnik.” I ask, “How do you know?” He says, “I can see the crease in your hat.” Very nice. If he’d said he could see chochmah, binah, and daas in me, I’d have been happy. But that isn’t what he tells me. What does he see? He sees the crease in my hat. Very nice. The crease

03:42 Speaker 1 in this hat. That’s the point here. But the whole point is to be alive. What does it mean to be alive? Look, you should know that what I’m saying here isn’t about speaking badly of anyone. I’m not criticizing anyone now; I’m talking about a problem, a real issue that concerns young people and older people alike. How do I renew myself? How do I become a living person again? How do I bring life back? As it says in the Book of Yeshayahu, “The living, the living, he will praise You, as I do.” The living, the living will praise You. Someone who is alive—a living thing. Because a dead thing is the ultimate source of impurity. It’s dead, and a person needs to be alive. Just think: every creature in the world has life. This is what the verse calls “He breathed into his nostrils the soul of life.” The commentators ask: What is the “soul of life”? Every creature has life, but the human soul is more alive than all of them. And the soul of a Jew is on the level of the life of life. A Jew is a different level. There is the inanimate, the growing, the living, and the speaking; and after the speaking comes the Jew. That is another level, with a greater measure of life. Now, what is a chossid? That’s what a chossid is. The whole idea of a chossid is a living Jew—not a dead Jew, but a living Jew. A Jew who has the breath of life in his nostrils, whose soul is full of life, full of life. And if, for whatever reason,

05:41 Speaker 1 there’s a decline in that, then what should I cry about? My sins, my debts, my troubles? I should cry because I’ve become a dead person. I’ve become a dead person. I go to shul, say aloud what needs to be said, then go and enter the mikveh and come out. They put dishes into a mikveh too, but a dish goes in impure and comes out pure. When a person goes into the mikveh a putz and comes out a putz, what’s the point? What’s the point of that? Of course, there’s what’s written about it. But what I want to say is: what comes of it? It should stir the person who goes to the mikveh. It should break that inertia. It didn’t happen: I went to the mikveh—fine, I went in, came out, got dressed, and... what? What happened? What was renewed? What changed? Yes, it says that the mikveh is a substitute. It’s in the Gemara, so no one should think I’m making this up. It says that the primary immersion should be in fire. That’s what the Gemara says. The primary immersion is in fire; something that cannot be put into fire is passed through a place called a mikveh. So what is immersion? What is immersion, if you haven’t gone into the fire? When you put something into fire, something happens to it: it comes out glowing, clean, or burned. But when you put someone into a mikveh—a hot mikveh, a cold mikveh, a lukewarm mikveh, a clean mikveh, a dirty mikveh—he goes in and comes out just as he was. The way he went in is the way he came out. So what is that? Again, I want to say that for a chossid it’s harder. And look, some of you surely learn with other people. Sometimes, when I work with someone who knows nothing and tell him

07:48 Speaker 1 a maamar of Chassidus, I can see a new light come over him. Years ago I saw something—and so you won’t think I’m just giving a sermon, I want to tell you a story. I saw a Jew who was a great Torah scholar, and although he was Hungarian, he was still a human being. He really was a great Torah scholar. I remember him: his family tradition was Nusach Ashkenaz; they davened Nusach Ashkenaz. I saw a chassidic Jew tell him something from Chassidus. And this man, who was over seventy, stood in shul and danced. An elderly, heavyset man standing in shul and dancing. He danced for joy because he’d heard something new that opened his eyes. I envied him. I’ll tell you: I envied that old Jew. Not for his Torah learning, though he was a great Torah scholar. Not for what he knew, though he was a great Jew. I envied his ability to hear a teaching of Chassidus and actually dance. I’m not saying he davened in some special way. He stood in shul and danced—an old Jew standing there and dancing. Why was he dancing? He’d heard a teaching of Chassidus. And here I sit, swallowing Chassidus like a whale—so many kilograms, so many tons of Chassidus. It goes in and... and... and... But it should be, “Is not My word like fire, says Hashem?” My word is like fire. Fire! It’s fire. Yet it goes in and comes out. If I put a little fire inside a vehicle, it can move tanks. But I put a great fire inside a person, and not even a puff comes out of him.

09:51 Speaker 1 So what can I say about that? What can I say about that? There’s a question there. A well-known maamar quoted in Tanya says that Moshiach will “bring the tzaddikim to teshuvah.” What does it mean to bring the tzaddikim to teshuvah? What can you tell a tzaddik? “Do this”—he’s already done it. “Learn”—he’s already learned. “Daven”—he’s already davened. “Serve Hashem sincerely, with all your strength”—he’s already done that. So what more is needed? Moshiach will tell him, “Now you need to start working on teshuvah.” Now I’m speaking here in a yeshivah, among people who are on the inside, not outsiders. There are no strangers here. I’m talking about us. How do you bring chassidim to teshuvah? Tzaddikim do teshuvah. How do they do it? Look—some of you have seen this. Sometimes you see people who are baalei teshuvah. And you see—this is what it says in Tanya, and I’m saying it—look at someone who used to be a sinner, G-d forbid, a bad person, and then something happened to him. He began learning Torah, learned Chassidus, and now he’s become a new person. And I’m the one teaching him. How should I feel? How should I feel? How should I feel when something like that happens? Why doesn’t it happen to me? Why does the Chassidus I teach others sometimes transform them completely, from one extreme to the other, but when it enters me—well, fine. I learned this, I learned more, gained more knowledge. I know how this point in Chassidus works, and at most I’ve added something to what I know. I’ve noticed this, and I simply have to say it—he isn’t

11:49 Speaker 1 here, so I can speak lashon hara about him quietly. I have a youngest son who, at his bar mitzvah, recited at least a hundred maamarim of Chassidus by heart. But years passed, and when he became a chassan and recited a maamar of Chassidus, as all chassanim do, he opened the book and read from it. What I’m saying is: after years of studying Chassidus, studying in another yeshivah and then somewhere else, what did he reach? What level? The level where he can now read the chassan’s maamar from the book. We get along nicely now. He lives here in Kfar Chabad, and I truly love him. I’m only saying: look, there’s an issue here. I’m not talking about the decline of the generations. I’m talking about this issue. What happens after I’ve sat and learned? What happens after I’ve sat and worked on all these things with my heart, soul and might? What comes of it afterward? How is it that all these things go outward but don’t enter inward? How does it happen that everyone else gets fat while I stay thin? Everyone, everyone, everyone gains, while I’m left at a loss. Such a thing is possible. It’s hard to address, and it’s one of the things we must do. We need to do it on 22 Shvat, on 3 Shvat and after Shvat, in Adar and on Purim, and after Purim on Pesach. And after Pesach. This whole matter is our very life; it is what Chassidus is really about. It is the essence of the whole matter. The point isn’t whether someone knows fifty books by heart. That doesn’t make any difference. It could be that in the World Above

13:55 Speaker 1 they’ll send him to Gehinnom and put the books aside. Maybe that won’t matter either. Yes, but that’s nothing. Apart from that, nothing will happen. But beyond that, beyond that point. They once told a beautiful story about one of the early tzaddikim: someone—I don’t know how to translate this into Hebrew—came to the Rebbe. The Rebbe asked whether he had learned anything, and he answered, “I’ve learned the entire Shas.” So the Rebbe asked him, “What has Shas taught you?” “I’ve learned, I’ve learned all of Shas.” And the Rebbe asked him, “And what has all of Shas taught you?” There’s such a thing. I know the maamarim from the year ’8 and from the year ’80. I know the maamarim from before and after. I know what was said over this many weeks and that many weeks. I know all the Rebbe’s sichos, and I can tell you exactly what happened when. Besides that, I know all the stories, and I can tell you what day of the week the Rebbe told each one. There are people who know these things. And I know in which quarter—on which day of the week the Rebbe changed his shirt. And after all that, after all that, after all that, with everything I know, what happened to me? What happened to me? There used to be such a thing. Nowadays, it’s considered good. They apply the term “a basket full of books” to rabbis who are examined. “A basket full of books.” In its original source in the Gemara, it’s a derogatory term—like calling someone a donkey carrying books today. What does it mean? He has so many books. One person has a whole Shas of books. Another person has, has, has

15:49 Speaker 1 Shulchan Aruch in his head, and another has fifteen books. But it’s as though they’re sitting in some library. They’re in the books, and they aren’t being used. They aren’t alive; they don’t come through—unless someone presses my button and I have to recite something. Now, I’m not saying this to make excuses. First of all, as you can see, when a person speaks, he speaks from himself and about himself. A person doesn’t speak about others. There’s a famous story about the Baal Shem Tov. The Baal Shem Tov told his disciples that every person in the world, whoever he may be, must confess his sins; he is always confessing them, even if people don’t realize it or hear it. But in truth, everyone confesses his sins—especially when someone has had a drink. Especially at a moment like this. But he doesn’t necessarily confess his own particular issues. So, G-d forbid, I’m not giving anyone a lecture. I’m saying that this is the problem: What am I doing? What am I doing? Being a chossid is, first of all, something far more demanding than if I were something else. It makes demands of you. But the question is: What has come of it? What has come of it? That is the question, and it’s a big question. I don’t need to answer it to anyone else. I don’t need to answer it to anyone else. If only a husband and wife could sit together at home and the wife would say to her husband, “What has become of you? When I met you, you were a bochur who talked about Chassidus, and now you’re...” I’d call him a Jew whose head is full of all sorts of other things. A husband could say the same to his wife, but

17:55 Speaker 1 that isn’t what I’m talking about now. I’m not talking about what a person says to others or what other people say. What does a person say when he’s alone with himself? When he’s alone with himself? He says: “I’ve been learning Tanya for thirty years. I’ve been a chossid for forty years, a chossid for fifty years—and in the end, what has become of me? What has become of me? I’ve spent fifty years immersed in this, and what, in the end, has become of me?” Now, I could say that nowadays this is a great achievement too. There are so many sinners, wicked people, utterly wicked people, that when I walk around and don’t publicly desecrate Shabbos, I know Hakadosh Boruch Hu owes me a medal. When I don’t eat pork, I get another medal. And when I don’t go around murdering people in the street, I deserve another medal as big as a dinner plate. That’s how I feel when I walk down the street: as a religious person, even more so, I feel like a Russian general, my whole chest covered in medals. Look how great I am, how wise I am, what a tzaddik I am, how G-d-fearing I am. And it goes on from one thing to the next; I have to show myself off. So I compare myself with others and say: “Well, I keep Shabbos. I don’t eat pork, I don’t eat creeping or crawling creatures, I don’t commit eight transgressions every day, and I even grow a beard...” And after that, when I take all these things, all this so-called theory of relativity—which tells me how much better I am than others, how much better I am—just imagine

19:48 Speaker 1 Imagine me sitting there and saying, “How much smarter I am than that donkey.” That’s why we keep a few cows here in the village: so the villagers can walk past them and say, “You know what? I really am intelligent. Compare me to them. Yes, compare me to them. I’m intelligent. I can read and write. I’m really something special.” Now, if they took the cows away, what could I say? What could I say? I’d have to compare myself to other people, and then it wouldn’t be so simple. I can read; my neighbor can read too. I stand by the wall and daven, and he stands by the wall and davens. I learn Chassidus before davening—or I’m supposed to—and he does that too. I start davening at ten in the morning, and so does he. Nu, so what? What’s the difference between us? So the question is: what can I say? I was talking about this kind of relativity, the theory of relativity, comparing myself to others. How convenient it is to be able to do that. But the question isn’t how I compare to others, or what I’ll say if someone asks me a question. That’s all vanity and emptiness. The real question, the biggest problem, is what happens when I ask myself a question. What happens when I ask myself, “What kind of person are you?” I have to answer that, and I can’t offer myself all the excuses that would work perfectly well on the neighbors. When I have to answer myself, what can I hide behind?

21:36 Speaker 1 And I’m not talking about what excuses I can give other people. What excuses can I give myself? What can I tell myself? A person sits and learns for three years, four years. Some learn Chassidus for ten years, twenty years, and—and then what happened? What happened? It’s true. I once wrote a book, and I wrote in it that many people look at religious Jews and think they’re not such a great find. Why? Because if they didn’t keep mitzvos, they’d be wild animals. They’d steal and commit adultery and rob people and all sorts of things. Now, as a religious Jew, I don’t do those things, because I have that framework. So that is real progress, and one has to appreciate that he keeps mitzvos. That’s fine when I meet someone on the street. But when I’m facing myself, I’m not facing other people. I’m not here to speak to other people or to ask their questions. I sit and talk to myself. I speak to my own heart. I sit in some corner—or not in a corner, but right in the middle of everyone. Look, a person is allowed to think about something even while sitting right in the middle of everyone. Instead of singing “boom, boom, boom,” he starts singing “oy, oy, oy.” Really, what’s going on with all these things? Where is it leading? What comes of it? Now, I know we say all these things, yes? And still, the question remains. I know the answer: I put it off until I make a resolution. Yes, I put it off until 12 Tammuz. From 12 Tammuz to 18 Elul

23:32 Speaker 1 and so on and so on. I keep putting it off. But it is still a question. A real question. Why? It isn’t a question of image or outward appearances, or how big this building is. I mean, there is something here. There’s a shul here—fortunate are we—a big shul. How good, how pleasant our lot. There are beautiful stones here; how fortunate we are. But now the question is: what’s happening inside? What’s happening inside? And again, I’m sure there’s Torah study and davening here. I’m sure there are classes every day. Right? How many classes? Quite a few. And I’m sure there are Jews davening here, not in just one building but in several. But the question is this: when I was young, someone met me and saw a book I had. It was actually a book of Chassidus, but he thought it was a book of Kabbalah, which impressed him much more. He said to me, “Nu, so do you already know how to make a golem?” Well, I don’t know how to make a golem yet, but making a golem is no great feat. After all, I was a teacher for many years, so I can say I made not one but quite a few. Quite a few. But it’s the same question: apart from making a golem, have you done anything yet? Have you done anything? Have you done anything in the world? I said, I sit and learn all these things. Have you done anything with them? That really is the question a person has to ask. And that’s the point: at least, if I’m a chossid—if I’m not a chossid in the sense that I’m full of life through and through, if I’m not a chossid in the sense that every time I’m stirred by a new light, if I’m not a chossid in the sense that

25:30 Speaker 1 a fire burns within me—then at least I can be a chossid in this sense: every morning I sit down, give myself a kick in the backside, and say, “Really, how long can this go on?” At least that would be something. L’chaim. L’chaim. I mean, I know how much goes in. Now, where it comes out is another question. I know where some of it comes out, but I don’t want to talk about that part.

26:33 Speaker 2 Talk about where it goes in.

26:35 Speaker 1 Yes. But where it goes in isn’t really the question. The question is whether—as it says in the Torah—“the spirit of the animal descends to the earth below, while the spirit of man ascends upward.”

26:50 Speaker 2 Upward, yes.

26:51 Speaker 1 Right? So that’s always the question when you invest in all sorts of other things: where does it go? Does it go up or down? And if it gets divided, which parts go where? Sometimes you need at least some part of it to go upward.

27:08 Speaker 2 Your hand, Rabbi, your hand.

27:10 Speaker 1 What do you mean? Oh, that’s what you want? Fine. Fine, l’chaim, l’chaim! L’chaim! And here I am. The fact that I’m drinking doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. You drink too. I say l’chaim, and you? You listen. I say things, and you hear them.

27:33 Speaker 2 And you’re like deaf people.

27:33 Speaker 1 You’re like deaf people. Yes, what do they call it—a deaf, blind child. And you’re like deaf people. Yes, yes, that’s the point. L’chaim.

27:46 Speaker 2 Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, Rabbi.

27:51 Speaker 1 L’chaim.

27:55 Speaker 2 Please raise your glass.

28:06 Speaker 1 But I don’t know whether anyone here has studied physics. If you knew—everyone has studied physics. Do you know how much energy there is in something like this? If all of it were converted into energy, it wouldn’t just blow up all of Eretz Yisroel; it would blow up Syria too, Syria and Egypt along with it. But what happens instead? It doesn’t become energy. It becomes what we call pee. You know, pee. That’s what happens: pee, and then more pee. And it’s not good that it ends up as pee. Fine, fine. Now I want to move on—not to another subject, just generally. I have to move between subjects; what does it mean to move between subjects? Fine, there’s one small thing I want to talk about, with your permission, [unclear]. But you do have the option, as they say, to vote with your feet. That’s something too. If someone’s had enough, he lifts his backside, gets up, walks away and puts it somewhere else. Yes, you don’t lift your head; you don’t take your head out of the farbrengen. The head stays here, but the last part, the other part—

29:35 Speaker 9 He lifts it between his legs.

29:37 Speaker 1 The other part gets put somewhere else. All right, but no, we won’t talk about that. I want to say that there are two sides to this, for praise and for criticism. On the positive side, there is a great benefit to it. Part of what the Rebbe taught us was everything I’ve been telling you. It’s all in the books and in the teachings of Chassidus. Others said it better than I have, more beautifully, and perhaps in a way that reached the heart more deeply. Generations upon generations of mashpi’im have said it, from the Baal Shem Tov onward. They said the same thing: the main thing is “You shall live by them,” not die by them. Live by them, live by them, live by them, live by them. And how do you do that? How do you do that? That’s the whole point I’m making. Look, if I were speaking here to a group of misnagdim, some of them would throw rotten vegetables at me and some would celebrate and be inspired. But I’m speaking to this group, so that doesn’t happen. Nobody throws vegetables. Which is a pity for the vegetables. Yes, even rotten vegetables have fruit; if there’s fruit, you can wash it. On the other hand, why is that? Because these things have been heard, are being heard, and will be heard again. And... it’s already a problem to laugh about it. That’s been done too; people have already laughed. They’ve already laughed. Yes, it’s that kind of problem. What do you do after that? Often, when there are sons and already an uncle, I’m glad when someone is here who isn’t part of what you might call the regular audience. The regular audience has already heard it, already knows it, and what is said is as though it hadn’t been said. And what...

31:46 Speaker 1 What happened is as though it happened, and afterward a person sits there collecting things. Like the people sitting here, he sits and collects them. Well, did the person sitting to his left say something clever or not? If he said something clever, he marks it down.

32:02 Speaker 10 He’s telling the truth.

32:03 Speaker 1 If he said some little clever thing, he’ll write it in his notebook and later repeat it in his name or without mentioning his name. That really is the power of...

32:12 Speaker 10 In his name, in his name.

32:13 Speaker 1 It doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t matter. What happens in this world is no insurance for the World to Come. In the World to Come they know the truth. We have nothing to hide, but I just want to say...

32:22 Speaker 10 How does it work in the World to Come? How?

32:24 Speaker 1 What I mean is, up there they write down all these things, and afterward they say to a person, “You were so clever.” So he says, “Yes.” “You knew how to learn?” He says, “Yes.” “You learned Chassidus?” He says, “Yes.” “Well, then you’re going down to the lowest section of Gehinnom.” “Why?” “Because if you had been an ignoramus and hadn’t known better, and had behaved as you did here, we could have put you straight into Gan Eden. But you learned a little in that place, so you go straight to Gehinnom. You occupied yourself with Chassidus? To the lowest section, the lowest section!” Why? Incidentally, there’s a famous story told about a number of Rebbes, and the gist of it was that a certain chossid... Let me tell you a famous story. A chossid told his Rebbe a story. They tell it about several chassidim who told it to their Rebbes. He spoke about the chassidim of another Rebbe. First of all, this chossid lives nearby. The Rebbe is close to his home; it’s easy to get to him. When he goes, he receives blessings and so on. So he goes, tells his wife he’s going to the Rebbe, and she makes him sandwiches and food. He goes to the Rebbe at his leisure, and he really gets to see him. The Rebbe listens, takes an interest, and enjoys it. Afterward the Rebbe blesses him in material and spiritual matters. He leaves full of satisfaction, comes home, is welcomed warmly, and passes on the Rebbe’s regards. Everything is fine. Later he arrives in the World Above, and they ask him, “What did you do?” He says, “I sat and learned and occupied myself with Chassidus.” “Whose chossid were you?” He says, “The chossid of such-and-such Rebbe.” So they tell him, “You’re going to Gan...” Now, the other chossid begins to answer: “The Rebbe lives far away. Just getting to the Rebbe...

34:21 Speaker 1 ...is a great deal of trouble. And when I tell my wife, she doesn’t want me to travel. So I have to sneak out of the house. I leave with whatever I’ve managed to take, a little underwear, a few things, and I barely make it there. Now, where can I see the Rebbe? There are so many chassidim. I can’t hear what he says, and can I get into yechidus to receive a blessing from him? It doesn’t happen. So I hear a general blessing and go home. Then I have to sneak back in by all sorts of means so they’ll let me into the house again. That’s in this world. Now what happens in the World to Come? They ask me, ‘What did you do? Whose chossid were you?’ I tell them whose. ‘You were a chossid of that great Rebbe, and this is how you behaved? Straight to Gehinnom!’” Well, the Rebbe who heard this story from the chossid said, “Actually, that Rebbe is right.” So I say to the Rebbe, “Rebbe, what can I tell you? Our Gehinnom is better than their Gehinnom.” That’s part of the point. In other words, they send a chossid to Gehinnom. What will he do there in Gehinnom? What will he do there? He’ll sit there. Look at a chossid from here. What happens when he goes down to Gehinnom? He goes down to Gehinnom [unclear]. There are demons there attending to him. So he asks the demons whether they’ve put on tefillin yet. If they haven’t, he’ll give them tefillin. Afterward he’ll tell them to say Birchas Hamazon. He’ll tell them that. So there’ll be an enormous commotion among the demons, and a place where people make a bracha and speak words of Torah is no longer Gehinnom. It’s no longer the same thing. And that, incidentally, is what a Chabad chossid can accomplish if...

36:10 Speaker 1 If a Belzer chossid went down there, he couldn’t do those things. But a Chabad chossid will talk to the demons and the horrors and all of them. So he can talk to anyone. He’ll ask one demon, and the demon might tell him that his mother was a non-Jew, so he’ll have to shout [unclear]. But all right... What? The truth is, it has to be one or the other. The Gemara says demons are G-d-fearing, yes? There’s a Gemara in tractate Megillah that says the demons are G-d-fearing and alive. When you see a very G-d-fearing-looking person with a big beard and a long kapote, you always have to ask, as the Gemara says, whether perhaps he’s a demon. Yes, sometimes you have to think about that, because if he doesn’t look like someone exceptionally G-d-fearing, he certainly isn’t a demon. He’s just some poor young fellow who stumbled along the way. But if he walks around like this, with the kapote and all that, and his tzitzis...

37:29 Speaker 11 That’s something special.

37:30 Speaker 1 Then perhaps, perhaps—what is he? You have to consider all sorts of other possibilities. But that has nothing to do with our subject. It doesn’t. Yes, this is just talk of things that, at one time, at this hour of the night, people wouldn’t even mention by name, out of fear. Why? Here we’re in Eretz Yisroel, and here we’re all brave. Why should we care about demons? We have a government; we already have every evil, all the evils joined together. So why should we be afraid of demons? We have a whole Knesset. So what? Ah, many years ago, the Rebbe sent me to Eretz Yisroel, to the Knesset. [Unclear.] He appointed me to a beis din for a certain matter, and told me I would head the beis din and speak with the members of the Knesset. I was there, and I must say that, all in all, they treated me very nicely on a personal level. But really, for a person to go alone to a place like that... It’s a place where they flatter you and humiliate you and do all sorts of things to you. That’s all. Who am I? What am I? What was I asking for? Not money, not property, not status, none of that. To the Knesset, that isn’t worth anything. Yet they all treated me very nicely, every last one of them. Afterward I came out positively sick. I had simply seen the Knesset. What was it? I had a very poor opinion of them before I went in, but I didn’t know I could sink still lower in my opinion. And that was the Knesset of about thirty years ago, which was vastly better than the Knesset today. So now I say: when a person sees that building...

39:26 Speaker 1 Who lives in Jerusalem, so what—is he afraid of all sorts of demons with tails, tails and horns? Here’s something, here’s a real example. We have a certain Knesset member, another certain Knesset member—and we won’t mention their names—but they’re all like that. They’re part of this, though that’s not exactly what I’m talking about. What I actually wanted to say is one thing—something else. All right, all right, you see I’m drinking something? So I’m allowed to say things, and I’m not responsible for what I say. A drunk man. Me.

40:02 Speaker 12 What do you mean, drunk?

40:03 Speaker 1 A man who’s had a drink.

40:05 Speaker 12 Not drunk, not drunk, just a little loose.

40:15 Speaker 1 I think maybe it’ll put something out. Not necessarily for me.

40:18 Speaker 12 Probably in the end.

40:19 Speaker 1 All right, I want to tell you: one of the things the Rebbe did—and in this respect the Rebbe made a great change, though I don’t want to go into it. As I said, I’m not going into the roots or the sources now, or discussing that subject. The Rebbe simply said that the cloud hanging over us here dims things. He took the situation and did something like this. How does that work? There are surely people here who have been in the army. Sometimes you take an army unit—some unit, I don’t know what example to give; how low can I go? A unit of the Military Rabbinate. That’s as low as I can go. So you take a unit of the Military Rabbinate and tell them, “Listen, this is an emergency. Take rifles and stand at the border.” So they take rifles and stand at the border. They really aren’t suited to it. One is fatter, another is thinner. But someone has to stand at the border. And in a sense, what the Rebbe did was take all the Chabad chassidim, the young and the old, the wise and the foolish, and tell them, “Gentlemen, you are soldiers now, and you have a job to do. I don’t care who you are. I don’t care what you are. I don’t care what level you’re on. You’re going to go and do the job.” And what is the job? You have a job now. The Jewish people are now in what’s called an emergency, in mortal danger, truly in danger. Since I don’t want to make a speech or go on at length about it, I’ll just say that for many generations the Jewish people haven’t been in such danger. The Rebbe didn’t speak about it much, but anyone—

42:34 Speaker 1 Anyone who knows even a little, who understands even the tiniest bit, knows it. This is a time of danger unlike any before. He told everyone, “You’ve been called up. Yes, you’ve been called up. Everyone has been called up, and you have a job to do.” Now, what if doing this job makes me an ordinary civilian? The Rebbe said, “Then be an ordinary civilian.” And what if it makes me what you might call a small, lowly creature—an ordinary Chabadnik? The Rebbe said, “Then be an ordinary Chabadnik. The main thing is to do your job.” That is what the Rebbe said. Now, what is the job? He says, “Look, there’s a flood now. There’s a flood, and in this flood your task is to save every soul.” Right? So you’re standing there on the riverbank. It’s worse than [unclear]. In truth, if any of you knew the numbers, the numbers worldwide are terrible. If anyone knew those numbers—and we live here in Israel and don’t see the num—things would be different. The numbers throughout the world are almost at the very limit, almost at the very limit. What I can say is this: you’re going to save Jews. That’s it. That is your task, that is your concern, that is your life’s work. That is what you need to do. Now, this is not at all simple. It isn’t simple. And again, a person can come along, quite rightly, and say, “Rebbe, I don’t know how to speak. I don’t know how to give a talk. I don’t know how to relate to people. I can barely look after one small child, and you want me to be a leader of thousands of Jews?” So the Rebbe simply—

44:41 Speaker 1 Told everyone, “I don’t care what you want.” Has anyone here ever been in the army? Surely someone has. What? That’s a shame. A real shame.

44:56 Speaker 13 Nir was in the army.

44:59 Speaker 1 What? Well, how many people? That’s why the army must be writing about it. Sending out notices. A notice. But to the point: why is that? Why is that? There’s a place called the army. Elsewhere a person says, “I’m going to daven at ten,” and by ten he doesn’t mean ten; he means—

45:22 Speaker 13 Coming.

45:22 Speaker 1 So it’ll be ten-thirty. But there—

45:27 Speaker 13 It’s what was set.

45:28 Speaker 1 They say there’s an army and he has to get up at six, so he gets up at six. He gets up at six like [unclear]. Yes, he gets up at six like [unclear], and he has to polish his shoes. He polishes his shoes. They tell him, “Run.” He says, “I have a hernia,” and they tell him, “Run with the hernia.”

45:48 Speaker 13 How do you know?

45:52 Speaker 1 You can see it on his nose. In short, gentlemen, what I want to say is that in the army they used to say that when someone says, “I can’t,” they tell him “I can’t” is a cousin of “I don’t want to,” and “I don’t want to” is a brother of disobeying an order—and that gets you three weeks in prison. Right? So there’s no such thing as “I can’t.” “I can’t” means “I don’t want to.” “I don’t want to” is disobeying an order. So the Rebbe simply said: at least do it even if you have to force yourselves. Lift up the relevant parts of your body—the parts that have a name in Latin. If anyone wants to look it up, in Latin it’s called the gluteus maximus, the largest muscle in the body. So lift that muscle and start moving.

46:54 Speaker 14 [unclear]

46:57 Speaker 1 Start moving. Who should start moving? Everyone. Whether you can or can’t, whether you know how or don’t—go as far as you can. Now I want to talk a little about this. I want to talk about it, not about the need to help. Not about the need to help, and not about that. I just want to tell you, gentlemen: whenever people come together, as we have here, I come to a shul—even if it’s a shul in Tel Aviv—I still see the people who are in the shul. When I’m in a shul, I don’t see those who don’t come to shul. I don’t see those who never come to shul. I don’t see those who don’t even know where the shul is, and I don’t see those who don’t know what a shul is. Right? And that is really the problem, and that’s what I want to talk about. Gentlemen, we face a situation throughout the world. Later I’ll speak mainly about the Holy Land and the holy place, because talking about other places is, again, other people’s business. Across the world, despite “Guardian of Israel, guard the remnant of Israel,” and so on, the Jewish people, the remnant of Israel, are in great trouble. We are in great trouble. We are disappearing from the world. For every Jew who joins us, who is born, several drift away. For every person who enters Jewish life, several leave it, in one way or another. We are, as they say, becoming fewer and fewer. Now, we can do the accounting differently. I once said this to those—

49:03 Speaker 1 In America: if they did that with their bank accounts, they’d go straight to prison. Why? Because they record their debts as assets. Yes, that’s a criminal offense, and people go to prison for it. What they do is record all their contributions as credits. They record them as... But when you add everything up, the bottom line is that the Jewish people are dwindling, declining and disappearing from the world. Why? Because people leave it, leave it through death.

49:42 Speaker 15 More than are coming in.

49:43 Speaker 1 More are leaving than coming in, more are dying than being born. And this is a problem that keeps coming up in all sorts of places. In some places it’s terrible and dreadful. In some places it’s just terrible; in others it’s just dreadful. But nowhere is it good. Nowhere is it good, and we know the numbers. There are all sorts of statistics, and the statistics aren’t good. Time is not on our side; time is working against us all the time. So even though we’re running around and making an effort, we’re not running fast enough or trying hard enough. We’re not trying hard enough. We’re not doing enough. We spend too much time sitting on those parts of our bodies, enjoying ourselves too much, and not doing everything that needs to be done. Now, what should we do? I don’t know everything that needs to be done. I know just one thing: a person has to understand that all these people are my brothers, my brothers, my family, my holy fellow Jews. They are no less holy than I am. They’re not. They’re no less holy. I meet them from time to time in all sorts of places, and some of them are... You have no idea how many people from distinguished families have non-Jewish wives. How many people from distinguished families, sons and descendants of righteous rabbis, sons of righteous rabbis. Ah, so that you shouldn’t feel bad about it: after all, you’re from the lineage too. You’re truly from the very heart of the lineage, right? The very heart of it. I can tell you that within that lineage, even among the descendants of the Alter Rebbe, there are quite a few people with non-Jewish wives and non-Jewish children. That’s how it is. Now, it’s true that in every... Again, there is no house without its dead. I mean, my cousin and my closest brother—there is no house without its dead. There is no

52:06 Speaker 1 house in this family where there isn’t... There are two people of distinguished lineage, two people of distinguished lineage connected with Chabad, two people of distinguished lineage connected with [unclear], and two people of distinguished lineage connected with... Two? Two? Two people of distinguished lineage. Two... people of distinguished lineage. Two people of distinguished lineage who belong to the world I know. [Unclear] secretary of the department, the surgical department, and so on. Instead, there are all sorts of people of distinguished lineage, and there are people of distinguished lineage who are no longer Jewish. They’re no longer Jewish. Now... Grandpa was Jewish. Grandpa was Jewish, Grandpa was Jewish. That’s the whole problem, the whole disaster, the whole tragedy—that someone... You’re making us despair. What? You’re making us despair. No, what I want... What I want to say is this: there used to be a kind of torture, a Polish torture, which they learned from the Tatars, who learned it from the Turks. What did they do? What did they do to get someone out of bed? They would take a pole, sharpen its end, seat a person right on the tip of it, and let him sink down. All I’m doing is putting that pole in place. Now, if someone wants to sit there, let him sit until it hurts, until he gets it into his head. Yes. I’m not saying this for... I’m saying it for this reason. Even a normal person, if you stick something like that in his backside, moves. A donkey moves when you do that to it. An ox moves when you do that to it. Why doesn’t a person move when it’s done to him? That’s a big question. Who is so clever—so clever that he just sits on it?

54:06 Speaker 1 But I’ve said what I wanted to say. There are people of distinguished lineage, and of very distinguished lineage. I know some of these people, and I know all sorts of people, one kind and another. As someone once said in our Knesset, there are people whose nerves you could use to make a vegetable salad. A vegetable salad. From their children you couldn’t even make [unclear] eggs and tomatoes. And now, what do I do about this? What am I supposed to think? I have to move. I have to move, because the question is: what happens when I go down to the wadi? I’m not an expert, I’m not a tzaddik, I’m not wise, and I see someone there who happens to be my brother, sitting and bleeding. What should I do? Stand there silently? Sit there quietly and say I’m waiting for the great expert to come? I’ll try to do something. If someone is injured, I’ll pick him up. If someone is sick, I’ll try to carry him, at least get him to the nearest hospital. What I want to say here is this: look, this is the situation of the Jewish people throughout the world right now, and it’s a very difficult, very bad, very grave situation. There is nowhere that the situation isn’t like this. And the Rebbe mobilized Chabad chassidim. If he could have, he would have mobilized the Gerer chassidim and the Breslov chassidim too. But they’re comfortable sitting there in their bekishes and davening, standing beside their Rebbe and feeling inspired, even as their brothers and relatives, their friends and family members, are being lost too. So he sits quietly and davens a long Minchah, a long Minchah. But ultimately, what did the Rebbe say? And this, this

56:14 Speaker 1 was a general matter, not something like that. There is such a thing as shluchim. Shluchim are a particular thing; they had their own role, and that’s something else, something else. The Rebbe spoke about wanting every home to be a Chabad House. So what did some Chabadniks do? They got nice signs, nice signs painted with gold letters. They bought them—how much do they cost, ten shekels apiece? Five shekels to hang them up? A person puts a sign on his house: “Chabad House.” And what does he do with that? Fine, he has a Chabad House. Yes, so he’s fulfilling what the Rebbe said and all that. That’s what you call an outright lie. Yes, I had a relative, back before the Holocaust, a relative of mine who was a rabbi in Kozhnitz. He was quite a wild man, and he was... What? He was a rabbi, but he was a wild man. That happens too. Yes, so he was...

57:17 Speaker 3 A chossid.

57:19 Speaker 1 What?

57:20 Speaker 3 A chossid too.

57:24 Speaker 1 I said he was a chossid. If he’s a chossid, if he’s a chossid, then... A chossid has all sorts of qualities. One of the things a chossid needs is at least to be a little wild, and at the very least not to sink to a low level. If he’s already going to be like some sort of creature, let him at least be like a tiger and not like a rabbit. Let him be something, have some life in him, and not be that kind of creature—what you’d call a snail, sitting there dragging itself along, smearing itself over the... smearing itself over the ground. That’s what I’m saying. So he wasn’t a rabbi for that. He wasn’t. The doctor told him...

58:07 Speaker 3 Over the ground.

58:08 Speaker 1 Yes, the doctor told him he needed to take up running. So every evening he would go out for five minutes, run down the street, and say that he had fulfilled the doctor’s instructions. I’m not talking about how you fulfill an obligation. How did I fulfill the doctor’s instructions? How did I fulfill this obligation? I do one crunch before and one crunch afterward, and I say I’ve done my duty. So I’m facing problems from all sorts of directions. These problems are real problems, objective problems. “Objective problems” means there’s a reality in the world, and that reality exists throughout the whole world. And when someone looks out at the world and sees things like this, sees that sometimes all a person has left is the great name “he shall be called by the name of Israel”—and not everyone even has that. Because there are people who no longer know they’re Jewish, and people who have already forgotten it. There are people who have never heard of it. We have to awaken them and reawaken the love. And again, I want to say what the Rebbe said, ultimately. It wasn’t just that I, the great tzaddik, the great wise man, sit in Kfar Chabad or sit in Jerusalem, the holy city, may it be rebuilt and established. I have to care about other people. He said, “It is my brothers whom I seek, it is my brothers whom I seek.” He put it this way: you may be no good at all, you may be nothing among them, you may be nothing to me, but you have to act. There’s someone out there who needs a hand to pull him out of the mud, and you have to be the one to give him that hand. Whoever you are, whatever your standing, even if you observe fewer mitzvos—go and do it. Go and do it. Not because you were given

1:00:04 Speaker 1 To give you the official role of shliach, or to make you officially the head of a Chabad House on the street—the head of a Chabad House on, on, on Kovshei Kfar Etzion Street, number sixty-five. Instead, they gave him, they gave him a chance to see. Is that his address today? No, absolutely not. My address is something else entirely. That’s my address; you don’t call things like that. In short, what I want to tell you, gentlemen, gentlemen, is that everything the Rebbe said was that it doesn’t matter who you are. It doesn’t depend on the title you give yourself, and it doesn’t even depend on what kind of, what kind of tail you are. But what can you be? That depends. No, it doesn’t depend! If you’re a little tail, then give someone a way to hold on to that little tail. Let him hold on to it, so he can rise by means of it, so he can grasp it. Do you have a bear’s tail or a mouse’s tail? Let there be someone who can hold on to it. Yes, someone who can hold on to it. Are you a big tail? Do you have a tail like a horse’s? Then more people will hold on to it; many will hold on to it. The essence and the main point of all this, of this whole matter—look what it means when it’s an emergency. When the Rebbe spoke about this around the time of the flood, when the Rebbe, in his time, spoke about this, when he mobilized people, dismantled all his yeshivos and sent people out to be teachers—and some of them were teachers. Well, I’m not allowed to speak lashon hara, and lashon hara is only when it’s true. Lashon hara is—I would say, so as not to say all of the lashon hara, that some of them were not successful teachers. Yes, that’s why I say that’s only part of the lashon hara. If I were really saying lashon hara, I’d have to put it more sharply. But

1:01:57 Speaker 1 the Rebbe sent them out, mobilized them, and told them, “Gentlemen, this is an emergency. And in an emergency, I don’t ask what you call it. I don’t debate, as they say in the holy tongue, who is a rebbe and who is a rabban, Eli bar Rebbe. Everyone goes, everyone moves, everyone heads out. Each person with his dignity, the bride to her wedding canopy. Out you go, out you go to do this.” Now, what are we going out to do? We’re going out, as they say, to do whatever can be done, as much as can be done. Because all these souls—these souls, in their hearts, in their neshamahs—and this is what it says in Tanya again and again and again. It’s to explain this matter from the perspective of the neshamah. If I happened to be born, as they say, on the right side of the railroad tracks, born into a home with certain kinds of parents and a certain kind of education, and I grew up and became, as they say—and a beard grew on me automatically—that doesn’t mean I’m better, or more righteous, or have more of a neshamah than someone who grew up on the other side of the tracks, someone who doesn’t know anything at all. So if I need to care, if I believe that there are Jewish souls, we need to care for Jewish souls. How do we care for Jewish souls? We go out and do something. We go out and do something. And who is responsible for it? Every single person, each individual himself. That’s how it is. Now, that’s what the Rebbe said, and in one sense we can—this is a big beginning. A big beginning. The Rebbe, the Rebbe once—when the Rebbe would say, he would tell someone, a rabbi, a Jew, as they say—they told this famous story. It’s still a true story: someone once came to... came to the World to Come clean-shaven, and the angel put his hand on his chin and said, “Jew, Jew, where is

1:03:56 Speaker 1 your beard?” And then a Jew came to him with a long beard, and the angel put his hand on the beard and said, “Beard, beard, where is your Jew?” Yes, where is your Jew? That’s a question. Listen to what a question that is. It’s not at all—it isn’t an escape. It’s a declaration. A declaration. There are all kinds of things that sound like an escape, sound like an escape, but aren’t. It’s a terrible thing. Even when people say it in an educational setting, in a healthy framework, people don’t realize they’re being insulted, being insulted—that they’re being told something true. “Beard, beard.” Fine, a beard grew on you, but ultimately, at the heart of it, there’s a big problem. There’s a problem. Now the Rebbe said, “I don’t care who you are: a beard or a Jew, or a Jew with a beard, or a beard with a Jew. You’re going. You’re mobilized. I don’t care.” Yes. All right, I’m sorry. Yes, that’s good. I drank. Everyone can see I drank.

1:05:04 Speaker 4 No, no, nobody saw. He doesn’t drink.

1:05:09 Speaker 1 I drank. Look, there’s a song that isn’t written down. Its author was a Torah-observant Jew, but he wasn’t a Chabadnik as far as I know, and this song isn’t a Chabad song. But it was a song people died with. Died! Yes, it’s the song, what they call the song, the anthem of Lehi. And it actually relates to this point. You see? I say I’ll sing it, but I don’t know how to sing it. The anthem of Lehi: “We are anonymous soldiers, without uniforms.” And I don’t remember all the words. “We were enlisted for life. Only death releases us from the ranks.” Yes, do you hear those words? Those are the words of a man who found himself ready to die for it. That was Avraham Stern, Yair. So you see? We are soldiers without uniforms. We’re enlisted for life. Only death releases us from the ranks. That’s it. Understand that people said this. People lived it. People died with it, people died with it. Now, Chabadniks, listen: what people said, what people lived, and what people died with—that, that is what it means. That’s what it means. I’m enlisted for life. Nobody asks me who I am. Nobody asks me what I am, and they don’t give me houses, they don’t give me ranks, they don’t give me anything. They tell me, “You’re going.” When will I be discharged? When I die. Yes, in the meantime, I work.

1:07:05 Speaker 5 Even then you won’t—

1:07:05 Speaker 1 Yes, so when I die, I know that I’ll have to deal with the Angel of Death. Maybe the Angel of Death is a nice Jew. Yes. I know. Look, he’s an angel now. Look. Look, with human beings, human beings, it’s hard, hard, hard to succeed when people don’t cooperate. The angel might get up and sit down. I’ll tell him something and he’ll believe me; maybe even the Angel of Death will believe me. But yes. But I’m talking—I’m talking here about the course of life. As I said, this is the point, this is life, this is the work, this is what it’s about. So now, on the one hand, the Rebbe said, “Who are you? I don’t care anymore. Who are you as a chossid?” It’s a bit of a cold shower. You sign yourself up there. Impressive. Which of those lists did you put your name on? Did you give a letter for a Sefer Torah? You’re enough of a chossid. They send you, uh, to bring... Yes, just let them bring it. It’s like what my friend did when he ran out of soldiers. So what did he do? He sent the children. He gave the children guns and said, “You start. You keep fighting.” That’s what we do. We say: you’ve run out, there are no more grown-ups, there are no more chassidim, so let the chassidim of chassidim go out. No chassidim of chassidim? Let the chassidim go out, the great chassidim. No more, no more Jews? Let the beards go out. The main thing is that they go out and do the work. That they go out and do the work. What?

1:08:51 Speaker 6 No, no, the same word.

1:08:53 Speaker 1 I don’t know. Now what? Anyone can put himself forward. The question, then, is what? What is the work? The work is: save a Jew. Save a Jew.

1:09:03 Speaker 6 Make a Jew.

1:09:04 Speaker 1 Save Jews, don’t make Jews. Jews are born; they aren’t made. Save them. Save them from the straits. Save them from wherever they are. That’s what you’re being asked to do, and that’s what we’re talking about. So how can I say the Rebbe made my life easy? The Rebbe isn’t asking me to learn now. I’m exempt from learning. I’m—I’m a Chabad House. The Rebbe tells me [unclear] to daven; I’m exempt from davening. The Rebbe said I’m a Chabad House. I need to deal with what they call guarding against the yetzer. There’s no guarding against the yetzer. There’s no more yetzer. I’m exempt. I’m a Chabad House, and—but that’s all the comfortable side of it. We said “exempt, exempt, exempt, exempt.” Now, your job: you were in the Military Rabbinate; you’re no longer in the Military Rabbinate. You had to bury the dead; you’re no longer burying the dead. You had to be there as a kashrus supervisor; you’re no longer a kashrus supervisor. What are you doing? You’re going to the front. You’re going to the front? You’re going. You’re going to fight. If there’s no oven, people will die. That’s what the Rebbe said. The Rebbe sent people to all sorts of places, to all sorts of remote places, into all sorts of danger. He told them, “Someone might die. Then he’ll die.” Why? Because now he’s operating in a state of war. War isn’t something where you send people out expecting everything to go well. Not everyone comes out of a war alive. In war, that’s a risk you accept, and you go and fight. You go and fight. That’s what the Rebbe said. So understand that the problem is that the Rebbe didn’t say—this is the last farbrengen in Kfar Chabad. I spent many years in Kfar Chabad, and I think that among the village’s residents, six of them are relatives of mine. Maybe more; I’m

1:11:10 Speaker 1 not sure. I’m sure of one thing: if you throw a stone in Kfar Chabad, it will certainly hit a relative of mine, one way or another. There’s almost no way it could hit someone who isn’t related. Yes, I could make lists of all the names, but in this village that would be too exhausting. Anyway, there are all sorts of opinions here, all sorts of people, songs, more songs, still more songs. The question isn’t—the question here isn’t whether they’re registered. The question is: is everyone enlisted? Everyone is enlisted. Now, I was in Kfar Chabad, and I remember it was the first time I discovered that they start davening at ten o’clock. I’d once seen in books that the idea was to get up at eight and sit and learn Chassidus for two and a half hours. I was in Kfar Chabad and discovered that for half an hour they talk about practical matters, for half an hour they get themselves sorted out at the mikveh, and for an hour they eat korem. That was a revelation to me. But obviously—they eat korem. Let them eat grapes and be satisfied. Now that doesn’t matter anymore. The Rebbe said, “I don’t mind if you eat korem.” The Rebbe said he doesn’t mind if you eat korem. But the Rebbe did say what he cares about: you’re enlisted, and you’ll go. That he does insist on. He may not insist on whether you eat korem instead of davening. So korem has the same gematria as Shabbos, and then another korem—and add one more korem and you get the gematria of a Shabbos and a half. So give me as much korem as you want; that’s fine. Do you daven? Fine. Do you just pretend to daven? That’s fine too. Do you open a book of Chassidus? Fortunate are you, and fortunate is your portion in this world and the next. You looked at the book? You’re among the great people of the generation. But none of that is the point, not

1:13:13 Speaker 1 one way or the other. The main thing is this: you’re not just doing a job; you’re enlisted. Are you enlisted? Then you have to act. Who’s enlisted? Every tortoise and [unclear]. Anyone who limps, or walks on three legs, or walks on four. Everyone is enlisted, and each person has one task. Now I want to go back, so there’s no misunderstanding about this. I spoke about the situation abroad as it is today and tomorrow. The situation in Eretz Yisroel is, in truth, no better. I’m not talking now about all the various issues. People talk about Gush Katif or not Gush Katif, withdrawal or no withdrawal, whether they’ll do it or they won’t, whether that Knesset of dogs will vote this way or that way. Those things don’t change anything. What matters is the Jews living here, in this place: the five million Jews living here. Who are these Jews? And I want to tell you again: listen, gentlemen, time is working against us. There are still people today who remember having a grandfather who went to shul. But that grandfather is dying off; in the natural course of things, he’s dying off. There are still people who remember that there was such a thing as Pesach and Rosh Hashanah. Years ago, an acquaintance of mine held a quiz for kibbutz children and asked them what Rosh Hashanah was. Almost none of them knew. One raised his hand and said, “It’s some holiday in September.” Do you understand? That’s it. And I could give you countless examples of this reality. This is the reality in our country, the one we live in. How far away? Five minutes from Kfar Chabad. Five minutes from Kfar Chabad, you’ll find all

1:15:34 Speaker 1 these things. It makes no difference. Go west and south, north and east. Everywhere you go, you’ll find it. You’ll find it. Now, who’s to blame? That isn’t important. Who has to act?

1:15:54 Speaker 7 We do.

1:15:55 Speaker 1 We do. We have to act. Now, if there’s a Jew sitting in Yehud or Rishon LeZion, or in some other out-of-the-way place, sitting in a library or sitting in [unclear]—if there’s a Jew sitting there who doesn’t hear that he needs to wake up, do something, and draw closer to Hakadosh Boruch Hu, whose fault is that? Ours. Ours. The Rebbe released us from all sorts of obligations. He said to these Jews and those Jews: “You don’t want to be chassidim? So be it. You don’t want to be part of the Jewish people? I knew long ago you weren’t up to it. You don’t want to be G-d-fearing? You aren’t anyway. But be soldiers. Be soldiers. Do the work. Do the work.” That’s what he says. On that, he won’t compromise. On that, he won’t compromise. Look, again, I don’t know. There are major Moshiachists here and minor Moshiachists, with a flag and without a flag, with all the trappings and without them, with crazy trappings on one side and on the other. I don’t care; it makes no difference. Look, there’s work to do. There are orders to carry out. So I carry out orders. I have to carry out orders. If I don’t carry out orders, I’m scum. That’s it. Here, with these things, it’s no longer a question of—what? I said, until now I was being nice and nice. I haven’t drunk—I haven’t drunk enough. So it doesn’t come out right, and things aren’t said as they ought to be said. It’s not that things are said as they ought to be said, and I generally use only polite language. Until today, what?

1:17:45 Speaker 8 Where have you been until today? Where have you been all this time?

1:17:48 Speaker 1 “Where have you been until now?” he asks. Every time I came to Kfar Chabad, wherever I went in Kfar Chabad, Kfar Chabad certainly didn’t want to see me. So they throw that at me, yes. Everyone here is G-d-fearing: chassidim, Litvaks, others. And I don’t fit in with them. Fine, so they sent me to Jerusalem, where there are Jews, Jews of [unclear]. But now I’m coming back to the point. I said: There’s something the Rebbe said to do. He said to do it. He said it was an emergency. Yes, it’s an emergency. There’s a fire burning. When a fire is raging, I don’t ask a person whether he has a license as a certified firefighter. I say: Can you grab a baby and save it? Grab the baby and save it. And don’t tell me afterward that I didn’t have permission from [unclear], that I didn’t have, as they call it, a license from [unclear] giving me the authority to do these things. Now, all these things—I want to say it again: Look. Time is simply slipping away. With every passing day, people forget and people lose their connection. It isn’t moving in the other direction. Someone who had a grandfather—his grandfather is passing away. Someone who had a picture at home of a person with a connection—that person is disappearing. Someone who once remembered there was something. Take a poll. Who knows what the weekly parsha is? Not which parsha it is this week, but what the weekly parsha means. Ask people,

1:19:53 Speaker 1 ask people about festivals and holidays, about mitzvos and practices. Ask people when the mitzvah of putting on tefillin began. They’ll tell you: “Colonialists invented it a hundred and fifty years ago.” Yes, that’s what people will tell you. That’s what people know—if they even know what tefillin are. There are many people here in our Holy Land, not far from here, who have never seen such a thing in their lives. They’ve never seen it. If they see a Torah scroll, they’ll see it in the Museum of Islamic Art. That’s where they’ll see it. And then [unclear]? Now all these people—all those who eat non-kosher meat, who trade in the organs of the dead, who slaughter pigs and [unclear]—all of them are righteous Jews compared with those who know what needs to be done and do nothing. All of them are [unclear], and there are people who truly know nothing, truly know nothing, and what they did know was no longer relevant. So now I have to go and bring all those people closer, and that’s what you call an obligation under [unclear]. Yes. It isn’t a matter of doing someone a favor. But I know there are ways, all sorts of ways, to evade it. I get up in the morning, I have to read the weekly parsha, I have to say Shema. How long does it take to say Shema? Then I have to work. Then I’m tired from work. Then I eat lunch or dinner.

00:00 Speaker 1 I eat lunch or dinner or whatever it is. Then I’m tired from the meal. Then I go watch television. Then I’m tired from the television, and then I go to sleep, and then I get up in the morning to have a little sex again. Two parts to life. Two parts to life. And after all that, I’ll tell you again: now you can say that it’s not appropriate to say this on the day of the righteous Rebbetzin. On the Rebbetzin’s day, I should have said that you’re all nice, as it were, and that you’re all, all of you, really sweet. That’s essentially what I was asked to tell you. So once again, I’m telling you quite officially: you’re all sweet. Every resident of Kfar Chabad is sweeter than the next. Even the Tel Avivians, though they belong to the inhabitants of the land of the Philistines—they’re all really sweet Jews, especially if they haven’t grown a beard. If they have grown a beard—

01:11 Speaker 2 It’s a beard.

01:13 Speaker 1 It’s a beard. There’s no point in making some sort of beard; that’s simply what it is. I’m sure that if you had to make one, it would cost too much. So it’s simply cheaper to let it grow by itself. As a Tel Avivian, then, you decided to let your beard grow rather than have one made at a theater prop shop. That’s fine. So I’m sure it’s a beard. It’s a nice beard; it’s a beard. So the Tel Avivians, and if there’s someone here from Rishon LeZion or somewhere else—you’re all nice, all beautiful, all pure, all sweet. What else can I say? What else needs to be said? I’ll go through the alphabet for you, the alphabet: mighty, clear, strong, distinguished, splendid, seasoned, and so on. May it be considered in your eyes as though I’d gone through the alphabet three times with every good description. After all that, after that whole alphabet, there is reality. And that reality—I’ll say it again—there is reality. Every Jew has a time for soul-searching, and there is a completely personal reckoning that every person must make for himself, standing before the King of Kings. That’s not my business. I can barely stand before myself. But there is Hashem’s business, Hashem’s business. Before I come before the great court up there, I have to pass before a court... before I even reach the lower court down here. Look, first of all, you’re all good people. You get up in the morning, and usually you look in the mirror. So look at that face in the mirror and ask it: Are you all right? Are you all right? Can you—can you

03:28 Speaker 1 stand up to the test? That face in front of me—can you stand up to it? That’s the question even before we get into reckonings about the higher worlds, about what they call the great court and the lower court and the great court on high. Before that court, there’s this question: Where do I stand? Where do I stand? And I need to see myself as I am. So, theoretically, let’s say he just barely qualifies. He’s called a chossid, known as a chossid, registered under the name “chossid.” Yes, he passes. He passes whatever you call the Zimbabwe tax authorities’ test. He can pass as a chossid. Fine, so he’s a chossid. Now the question is: So what? So-and-so is a chossid—what does he do? He has something he needs to do. He has a role and he has work to do. And if there’s a young man or woman in our Holy Land who knows nothing and cares about nothing, whose fault is it? Ours. Ours, ours, ours. We’re always the first ones responsible. Yes, always the first ones. We’re the ones to blame. We are. Now I can offer every excuse, but as a great rabbi once said, excuses are for the police. Excuses are for the police. Sometimes the police believe them; sometimes they don’t. I can’t tell the police the truth. So what am I going to tell the police? Let me ask instead. A person comes to me and I ask him: What have you done? What have you done about this? You’re exempt from Torah and mitzvos. Fine, we’ve already exempted you. The Rebbe has exempted you from Torah and mitzvos, from fear of Heaven and from Chassidus. Let it be an atonement for your sins; you’re a darling. Now you have work to do. Are you doing your work? You’re not doing your

05:39 Speaker 1 work. What are you good for? Tell me, what are you good for? Not even kapparos—kapparos at least requires a chicken. Yes, but here sits something that isn’t even a chicken. Yes, here sits this little, bedraggled creature with a beard. What do you call it—not a billy goat and not a nanny goat. Imagine I took a snail, put a beard on it, and put a gartel on it. Well, what sort of face would it have? What sort of face would it have? There’s a face for you. The face of a chossid. So there it is, all ready. All these things are the sort of things I’ve said as though I hadn’t said them. One ought to be nice. I wasn’t—I wasn’t nice. Look, I’m subsidized, yes, because I’ve said only good things to lift your spirits and tell you: first, that you’re exempt from cooking. No one here has to be there. Why? Someone’s already a chossid. No one needs to be a chossid. Someone is already serving Hashem. And why is he serving Hashem? If he works, he works at a Chabad House. So he’s exempt from everything—from Torah, from mitzvos, from the laws. That’s perfectly fine. No? Doesn’t that make life good for you? But now, when we get down to what they used to call the bottom line, the concluding line—well, well, “Speak to the Children of Israel,” the Children of Israel. Speak to the Children of Israel and let them move, let them move. Now, if they don’t move, if they don’t move, if they don’t move—that’s not the problem. They don’t move at all. I mean, I can certainly do it. I put all the boards together properly. I get up in the morning, I recite prayers over the troubles of the Jewish people, and afterward I put a slip in the ballot box, because I, too, am concerned about the troubles of the Jewish people. I do various things, and I—

07:44 Speaker 1 What do you call it? I subscribe to the Kfar Chabad newspaper, and I agree with its politics. So there you go—you’ll get through life. Yes, what could be better? What could be nicer? I get Kfar Chabad every week. I read the editor’s column. I read it. I read the editor’s column every week, and I delight in pleasures. As the song says: “To delight in pleasures, with swans, quail, and fish.” That’s enough. That’s enough for a whole week of—of—that’s enough for a whole meal that I don’t eat. Now, after all these true things, we come to what’s called tachlis. Tachlis: what are you doing? Yes, there was once—my father had a song he composed. It went: “We didn’t learn, we didn’t daven; only at Hakadosh Boruch Hu we didn’t shout.” Yes, that’s essentially what I’m talking about. We didn’t learn—so what? There will be Torah scholars. If there aren’t Torah scholars among the chassidim, there will be Torah scholars among the misnagdim. But the misnagdim show no sign of raising Torah scholars in their midst. They raise something like Torah scholars—people who think they’re Torah scholars, people who, who, who have... Now there’s this wonderful concept, what they call—I don’t want to repeat what there was back then. I heard it from Rabbi Rom[?]. Today there’s a whole world of [unclear]. Yes. So there are [unclear], and they decide that someone is a ben Torah. Yes, from the word Torah. Yes, as it says in the Gemara, [unclear]. So there’s a ben Torah. All right, yes, and with that I’m finished. L’chaim.

13:22 Speaker 3 Well, I don’t want to make it so that afterward we have to put each and every one of you to bed outside. That would be a bit of a bother—putting each one to bed, stroking him, and telling him to say Shema, the bedtime Shema. But let me tell you one more thing. Sometimes, when people talk about things like this, the kinds of subjects I’ve been talking about, a person says, “What do I know? What do I know?” I could say that too. Nobody knows. I just want to say: imagine each of you sitting down and, G-d forbid—no, by the way, one of the differences between Sephardim and Ashkenazim is also one of the Sephardim’s advantages. When Ashkenazim mention something unpleasant, they say, “Not to us.” When Sephardim say something like that, they say, “Not to you.” So let’s say that’s the difference: the Ashkenazim worry about themselves. But never mind; let’s even speak in the Ashkenazim’s favor. So, not to us and not to you: imagine someone gets a thorn right where he sits.

14:57 Speaker 4 What’s a thorn?

14:58 Speaker 3 And that thorn really hurts. So what does he do? Now, one approach would be for a person to say, “This thorn hurts me, so we need to go and discuss the matter. Hold a meeting—a village meeting, a meeting of the village council, a meeting of the action committee, a meeting of the board of trustees—and discuss what to do about the thorn in that place.” The problem is, whether the committee makes its decisions about what to do with the thorn or doesn’t make its decisions, what do you do about the thorn? I know one thing: I have a thorn there, and it hurts. When the thorn hurts, I want to pull it out. Now, that’s what I wanted to tell you with everything I’ve been saying. What needs to happen is for a person to feel that he has a thorn in his backside. I don’t have the solution. What’s the solution in every case? What can be done? If a person asks, “What can I do?” I tell him: you have a thorn right now. It’s his thorn, my thorn. If someone has a thorn that really hurts, in a place that really hurts, perhaps he needs to go and find out what he can do to get out of it. Does he need people to come and give him a blessing and tell him, “Listen, [unclear]”? You have a thorn there, and it needs to be pulled out. So you know you have a thorn, because if you don’t know you have a thorn, you’re in very bad shape. You may be in the early stages of paralysis, the early stages of nerve degeneration. So if you

17:04 Speaker 3 know you have a thorn, I’m coming and telling people that they have a thorn. Now what needs to be done? The thorn needs to be pulled out. There’s a problem, and that is his problem. It isn’t a matter of sides; it’s a different problem. That’s what I said.