Episode 28: Multi-Shlucha 🌎 | With Naama Oishi, Chabad shlucha in Kaluga, Russia

00:00 Speaker 1 We came back from the banquet that concludes the International Kinus Hashluchos and sat down together to record a podcast for you. So why is Naama a shlucha specifically in Kaluga? How did it all begin? How did she come to share things on her status? And a little peek behind the scenes of it. All this and more in this fascinating podcast with shlucha Naama Oishi. A reminder: if you enjoyed the podcast, you’re welcome to pass it on and share it with your sisters, friends, neighbors, acquaintances, cousins, and anyone who matters to you. Intro, and let’s begin. How do we turn our lives into lives of shlichus, full of meaning? This is Chani Moskowitz, a shlucha in Kharkiv, Ukraine. In this podcast, we’ll meet different women who have brought their shlichus into a variety of fields, and through them, help each of us find and define our own shlichus in the world. Because living the lives we were created to live is as good as it gets. Shlichus as a way of life. We’re starting now. Good evening, Naama.

01:02 Speaker 2 Hi, good evening! How’s it going? What an evening. Good night, good morning.

01:06 Speaker 1 Oh my goodness, what an incredible banquet. Wait, we’re broadcasting now from the Kinus Hashluchos.

01:09 Speaker 2 New York. The Kinus Hashluchos. The time here is—

01:12 Speaker 1 [unclear].

01:13 Speaker 2 It’s two in the morning here.

01:15 Speaker 1 Two in the morning.

01:15 Speaker 2 In Kaluga it’s probably eleven or ten in the morning right now.

01:20 Speaker 1 Wait.

01:21 Speaker 2 Yes.

01:22 Speaker 1 Right, and in Israel it’s nine?

01:23 Speaker 2 Something like that.

01:24 Speaker 1 Yes.

01:24 Speaker 2 Anyway, jet lag. We don’t remember what day it is.

01:27 Speaker 1 Of course, our brains can only handle so much.

01:29 Speaker 2 Yes, we can—everything can be blamed on jet lag. Everything.

01:31 Speaker 1 Yes.

01:32 Speaker 2 We’re at the Kinus Hashluchos. What is the Kinus Hashluchos? Once a year, around 22 Shvat, usually from Thursday through Monday, shluchos from all over the world gather. Not all of them. Some have just given birth, some are nursing, so—

01:47 Speaker 1 No, this year was the biggest kinus yet.

01:49 Speaker 2 This year’s kinus was huge.

01:50 Speaker 1 Over three thousand shluchos.

01:51 Speaker 2 So they say.

01:53 Speaker 1 Wow, incredible.

01:54 Speaker 2 Yes, I started counting.

01:55 Speaker 1 The whole neighborhood is packed, because besides all the shluchos who come, there are groups of girls and women here from all over the world. After all, it’s the yahrzeit of Rebbetzin Chaya Mushka, the wife of the Lubavitcher Rebbe.

02:05 Speaker 2 And the neighborhood is always full of guests from all sorts of places anyway. So yes, it’s been—it creates such an amazing atmosphere. I actually enjoy all the bustle.

02:15 Speaker 1 All the bustle, yes.

02:16 Speaker 2 Yes, getting that feeling of...

02:17 Speaker 1 Standing in lines, meeting people.

02:19 Speaker 2 Yes.

02:19 Speaker 1 Where are you from? And where are you from?

02:21 Speaker 2 That sense of everyone being together.

02:23 Speaker 1 Yes. And 770 is absolutely packed. Okay, Naama, introduce yourself to us, for anyone who doesn’t know you yet.

02:30 Speaker 2 For anyone who doesn’t know me, yes. My name is Naama Oishi. I’m thirty-seven, a mother of four, and a shlucha in the city of Kaluga, Russia. I’ve been a shlucha for twelve years. I always say—I always introduce myself this way, because I always say that first and foremost, I’m a mother.

02:49 Speaker 1 Right.

02:49 Speaker 2 Then I’m a shlucha, and then everything else. But really—

02:52 Speaker 1 Because being a mother is the shlichus.

02:52 Speaker 2 I try very hard.

02:53 Speaker 1 The first one.

02:53 Speaker 2 Yes, I always try very hard to put my family, the children, and of course my husband, first. So, we’re on shlichus in the city. It’s a city of half a million residents, with around two thousand Jews, by our estimate. My husband is the city’s rabbi, and we’re also the shluchim there. Any Jewish activity, any Jewish need—even one the Jews don’t yet know they have—we provide it. Programs, classes, activities...

03:29 Speaker 1 Was there a shul there before you arrived?

03:31 Speaker 2 There was a shul. It was established about a hundred and twenty years ago. Back then there was a community too, and a rabbi. We know the rabbi’s granddaughters. We have a Torah scroll that was used back in those days. Someone once brought us a shechita knife she’d found in an attic.

03:49 Speaker 1 Wow, a shechita knife, of all things.

03:50 Speaker 2 Yes, specifically a shechita knife for large animals, for cattle.

03:54 Speaker 1 Wow.

03:54 Speaker 2 Yes. And then, when communism began, the shul was closed. Today we know where they used to daven in secret. It’s funny: when we arrived, an elderly woman discovered that her father used to go daven on Shabbos. She hadn’t known. Suddenly she realized—

04:13 Speaker 1 How wonderful.

04:13 Speaker 2 She said, “Oh, I understand. My father used to go play cards.”

04:18 Speaker 1 Where was it? Near the shul?

04:20 Speaker 2 Near the shul, maybe a ten-minute walk away, something like that. Sometimes we walk past it on Shabbos. Not long ago we went in, and the owner was there—not the original owner, but the person who bought the house.

04:32 Speaker 1 Is it a house with a basement?

04:33 Speaker 2 A house—no. He actually said they probably davened on the second floor. We told him about it; he saw my husband right after the Shabbos meal, coming from davening, with his tallis and everything. So he said to my husband, “You must have come to ask about the house.” My husband said yes. He said, “There was a fire.” The upper part of the house really is burned; he uses the yard. He said, “There was a fire and nothing was left there, but I know there were siddurim there and that people davened there and everything.” It’s really sad that nothing was left. But whenever we pass, we look over and say, this is where it was, this is where they davened. Of course, they didn’t tell anyone. The children knew that their father went to play cards every Shabbos.

05:15 Speaker 1 What a story.

05:16 Speaker 2 That’s how it was, yes.

05:17 Speaker 1 Wow.

05:18 Speaker 2 Then the shul became a school, and they divided it up too. Originally it was just one floor, a shul with an ezras noshim on a kind of half-floor above. They divided it into two floors and into rooms, expanded it a little, and the municipality took it over. Eighteen years ago, some wealthy Jews from the city decided—they weren’t observant or anything—that they had to get the shul back into Jewish hands. They felt very strongly about it, but they couldn’t make it happen. They wrote letters to the municipality and made demands, but nothing helped. Then they approached Rabbi Lazar through the Jewish Federation, and the matter reached the president’s office. As soon as it reached the president’s office, an order came down from above that very day, and the shul was returned to Jewish hands. They renovated it and turned it back into a shul. And then we arrived.

06:14 Speaker 1 That’s what you arrived to.

06:16 Speaker 2 Brand-new. We came to actually put the shul to use. They didn’t know anything; they didn’t know what to do.

06:21 Speaker 1 So until then, there hadn’t been any shluchim in Kaluga. Why was that?

06:23 Speaker 2 There hadn’t been. It wasn’t a big enough city, and there was a community there that supposedly functioned—a Jewish community where most of the people weren’t all that Jewish. It was more like someone who had once walked past a Jew, someone who liked hummus, someone who liked Jewish songs.

06:39 Speaker 1 Someone whose daughter lives in Haifa.

06:40 Speaker 2 Yes, exactly. That was more or less how it functioned. Then the Jewish community itself reached the point where they wanted a rabbi. They didn’t yet know what that meant.

06:52 Speaker 1 They asked for you.

06:52 Speaker 2 But yes, they wanted a rabbi, a rabbi who—

06:54 Speaker 1 Someone there who—

06:55 Speaker 2 Yes. Once they realized what having a rabbi meant, they weren’t quite so eager for us. No, they didn’t like the idea so much.

07:00 Speaker 1 They wanted—

07:01 Speaker 2 Yes. They wanted some kind of theatrical figure who would put on a show, daven for them, and that would be it, and—

07:09 Speaker 1 You press a button.

07:10 Speaker 2 Yes, yes. But today, boruch Hashem, they’re very, very happy, and we’ve managed to—

07:16 Speaker 1 And then you heard that—

07:17 Speaker 2 Yes, then we heard about it. It was really hashgacha pratis. The shliach nearest to the city, who had helped them renovate the shul, got in touch with my husband about something else entirely. Then he asked him, “Do you happen to know anyone looking for a place to go on shlichus?” My husband said, “I am.”

07:32 Speaker 1 What a story.

07:32 Speaker 2 So he said, “There’s a city called Kaluga.” Until then we’d never even heard the name. What was Kaluga?

07:37 Speaker 1 Had you seen it before?

07:37 Speaker 2 We started looking into it. We went—

07:39 Speaker 1 Nowadays you can go on Google and tour a city.

07:41 Speaker 2 Yes, yes. No, to be honest, we didn’t think of that then. My husband and I went there for a few days and had a look around. I remember one of the wealthy people there took us down the main street, to show us the fountains and the malls.

08:01 Speaker 1 To impress you.

08:02 Speaker 2 Yes, we were impressed by the size of the city and all that. But we had already been in Ukraine; we knew the style. We knew what it was like. So we said, okay. What interested me more—what really interested us—was the people and the potential. How much potential was there? What kind of people were they? And that was it. We set out. How many years have you been there? It hasn’t been an easy road. Seven years. Seven years already? Seven years already, yes. Wow. The beginning wasn’t easy at all. Rashi says, “All beginnings are difficult.” Rashi, we agree with you. It’s not easy at all to change the way people have always done things. Imagine the whole— I always say it’s like a new boss arriving at work and all the employees hate him. He says, “I’m here to introduce a new way of doing things, to make this whole operation more efficient,” and everyone says, “What do you mean, more efficient? We’ve been doing things this way for thirty years.” But what was there before? It sounds like there was nothing. There were a lot of elderly people. They had some sort of classes— Yes, yes. Someone told me they used to light Shabbos candles, put them out, and turn on music. It was all sort of— They wanted to do something, but it was disorganized, and they didn’t want religion. There’s a beautiful story I love telling that really illustrates what Jews in Russia were like in general. About six months after we arrived, we made a bar mitzvah for a boy. Again, they had no idea what a bar mitzvah was. His mother didn’t even come to her son’s bar mitzvah. They were waiting for him to put on tefillin. Yes, she just didn’t understand what it was. Fine, they’re making some sort of celebration for him. My husband was putting tefillin on a man, and the man started crying and crying. He was seventy. He has since passed away, alav hashalom. He

09:42 Speaker 2 passed away, and he was crying and crying, and my husband couldn’t understand why. I mean, imagine wrapping black straps around someone’s arm. To someone who knows nothing about it, it doesn’t mean anything. So my husband said, “Tell me, what happened? What is it?” And he said, “Listen, when I was little, my grandfather would come to our house every summer. Every morning he would shut himself in a room, and we weren’t allowed to open the door. We weren’t allowed to look.” He said, “I was a little boy. One day I opened the door, and I saw Grandpa winding something around his arm, some black strap. My mother came right away, closed the door, took me into the kitchen, and said, ‘Listen, Grandpa is sick. He has to check his blood pressure every morning.’” Oh, wow. “‘That’s what you saw. But you should know that Grandpa is very embarrassed about this illness, so don’t tell anyone.’” Wow. And he said, “I grew up my whole life thinking my grandfather was sick.” Then he said something to my husband that was so powerful, that expresses so much about how those Jews grew up: “Only today do I understand that Grandpa was healthy, and we were the ones who were sick.” Wow, that gives me chills. Yes, because it simply wasn’t out of malice. It was a basic lack of knowledge about what it means to be Jewish, what a Jew is— And the helplessness of the previous generation, who couldn’t pass it on. Yes, yes, they couldn’t pass it on. They grew up with anger; they grew up afraid to be Jewish. Afraid their child might even inform on them. Yes, and that sinks in very, very deeply. The power of education— Yes. It sinks in very deeply. So people keep their distance. They don’t want it. They just look for the pleasant parts of Judaism—the songs, “Hava Nagila.” And very often, that’s where you begin

11:21 Speaker 2 to draw them in, through something that seems pleasant, and then— Right, because there’s no tradition either— The tension eases. They have no tradition. Yes. They have no tradition. That’s really the great difficulty. Many of them have no tradition. It’s as if there’s— Exactly. It’s not that you remember wanting to celebrate your child’s bar mitzvah, or wanting a particular ceremony. There’s nothing. Simply nothing. What’s a bar mitzvah? What’s a mezuzah? Tefillin? At most, what they remember is matzah, right? And again, without any connection to a holiday or a particular food. Just— A symbol. Yes, that’s it. Yes. So we had to start from absolute zero, improve what was there, change the rules and the way they were used to doing things. And boruch Hashem, I can say that today we’re in a much better, much more stable place with the community. People love us, trust us, open up to us, and come. There’s still a great deal of work to do, but— And there was space for a mikveh in the shul too? There was a room in the shul. That was really thanks to the shliach, Rabbi Mendy Zaklas from Bryansk. When they renovated the shul, he told them, “One day, when you have a rabbi and he wants a mikveh, leave a room where he can build one.” And there was simply a room. When we arrived, it was a storage room, okay, but they told us, “That’s the mikveh”—meaning, “That’s where the mikveh will be.” The very last room at the end of the corridor. With some kind of infrastructure? No, there was nothing there. Just a room as it was. The shul is also considered a historic building, so we couldn’t change it. From the outside, for example, we couldn’t block up

13:10 Speaker 2 the windows or anything like that. Everything had to be done inside. But yes, they simply dug. There was a bit of— They dug and reached groundwater, which is a problem for a mikveh. You can’t just— Yes, it can’t be like that. You have to follow all the halachos, get everything exactly right— Dig the pools— There are whole books about it. Yes. Listen, it really is interesting. It also makes you appreciate things you would otherwise take for granted. That’s it. When you live in Israel, a woman simply goes to the mikveh, immerses, and goes home. Yes, exactly, exactly. You don’t know all the halachos behind it— And she doesn’t know there’s a filter and there are pools and all the work behind the scenes, the water that has to be collected and how it has to be collected. In the end, it’s interesting— It really is. It’s part of— When you come to a place like this, you follow the whole process. It’s part of Judaism too. It’s not like going to a swimming pool and saying, “I wonder how the plumbing works here.” Yes. Here it’s part of it; it’s Judaism. Just as you know how matzah is made— Yes. And the halachah of lighting Chanukah candles. Look, nowadays they sell menorahs. You don’t really need to know the halachah. True. But we do learn halachah, right? So there’s something interesting about it. When I teach the women here, I don’t just give them a tour of the mikveh; I take them into the back room. I tell them, “Come and see what this actually is.” It’s rainwater. Why? Why is there all this plumbing and this incredibly elaborate setup around what is, in the end, a small pool? Yes. I show them all the pools and how it works, the rainwater, how it’s collected and what’s collected. Wow, it really is interesting. Yes. Beautiful. Tell me, I’d like you to tell a story that once

14:46 Speaker 2 You told that story on your status. By the way, for anyone who doesn’t know, Naama has a status—uh, hidden at the end, at the finish. Why? Now it’s going down like—now, now, come on. Plus—plus seven, nine zero six, five zero six. No, write it in the—what’s it called? Anyway, uh, a story—just today it came up at the table. They asked us if we speak with an accent. Were you there? No. They asked us if—uh, it was on Shabbos. They were talking about Russian accents and all that. I said the children switch so quickly between Hebrew and Russian that, when they’re speaking, they can say something in Russian in the middle of a sentence, and they say it with the Russian “r”—you know, the letter “r.” You can understand them. Yes. And suddenly they switch to Hebrew as if they’re speaking—I don’t speak with an accent, but my phone number has a three in it: “tri.” If you say “tri,” they don’t understand. They don’t understand. Russians have a really hard time with the... with “tri.” “Tri.” Right. And every time they ask me in a store, when I give my phone number because it’s linked to the discount card and all that, my kids stand next to me to hear me say “t-t-tri,” and they all collapse on the floor laughing. And the Russians are like—Mom’s a free attraction. Yes, exactly. Oh my goodness. They elbow each other, like, “Wait, ‘tri’ is coming.” One day I’ll change my phone number. No, but it was—the number, because it has an “r.” No. “R.” Yes. And “tri.” It has “tri.” “Tri.” Yes. Yes. But “shtri” has the “sh” before it. Here it’s “tri,” and they’re like, “Tri.” “What?” “Tri.” “What?” “Tri.” Oh. No, they don’t understand.

16:29 Speaker 2 They don’t understand here. Yes, they don’t understand. Yes. My daughter still has that... When she says brachos, because she says so many brachos in preschool—it’s something else. So she has that “baruch.” “Baruch.” Yes, it’s something we laugh about on the side—it’s so funny, because they can even say someone’s name, Sonya, and then suddenly, come on, with that “Sronya,” as if—Yes, Margarit—Margarita. Yes. Uh, and you mentioned Shabbos. What happened on Shabbos? There was a story that really stuck in my mind. Yes? About a Shabbos, a rainy Shabbos like this one, when you finished the meal—Oh. And you waited and waited. Yes. No, there’s—the thing with us—it starts with—okay, it was Shabbos. Let’s tell it this way. Yes. It was a very, very rainy Shabbos. Usually the rain comes in the—actually, in the summer, not the winter. And we waited and waited and waited. Sometimes the rain lasts ten minutes, a quarter of an hour. Sometimes, when it rains, people just stand there and wait for it to pass. To stop. Yes, and then they get on with their lives. Because even umbrellas don’t help. It rains as though someone turned the tap all the way on. Anyway, we waited and waited, and we saw that the rain wasn’t letting up, wasn’t letting up, wasn’t letting up. Well, what could we do? It was Shabbos afternoon; we had to go home. You were at the shul. We were at the shul. We eat the Shabbos meal with the whole community, and we said, “All right, come on, we have no choice.” It wasn’t cold; it wasn’t dangerous. We’d walk home, get there, and change our clothes. Now, the street was completely, completely empty. Then, at my class—I have a regular women’s class on Tuesdays—one of the women said to me, “Tell me, what did you end up doing on Shabbos?” I said, “What do you mean? We walked.” She said, “You walked? You didn’t take

18:16 Speaker 2 a taxi?” I said, “What do you mean? It was Shabbos.” She said, “No, I thought maybe, uh, because it was raining. You had no choice.” Yes, no choice. I mean, what else—were you going to walk in the rain? And that’s what I keep telling them: Judaism isn’t just for when I feel like it, when it’s convenient, when it’s enjoyable. Judaism is Judaism. I walk on Shabbos, even if I’m cold, even if I’m hot, even if it’s uncomfortable. I walk. She was stunned. She was sure we’d taken a taxi. Suddenly it hit her; she looked at me as if to say, “Wow, you really keep it. Really.” It’s such a powerful story, because the penny drops: there really is commitment here; there’s something here. Yes. Something stronger than everything else. It’s not, “Oh, it’s cold, well, then...” I always say this about dieting. Why can’t we treat a diet the way we treat meat and dairy? Yes. If I’ve eaten meat, it wouldn’t even occur to me to drink coffee with milk now. But with a diet, there’s always that “Oh, come on.” Because of the power of Torah. There’s a power here, exactly—the power of yiras Shamayim. Yes. It’s stronger than everything. And that’s what I sometimes say: it’s a power that took hold of me. With the children, too—for example, with kosher food: when there’s no kosher food, it wouldn’t even occur to them to come to the supermarket with me and say, “Mom, maybe we can buy some chips anyway?” It’s not kosher. They know that’s like a road: it’s dangerous, not something you just jump into, right? That clarity. Yes. It’s clear and unequivocal. But when we’re in Israel, for example, and on Shabbos you can walk in the road, suddenly that’s allowed. You can do that.

19:56 Speaker 2 It’s like—do you understand? And when we actually get to Israel, every single store becomes, “Mom, can we? Mom, can we? Mom, can we? Mom, can we?” And there, saying “no” won’t help me anymore, because they know that here it’s a possibility. And that’s what I always tell them about keeping all the mitzvos. You keep them, period. That’s it—absolutely, without compromises or anything. Wow. Tell us about the book. Oh, that’s... Actually, it’s a funny story; we talked about it. Uh, my husband actually wanted to translate it into Russian. No, wait, the original is in Hebrew. Uh, the original is in Hebrew, right, the original is in Hebrew. Let’s start from the beginning. Yes. My husband writes very, very well. Among his many talents, he writes very, very well. Really, it just pours out of him, as if he doesn’t... You can see it... Yes. People say to him, “Wow, how long did that take you?” He says, “It’s just...” When you have it, you have it. I have that, yes. Sometimes I say to him, “Write me something for some special date.” He says, “No, no, it’s not coming to me right now,” and then suddenly, that evening, he says, “I sent you something.” It’s that kind of inspiration that comes in the moment. And very often he writes stories about things that happened to him, either on shlichus or in life, or a story he remembers from his childhood that his mother or father told him, with some interesting insight, something with a little twist. And he shares it, like we all do, in a few WhatsApp groups with friends. Sometimes it gets passed around; sometimes it doesn’t. One day a man named Dovid Zelikovsky writes to him—he’s a book editor in the United States—and says, “Listen, I want to publish a book.” He says to him:

21:36 Speaker 2 “Okay, what?” “No, I want to publish a book of your messages.” It turns out that for years this man had been collecting all the messages my husband wrote. How did he get them, actually? Are they in some group together? Yes, some group together. They met or something. An American Jew, right? Yes, a Chabad chossid. And when I heard about it, I really laughed. I said, I believe in my husband, I know he’s talented and everything, but at the end of the day, these are WhatsApp messages. Right. Then I saw it turn into a really serious process. We didn’t put anything into it. We didn’t make money or lose money. It was his baby. He just needed permission, basically. He needed permission, and he needed photos. He really wanted... I was just telling someone today that he wanted a photo of us on the cover. Wow. I told my husband, “There’s no way that’s happening.” Photos of you? Yes. First of all, I told him I wouldn’t feel comfortable with a photo of me and my children. I also don’t feel it’s so modest for us to be on a book cover. And I’m not the type to dress all the children alike and take them out to some beautiful park. I don’t have the patience for it, my children have even less patience for it, and they don’t like dressing alike. In short, it wasn’t going to be what he had in mind. I thought maybe I’d have my back to the camera, or just half of me would be in the picture... That would be awful, actually. In short, no, it wasn’t appropriate. I told him... Mom went out of town, Mom happened to turn around. I told him, I don’t mind if there are photos inside... Oh, she’s in a photo now. Never mind. I told him,

23:14 Speaker 2 inside, I don’t mind if there are photos of the community, of community life and so on. In the end he worked it out and did something else, and he did something very beautiful. He divided all the stories into sections—childhood, foundations, childhood... I don’t remember all the sections right now, but he divided them up beautifully. For each section, he sent me questions. Questions like, what do I have to say about childhood, about my father’s character? What do I have to say about raising children, particularly at a young age? Some interesting insight. He sent me several questions for each section, and I had to answer them. So I wrote the answers. And again, the whole thing was so casual—I never really thought that one day I’d receive a book with all this written about me. I thought maybe it would be a kuntres, some little booklet with three shidduchim on the side. And from my answers, he put together an introduction to each chapter. Wow. Yes. So the book is about Michael and Naama Oishi. It’s called Bein HaShuchot—like we’re out in the field, in the field of shlichus. The name takes on a lot of meanings, all sorts of meanings. And it’s sold mainly in the United States. Have you heard feedback from people who—? Actually, at first we did, and we heard that shluchim had ordered it. Unfortunately, then the war started in Russia, and let’s just say Russia isn’t very popular in the world. People don’t know how to make the distinction. Yes, for other reasons, they don’t really know how to make the distinction. Yes. [unclear] told me they canceled all his orders. Shluchim all over the United States had ordered from him at the time, just before Purim. They’d ordered large quantities for mishloach manos, he said. And just before Purim was exactly when it all started. They canceled every order. They told him, “We don’t want to see Russia.” They didn’t want to— Maybe they couldn’t. They were afraid, perhaps— No, no. They treated Russia as something to avoid altogether. Right.

25:05 Speaker 2 Well, we’ll come back to that. Tell me— But yes, just today at the Kinus, someone said to me, “Are you Oishi? From the book?” How lovely. And I don’t even make the connection sometimes. I say, “It’s my husband’s book.” So she says, “No, Michael and Naama Oishi. Wow, I can’t believe it. I read it—such beautiful stories and insights.” There really are some very beautiful, moving things in it. Wait, so if he translated it from Hebrew into English, why not keep the original as well? Because someone would have to fund that whole publication. It’s not— Because English was probably more— No, he says this was off the record. He says it was his baby. He publishes a great many books, and he said, “Those are books people order. I want to publish the things I enjoy.” It was a hobby project, really. It came out in this cute little pocket-sized format. Oh, really? It’s small? Yes, yes, really small. I saw a sample photo; I didn’t remember the proportions. Yes, it’s really small. Okay, Naama, let’s move on to the status updates—we have a lot to talk about there. Let’s move on to the status updates. Go on, tell us how it all began. Have you ever told that story before?

26:33 Speaker 2 I probably have, you know, to people who asked. Actually, it’s connected to today, because it’s 22 Shvat, the yahrzeit of Rebbetzin Chaya Mushka, and the last Kinus Hashluchos I attended— Wait, today is— Today is 22 Shvat. Yes, right now. At this very moment. The last Kinus Hashluchos I attended was three years ago, just before COVID. I remember the shlucha from China still spoke at the Kinus. She gave a speech wearing a mask. As a joke? No, seriously. COVID had started there, and she said, “Yes, we have some sort of very, very contagious virus. I’m wearing a mask.” People had already begun hearing a little about it. She said that when women heard she was from China, she thought they sort of moved their chairs away. It’s funny you say three years ago. I don’t know—it feels longer. Yes, we thought it was longer. Then a shlucha met me. I loved writing back then. These days I write less. I still get the urge to write sometimes, but— You have time for it. Yes, I write short things nowadays, but back then I wrote a lot. I wrote about the Kinus Hashluchim, and I wrote a little at the Kinus Hashluchos too—posts and things like that. Mostly, I’d send them to my friends anonymously. “No, don’t say I wrote it.” One piece even made it onto the radio once, and my husband said to me, “They’re reading what you wrote on the radio.” Right, what was it? Yes, on Sivan Rahav-Meir’s program, with her husband. About the Kinus Hashluchim. [unclear] Right. Beautiful, it’s a quote. You see, that softens it. And suddenly he tells me, “They’re reading it, and people are asking who wrote it. Someone in the group—someone in the men’s group asked,”

28:21 Speaker 2 Uh, who wrote it? “Who wrote this? Who wrote this?” The piece they were reading over the phone just then. It was Friday. I remember, I remember... Do you remember? I think there were ten exclamation marks. “Don’t tell them it was me, don’t tell them it was me.” I don’t know, I felt awkward. I don’t know what it was. Yeah. Writing for the drawer, you know. Exactly, writing for the drawer. And then even friends of mine in a WhatsApp group of shluchos wrote, “Is anyone listening to Sivan Rahav-Meir’s broadcast? You have to hear what she’s reading.” Then someone wrote, “I’m sure it’s someone in this group. We just have to find out who.” So after the broadcast ended, I told them I’d written it. Anyway, then I was at the Kinus Hashluchos, and, you know, there’s always small talk with different shluchos. I always say this—I said it to someone this year, too—that it’s דווקא from those little conversations that you get... You can hear lectures by women who are truly inspiring and everything, but it’s those little chats on the street, while you’re shopping, even the whispers during a lecture, that give you real, life-changing insights. Something that makes you say to yourself, “Wow, I’m going to do this. This is me.” Then I ran into someone who was here, not for the Kinus Hashluchos but for another reason. She stopped me. I mostly know her from the media, and I’d been wondering whether to say hello, whether to tell her that I follow her and enjoy reading her content. In the end, I went up

29:59 Speaker 2 to her. And today I understand how lovely it is when someone says that to you. It doesn’t matter if people tell you ten times a day, twenty times, fifty—it feels good. So I said, “Listen, I read your posts. I really enjoy them; they’re so interesting.” And she said, “Who are you?” I told her, “Naama Oishi.” “Where are you from?” “Kaluga.” “What do you do?” I said, “I’m a shlucha.” “No, what do you do?” I said, “I’m a shlucha. I do... if you’re asking seriously, I organize trips, I do this and that.” Yeah, a full open-heart operation on Kingston Avenue. What do you actually do? So she said, “Who is Naama Oishi? You’ve got the headline. What’s the subheading? Shlucha. What’s underneath that? How are you changing the world in Kaluga?” And while she was pulling me apart, one piece at a time, she asked, “What are your hobbies?” I said, “I like to write.” She said, “Great. Where can I read what you write?” I said, “You can’t, because I...” So she said, “Naama Oishi, Chabad needs creators. Chabad needs talented people. Chabad needs you to put your world out there. You don’t write for the drawer. You write, you publish, you put a post on Facebook, wherever you want, on WhatsApp, whatever you want. Use the strengths you have. Do something with them.” And then I walked away. The conversation was over. Okay, fine, I’d heard her, but it went into a drawer somewhere in my mind. At that Kinus, though, I documented a lot. I even remember you saying to me, “Wow, you really brought those of us who didn’t make it to the Kinus into the atmosphere.” I put it on Instagram

31:44 Speaker 2 because I had an Instagram account for friends and family, you know. Yeah. And I really enjoyed it. I thought, how nice it is to show things, to write. I’ve always liked adding a cute little line, and I started taking more pictures. So I really did post more on Instagram. And at the Kinus, too, I remember it came up a few more times that none of us really shows the outside world what our shlichus is like. It’s all very much kept among ourselves. Right. We have our groups, we have our... But what about the rest of the world? Women who put so much into their shlichus. What does the world know... Yeah. About Chabad shluchos, really? Yeah. And then there’s that well-known interview with Sivan about the crazy ones—the crazy ones, yes—when she asked what people don’t know about Chabad shluchos. I said we’re all crazy. That also made me realize that interviews always have the standard things: a shlucha does this, they have hundreds of travelers, she does that... Even our shlichus doesn’t get the kind of publicity that the bigger places do, the ones millions of travelers visit and everyone knows. Anyway, I went home, back to our place of shlichus, with all those insights. Yeah. But those insights went back into a sort of inner drawer, and I didn’t really think about them much more. Then, on a Thursday evening, I was talking to a friend on the phone. We always have long chats, and I told her about those conversations. I just said, “I met Doti, we talked,” and so on. She said, “Listen, you need to write. You need to post statuses.” And I said, “What? What does that mean, post statuses?” To me, a status

33:38 Speaker 2 meant uploading a picture of my daughter saying something cute, so my sister and my mother and whoever else would see it. Just sharing with friends. On Sundays I’d always throw up pictures of the activities I’d done, but a status goes to people in your contacts. Who’s in my contacts? People I... I asked her, “Tell me, who even sees a status?” She said, “Oh, you have no idea. It can get hundreds of views.” I said, “Hundreds? When I post a status, seventeen, eighteen, twenty-five people see it.” She said, “Hundreds, hundreds. You don’t understand.” And I said, “But why would... I don’t know... Chava Cohen from Jerusalem, a teacher or something—why would she be interested in Naama Oishi and her activities?” It sounded very, very strange to me. And the way I saw social media then, it was something much more... well, not all that deep, let’s put it that way. I hadn’t really been exposed to it. As if you were afraid of entering a shallow space? Yes, a space... No, I wouldn’t say shallow. I don’t think it’s shallow, especially now that I see it... It just wasn’t me. Yeah. I couldn’t see myself identifying with something I saw as public and famous. And I also thought, I don’t know, who would ultimately be interested? Why would someone who doesn’t know me care? All kinds of thoughts like that. She told me, “Try it. What have you got to lose?” It was Thursday, I remember. I said, “Okay,”

35:23 Speaker 2 What do I need to do? So she told me, “Nothing. I’ll make you a link and…” Back then, we didn’t even know how to make the links yet. “I’ll ask my uncle, okay? He’ll make us a link, and I’ll do it. I’ll tell people.” In the past, when we did fundraisers and things like that, she would post about them on her status. Or if she came to visit me, she’d post that she’d come to visit. She’s a pastry chef, so she had a few more viewers than most people. She put it on her status. While we’re talking, I see people starting to join, and I’m watching the numbers go up: ten, twenty, thirty. I say to Shani, “Listen, there are already fifty-two women. Now there are fifty-six.” Two hours later, I suddenly see these huge numbers. And I’ll tell you the truth: at first it stressed me out. I told her, “Okay, listen, we have to finish this conversation quickly…” She’s checking all the… because I already have two hundred women waiting here, wow, on the line. From the Golan. Yes, laugh, but I told the viewers I met here in the community that in my head, there were two hundred women sitting in Eretz Yisroel waiting for content. “Come on, Naama, post already, post already!” To the point that I wrote, “Dear friends, don’t be upset, we’re starting very soon.” Chin broadcasts. Yes, I just need to save your numbers. Why am I even writing to them when I haven’t heard from them yet, right? Right. And I replied to every… And, uh, every person who contacts you, you basically have to tell her she needs to save your number. Today everyone knows that. It was a new concept. People weren’t so familiar with it then; they hadn’t realized they needed to… So I had to write, “Save my number so you’ll be able to watch.”

37:13 Speaker 2 It was a fairly long message, and I really put effort into it. I so appreciated every single person who had even come to watch, who was willing to. So I wrote, “Thank you so much for coming.” I wrote personal messages. Today I copy and paste the same shortened text: who I am, “Save my number and I’ll save yours.” But then I really wrote each person a personal message, in a different style, with a different smiley. I’d look at each one’s profile picture and compliment her: “What a beautiful family,” or “That cake looks delicious,” or “What a lovely event.” It really, really was… You sent a cake emoji, or…? Oh, I loved the… If I saw a cake in her profile picture, I’d say, “What a cake! What do you do?” Things like that. And I really felt… Wow, wow. …like I was welcoming her into my living room. Getting acquainted. I’m welcoming someone into my living room. Oh, that’s sweet. And then, uh, I really discovered this world. Today I see it as stages—stages of growing up, of understanding. It’s not just a sudden switch; you develop. And that’s how it started. It was on Purim. On Purim, the pandemic hadn’t quite started yet… But it was a week, a week and a half, before the first lockdown in Israel and around the world. It was a very, very good time for it, and the status world was still in its infancy, so to speak. There were a few people doing it. There was a group—not a very large one—but a few were already well known, and people were hungry for it. For anything new: another new person with a different niche. And little by little, the viewers added up. I remember that at first I was very, very absorbed in it. I’d wake up in the morning thinking, “What am I posting today? What’s going to happen today?” If it was a day when, for example, I had no activities—Mondays are more of a rest day after Sunday, a day

39:18 Speaker 2 when I start organizing the week and taking care of what needs doing at home. Sometimes things come up, but Monday was like, “What am I going to do on Monday? What am I going to show?” So you were already occupied with it every day. Occupied with it. There was definitely a period when it took up a lot of my attention. I didn’t prepare things in advance. I once heard someone say that for a while, she would leave the house just to create some kind of content. But yes, it was important to me to keep posting content, and it was always somewhere in the back of my mind. You know what I mean? I need to create content; I need to give the audience what they’re expecting. And slowly you get to the point—I call it virtual maturity, virtual development—where you realize that no one… True, today, baruch Hashem, there are people who write to me, “Well, what’s happening? Share more. We’re waiting,” and that really warms my heart. But people understand that today I was less in the mood, today there was less to show, today I didn’t feel like it, I didn’t have time. I think it’s more than that, too. What you post becomes much more natural to you; it comes readily. It’s less of a whole process— Yes, more natural. Though you should know that even at the beginning, I remember… Today I hear from all sorts of friends—I’m in touch with many women who post statuses, and they write to me and sometimes even ask for advice: “But I have nothing to post. I don’t know what to post.” And for me, baruch Hashem, it really is a sort of talent. I was sitting at a Shabbos meal with some viewers, and they asked me exactly that: “What do you do when you have nothing to post?” So I told them, it’s not

40:58 Speaker 2 a question of whether I have something to post or not. When you have something, you don’t necessarily post it. I walk around with my phone, okay? I always have it on me. I also use my phone for a few other kinds of work. Today we’re all attached to our phones, right? Let’s not pretend otherwise. And I see something. We were sitting in some hall, and there were wires coming out of the ceiling and going somewhere. So I told them, “I see something that looks interesting to me, something different. First I pull out my camera and take a picture.” Now, I’ve always loved taking pictures. I’ve always photographed all kinds of things. So I tell them, first I take a picture. If something cute to say about it comes to me right then, I post it too. If not, then five minutes later, when I have a moment, I’ll sit down with my coffee and… Right. Then I told them, “About those wires, I would write that the shadow government has apparently started installing something here too, because too many shluchos have gathered here.” They said, “But—where did that come from? How did you suddenly think of that?” I don’t know. One person sees ingredients, and suddenly a cake comes out of it. Someone else sees— Listen, a stand-up comedian— Exactly. Sees something— Sees something, and it turns into a joke. Right. A singer sees something, and it becomes a song. Right. And your mind starts thinking in statuses, so to speak. That’s why it’s also not— Ideas for the right moments. “Wow, how do you have time?” Posting itself doesn’t really take time. It takes time if, say, I add captions. A bit of editing. A bit of editing takes a little more time. Not much, though, because I’m very comfortable with technology, so I really do it as I go. Sometimes people sit with me and say, “How are we sitting here talking while you’ve been busy with…?” There were times. Because we

42:41 Speaker 2 Sometimes we’re sitting around the table and everyone’s on their phone except me. I laugh to myself and think, they’re busy watching things or messaging, and I don’t know—it’s not urgent for me right now. When I do feel like it, I can edit it in two seconds, put on the right caption and post it. Yes. And honestly, I really, really enjoy it. I don’t know, it’s just fun for me. At first I didn’t see it as shlichus, like I was going to take on a second shlichus. I saw it as something—a hobby. A nice hobby. Yes, why not? Let people see. I love meeting new women, hearing opinions, learning about different customs and routines—just other people’s lives. So I don’t know, that’s how it developed. And then it kept growing and growing and growing. Yes. So how many are you up to today? Oh, over six thousand. Wow. Yes. That means, imagine standing somewhere and telling a story, just something you told today, say, and there are six—six thousand people standing there—wait, wait. You don’t really think of it that way. Today, in the hall—right, there were—how many people were there? That’s the number. Right. You’re standing on the stage at the convention, showing them yourself out on the street in Kaluga, say, and that’s how many people see it every single day. Every day. Every day. Several times a day. Yes. You don’t think about it at the time. I think that when you live somewhere else—the fact that it’s another country, another language, another culture—it’s like a documentary without your having to do anything. That’s true and not true. You create things too. Fair enough, yes. I’ll give myself some credit and say that… Right. Even when I was in Israel—okay, I’ll put it the other way around—did you notice how… even

44:34 Speaker 2 when I was in Israel, it was interesting. People really enjoyed it. Yes. They told me, “Listen, we’re experiencing Israel from another perspective.” It was something like, “We’ve walked through Geulah so many times and never thought…” I don’t remember what I posted from Geulah just now, but they’d never thought about it, never seen it that way. So I see it as—not a lack of excitement, exactly—but people say, “Okay, you live in Kaluga, so you have content.” But at some point that content runs out too. How many times can you show the same market? Kaluga isn’t… Kaluga isn’t—and the same goes for Switzerland. Yes, or anywhere else. Right. Switzerland, Nepal, Thailand—at some point you’ve shown all there is to show. You’ve shown all there is to show. The city doesn’t change. The novelties there don’t change. Yes. Right. The trick is to keep showing things, but we change. Our perspective changes. Our lives are very, very, very dynamic. Yes. So the trick really isn’t to go looking for something. It just comes up. It comes up; it just comes up. Like what you do in the supermarket each time: “Oh, they’re getting ready for Tu B’Shvat.” Yes, yes, yes. It really does happen somehow. How does it happen? How does it happen? And I tell them, “I don’t know. I walk into the supermarket, and at the entrance there’s the Tu B’Shvat fruit. So that’s Tu B’Shvat in Kaluga.” Oh, that’s cool. Yes. No, it really is a talent. Of course it’s hard to put a name to that talent, because it’s not like being a singer, you know, something clearly defined. But creating content—so I say, when people call me a content creator, I

46:16 Speaker 2 don’t create content. Why? I spot the content. I’m not creating something out of nowhere. It’s like you said: it’s called Likkutei Amarim because he took—because they’re collected teachings. Yes. But you’re creating something new. Two things: you’re creating something new. Yes, right. Right. And that’s what you do. Right. Creating content that, boruch Hashem, really does come into being. Yes. It really comes about on its own. There are days when I say, “Today I didn’t plan anything,” and suddenly there’s something here and something there, and a recipe, and my daughter said something. Yes, even today, for example, I had so many things. I’m still in the middle of posting my impressions from the Kinus, and I said to myself, “Oh, there was such a cute moment this morning and I haven’t shared it yet.” Share it now. My husband stayed home with the kids, and it’s a week without Mom at home, with no helper either. So the house is upside down, as they say. But my approach is to let go. He’s a grown man; he’s the children’s father. He’ll manage. Nobody starves with Dad, even if they order falafel and pizza. I give husbands full credit. They’re not little children, after all. That’s huge. No, I don’t put food in the freezer or—the only thing I prepared was rolls for Shabbos. I don’t freeze meals, I don’t lay out sets of clothes, I didn’t even fold the laundry. I left it on the drying racks. Excellent! They’ll have something to do. Yes, they can pull things off the racks—come on. Use their initiative and fold the laundry. And today my husband sent me a message: he remembered some dish he’d made once and really wanted it for dinner.

48:05 Speaker 2 So he looked it up on YouTube. Normally my husband doesn’t cook at all, but he found the recipe on YouTube and made it. He even filmed the whole—the whole process, and there it was, ready to show off. Yes, exactly. Is it in his drive? It’s in his— And then the girls sat down to eat. So Mussy, our five-year-old, says to him, “Wow, what delicious food Mommy left us!” No, that’s priceless. Yes, it was like getting the seal of approval. The seal of approval, completely. You have to put that on your status, because it’ll be before people hear the podcast. Yes, huh? I’ll post it. I’ll post it tomorrow, and give him credit too. He really deserves it. Tell me, what was an especially moving response you got? You’ve received lots of moving responses, but was there one that really stayed with you? Wow, there really have been so, so many. Something that gave you a burst of energy to keep going. Did you ever think of stopping after a while, or did it just…? No, no. There was a period when my status kept freezing. When the problems started, I remember I was in Moscow. I’d needed to go there for something, and then I stayed on by myself—go to the mall, clear my head. The kids were at home, because they study online, so the teachers often send a link. I think the math teacher sent a link for class. The status was so stuck that I wasn’t getting messages in real time and couldn’t send messages either. Oh, that uncertainty. And all I could see was the teacher’s message with—what do you call it?—the link. You needed a password for Zoom. I remember my son was frustrated at home, and I couldn’t even message the teacher to ask for the password, and I had no

50:06 Speaker 2 other way to reach her. Everything was stuck, I couldn’t get hold of my husband either, and I couldn’t make a WhatsApp call. Everything was just stuck. I remember—I even remember exactly where I was—and everything felt stuck. There was traffic, noise and chaos, and I just wanted to get home. And then there was WhatsApp too, and I could see how long it had been stuck. I said, “Hashem, that’s it. This is holding me up. It’s simply holding me up. I’m going to stop doing this. I’m just going to stop. I’m not carrying two phones; I don’t have the energy for that. I know I won’t keep it up, and that’s it.” And about a week later, suddenly everything started working again. Isn’t that something? Yes, really. Everything, everything. Maybe the servers there… What do I know? Nobody really knows. Everyone says they know, but nobody knows. There was a period when a certain trick worked. We all did it, and it worked. I remember. I still do it today—I take it right aw— To this day I stay on the page. I don’t go in— Does that help too? Yes, it helps. It helps me. These days it still gets stuck. Sometimes it gets stuck for half an hour. Right, sometimes more and sometimes less. Sometimes it doesn’t get stuck at all. Right. But my husband knows. I always say that apart from the children’s teachers, who really do need to reach me… My husband knows that if I’m not available, there are other ways to get hold of me. Yes. Other people can wait. Isn’t that something? Sometimes there are things—today I said, “Oh, what if someone writes to me and I’m simply not available?” Well, I won’t be available. What can I do? If my battery had died or I had no reception

51:43 Speaker 2 And if I hadn’t had internet—right. I wouldn’t have been available either, right? So... wait, let’s go back to moving responses. A moving response? There were so many. I remember saying, “Wow, that’s so moving! Wow, that’s so moving!” Remember. Yes, I can’t remember right now. I think it’s the smallest things—generally, what kinds of things do people write to you that... Honestly, the things that have touched my heart the most, that surprise me the most, are things you didn’t even intend. You know, I’ll tell you, because this just happened—and I mentioned it a moment ago. A shlucha met me at the Kinus. I know her from my status updates. She came over to me; we’d spoken a little earlier about shlichus and things. And she said, “Listen, I owe you a huge thank-you. You made me feel normal. I was about to leave for the Kinus Hashluchos, to fly out, and I didn’t have the energy to prepare food for my husband, to fill the freezer with all the food we usually make. I sat there thinking, ‘What kind of wife am I? What kind of homemaker? I’m leaving my kids and my husband without preparing the food first,’ and making piles of clothes. Then I opened your status and saw that Naama had gone away and left an empty fridge.” She said, “Listen, you made me feel so much better. I’m not the only one. I’m okay.” I said, “Wow, listen, I wrote that in the moment...” Yes, sometimes what we need is someone to tell us, “No, you know, that’s completely normal.” Normalize things. Normalize things. There was something else like that—what was it? I don’t remember. You’re very practical like that, and... I’m a very practical person.

53:39 Speaker 2 I remember responses you posted that did make women say, “Wow, you can look at things differently.” Yes, people often tell me that I take things in stride. I do take things in stride. Honestly, I learned that from my husband too. I wasn’t always such a calm person. I’m not indifferent, but my husband has taught me a lot. He says, “What good will getting worked up do? What good will the stress do?” It’s so true. Wow, but you really have to live that way. Here’s a pretty extreme example. I always give this example: we missed a flight. Okay? We got to the airport with all the kids. We were on time; everything was fine. The woman at the desk simply didn’t realize we were booked on that flight and didn’t let us board. That was it. The flight took off. We weren’t on it. And I remember looking at my husband, and I was in despair. After a four-hour drive, the kids had thrown up on the way, someone had fallen and gotten a little cut. You just want to be on the plane already. You want your vacation to start, and instead you’re stuck there. I remember my husband came back from trying to get new tickets and finding out we couldn’t even get on the flight—You really missed the flight? How did that—We missed it. We missed it. I thought you’d come up with a hypothetical example. No, no, no. Okay. We really missed a flight. [unclear] Wow. [unclear] Wow. And then my husband said to me, “Naama, no matter what happens, we’ll get to Israel in the end. The question is how we’ll get there.” And he said, “That’s entirely up to us.” He knew he was the calm one, and I might not start overturning tables, but I could get upset, be in an irritable mood. Yes. Give irritable answers, like—

55:27 Speaker 2 Snappy answers, project irritation. That’s our automatic response. Exactly. And then he said to me, “No. At whom? About what? Even at each other? Will that get us anywhere? Will it help us at all?” The automatic response is to look for someone to blame. We’re always looking. I remember hearing in a parenting course that whenever you get angry and shout at the children, you should think afterward, looking back... We’d missed a flight, and neither of us was really to blame. Only the woman at the desk. We were completely exhausted. We had every reason in the world to lose our tempers, get angry with each other and fight. “It’s your fault,” or “It’s your fault because you...” But what would that have given me? What good would it have done? Nothing. And suddenly you make that switch in your head. I told the kids, “Wow, this is going to be an adventure. We’re going to another airport, and we’ll spend a whole day in Turkey.” To this day, the kids remember it as an adventure. We arrived exhausted and starving. There was a holiday there that day, and the shliach sent us frozen Turkish Airlines meals. I remember we were so hungry. The kids ate fish—no, it was some kind of smoked salmon. They hate it, but we finished off everything there. We ate absolutely everything because we were so hungry. It was quite an adventure, and to this day they remember it as fun. It was simply fun.

57:27 Speaker 3 That’s incredible.

57:27 Speaker 2 And that really was thanks to... So when people always ask me how I stay calm and how I always respond like that, it’s really—

57:36 Speaker 3 With that kind of peace of mind.

57:37 Speaker 2 Not peace of mind, not indifference. I don’t like indifference.

57:41 Speaker 3 No, that’s why I didn’t say indifference.

57:41 Speaker 2 Yes.

57:42 Speaker 3 Peace of mind. It’s a matter of faith, knowing that everything is okay.

57:46 Speaker 2 It’s like, what good will it do? I need to think carefully about my response and understand where it will take us.

57:57 Speaker 3 Yes.

57:57 Speaker 2 Okay? And if it won’t get us anywhere... Look, plenty of times I’ll tell the kids, “I’m really upset.” Just to share my feelings with them.

58:12 Speaker 3 Yes.

58:12 Speaker 2 “I’m really upset. I’m really tired. I’m really frustrated. I’m worried.” You understand? But not let it reach the point where they have to figure out for themselves that Mom is worried, upset—

58:24 Speaker 3 Yes.

58:24 Speaker 2 Tired, and so on.

58:26 Speaker 3 That takes a lot of self-awareness, and you’re teaching them too.

58:29 Speaker 2 Yes, yes, yes, yes.

58:30 Speaker 3 How to recognize, “Okay, this is how I feel,” and what to do with it.

58:35 Speaker 2 You have to train yourself too. You really, really, really have to train yourself.

58:37 Speaker 3 To manage your emotions.

58:38 Speaker 2 To manage your emotions. Yes, to tell yourself, “Breathe.” What do they say? Count to ten.

58:45 Speaker 3 Yes.

58:46 Speaker 2 Take a step back for a moment. Look at the situation, because when we see other parents getting angry or shouting at their child, we immediately think, “She’s lost it.”

58:57 Speaker 3 Right.

58:58 Speaker 2 We don’t say of the child, “He made her lose it.” Usually it’s, “Wow, she should control herself.”

59:04 Speaker 3 We parents really do need to take responsibility. I read somewhere that according to Chassidus, the father and mother represent the intellect, and the children are the offspring—the emotions, the middos. And no matter what, the father and mother always need to be the ones in control of the situation. There’s no such thing as “I lost it.”

59:26 Speaker 2 Yes, yes.

59:27 Speaker 3 “I lost it with the kids,” you know.

59:29 Speaker 2 And really, understanding that—I don’t know. My husband always says that whatever the situation, in the end it will work out. Things really will work out in the end. Like he told me, “In the end we’ll get to Israel.” I wanted to tell him, “Forget it. Let’s take the kids and drive back home. I don’t want to see anyone.” But again, you come back to the question: What would that actually give me? Where would it take me?

59:52 Speaker 3 Right. Wow.

59:55 Speaker 2 Yes.

59:56 Speaker 3 Okay, a few words to wrap up. We could sit here talking until morning in another minute. Things that really come up again and again. You get such lovely responses, Naama: “I enjoy watching your status updates because...”

1:00:07 Speaker 2 Most of the time, it’s the things I least expected. I didn’t think those would be the things that—

1:00:12 Speaker 3 By the way, “I enjoy watching your status updates”—those messages are very brief. What they’re really saying is, “Thank you for letting me into your life, in a way.”

1:00:20 Speaker 2 Yes, yes. It really warms my heart when people say thank you. “Thank you for doing this. Thank you for sharing with us.”

1:00:28 Speaker 3 That they don’t take it for granted.

1:00:29 Speaker 2 They don’t. Every woman is busy, not just a shlucha. Everyone has her own... And they appreciate it and understand that I’m doing something I don’t owe anyone. I enjoy it, yes?

1:00:44 Speaker 3 Yes.

1:00:44 Speaker 2 But I do put myself into it. I go beyond just posting. I make it look nice, add captions, add some music. Sometimes I make sure it’s attractive and pleasant to watch.

1:00:56 Speaker 3 Yes.

1:00:57 Speaker 2 And most of the time, it’s funny—when people write to me, “Wow, that really moved me,” it’s about the very things that make me think, “Wow, really?” Those little everyday things I might not even have noticed. Like, that’s what moved her? That’s what touched her? Sometimes they tell me, “Listen, I carried that with me all week,” or...

1:01:23 Speaker 3 Wow.

1:01:23 Speaker 2 Yes, really little things. I have a friend who always says, “I ask myself, what would Naama do in this situation? If I asked her, what would she answer?” She tries to get into my head, and she says, “Wow, listen—”

1:01:35 Speaker 3 Wow, that’s so moving.

1:01:36 Speaker 2 It’s... it’s a responsibility.

1:01:39 Speaker 3 Right. It’s that thing where we take our own strengths for granted. I think every woman has things that come more naturally to her.

1:01:47 Speaker 2 Right.

1:01:47 Speaker 3 And they inspire other women. That’s how I began the first episode of the podcast, when I explained why I started it. Through my status updates, it suddenly dawned on me: let’s bring women on, because every woman has things she takes for granted.

1:02:04 Speaker 2 Of course, of course.

1:02:06 Speaker 3 And sharing those things with others is an amazing kind of shlichus.

1:02:09 Speaker 2 And women really need to—need to understand that. People often ask me, “Don’t you have some kind of entrance exam? Surely a shlucha has to be someone very...” Shluchim in general—a family must have so many talents: cooking, children’s activities, public speaking...

1:02:29 Speaker 3 Some kind of basic audition.

1:02:31 Speaker 2 Exactly. Someone once said, “It would be interesting to see the test you have to take.”

1:02:34 Speaker 3 Yes.

1:02:34 Speaker 2 The admissions process, so to speak. I say, that’s what’s beautiful about shlichus, and about our lives in general: everyone came with their own shlichus, their own purpose in life, and everyone was given exactly the qualities and the—

1:02:51 Speaker 3 Talents.

1:02:51 Speaker 2 Talents they need for it. No two shluchos are alike. One is great in the kitchen, so she holds cooking events. Her Shabbos meals are really delicious. Another is good at design, so she makes things look beautiful. She helps her friends decorate. Her table looks gorgeous. Maybe the food isn’t extraordinary, but the design is beautiful. Each one uses her talents. She can try to develop other skills too, but there’s no... what’s it called?

1:03:26 Speaker 3 A sys... uh, a box that you put people into.

1:03:29 Speaker 2 No, not a box. A factory. There’s no factory producing identical shluchim.

1:03:35 Speaker 3 Yes.

1:03:35 Speaker 2 No single mold they all have to fit.

1:03:38 Speaker 3 Yes.

1:03:38 Speaker 2 Take your talents and use them to change the world.

1:03:42 Speaker 3 Right.

1:03:43 Speaker 2 Everyone does it in their own way. And most importantly, don’t try to be someone you’re not. You might see a woman you admire and connect with, but you don’t have to be like her.

1:03:57 Speaker 3 Take inspiration from her.

1:03:58 Speaker 2 Exactly. Take inspiration from her—even from the fact that she’s doing something with her talents that makes you say, “Wow.” But don’t try too hard, don’t force it. I always say this because I’ve felt it myself: it’s like a little girl putting on lipstick. It looks forced. She’s a little girl wearing lipstick. You’re a little girl; lipstick doesn’t suit you right now.

1:04:18 Speaker 3 You have your own things, the things you enjoy.

1:04:20 Speaker 2 Everyone can see it, and you can see it too, and in the end it doesn’t feel good.

1:04:24 Speaker 3 Right.

1:04:25 Speaker 2 Be who you are, the best version of yourself.

1:04:28 Speaker 3 It’s really about that faith—truly believing that Hakadosh Boruch Hu sent me into the world—

1:04:33 Speaker 2 With everything I need.

1:04:35 Speaker 3 That’s really faith in hashgachah pratis. I have the abilities I need to do my work. The people around me are the people I need to work with.

1:04:42 Speaker 2 Right, right.

1:04:43 Speaker 3 Just approach your shlichus that way. If you pause for a second... it’s self-awareness. Self-awareness plus hashgachah pratis.

1:04:50 Speaker 2 Yes. That’s what’s truly amazing about shlichus as an institution. There aren’t—

1:04:56 Speaker 3 It’s mesirus nefesh.

1:04:56 Speaker 2 Entrance exams.

1:04:57 Speaker 3 Yes.

1:04:58 Speaker 2 There’s no one template—that’s the word I was looking for.

1:05:02 Speaker 3 Yes.

1:05:02 Speaker 2 No single template to follow. The Rebbe never said a shliach has to be charismatic, his wife has to know how to give classes, his wife has to... Nothing like that. If she doesn’t know how to give classes, she’s good at a million other things that the woman who gives incredible classes isn’t good at.

1:05:23 Speaker 3 And what’s interesting is that often, I think, shluchos go out on shlichus and then suddenly discover all kinds of interesting abilities in themselves.

1:05:30 Speaker 2 Exactly, exactly, exactly.

1:05:31 Speaker 3 “Wow, I’m good at this, and I can express myself.”

1:05:35 Speaker 2 You start out in one place, and suddenly you find yourself—

1:05:39 Speaker 3 Discovering yourself.

1:05:40 Speaker 2 Flourishing in—

1:05:41 Speaker 3 Flourishing in—

1:05:41 Speaker 2 Areas where you’re, uh, where you’re good at something, yes.

1:05:43 Speaker 3 Because when you want to give something to the world, you suddenly realize, “I have something to give.” So, uh...

1:05:47 Speaker 2 I think that also makes things much easier. It may be a big part of the shluchim’s success: there really aren’t comparisons.

1:05:54 Speaker 3 Because there’s—

1:05:54 Speaker 2 Usually, when there’s, uh... We... we aren’t competing with one another.

1:05:59 Speaker 3 Right.

1:06:00 Speaker 2 Everyone has their own niche, their own place, their own... what they do there.

1:06:06 Speaker 3 And everyone is working toward the same goal.

1:06:08 Speaker 2 And everyone is working toward the same goal.

1:06:09 Speaker 3 That’s the...

1:06:10 Speaker 2 Yes.

1:06:10 Speaker 3 To be in the world today—think about it.

1:06:12 Speaker 2 And everyone uses the same tools, but in completely different ways. Completely different ways.

1:06:17 Speaker 3 Just amazing.

1:06:19 Speaker 2 Yes.

1:06:19 Speaker 3 Wow, Naama, this turned out to be something special, uh—

1:06:22 Speaker 2 We can go to sleep.

1:06:23 Speaker 3 Kinus Hashluchos.

1:06:23 Speaker 2 We can go to sleep.

1:06:24 Speaker 3 That’s it, that’s it. Tomorrow’s the flight. It was amazing, amazing—the podcast and the Kinus. All right, thank you.

1:06:32 Speaker 2 My pleasure.

1:06:33 Speaker 3 Wishing everyone a good trip home—

1:06:35 Speaker 2 Amen.

1:06:35 Speaker 3 With Hashem’s help.

1:06:35 Speaker 2 May we get there easily.

1:06:38 Speaker 3 All right, goodbye.