Episode 30: Free(dom) Is in My Hands | With Rachel Bolton, developer of the Taatzumos method - tools for change in life

00:00 Speaker 1 Why did Strauss suddenly start making products with mehadrin kosher certification? What are the three things each of us needs to have? What did Rachel Bolton decide she had to buy while she was connected to twelve IV lines? Come discover freedom—and pick up a little tip for your Pesach kitchen along the way—with Rachel Bolton, developer of the Ta’atzumot method, tools for making changes in life. A reminder: if you enjoyed the content, you’re welcome to share it and pass it on to anyone who wants it. Intro, and we’ll begin. How do we turn our lives into lives of shlichus filled with meaning? I’m Chani Moskowitz, a shlucha in Kharkiv, Ukraine. On this podcast, we’ll meet different women who bring their sense of shlichus to all kinds of fields, and through them help each of us find and refine our own shlichus in the world. Because living the lives we were created to live is the best there is. Shlichus as a way of life. We’re starting now. Hello, Rachel Bolton.

01:04 Speaker 2 Hello and blessings. Chodesh tov.

01:06 Speaker 1 A good and blessed month. The month of Nissan. Rachel, the author of the Ta’atzumot method—is that how to put it? Uh...

01:13 Speaker 2 Developer.

01:14 Speaker 1 Developer of the Ta’atzumot method. So, first of all, we’d love to get to know you.

01:20 Speaker 2 So, I’m Rachel Bolton. This summer I’ll turn seventy-three. I became observant over fifty years ago.

01:35 Speaker 1 Wow.

01:35 Speaker 2 Hardly anyone here was becoming observant then, and hardly anyone understood what I wanted, either. I’m married to Rabbi Tuvia Bolton, who heads a yeshiva for English speakers. We have four children, may they be well. We live in Kfar Chabad. For a year, I spent time among Litvish Jews. I didn’t really understand what was what, and after a year I thought being religious wasn’t for me. It was very nice, but it had nothing to do with me. Then a Litvish rabbi, of all people, sent me to Chabad. I came and simply felt I’d come home. For many years I lectured about Judaism. I was the first woman lecturer at Arachim, and I lectured at El HaMekorot. Notice that those were all Litvish institutions; they knew me before I became observant. I was even the rebbetzin at Rabbi Baran’s[?] school for girls in Herzliya, may he rest in peace. Somehow, I eventually came to Tzeirei Chabad as its first woman on staff, and I was in charge of publicity. I can’t even describe how profound and great a privilege it was to put into practice everything the Rebbe wanted. There were the Ten Mivtzoim, the Ten Miracles, the Twelve Pesukim, leaflets, Shabbos candles, tefillin, booklets—everything. There were Lag BaOmer calendars, too. I branded it all. It was an enormous privilege, and perhaps the greatest privilege of my life was “Get Ready for the Coming of Moshiach.”

03:48 Speaker 1 The yellow one.

03:49 Speaker 2 The yellow one, with the rising sun.

03:51 Speaker 1 Wow.

03:53 Speaker 2 And the lettering I arranged in an arch around the sun. “Get Ready for the Coming of Moshiach”—not in a straight line, but curving around it. I think I also put a great deal of thought into how the Rebbe would be perceived by the world. Chabad in Eretz Yisroel led the publicity work, and the rest of the world followed us, not the other way around. Everything here would be sent to the Rebbe, and I’d receive corrections from the Rebbe in the early hours of the morning, when it was late at night there. For example—

04:35 Speaker 7 You must have sent the materials physically for the Rebbe to review.

04:38 Speaker 2 Yes. There wasn’t even a fax yet.

04:42 Speaker 7 That’s something.

04:43 Speaker 2 There certainly wasn’t a fax machine. So I designed the tzedakah box, and because I came from the chareidi world and knew how things were done, I instructed the illustrator to draw only a boy. The Rebbe saw the picture that was going to be printed on tens or hundreds of thousands of tzedakah boxes, and he asked, “Where’s the girl?”

05:12 Speaker 7 Wow.

05:14 Speaker 2 My whole world changed with that question. As much as I knew how much the Rebbe valued women, my whole world changed in an instant with that one question: “Where’s the girl?”

05:34 Speaker 7 It’s amazing how it also shows us that graphic messages are part of our education.

05:39 Speaker 2 Right.

05:40 Speaker 7 It’s so critical.

05:41 Speaker 2 Right, right.

05:42 Speaker 7 It mattered to the Rebbe that every picture be right, and every—

05:45 Speaker 2 Right, right, right. Very much so. What people see, what they hear, what they experience. I worked at Tzeirei Chabad for ten years, and one day I was let go, with lots of praise and compliments, but—

05:59 Speaker 7 And severance pay.

06:00 Speaker 2 Yes, and generous severance pay. They decided I’d put in a tremendous amount of work, and they had plenty of materials they could continue using for quite a few years. It happened on a Thursday night. My husband was with the Rebbe, and I was here alone with small children. I took it very hard. It felt as though the ceiling had fallen in on me. It wasn’t that I’d earned a lot of money at Tzeirei Chabad and now the money would stop.

06:33 Speaker 7 It was sudden.

06:34 Speaker 2 It was sudden. I remember crying. I don’t know. Sunday morning—I’m an early riser. Four, five o’clock.

06:50 Speaker 7 Ah, yes, same here.

06:54 Speaker 2 I’m walking quietly around the house, and by then we had a fax machine. It also had a telephone, but we never used the fax machine’s phone. Suddenly I hear that phone ringing. Not the fax—the phone. I think, Who’s calling the fax machine’s phone? I pick up the receiver, and Rabbi Groner, may he rest in peace, is on the line. He says he’s calling because he’s trying to reach his son in Kiryat Gat and can’t get through.

07:39 Speaker 7 What’s the connection?

07:41 Speaker 2 What’s the connection? I didn’t even know he had a son in Kiryat Gat then. He asks me to try to reach his son for him, and I put two and two together. I say, “Rabbi Groner, you must have heard I was fired.” He says, “Who?” I say, “Racheli Bolton—this is the opportunity of your life.” And I say, “I want to ask the Rebbe for a bracha for success in opening an advertising agency for the chareidi community.” Just like that. I don’t know where I got the idea. There was silence, and then he said, “The Rebbe says: bracha and hatzlacha.” The Rebbe was on the line.

08:24 Speaker 7 Wow. Live.

08:26 Speaker 2 Live. I won’t say that I didn’t shed tears for years or feel the pain, but that brought so much healing with it. From then on, I understood that I was going to open an advertising agency that represented Chabad.

08:50 Speaker 7 Had you had that idea before?

08:51 Speaker 2 No.

08:52 Speaker 7 Or did it just come to you during the call—

08:54 Speaker 2 I’ll put it this way. Elite had a very, very big problem with the Eidah Hachareidis over an advertisement they’d made. The advertising man couldn’t find a way out of it, so he came to me at Tzeirei Chabad. He said, “I follow the publicity you produce for Chabad. Try to solve this for me.” I solved it, and I went to Elite and solved it there too, because he said, “I won’t be able to convey it the way you do.” Then, somehow, all at once—because I’d arranged a photo shoot for him, helped him, brought him children from Chabad because chareidi children wouldn’t be photographed, and brought him a man from Chabad who agreed to— All of it was about chocolate. Yes. And then I found myself in an advertising agency. Within five years, I’d made it number one in the religious and chareidi community.

09:56 Speaker 7 About what year was that?

09:58 Speaker 2 Oh, don’t get me started on dates. I have no idea.

10:00 Speaker 7 No, I’m curious—did those newspapers already exist, Mishpacha, Bakehilla, all of those?

10:07 Speaker 2 Well, I have to say that I was the one who brought about that change in the newspapers.

10:13 Speaker 7 Wow. I remember seeing “Bolton” on the side. Bolton Potential?

10:17 Speaker 2 After that. In the end. Yes. Yes, once I’d sold it, we added the potential. Ah, that’s it. After ten years, Globes named me one of the leading women in the economy, and among the fifty leading women in the economy in Yedioth Ahronoth’s Mamon supplement, I came in twenty-fourth. No, I didn’t really deserve it, not alongside Ofra Strauss. And I served on the board of Africa Israel for six years. Twenty-three years ago, I began a process of change. Now, what kind of change? I run a chareidi home—perhaps an artistic one, but a chareidi, chassidic home, with everything that entails. The change came mainly from a place of having experienced a lot of pain. I felt that I had taken responsibility for supporting the household. I knew whom I was marrying. It wasn’t a surprise. Sometimes you marry someone and suddenly he wants only to learn, or suddenly he wants only to work. I didn’t have that kind of surprise. When my husband was suggested to me, it was on precisely the basis of what I was looking for: someone whose world was Torah. A lot of the pain came from feeling like a victim. Not a Pesach offering, but a victim. What kind of victim? Everything was on me. I was the breadwinner; I took care of the children, cooked, cleaned. We didn’t have money in the early years. I took all my severance pay and invested it in research, because, to my mind, the chareidi public as portrayed in advertising before me couldn’t be pinned down as any one thing. I took all my severance pay, apart from about three thousand shekels that I used to buy him an old clunker of a car, and invested it in the best research firm in the country. The research showed what the chareidi public needed in dairy products, what they expected from health services, what transportation they used, and what they believed in more or less,

13:09 Speaker 2 which banks they used. In short, I then went to the Israel Business Conference, put down four booklets bearing the name of the best polling institute in the country, and they gave me an hour onstage when I didn’t have a single client. And essentially, I explained it all—I made it rain. I told the prospective clients sitting at the Israel Business Conference: if there’s a market, this is the market. This is where you need to go. It’s growing. Here are the statistics. Here’s what they consume.

13:44 Speaker 8 They hadn’t realized that?

13:45 Speaker 2 They hadn’t.

13:46 Speaker 8 It’s an economic engine. The chareidi public has purchasing power.

13:48 Speaker 2 “Chareidim don’t spend money. Chareidim don’t spend money.”

13:50 Speaker 8 That’s something.

13:51 Speaker 2 Why would they need Danone? They eat plain yogurt. Who are chareidim?

13:55 Speaker 8 That’s something.

13:57 Speaker 2 Yes. No, no, it was a different world. The advertising people didn’t understand then that they were making a mistake. They were afraid that if the client understood who chareidim were, they wouldn’t need the advertisers. Quite the opposite. That’s what I did the whole time: I expanded the market—in people’s perception of it, its place, and its importance.

14:23 Speaker 8 So that also affected, for example, the availability of more stringent kosher certifications.

14:27 Speaker 2 Absolutely. I brought in all the kosher certifications and every possible client—everyone in the market. Come, let me help you. You can get certification from Rabbi Landau, Rabbi Rubin. You can get it—what are you waiting for? Get moving.

14:40 Speaker 8 Wow.

14:41 Speaker 2 And that’s what I did. I was in and out of the Eidah Hachareidis like one of the rabbis, yes. Bringing in more clients, arranging things, and so on. Because when there’s market competition, the chareidi customer benefits.

14:58 Speaker 8 Right.

14:58 Speaker 2 When there’s a monopoly, the customer loses. As long as Tnuva Mehadrin was the only option, it came at the expense of the chareidi public’s health and, really, their pocketbooks. Once competition began, with a wider variety and everyone wanting their business, there were promotions, special packages, and a different kind of consideration—like mini Kif Kef bars. Why buy a whole Kif Kef for a small child for 1.80 shekels, when for a few shekels you can buy a bag full of individually wrapped ones?

15:34 Speaker 8 I hadn’t even thought about that, because that’s how I’ve always known it.

15:37 Speaker 2 That’s how you’ve known it.

15:37 Speaker 8 Right?

15:38 Speaker 2 The mini ones—that was me.

15:39 Speaker 8 I do remember Strauss suddenly becoming mehadrin.

15:41 Speaker 2 Yes, that was me.

15:42 Speaker 8 [unclear] Strauss.

15:45 Speaker 2 Right, I pushed them to do it. And... I experienced a lot of difficulty and pain at home. I should say that when we come into the world, we bring an animal soul along with us, and it has something to say. Otherwise, why would it come? It works very hard here. So I came with an animal soul that has—I received three gifts, that’s how I describe it. The first time my husband heard me say I’d received three gifts, he was sure he knew what they were: him, the children, and the grandchildren. What else could it be? Well, the three gifts I received were anger, control—I call myself Rachel Control, with a capital C—and a short fuse. Once I was arguing with my son, and I said, “But you know I have a short fuse.” He said, “I hope you won’t be offended, but you don’t have a fuse at all.” And he’s right.

16:50 Speaker 9 But you received a gift in being aware of your gifts, which is...

16:53 Speaker 2 Yes. No. In being willing to understand that they’re gifts.

16:58 Speaker 9 Right.

16:59 Speaker 2 I was aware. The anger hurt me badly. It humiliated me. The gift is understanding that it’s something that prompts me to work on myself. Pain is really there only to make us move and grow. That’s its purpose. So if something hurts or makes us uncomfortable, we’re really being called to change. And change always comes out of pain. When everything’s fine, nobody moves. Change itself is very painful. It’s awe-inspiring, it’s exciting. The insights, the ability not to get entangled in things you shouldn’t be involved in—those are enormous gifts. But it still comes with a lot of pain. And I came to understand something very significant. It took a few years. I understood that nobody is against us. Everyone is for themselves.

18:19 Speaker 9 Beautiful. That’s true.

18:20 Speaker 2 And everyone sees life through their own experience. Experiences aren’t facts; they’re just experiences. If my husband experiences me as listening to everyone except him, I can’t argue with that. Even if I have proof, I can’t argue, because that’s his experience. It isn’t a fact; it’s an experience. And I learned to respect the experiences of the people around me, even when I disagree. That’s often not simple. It’s still challenging, but it’s good to face challenges when you have the tools.

19:12 Speaker 9 Yes, there are always challenges. The question is whether you have the tools to deal with them.

19:15 Speaker 2 Yes, yes. And then, at a certain point, I understood that my life depends on me. I’m not dependent on anyone else. My death, the time of my passing from this world, depends on the Creator, but my life depends on me. I was given everything I need to be here and follow the path Hashem gave me, and I decided to take responsibility. Since we’re approaching Pesach—and maybe we’ll talk more about Pesach later—I just want to say that, for me, it’s the holiday of holidays. I know we work terribly hard, and I do too. I know there’s that pressure to get everything done and all sorts of things. I don’t know. I love this holiday completely—not ninety-nine percent, not even ninety-nine point nine percent, but one hundred percent, in every respect. And maybe that’s because one day I understood its depth. In the Taatzumot method, we learn that a person needs love and appreciation. You can’t do without them. Not only do we need love and appreciation; they also become the source of our fears. Most of our pain comes from feeling, in our view, that we aren’t loved or that we aren’t appreciated for what we’re worth. That’s it. There aren’t many other kinds of pain. Even the body hurts from this, not just the soul. So love and appreciation are [unclear]. Chassidus teaches that a mitzvah needs two wings to rise: it needs fear and love—seemingly, love and awe, awe and love. Awe needs to grow. And awe is a kind of awe of Hashem’s exaltedness. It’s like respect, like appreciation. When a person has a lofty fear of Heaven, it comes from deep contemplation of who Hakadosh Boruch Hu is and who I am. But it also comes from tremendous respect, from that appreciation—the love and appreciation a person needs. That’s on the higher spiritual levels. Love and appreciation are something very lofty, but they aren’t the main thing. There’s something higher. Above Chochmah and Binah is the will of Hakadosh...

22:40 Speaker 2 Blessed is He. That’s the highest thing: above love and appreciation, there is freedom. A person can be loved but not be free. All that love is worth nothing. A person can be respected and appreciated but not be free. None of it is worth anything. And something very great happened to us on Pesach. Hakadosh Boruch Hu Himself—“I, and not an angel; I, and not a seraph”—descended into the forty-nine gates of impurity to pull us out of slavery. Now let’s look at what happens. We’re all addicted to something, and sometimes we’re addicted to a lot of things. Addiction is, in fact, slavery. I’m not free. I’m not at liberty. I’m a slave. What will you think of me? What will you say about me? What did they say about me? What did they write about me? Why didn’t they write about me? And that’s before we even get to addiction to screens, drugs, alcohol, honor, food, shopping and spending.

24:06 Speaker 10 Why not?

24:07 Speaker 2 Thousands of addictions. Professor Viktor Frankl, whose approach underpins at least seventy percent of the Taatzumos method, was actually invited to the United States before the Holocaust. But he didn’t want to leave his parents, so he stayed in Vienna.

24:33 Speaker 10 Wow.

24:33 Speaker 2 In fact, he was taken to the camps, and, sadly, the Germans—may their names be erased—murdered his father, his mother, his pregnant wife and his brother. They kept him alive because he was also a doctor, a neurosurgeon. And immediately after the Holocaust, he was once again invited to the United States, this time with great honor, and appointed chief psychiatrist for all the prisons in the United States. Any psychiatrist in any of those prisons who had a problem could turn to Viktor Frankl for help. Professor Viktor Frankl said to the United States: “You have the Statue of Liberty in the east. Put up a Statue of Responsibility in the west.” There is no freedom without responsibility. There are two Hebrew words that contain the word for freedom: “choice” and “responsibility.” The word for freedom is inside them. In other words, what is freedom? It means I can choose. If I can’t choose, I’m not free. But can I choose only when I have what I want? That isn’t choice; it’s preference. If, among the things Hashem brings my way, I choose what Hashem wants, that is choice. But if I can’t choose, I’m not free. Why can’t I choose? Because what will you say about me—that Rachel Bolton chose this and not that? And then I can no longer choose? The Rebbe speaks about this: I must not be ashamed of those who mock me. Choosing isn’t the same as having a preference. If someone asks me, “What ice cream do you want?” and I say vanilla, and they ask why—is it because I chose vanilla? No, it’s because I prefer vanilla. That isn’t a choice; it’s a preference. I simply like vanilla better. When Hashem brings me to a crossroads in life, and none of the paths at that crossroads is one I ordered, I’m asked to choose Hashem’s will. That is choice. I ask myself: Is this what You want now? In Taatzumos we have a phrase: “May Your will be done.” May Your will be done. I often say to women,

27:41 Speaker 2 One says, “My daughter has met someone for a shidduch, and we don’t want him, but she does. What will happen?” Turn to Hakadosh Boruch Hu and say, “May Your will be done.” After all, if He has decided that this is a match made in Heaven, nothing you do will change it.

27:55 Speaker 10 Right.

27:56 Speaker 2 So at least choose His will. You also want to—Hashem will do what He wants anyway, and you’ll suffer as well. Why should you suffer? Come on, choose. Just give Hakadosh Boruch Hu that credit on your part: accept His will. What He wants will happen in any case. Responsibility means not blaming anyone. Not the government, not the left, not the right, not your parents, not the neighborhood, not the neighbors, not the recession. Don’t blame. Take responsibility. When I blame someone, I feel as though I’m doing something—something big. I blame, I get angry, I say, “What kind of upbringing is that? Why this? Why—” It’s called blah, blah, blah, because it’s nothing. What are you doing? Why are you blaming anyone? Who are you blaming? What difference does it make? Take responsibility. Don’t walk down the street saying, “Look how much garbage there is here.” Bend down and pick it up. Don’t say, “They aren’t doing anything for the girls.” Do something.

29:20 Speaker 11 And we get such pleasure out of blaming everyone.

29:23 Speaker 2 Yes. Someone—

29:24 Speaker 11 It does something for the soul.

29:26 Speaker 2 Yes. Someone needs to take care of the world. Not me. I’ve arrived, and things need to be taken care of. I’m just here to see whether they’re doing it properly.

29:33 Speaker 11 Exactly. An inspector.

29:37 Speaker 2 Yes. When I take responsibility, I have freedom. I often coach couples. Sometimes I’ll address the woman or the man separately, and sometimes both together. “Are you blaming me?” they ask. I say no. I’m speaking to the adult in you, asking you to take responsibility. And very often, the word “responsibility” is taken to mean that I have to pay the price. No. A responsible person is someone the world and Hakadosh Boruch Hu can rely on. And being responsible doesn’t mean I can solve all the world’s problems. As I say, there’s no such thing as a perfect mother; there’s a good-enough mother. I do the best I can. I just don’t like the word “trying,” because I don’t understand what “trying” means. Either you’re sitting or you’re trying to sit. So, “trying.”

30:48 Speaker 11 Yes.

30:48 Speaker 2 You’re sitting.

30:49 Speaker 11 Like, “I’ll try to do it.” Do it.

30:50 Speaker 2 Do it. Yes.

30:52 Speaker 11 Yes.

30:52 Speaker 2 Either you haven’t done it or you’re doing it. Freedom is everything. When there’s freedom, there’s room to experience love. When there’s freedom, there’s room to experience appreciation. It doesn’t necessarily follow, though. We have to understand that people often build walls to protect their lives, and then they can’t experience love.

31:27 Speaker 11 They isolate themselves inside those walls.

31:28 Speaker 2 Because that cuts a person off from a real connection. Because love hurts. It does. The people we allow ourselves to be close to are the people who hurt us most. If we took a survey of who has really hurt us, it would be our parents or our children or our siblings—the people closest to us. Could a hairdresser have hurt me once? Well, okay.

32:02 Speaker 11 That’s not enough.

32:02 Speaker 2 As they say, [unclear].

32:04 Speaker 11 Yes.

32:04 Speaker 2 Hurt. The point is what I’m doing today. And I’m actually not finished, because I could say, okay, Taatzumos stands on its own. There are already coaches trained in the method; there are books, videos and recordings. In any case, let’s say I’ve had a regular segment on Radio Kol Chai for nine years and an interpersonal column in the Kfar Chabad newspaper for seven years. Fine, things have gone out into the world. But in recent years, long before COVID, I’ve been deeply driven and troubled by the need to bring an answer, a response, to a real epidemic: loneliness. And I know that there are three factors which, if we examine them and work on them, can reduce loneliness to much smaller proportions. To define it, first it’s important to say that being lonely isn’t the same as being alone. Being alone is sometimes a choice. You feel like spending a few hours alone—to go for a walk, read, rest or sleep.

33:38 Speaker 11 I’m with myself. I’m not lonely.

33:39 Speaker 2 Alone, exactly. But when you’re lonely, you feel all on your own. And loneliness is something that actually kills. It’s not only that there are suicides, Hashem protect us. Loneliness itself kills; it saps a person’s vitality. And that’s why I see it as... I have amazing answers in Igros Kodesh about working on this and doing something about it. I can’t rest when it comes to this subject. I’m truly driven to work on it and bring some kind of answer, some kind of transformation, to the world on the issue of loneliness. And I think the Rebbe did something that only someone of the Rebbe’s stature could have conceived: Chabad Houses around the world. They give every Jew, wherever they are, the feeling: You are not alone. There’s a place you can turn to, where you belong. There’s a place you belong. I know today that there are three factors which, if we address them, will reduce loneliness to much smaller proportions.

35:20 Speaker 11 Loneliness is really something I experience. As you said at the beginning—

35:23 Speaker 2 My experience is that I’m not understood.

35:26 Speaker 11 In other words, it’s an experience, not—

35:28 Speaker 2 Not a reality.

35:29 Speaker 11 Yes.

35:30 Speaker 2 You can be married, surrounded by children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and a whole extended family, and still feel lonely. Usually, loneliness is the experience of feeling that I’m not understood, or that what I have to say doesn’t fit with the people around me. There are three things we need. The first is a place. A person needs a place. A place isn’t just a bed, a chair and an address. It’s: what is your place in the family? Who are you? What do your family members think of you? How much room is there for what you express, say, feel? What is your place at work? What is your place in the community? And I teach that you have to take your place—not by force. You’re given a place, but if you don’t fill it, no one will do it for you. Saying, “I’m the eldest daughter in my family”—that’s a place. But a breath later, that eldest daughter tells me, “I don’t feel I belong there at all.” In other words, you haven’t filled that place of eldest daughter. You were given it, but you didn’t fight for the place you already had. You didn’t fill it with meaning. Hamakom, “the Place,” is one of the names of Hakadosh Boruch Hu. On Pesach, we mention that name of Hashem five times in the Haggadah. We also use it in “May Hamakom comfort you,” and in “With the consent of Hamakom” on the eve of Yom Kippur.

37:46 Speaker 12 That name is also used in certain other contexts.

37:49 Speaker 2 Very specific contexts.

37:52 Speaker 12 Interesting, yes. Each name has a different meaning, but—

37:55 Speaker 2 Absolutely, yes, that’s right. And the second thing a person needs—when it’s there, it’s even more of a remedy than having a place, though it also makes that place possible—is belonging. Belonging means: I belong to the human race, to the world of people who speak. I belong to the world of women. I belong to the Chabad world. I belong to the Jewish world. I belong to Eretz Yisroel. I belong to Kfar Chabad. I belong to the Pinchas family I came from. I belong to the Bolton family, which is my family today. Belonging can also mean people who like the same sport—Beitar fans, Maccabi fans. I don’t know.

39:16 Speaker 12 So that’s basically a fact, isn’t it?

39:18 Speaker 2 No, it isn’t a fact. It’s belonging.

39:21 Speaker 12 No, I mean, you’re born into a particular family, so that’s part of me whether I choose it or not.

39:30 Speaker 2 You can still not belong.

39:34 Speaker 12 I have to choose to want to.

39:35 Speaker 2 You might not feel you belong.

39:38 Speaker 12 It’s interesting... I remember once thinking about how, when you’re abroad and suddenly meet Israelis there, it’s like, “Wow!” Suddenly they feel so close.

39:45 Speaker 2 Exactly.

39:46 Speaker 12 Because we’ve gone farther away, a circle of mine that supposedly feels very distant has meaning there, even though here I don’t feel it.

39:52 Speaker 2 Right, right. Belonging is really about this: when you want to give someone a sense of belonging with another person, it isn’t about doing them a kindness. Someone who lacks a sense of belonging doesn’t want you to do them a kindness. They want you to accept something from them. When you accept something from them, they belong. When a woman comes to my home as a guest, you say to her, “Sit down, make yourself at home.” But to someone who belongs, you say, “Could you bring me a glass of water?”

40:32 Speaker 13 Because she belongs.

40:33 Speaker 2 Because she belongs. When you define her as a guest and say, “Sit down,” you’re telling her, “You’re here and I’m the host; you’ll receive.” So her sense of belonging here is limited.

40:49 Speaker 13 And people add, “Feel at home.”

40:50 Speaker 2 “Feel at home.” Yes. Once my brother, of blessed memory, came over, and my daughter told him, “Feel at home.” He said to her, “No, thank you. At home I take out the garbage and wash the dishes. Here I want to be a guest.”

41:05 Speaker 13 Oh—blessed are You, Hashem our G-d, King of the universe, by Whose word everything came into being.

41:09 Speaker 2 Amen. There’s something about belonging: you let another person understand that they contribute something to you. Even meeting a neighbor in the stairwell and saying, “You have no idea how much you make me smile when I see you. We meet for just a moment in the stairwell; we hardly even talk. But there’s something about you that makes me happy to see you.” You let her give something to you. You needed her. To feel they belong, people need to feel needed.

42:03 Speaker 13 So that’s something I actually receive from outside myself.

42:06 Speaker 2 Right. You allow others to give to you, and we aren’t willing to let that happen. We think that if people give to us, we’re weak. And the world teaches people to fight and take, which only increases loneliness.

42:31 Speaker 13 I can manage on my own, I...

42:32 Speaker 2 Yes: “I choose, I can do it, I understand, I’m grown up.” For example, loneliness strikes two age groups in particular: older people, and not necessarily people without money or intelligence, or people who aren’t academics. No, loneliness doesn’t sort people that way. No one is immune to it. And young people, young people. Today, sadly, it has reached children as young as ten, who experience loneliness and don’t go out to see friends, don’t leave the house, don’t go out, and— it’s a catastrophe. If a friend called that child and said, “Come, we want to build something now, and we need you,” he wouldn’t feel lonely. He wouldn’t feel lonely. But if they say, “Come on, why aren’t you coming? You come too”—why would he? He isn’t sure they need him. Maybe he’ll just tag along, a fifth wheel in the vehicle of life. Take a grandmother and say, “Tell me, how did you always get your silverware so shiny? Teach me, Grandma. What did you do? How did you polish it? Did you use a towel? What did you use? Because I think a towel would scratch it.”

44:22 Speaker 13 So it has to be genuine.

44:23 Speaker 2 Yes. A recipe. I had a sister, my eldest sister. There was a very large age gap between me and my brothers and sisters. In fact, I have siblings who—

44:37 Speaker 13 Could have been your parents.

44:39 Speaker 2 Yes, they easily could have been my parents. My eldest sister went through a form of Parkinson’s, and by then she was fairly paralyzed throughout her body. She could still speak in a whisper, though toward the end she couldn’t anymore. I came to visit her. She lived in Nahariya, and I said, “Bas Sheva, you know, before I became observant, I ate a chocolate cake at your house whose taste I remember to this day.” And that’s true. “I really want to make that chocolate cake. Could you give me the recipe?” It took a long time. My sister spoke very slowly. I wrote down the recipe; she remembered it by heart. I wrote it down. On Friday, I called my niece and said, “Turn on your phone’s camera. I want your mother to see something.” My niece is my age, yes. She has children of her own already. I said, “I want to show your mother something.” And I showed her the chocolate cake, almost entirely eaten, and said, “Bas Sheva, this is before Shabbos.”

46:03 Speaker 13 Wow, that’s beautiful.

46:05 Speaker 2 My sister had tears in her eyes. She was needed; she belonged. Such small things can make another person feel that they belong. If only we understood that. What do you think? You can ask a guest, “How should I arrange the napkins?” What, you don’t know how to arrange napkins? It isn’t about what you know. It’s about the space you give the other person to feel that they belong. The third of these things is that a person needs meaning.

46:57 Speaker 13 A person searches for meaning.

46:58 Speaker 2 Yes, searches for it. And ultimately, meaning is what keeps people going. Look, building the Beresheet spacecraft is something enormously meaningful. But who says meaning has to be enormous? Don’t chop a salad without meaning. Don’t do anything without meaning. Just remember that everything has a reason. It isn’t random. It doesn’t just happen. Sometimes I’m preparing for Shabbos. It sounds funny, but this is how it is: I’m preparing for Shabbos and I have to throw away, say, part of a vegetable that isn’t usable. And I can say to a cherry tomato, “I’m sorry you won’t make it onto the Shabbos table.” But I know it’s here to try to make it onto my Shabbos table. Nothing is random. Nothing is by chance. It isn’t that I went shopping and simply saw what vegetables were there. It wasn’t just what happened to be there. It was what you needed to elevate from among the vegetables, so that in your home people would say blessings over it. So there’s something in understanding that I’m a shliach in this world. I’m a shliach. I’m an ordinary person who connects the physical with G-dliness through blessings, mitzvos, deeds and Torah study. And through these mitzvos, I make it possible for G-dliness to be present in the world without the world falling apart. There’s no way G-d could be here and this cup, this microphone and the headphones on my ears would still be here. No way. At the Giving of the Torah, with every utterance Hakadosh Boruch Hu spoke, our souls departed. That wasn’t for no reason. Didn’t we want to encounter G-d? Yet we said to Moshe, “You speak to us.” We have to understand that our shlichus can be in the smallest thing. I want to say something personal about myself for a moment, as though I haven’t said anything about myself until now. I’m one hundred percent physical and one hundred percent spiritual. I’m not fifty-fifty.

49:43 Speaker 14 So you’re two hundred percent.

49:47 Speaker 2 I’m one hundred percent this and one hundred percent that. And... I have a strong need to feed people, and I put a great deal into it. I don’t do anything without thought, and I don’t buy prepared food either. And—

50:14 Speaker 14 To feed people.

50:15 Speaker 2 To feed people.

50:16 Speaker 14 I thought you said “to contain people.”

50:17 Speaker 2 Huh? To feed them. To hold space for them, too. Of course. It’s one hundred percent spiritual.

50:21 Speaker 14 Right, that’s what—

50:23 Speaker 2 I have a strong need to feed people, and I often ask myself: What’s your problem? Right, you were sitting here, and they asked me if a group could come on Shabbos.

50:35 Speaker 14 Yes.

50:36 Speaker 2 What was the next thing I thought about?

50:39 Speaker 14 What would—

50:39 Speaker 2 Am I prepared to serve refreshments? It’s not watermelon season yet, when you can just cut one open and serve something cold. Am I prepared? No, I’m not, but I will be. And today I know that’s something very significant. Because which is greater, the soul or the body?

51:06 Speaker 14 Supposedly, the soul.

51:08 Speaker 2 Yes, but the body will be there at the Resurrection of the Dead. It will rise, because the body is what connects G-dliness to the physical world.

51:21 Speaker 14 So that’s what Hakadosh Boruch Hu wanted here.

51:23 Speaker 2 Yes.

51:23 Speaker 14 The body.

51:23 Speaker 2 He wanted the body. And that’s why, when we bless a Jew, we wish them well materially and spiritually—not spiritually and materially. Because the physical is the vessel, and giving a Jew food means giving sustenance to the vessel that can connect G-dliness and the physical world. I was just telling a friend that when someone knocks on the door asking for tzedakah, we give tzedakah along with food—a banana, an apple, an orange, cake, a bagel, something. Because there’s a particular importance to giving a poor person food. Money is another thing. Tzedakah begins with feeding a Jew.

52:24 Speaker 14 That’s called sustaining the soul.

52:26 Speaker 2 Sustaining the soul. Food to satisfy it. The soul needs to feel satisfied, and I personally put a lot into food as a way of embracing the people who come. And when I suddenly understood from Chassidus how lofty the whole matter of the body is, I realized that what I’m really trying to do is bring satisfaction to the soul.

53:06 Speaker 14 That’s exactly it. I’m remembering the meals we used to host all the time, and people would come seemingly for the food.

53:14 Speaker 2 Seemingly.

53:14 Speaker 14 And everything happened through that.

53:16 Speaker 2 Exactly.

53:17 Speaker 14 They’d come into the kitchen.

53:18 Speaker 2 Exactly, exactly.

53:19 Speaker 14 They’d want to peek at the...

53:21 Speaker 2 Yes, and, “Give me the recipe,” and “How do you make this?” We were already talking about the Pesach recipe booklet before we started.

53:29 Speaker 14 Yes.

53:31 Speaker 2 This idea of refreshments—what are they called in Hebrew? Tikroves. They bring people closer together.

53:40 Speaker 14 Right.

53:41 Speaker 2 And I thought they don’t just bring people closer together. They help the body fulfill its mission in the world: bringing the physical and the spiritual closer together.

53:56 Speaker 14 Really, our job is to see that.

53:58 Speaker 2 To see it.

53:59 Speaker 14 We’re doing it anyway, but...

54:01 Speaker 2 To see it.

54:02 Speaker 14 To feel it.

54:03 Speaker 2 Yes, to give meaning to what we do. You’re not just making potato salad for Shabbos. The potato salad you make for Shabbos sustains a soul at the table—maybe several.

54:25 Speaker 14 And you never know what touched someone, or where.

54:28 Speaker 2 Right, right.

54:30 Speaker 14 See, I told you about the recipe booklet.

54:32 Speaker 2 Right.

54:33 Speaker 14 We’ll get to that in a moment, and talk a little about Pesach.

54:35 Speaker 2 Yes, yes.

54:36 Speaker 14 So, for anyone who doesn’t know, Rachel has a special touch in the kitchen. And do you remember that I made one especially for Shavuos?

54:41 Speaker 2 There’s a Shavuos booklet too.

54:44 Speaker 14 Oh, that’s right.

54:45 Speaker 2 Yes, there’s a Shavuos booklet. I’ll tell you the story.

54:48 Speaker 14 Because for Pesach, everyone’s looking for recipes. “Save me!”

54:50 Speaker 2 Yes, yes. I once met a woman somewhere, and she came up to me and said, “Look, we’ve taken it upon ourselves to make Pesach at home. I don’t know how to cook at all.” And I told her, “You’re exactly the kind of challenge I like. Let me help you, and I’ll give you recipes.” Somehow it reached the shluchim, and I get a lot of requests for it. I have lots of new recipes that, unfortunately, I haven’t had time to add to the...

55:22 Speaker 14 Second edition.

55:23 Speaker 2 The second edition. But I do want to share one small, very useful recipe tip.

55:31 Speaker 14 Straight to Pesach.

55:32 Speaker 2 Straight to Pesach. Almond flour—we make sure it has the Eidah Hachareidis hechsher. One cup of almond flour, four eggs, a tiny bit of salt. Mix it very well. Buy an electric pancake maker; it costs next to nothing. Spray on a little walnut oil, pour in the batter, and make pancakes for the children in the morning.

56:02 Speaker 14 How about that.

56:03 Speaker 2 Before davening, everyone sits and eats pancakes, and the kids make them. I don’t even make them anymore. My grandchildren do. “Who else wants pancakes?” And there’s a whole stack. It all takes seconds. Nothing to it—three ingredients. The salt is just there to bring out the almond flavor. A cup of ground almond flour, four whole eggs; mix well. I bought a simple plastic jug with a spout, so you pour the batter rather than using a ladle.

56:43 Speaker 14 For the batter.

56:44 Speaker 2 The batter, yes. Not a ladle, because then you’re standing there ladling it out.

56:48 Speaker 14 Nice. One meal without potatoes.

56:50 Speaker 2 Yes.

56:53 Speaker 14 Wow.

56:54 Speaker 2 And it’s lovely because there’s something else to it: you serve them a little warm. So first of all, it’s something warm, and it’s also very filling. Everyone has it before davening, instead of always having just cookies—however many cookies.

57:10 Speaker 14 Yes. It’s beautiful to see how, on the one hand, you do such big things—whether it’s the advertising company or the empowerment work—but you also love the kitchen, which someone might see as something secondary.

57:23 Speaker 2 Very much.

57:23 Speaker 14 And you give it a place in your life.

57:25 Speaker 2 Very much.

57:26 Speaker 14 Not as though, “Fine, it’s a hobby, it’s trivial, forget it.”

57:29 Speaker 2 No, not at all.

57:30 Speaker 14 As if to say, “What’s that compared to...?”

57:32 Speaker 2 Yes, yes. I don’t just dabble in the physical. That’s what I was saying: I’m not fifty-fifty, I’m a hundred-a hundred. I also set a very beautiful table. Appearance and aesthetics are very important to me, and I’m practical—which may be a great gift. I’m practical. I used to fold my children’s clothes together. I have four children, one daughter and three sons. Inside each pair of pants, I’d fold underwear, an undershirt, tzitzis, socks and a shirt. They’d just take out one bundle.

58:10 Speaker 14 Wow.

58:11 Speaker 2 That way they wouldn’t pull everything apart.

58:12 Speaker 14 I never thought of that.

58:13 Speaker 2 I don’t want my closets pulled apart.

58:17 Speaker 14 How about that.

58:17 Speaker 2 These days I fold bedding that way: duvet cover, sheet, pillowcase. I give guests a bundle.

58:27 Speaker 14 We need a collection of your practical tips for organizing the house.

58:32 Speaker 2 Yes. And I value everything. That’s a very important point to me. I value things. I don’t just throw away a lot of food, and if I have extra, I look for friends or baalei teshuvah with large families who are happy to pick it up from here. It happens. I hold events and there’s food left over, and it’s all fresh. It’s not as though I give it away after three days because I don’t know what to do with it—G-d forbid. That’s it. Is there anything else you wanted to ask me?

59:08 Speaker 14 There’s a story I loved hearing from you, and if you could close with it—the one about the jacket you bought yourself.

59:15 Speaker 2 Ah.

59:17 Speaker 14 Really, about this idea of...

59:19 Speaker 2 “Choose life.”

59:20 Speaker 14 Ours. Yes, that’s it.

59:21 Speaker 2 Yes. Well, I was hospitalized for ten months here in Eretz Yisroel. I had lost a great deal of weight. I couldn’t even stand anymore; my legs gave way. Eventually it became clear that no one here could operate on me. They’d operated on me twice and hadn’t succeeded.

59:53 Speaker 14 Wow.

59:54 Speaker 2 Then they decided I would fly to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, the largest hospital in the world, and arrangements were made with a particular professor. I was supposed to arrive on Sunday night. Anyway, there was a delay, and I arrived on Monday. The operation was supposed to be on Thursday. When I arrived, a professor of internal medicine—not the one who was going to operate on me—examined me, and they did every possible test and scan. Then he said to me, “Look, it isn’t my place to tell you this, but I want to prepare you. There won’t be an operation on Thursday. Your body isn’t in a condition to withstand what it would have to go through in the operating room. The surgeon will explain it to you.” That afternoon I met the surgeon, and he said, “We’re going to take you into the operating room, put you under for ten minutes, and insert twelve tubes, each with a different purpose. We’ll build up your body so it can withstand the operation.” And sure enough, I woke up—I don’t know how long afterward—but I woke up and saw that I had tubes coming out of every possible place.

1:01:29 Speaker 3 So how many days was that for?

1:01:31 Speaker 2 For several days, through arteries, not just veins. So I was under general anesthesia. And of course, since it costs almost a thousand dollars a night to stay in the hospital, that whole place is built around the hospital. It’s a place with snow seven months of the year. Nobody wants to live there, so taxes and everything are very cheap, and it was all planned very cleverly. An entire city revolves around the hospitals, around this huge hospital with three thousand beds or something like that. The apartments and hotels are built for patients. The doorways are wide enough for wheelchairs and beds to pass through. Everything is designed for patients, but it has everything. It’s an apartment with a washing machine and an oven. Anyway, there’s a Chabad shliach there who really saved us. They told me that a medical team would come to the hotel where I was staying twice a day. In the morning they would run tests and see how I was doing, whether we were making progress, and in the afternoon they would change the bags and take care of me. And that’s what happened. The next day, both teams came, morning and evening, and I watched and understood what they were doing. On the third day, I told my husband, “I really want you to rent me a wheelchair.” He said, “What?” I said, “When we landed and arrived in Minnesota, I saw there was a mall there.” He said, “Yes, so?” I said, “I saw a Macy’s, and there’s a sale.” He said, “And...?” So I said, “I want to buy a leather jacket.” He said, “Do you hear what you’re saying? Have you seen what you look like? What are you talking about?” There was one complicated thing about all those tubes: I was receiving nutrition that had to be kept at exactly the temperature they wanted. So the bag of nutrition sat inside this, um, James Bond briefcase,

1:04:14 Speaker 2 you know? But it was a very heavy insulated case that kept the bag warm so the temperature wouldn’t drop. My husband said, “That suitcase.” I said, “I’ll carry it on my lap.” I was weak, yes, but I could manage that. I couldn’t carry anything else. My husband said, “I don’t think so.” My son, who was with us, said, “Dad, give me the credit card. I’ll get a wheelchair.” I told him, “Son, make sure it has enough poles to carry the bags and bottles.” And he came back with a wheelchair. They lifted me in and started hanging up all the equipment. There were free shuttles; everything was built around the hospital. There were seven stops.

1:05:10 Speaker 4 A whole city.

1:05:10 Speaker 2 A whole city. And I didn’t get off at any stop. The last stop was the mall. I could hear the driver’s jaw drop in shock when they took me off at the mall instead of the hospital. We went into Macy’s, and an African American saleswoman came over. My husband is American, after all, and she said—almost as if she wanted to stop us—“How can I help you?” My husband said, “My wife wants a leather jacket.” She looked at me and said, “Ma’am, please let me bring the leather jackets over here. You have a lot of tubes, and there are clothes hangers. I’m afraid something might happen.” I said okay, and she said, “I can see your size. What color would you like?” I said black, and she brought three black leather jackets. Now my son lifted me, and my husband and I each worked on getting the bags and bottles through the sleeves so I could try on a jacket. Not even all the way—just enough to see it. I tried on the first jacket and said no. The second was too masculine, so no. With the third, I said, “Okay, I think this is it.” When my husband went to pay at the register, the saleswoman said, “I’ve worked here for thirty years. I’ve never seen a woman like your wife.” So he told her, “My wife is a very smart woman. I didn’t tell her, but there’s a fifty percent chance we’re coming back with a coffin instead of a wife.”

1:07:18 Speaker 4 That’s what the doctor told him.

1:07:19 Speaker 2 Yes. Then I had an eleven-hour operation, which the professor had thought would take another four hours. I’ll tell you that the next morning, when the professor came in, I saw the worry in his eyes, and that worried me. Then he turned to me and said he was terribly sorry. He wasn’t sure he had closed it properly. I had to have a scan, even though it would hurt terribly right then. They positioned me, moved me, and did the scan, and boruch Hashem, it was all right. Did I really need a leather jacket? Not exactly. Anyone who knows me well knows I dress nicely, but I’m not a fashionable woman. That’s not what this was about at all. I wanted to tell myself and the world that I was going to live. That professor and his wife became friends of ours. They came to Israel, spent a week with us here, and we went sightseeing. In the car, my husband drove, the professor sat beside him, and his wife sat beside me. She said, “You know, when you were in surgery, I was very worried. It was midnight, and my husband wasn’t answering. The operation had started at noon. What was going on? I kept calling, and they kept saying he was in the operating room. When he got home at one in the morning, he said, ‘She pulled off a miracle on the operating table.’” So I said, “No, he performed the miracle.” The professor turned to me and said, “Mrs. Bolton, you chose to live.” And he didn’t know about the leather jacket. When we got back to Israel, my husband asked everyone not to come to the airport because the flight was so exhausting. There was a layover in [unclear][?] and a change of planes. I was in a wheelchair, still connected to three of all those tubes. Everyone was waiting here, apart from one son who came to pick us up. I didn’t even come in the usual way. Then, here at home, everyone asked, “So, how was it?” I had my operation on Purim.

1:10:04 Speaker 5 On Purim itself.

1:10:05 Speaker 2 Purim.

1:10:05 Speaker 5 Wow.

1:10:09 Speaker 2 “So, how was it?” And my husband said, “She bought a leather jacket. What do you mean, how was it?” Ah, I want to take this opportunity to tell one more little story. On the eve of Purim—um, Purim fell on Shabbos or something like that. I don’t remember exactly how it worked out.

1:10:31 Speaker 5 You’re talking about that same year?

1:10:33 Speaker 2 That same year. Bruriah Holtzman, as principal of the elementary school, printed out my name, Rachel bas Tova, for a complete recovery. She handed it out throughout the school and said, “Girls, pray for her when you light Shabbos candles. And tell your mothers too.” I was very moved.

1:11:06 Speaker 5 Wow.

1:11:07 Speaker 2 Yes, I was very moved. When I came back, it was around this time of year, really just two days before school let out for Pesach. I called Zami Lipsker and said, “Zami, I need five hundred chocolate bars.” “I don’t know,” he said, “kosher for Pesach?” I said, “No, no, no, it doesn’t have to be kosher for Pesach.” We printed stickers, and I wrote a message for each one. Every girl received one that said: “I want to thank you. Your prayers helped.” I wanted the girls, who are asked all the time to “pray, pray,” to know that sometimes it helps. Not sometimes—always. I said thank you; I recovered. Rachel bas Tova. Now, you have to understand, they didn’t know that Rachel bas Tova was Rachel Bolton. The girls didn’t know. Parents of those girls, some of whom knew who Rachel bas Tova was, told me, “You have no idea what you did for my daughter.”

1:12:35 Speaker 6 Wow.

1:12:36 Speaker 2 She came with [unclear]. She said, “You know, she recovered.”

1:12:40 Speaker 6 Oh, that brought it full circle for them.

1:12:44 Speaker 2 Yes, very much so. It was very important to me that those girls—I mean, children are asked to do so much: “Do this, make this bracha, say this, observe that.” They don’t know whether something happens afterward or not. It was very important to me.

1:13:02 Speaker 6 Wow, wow, how moving.

1:13:04 Speaker 2 And you know, I heard afterward that most of the girls didn’t eat the chocolate. They wanted to show people that they had received chocolate.

1:13:14 Speaker 6 Wow. I’ll close with a wish that we truly merit

1:13:19 Speaker 2 the complete and imminent Geulah. And I believe very strongly that every woman who brings Geulah into her own life lights a lamp. When most of the lamps in the world are lit, everything will be clearer.

1:13:37 Speaker 6 Right.

1:13:37 Speaker 2 Just light the lamp.

1:13:39 Speaker 6 To step into my own personal freedom, and—

1:13:41 Speaker 2 Right, right.

1:13:43 Speaker 6 Wow. Thank you so, so much, Rachel.

1:13:44 Speaker 2 Thank you so much for the opportunity.

1:13:45 Speaker 6 Thank you very much. A kosher and happy Pesach.

1:13:47 Speaker 2 A kosher and happy Pesach.