Episode 62: A winning mindset for a big business | With Zeldi Blum, owner of the activities brand "Zeldi - This is how you make joy!"

00:00 Speaker 1 It’s worth listening to this podcast with a pen and paper, or a note open on your phone, so you can write down the messages—because it’s a huge, huge lesson for life. Zeldi Blum is twenty-three, with a wisdom about life that could hold its own against generations before her. She leads dancing and activities for thousands of girls across the country and is a leader in her field, and for good reason. Come hear how, at her age, she managed to build such an empire. How did she lead an activity for the women in Neve Tirza prison without a single prop, using only herself? What did she do when she broke her ankle at the start of her busiest season? And how does everything fall into place when you understand that none of this happens through your own strength? A reminder: if you liked this episode, don’t keep it to yourself. Pass it on to your sister, your mother, a neighbor or a friend—to anyone you care about. To follow me on Instagram, search for Chani Moskowitz. To watch my status, book workshops and talks about life-changing tools from Chassidus, or join the “Chassidus by the Spoonful” program, it’s all at 050-850-5770. The intro, and then we’ll begin. How can we turn our lives into lives of shlichus, full of meaning? I’m Chani Moskowitz, a shlucha in Kharkiv, Ukraine, and now continuing my shlichus in Karmei Gat, Israel. In this podcast, we’ll meet different women who bring their shlichus to a variety of fields and, through it, help each of us find and refine our own shlichus in the world. Because living the life we were created to live is the best there is. Shlichus as a way of life. We’re starting right now. Welcome to another episode of Shlichus as a Way of Life. Today we’re with Zeldi Blum.

01:39 Speaker 2 Nice to meet you.

01:40 Speaker 1 How are you?

01:41 Speaker 2 Boruch Hashem.

01:43 Speaker 1 So, Zeldi, how old are you?

01:45 Speaker 2 Should I say?

01:47 Speaker 1 Let’s start there. Let’s start there.

01:48 Speaker 2 I’m twenty-three.

01:49 Speaker 1 That’s something.

01:50 Speaker 2 And a mother of three sweet children.

01:53 Speaker 1 No way. Incredible.

01:53 Speaker 2 Boruch Hashem. Happily married, and that’s it. And I have a business, boruch Hashem, and run a school with activity leaders, and boruch Hashem, I don’t know where...

02:08 Speaker 1 Where to start. Wherever you like.

02:09 Speaker 2 Exactly.

02:10 Speaker 1 I told you earlier that I invited you because people reached out to me and said, “Talk to Zeldi, talk to Zeldi.” And a lot of times, when I speak to someone who appears on statuses and stories and shares what she does, I say, “Here’s your chance to show more than a minute.” Because you see someone, she gives you inspiration and strength, you connect with her, and you think, “Wow, I want to hear her speak for more than a minute at a time.” Something more from the inside, something more...

02:41 Speaker 2 What’s going on beyond that.

02:42 Speaker 1 Yes. So here’s the platform and the place for it.

02:45 Speaker 2 How exciting.

02:46 Speaker 1 So introduce yourself. Take us back for a moment. Where did you grow up? Where do you come from?

02:52 Speaker 2 So let’s start at the beginning.

02:53 Speaker 1 It wasn’t that long ago, but...

02:56 Speaker 2 It already feels like a long time ago. I grew up in Beit Shemesh. My school was very... I went to a very, very sheltered school. We were Toldos Aharon for years and years. When I was about twelve or thirteen, my father became close to Chabad and began learning more Chassidus. Actually, he started learning Chassidus when I was younger, but by the time I was growing up, he was a real Chabadnik. The Rebbe, and... the whole home was very, very Chassidic. And I said, “I’m going to be Toldos Aharon.” That’s how I grew up; that’s how I was taught. I was about fourteen or fifteen, and I knew I had to decide what I wanted to be when I grew up: Toldos Aharon or Chabad. Because in Toldos Aharon, and in the community I grew up in, people marry young. At seventeen and a half, you become a bride. So at fifteen, you need to know what you want to be.

03:48 Speaker 1 Wait, where was your mother in all this?

03:51 Speaker 2 My father became close to Chabad, and my mother came along slowly, slowly, slowly. Today my parents’ home is very Chabad, but back then it was more that everyone could choose what they wanted to be. One brother went on to Breslov, and another remained very firmly Toldos Aharon. My sisters who got married did become Chabadniks, and I was—I was sure I’d be Toldos Aharon. I mean, that was what you knew as the best, the most protected, the purest and the most closed-off. That’s how you grow up from the time you’re little. I went to tishen, I had a good friend, I had lots of friends, and it was just understood that this was what I’d be. One day—one of the things that was very, very forbidden at our school was going away for a Shabbos camp with friends. So, of course, something forbidden was the very thing I wanted most. I dreamed about it. My biggest dream was to go to a Shabbos camp with friends. And a lot of things were forbidden. We used to say, “Everything is forbi—everything is forbidden except what’s permitted.” For instance, we weren’t allowed to speak Hebrew. We finished school at one o’clock.

04:58 Speaker 3 You weren’t allowed to speak Hebrew? So all the classes were in Yiddish?

05:00 Speaker 2 In Yiddish. We studied on a strictly religious basis, without government funding or a secular curriculum. There was just geography, arithmetic, Chumash, Navi, Tehillim, and things like that. We didn’t have... we didn’t study [unclear], and there were no secular subjects, no matriculation exams. Even in ninth, tenth, eleventh and twelfth grades, we finished at one o’clock. And I actually enjoyed it very, very much.

05:27 Speaker 3 That’s not bad.

05:29 Speaker 2 But we also weren’t allowed to go to a swimming pool or to the beach. I remember once I went to the beach with my cousins, and they suspended me from school for two weeks because they found out my face had gotten sunburned.

05:42 Speaker 3 So it really was more closed-off than the typical Charedi community.

05:46 Speaker 2 Yes, yes. It was, it was a bit...

05:49 Speaker 3 Because here in the Charedi community, all summer long I see people going to the beach and to clubs.

05:54 Speaker 2 They were the modern ones to us. They were considered really modern. An ordinary Bais Yaakov was already, well, very far from us. We really were... it was the most sheltered and closed-off school in the country, as far as...

06:08 Speaker 3 Oh, wow.

06:08 Speaker 2 As far as I know. And because—at other schools, for example, there are lots of camps with friends and lots of trips. For us it was forbidden; there was no such thing. That’s why it was such a big dream.

06:21 Speaker 3 There’s something called Basya, right?

06:23 Speaker 2 Basya is an after-school organization. A camp is basically a two- or three-day trip with everyone, the whole school, the whole high school. We didn’t have that. We had an annual trip once every two years.

06:39 Speaker 3 A biennial trip.

06:40 Speaker 2 Exactly. So it was something I dreamed about very, very much. Why am I telling you this? Because one day I found out that my friends from Toldos Aharon—my very best friends—had gone to a Shabbos camp, and they hadn’t invited me. It hurt a lot, and I was very upset. I tried to find out why they hadn’t invited me, what had happened. I mean, I was the one who should have organized it, so they weren’t going to invite me? It was really strange. I wasn’t a quiet girl, or someone they wouldn’t invite because of where she stood socially. There had to be a reason. So I tried asking some friends, and they said, “Zeldi isn’t Toldos Aharon anymore. Zeldi’s a Chabadnik now, and we don’t interest her anymore. That’s why we didn’t invite her.” At that point, I was still saying, “I am Toldos Aharon. I’m going to be Toldos Aharon. I’ll marry someone from Toldos Aharon.” But apparently my home and the Chassidus at home had seeped in without my knowing or feeling it, and I acted like a Chabadnik, or spoke like one. I don’t know.

07:42 Speaker 3 That’s something.

07:43 Speaker 2 And they said, “Zeldi isn’t Toldos Aharon anymore. Zeldi’s a Chabadnik.” I said, “That’s what they’re saying? Then I’ll show them. Now I’m going to be a Chabadnik—all the way.” Now, Toldos Aharon and Chabad have a lot in common, because after all, it’s also a Chassidic group. There’s a Rebbe, an Admor, there are Chassidic ways of conduct and customs that are very similar. For example, kashrus and family purity, and being particular about things like negel vasser and Pesach. It’s the same: things we didn’t eat in Toldos Aharon, we don’t eat now. It really is the same.

08:18 Speaker 3 So those are more the practical details, really.

08:19 Speaker 2 But there’s something—for example, in Toldos Aharon, how can people tell by looking at me that I belong to Toldos Aharon? There’s something outward that identifies me. For example, the clothing. If I wear a black headscarf and black stockings, that means I’m Toldos Aharon. And if I don’t, that means I’m not. So in that sense, it’s very easy not to be Toldos Aharon. Change your stockings, and that’s it. But when I wanted to show everyone that I was Chabad—because, after all, I was doing it to spite them—it still wasn’t coming from a deeper place. So I was lost. How was I supposed to become Chabad? It’s not as though I could put on a sheitel and skin-colored stockings and people would see that I was Chabad. Plenty of women wear sheitels and aren’t Chabad, and plenty of girls wear skin-colored stockings and aren’t Chabad. So that wasn’t going to define me. And that’s how I kept searching. And by the way, the girls—exactly a week later, we went with, with—I can hear myself...

09:20 Speaker 3 Maybe just a little. Yes, exactly.

09:23 Speaker 2 Great. The following Shabbos we went with—do you know the Maayan Yisrael community? It brings together people from lots of different Chassidic groups to study Chassidus. So we went away for Shabbos, and I said, “Great.” Lots of Chabad girls from Kiryat Gat had come to babysit the children. So I said, “I’ll sit with all these girls the whole Shabbos. I’m going to watch them. The way they behave must be how Chabad girls behave. I’m going to see what a Chabad girl is like.”

09:49 Speaker 3 Wow.

09:50 Speaker 2 So I sat with them in the babysitting room, hour after hour after hour after hour. That’s what I did all Shabbos, from beginning to end. And by Motzaei Shabbos, I had discovered that Chabad isn’t stockings or a headscarf, or a sheitel, or a sirtuk, or a hat, or a crease in the hat, or a gartel. Chabad is something much deeper, much more inward, much more real than anything outward. In other words, Chabad demands inner substance. You can’t prove to the whole world that you’re Chabad, because no one can know. You can look Chabad, but you have to truly be Chabad. I came away from that Shabbos with a study partner for learning Chassidus. Those girls started drawing me into farbrengens, and I started going to one farbrengen after another. With every farbrengen, I became more and more Chabad. And slowly, slowly, I began to discover what Chabad was, and my whole outlook on life, my whole inner world, changed. I remember sitting at school in twelfth grade and talking about Chassidus, about what Chassidus really is. Everything I learned—a sicha of the Rebbe’s or Tanya—I’d come to class afterward and tell all my friends, but in different words. I started talking about hashgachah pratis, Divine Providence, but I had to change the whole story and all its details, because I couldn’t tell them about the Frierdiker Rebbe, or the Rebbe, or the author of the Tanya, or Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, or the Baal Shem Tov. Instead, I kept saying “a leader of the generation,” “a great Jewish leader,” “a leader of the generation”—

11:29 Speaker 3 But what does that mean when it comes to the Baal Shem Tov, for example? After all, Toldos Aharon ultimately comes from that tradition.

11:34 Speaker 2 No, but I didn’t go to a Toldos Aharon school. They don’t have a school of their own, a school within the Chassidic group. There are several very sheltered schools. I went to one of them, a huge school, with more of a Jerusalem Litvish style.

11:50 Speaker 3 Oh, so it wasn’t Chassidic.

11:51 Speaker 2 Not Chassidic. Not against Chassidus, either. But they became very afraid of me. They scrutinized every word I said and were very, very careful that I shouldn’t—how do you say it—turn the girls into Chabad girls. Bring Chabad to them, I mean.

12:08 Speaker 3 Like trying to make them religious—is that it?

12:09 Speaker 2 Exactly, exactly. So that’s how I slowly began becoming Chabad. Then, in twelfth grade, even though I’d discovered that Chabad was something deeper than outward appearances, I still had this very, very strong desire to belong, to be like all the Chabad girls. I kept wanting to prove that I wasn’t like them. I wasn’t going to be like all the girls in my class who got married at seventeen and a half. I’d be like Chabad girls, who get married at twenty. I wouldn’t marry someone from Toldos Aharon or another Chassidic group. I’d marry a Chabad boy who was born Chabad, grew up Chabad, studied Chabad Chassidus, and learned in Tomchei Temimim. Everything, absolutely everything, would be arranged so people could see that I was Chabad, because at last I’d be able to show it. Until then, I was Chabad on the inside, with no way to show it. At last I’d have a way. When I was seventeen and a half, I wrote to the Rebbe. Actually, no—when I turned seventeen, I wrote to the Rebbe through Igros Kodesh about my birthday. I opened the Igros Kodesh and found a letter in which someone asked the Rebbe whether he should start hearing shidduch suggestions for his seventeen-year-old daughter. The Rebbe said he could start hearing suggestions. My father is such a chossid. He said, “If the Rebbe says so, that’s what we’ll do. We’re going to start hearing shidduch suggestions for you now.” And I said, “What? I want to get married at twenty. I still want to study in Chabad. I still want to show everyone.” It was coming from a desire to show people. But in the end, when I was seventeen and a half, my father said, “Listen, just meet the young man. He’s from a family that’s really very, very—

14:00 Speaker 2 very well suited to us.” In their family too, all the sons had been Toldos Aharon and had become Chabad. So the family was a very good match, and everything fit very well. My father really liked the young man. So he said, “Come, meet him. At worst, you’ll say no.” That last part caught my attention, because in the community I come from, you usually have one meeting and then agree to the match. So I thought, “I’ll meet him and say no. That’ll make me different from everyone else.”

14:29 Speaker 3 The most Chabad of all.

14:30 Speaker 2 Yes, exactly.

14:31 Speaker 3 How old was he?

14:32 Speaker 2 He was an older bochur. He was twenty-three.

14:37 Speaker 3 Wow.

14:38 Speaker 2 And that really was—and also, also—

14:41 Speaker 3 Also Shvat.

14:41 Speaker 2 Here too, I thought I’d be different from everyone else, because I’d marry someone who wasn’t eighteen or nineteen, but older. So I thought, “I’ll meet him, I’ll say no, and that way I’ll come out the most Chabad of all.” I met him, and I said yes. A week later I was engaged, and four months later we got married. I was so happy. I was already married halfway through twelfth grade. But then I ran into a real problem: I didn’t have a job. I very much wanted to be a teacher. Very, very much. It was my dream. But because I’d become Chabad, the school wouldn’t—where could I work? Where could I be a teacher? I had no certificate. We didn’t take matriculation exams or external exams that would prepare us to study afterward for a teaching certificate, or at seminaries or colleges. That was forbidden for us; there was no such thing. So in twelfth grade, every girl got married and then took a job that didn’t require a certificate—at a daycare center, as a saleswoman, or something like that. Some became teachers or kindergarten teachers, but they wouldn’t accept me because I’d become Chabad. They were very, very afraid, and they understood how much influence a teacher has, so they didn’t want to hire me. And Chabad schools wouldn’t hire me as a teacher because I didn’t have a certificate. So I went around feeling very bitter and angry, without a job, and I looked everywhere.

16:12 Speaker 3 You really fell between the cracks.

16:14 Speaker 2 Yes, and I really felt it wasn’t fair. I was angry all the time. It just wasn’t fair. Why had I studied there? Why? I was really lost. I went around like that for a year, and after a year I said, “I’m going to travel to the Rebbe, and I want to pray that I’ll have a job.” During that year, ten months after the wedding, I gave birth to my eldest daughter, and to me that was such a gift. I was so happy. But I already had a baby, and I was probably a little spoiled, so I didn’t want to work as a saleswoman or anything like that. I really wanted to be a teacher, like I’d dreamed, but there was no job. So the day before I traveled to the Rebbe, my sister-in-law had her bas mitzvah. Because she was the youngest in the family, they made it a really elaborate event. They brought in someone to run the activities—something I’d never seen before. I didn’t know that was a profession. I didn’t even know what it was. In our community, that just wasn’t done. But because she was the youngest, they really went all out. I watched the woman leading the activities and felt that I wanted to be in her place. I wanted to do that. I left there, and the very next day we flew to the Rebbe. I said, “I know what I want to pray for. I want to run activities. I want to run activities.” That kept going around in my head: “I want to come back from here doing that.” We went to the Ohel. I went in. I remember I didn’t cry; there were no tears. But I had a very strong desire. I said, “Rebbe, I want to leave here with a job. Not in another two weeks, not when I get back to Israel, not sometime later. I want to leave here with work running activities.” I came out of the Ohel, and on the ride back, I sat

18:09 Speaker 2 for about half an hour. I sat down next to a woman in the van, and she asked me, “What do you do for work?” I told her, “I’m not working right now,” and I asked her, “What do you do?” She sent a link to my phone and said, “Take a look.” I opened it and saw that she ran activities on a large scale.

18:29 Speaker 3 Wow.

18:29 Speaker 2 She has an activities company. Her name is Chaya Maran[?]. She lives in Tzfas. She runs clubs, camps, activities—all sorts of things. And I said, “Wow, I want to work with you.” She said, “Gladly.” I was shocked, because I was sure she’d say, “No, I don’t need anyone.” So we talked. I live in Beit Shemesh and speak Yiddish; she lives in Tzfas and speaks Hebrew. We’d open a branch of her activities business in Beit Shemesh, in Yiddish, and see how it went. Then, on the flight back from the Rebbe in New York, we spent ten hours talking about how it would work.

19:06 Speaker 3 Oh, you were—

19:07 Speaker 2 Like, you—yes.

19:07 Speaker 3 On the flight too, so we didn’t go over it.

19:09 Speaker 2 A ten-hour business meeting. Really working out how it would operate. She gave me all the equipment, and even helped me with marketing at the beginning. We said we’d try it for a few months and see how it went. I started promoting it, started getting into it, and it caught on. People liked it; they enjoyed it. I was going into schools. At first I charged fifty shekels per activity session, and then the price went up and up. One school recommended me to another, and gradually we saw that operating as her branch wasn’t quite the right fit. So I opened a branch in Beit Shemesh—no, I mean, I started my own business, and kept moving forward. And that’s how—

19:53 Speaker 3 What kind of activities were they, exactly? What did you start with?

19:56 Speaker 2 At first she gave me headphones and clickers, and that’s what I started with. Why did we see it wasn’t quite the right fit? Because I immediately wanted to grow a lot, and she told me, “If you want to, by all means. But do it as your own thing.” So I brought in drums and started promoting it more and more. It grew very quickly, on a very large scale. I really wanted to—I don’t know what to call it—conquer the world.

20:25 Speaker 3 So much light, and you needed to make vessels for it.

20:27 Speaker 2 Yes. So we parted ways, and I said I’d build it up myself, at my own pace. It was a fast pace. After a while, my aunt, who had lived in the United States, said to me, “Listen, they have Kangoo shoes there—those springy shoes. I think they could do really well. It could be a brilliant idea. Bring them to Israel.” And I thought, wow, that sounds good, but it’s a huge, huge investment. We were, I think, a year and a half after our wedding. We were a young couple living on our income. How could we bring in something on a scale that would practically require a mortgage? So I said, I started with the Rebbe’s bracha, and I truly felt that bracha. You feel that what you’re doing is blessed. It isn’t you doing it. It’s not me. There’s something greater, something special here. So I said I would write to the Rebbe. It started at the Ohel, so let’s see what happens. We wrote through the Igros Kodesh, and I opened it and saw that the Rebbe was writing to a business owner who had asked whether to invest in something. On the one hand, he said, it was a big investment and a big risk; on the other, there was a good chance it would succeed. What should he do? The Rebbe told him that our approach is “you shall walk expansively”—to make broad vessels for the abundance that will come. Those were the actual words. I said, wow, I’m going to make broad vessels. That has stayed with me ever since. With everything, I say, “I’m going to make broad vessels”—make a vessel for the abundance. It’s going to be good. So we made the investment, and I brought the shoes to Israel. It was simply incredible. The more prestigious schools, the high schools that are very hard to get into—I won’t name names, but these are places where it really takes years before they

22:22 Speaker 2 build trust and are willing to let someone come in and run activities—wanted the shoes. They were an attraction, something that hadn’t existed in Israel. This was about fifteen years ago. Everyone got excited. The phone calls were nonstop, one after another, and it became almost a competition over who had brought them in first. At first they brought in Zeldy because of her shoes: “She has jumping shoes; let’s bring in the jumping shoes.” But very quickly they discovered that there were the jumping shoes, and there was Zeldy, the woman running the activities. They really enjoyed the activities too. I was a good fit for them—my style. I’m modest enough for them, I even speak Yiddish, and there’s plenty of—

23:03 Speaker 3 But open enough to bring in all of this.

23:05 Speaker 2 Yes. There was a great deal of innovation and a lot of energy, baruch Hashem. It really had a lot of power, and they enjoyed it. Then they started bringing me in for me, not just for the shoes. And baruch Hashem, today—it’s almost four years now—but two and a half years after I started the business, we became the largest activities company in the chareidi community, and later in the wider community as well. All the institutions, all the municipalities. You look at it and say, it’s an incredible, incredible, incredible bracha. After that we brought in more and more things. Today there are large trampolines too—really, anything innovative. So there are a few elements to our company. There are the activities themselves, which are very special, but there’s also a great deal of innovation. Chareidi institutions invest a lot in this. They’re really looking to excite the girls, get them enthusiastic, and bring them something they haven’t seen before. So these innovative things really appeal to them. And that’s how I kept bringing in more and more things. It didn’t remain just about the shoes, baruch Hashem.

24:14 Speaker 3 The shoes were the first ste—literally, the first step.

24:17 Speaker 2 Oops. Yes, the first leap.

24:20 Speaker 3 Wow! Listen, you travel—

24:22 Speaker 2 So that’s how I started the business.

24:23 Speaker 3 You know, it’s like an auditorium, but you’re twenty-three. It’s simply amazing.

24:27 Speaker 2 Baruch Hashem.

24:28 Speaker 3 What’s the business actually called? Its official name?

24:29 Speaker 2 Zeldy—That’s How You Make It Fun.

24:31 Speaker 3 Nice.

24:32 Speaker 2 From the very beginning, I think my goal in this business has simply been to bring joy. Before the activity, before anything else, I tell myself: I’m here on a mission to bring joy, to make people happy. I’ve led activities in all kinds of places. When you’re up on a stage leading the dancing—and today, baruch Hashem, when people say “Zeldi,” it’s not just me anymore; it’s become something of a brand—you see hundreds of girls dancing with such energy, and you think: Wow, how did I merit to lead four hundred, five hundred, six hundred girls in a dance like this? And it’s not me. I feel grateful to Hashem for the mission of bringing them joy and getting them dancing. Once, I led an activity in a women’s prison. We weren’t allowed to bring anything in: no props, no speaker, nothing at all. I could bring a USB drive with songs, which they checked beforehand to make sure it had nothing else on it. It was Sukkos last year, just before Simchas Torah, October 7. All I could do was bring the USB drive and come make them happy for Simchas Beis Hashoeivah. They gave me a computer and a small speaker, and I got started. You see, you don’t need props. You don’t need lights or scenery or glitter. You don’t need anything. You just need joy. You just have to come in with the attitude of, “Come on, let’s be happy! Let’s dance!” I came to bring joy, and that’s how I went in. It was really frightening at first. Who knew whom I would meet? I saw everyone from eighteen-year-old girls to ninety-year-old women, all kinds of people. There were

26:36 Speaker 2 even Chareidi women, religious women—really every kind of woman. They all left with tears in their eyes, and afterward they told the prison rabbi, “Bring her every Friday! Bring her every week!” When you come from a place of “I’m here to bring joy,” you don’t need anything more than that. All the other things are just scenery that adds to the experience. But really, every person just wants to be happy. And there—why am I telling you this? Because there you could see that when they were happy, when they were dancing, they weren’t in prison. They weren’t in confinement.

27:10 Speaker 3 Wow.

27:10 Speaker 2 They weren’t there. They were somewhere else entirely. All around them there was even barbed wire, and you were in a prison—but you weren’t in prison. You were somewhere else. That’s it. And since then, I see it everywhere. When you’re joyful and you come in saying, “Come on, let’s be happy,” you’re not in prison. Really.

27:31 Speaker 3 Wow, that’s so moving. Listen, joy really does take you out of confinement.

27:35 Speaker 2 Exactly.

27:36 Speaker 3 There’s that well-known story about the two brothers who were in prison and danced around the bucket. Do you know it? I can tell the details.

27:45 Speaker 2 And Reb Zusha.

27:46 Speaker 3 They danced because, if this is what we have here... The prison, the confinement—it connects so deeply. I think there’s also a powerful thing that happens when you’re truly happy and you bring your soul into it: Divine souls connect and rise together. And then, try putting a limit on that. Who could limit such a thing? It’s just so moving, and—

28:13 Speaker 2 I think that’s really the power you feel when you lead dancing, in the dancing and the joy.

28:19 Speaker 3 You don’t need to explain why your business is successful. It’s all clear. It’s—

28:22 Speaker 2 Baruch Hashem.

28:23 Speaker 3 You’re putting your soul front and center.

28:27 Speaker 2 Right.

28:27 Speaker 3 And it’s your soul that gets everyone dancing.

28:28 Speaker 2 Right.

28:29 Speaker 3 It’s amazing.

28:30 Speaker 2 And I’ll tell you something more. Seven weeks ago, right at the height of our busy dancing season—this is how it works for us: Winter camps start at the end of Teves, and Shvat is packed with activities, day and night. Mostly at night, because the camps are really themed seminars, and they want the girls to sleep as little as possible. You can’t put on a film or a lecture for them at night, because they’ll fall asleep. So they bring in dancing.

29:03 Speaker 3 They love the—

29:03 Speaker 2 And what dancing it is! So that’s from the end of Teves through Shvat. Then comes Adar, which is, of course, the month of joy, with events in all the schools. So the busiest part of the whole year is concentrated into about two months, from the end of Teves until Purim.

29:22 Speaker 3 By the way, what about the summer?

29:24 Speaker 2 In the summer, too, there’s a stretch from after Shavuos until 17 Tammuz—another month and a half. But winter is even busier. At the beginning of that busy stretch, in early Shvat, I had an event I was very excited about and had prepared for carefully. It was for influencers, and I’d really wanted to be there. They were holding some kind of conference for them, and for me it was a new kind of venue. Until then I’d mostly worked in seminaries and institutions, and I wanted to bring that energy there and get them dancing. I wanted to lead a dance activity with jumping boots. They’d booked me, and I called my husband to ask where the jumping boots were. I needed two more pairs. I’d already loaded everything into the car. We have four hundred pairs, but I wanted to bring the best ones.

30:20 Speaker 3 Wow.

30:21 Speaker 2 The pairs that were exactly right. So I asked him, “Where are two more pairs?” He said, “They’re in one of our four trailers, the one outside the parking area. But don’t open it—it’s on a slope, and if you open the door, everything will roll out. It’s dangerous.” I said, “Okay,” but I really wanted those two pairs, which happened to be in that trailer. So I left the parking area, walked over to the trailer and thought, I’ll just take a peek. If nothing happens, I’ll take out the boots, and that’ll be it. And if I see something start to move, I’ll close the door right away. But, as they say, I took a peek and paid for it. Before I could even take in what was happening, all the carts holding four hundred pairs of boots rolled toward me. I moved out of the way at the last second, but the door still came down on my leg. I saw stars, and it turned out I’d fractured my ankle.

31:27 Speaker 3 Wow.

31:28 Speaker 2 I sent one of my activity leaders to that event, and I had another event that evening, so I sent someone else to that one. But there I was. First of all, I was afraid to call my husband. What would be the first thing he’d say? “I told you so.”

31:42 Speaker 3 Oh, wow. Usually it’s the other way around—the wife says that to the husband.

31:45 Speaker 2 Yes, but I hadn’t listened. And I thought, I need to get an X-ray. My leg was swelling and everything. So we went to an urgent care clinic, had an X-ray, and it turned out I had a fractured ankle. At first, it felt like the sky was falling. How does someone who leads dancing do that with a broken ankle? What was I going to do? My calendar was already full. Baruch Hashem, I was at the point where everyone had already booked their activities, and I was very worried: the income from those two months supports me for half a year. If everyone canceled now, what would happen? That was my first fear. Then I said to myself: Wait, wait. Breathe. If you believe that everything happens through hashgachah pratis, and that abundance and livelihood come from Heaven, then it’s all already written for you. It’s all already determined. I told myself that right then. You can worry about plenty of things, but you have no reason to worry about your livelihood. Let me put it differently: If I believe that everything happens through hashgachah pratis, and that whatever money, abundance and livelihood is meant for you will reach you, then all you need to do is make a vessel for it. All you need to do is make an effort. When you lead activities, you’re making an effort—that’s all. Your livelihood isn’t necessarily tied to the activity you led or the effort you made. Hakadosh Boruch Hu sends you your livelihood; you just need to make an effort. But it can come from somewhere else, not necessarily from the activities you led. So if you believe that, and you say it all the time and think about it all the time, and that’s the outlook you live by, why are you worried about your livelihood now? If right now you can’t make that effort in this particular way, in quotation marks,

33:38 Speaker 2 If it isn’t connected to that—if abundance will come regardless of my efforts—then it’ll come anyway. And you don’t need to worry about your livelihood. You don’t need to worry about abundance. You can think about what to tell the clients, how to arrange things, how to cause as little distress as possible along the way. But you don’t need to worry about your livelihood. And at that moment, the pressure lifted. Because that evening everyone was asking me, “What are you going to do? You’ve hit a roadblock. What are you going to do?” So I said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I’m not worried. I’ll think it through. I’ll think about it calmly and carefully.” And what actually happened was, that day I thought to myself: I’m always saying that there’s a difference between someone who leads dancing and a dancer. A dancer is someone who dances for herself, dances in front of the mirror, loves to dance and all that. Leading dancing is something much more powerful. You’re not dancing for yourself; you’re using your voice to get others dancing. It’s not so much about your body or the moves you make, but how you speak, how you guide it. I say this to my students a lot, and I talk about it a lot and experience it a lot, because I can stand on a chair without moving and four hundred girls will dance because I’m telling them how to dance. So I said: Great, now practice that more.

35:06 Speaker 4 Wow.

35:06 Speaker 2 You’ll be in a cast and you’ll have to lead the dancing. So first of all, I called the clients one after another and told them I’d injured my leg, but they didn’t need to worry; the dancing would be absolutely fine. And really, baruch Hashem, one after another—it was incredible. Everything was fine. Not one client canceled. They trusted me so much, baruch Hashem, that they said, “Okay, if you say it’ll be fine, we trust you.” And I said, “Master of the Universe, help it be fine, because I don’t trust myself. I trust You.” Maybe they trust me because that’s what I need to convey: Trust me, everything will be fine. But what I’m saying is: Trust Hakadosh Boruch Hu, and everything will be fine.

35:49 Speaker 4 Yeah.

35:51 Speaker 2 And it got to the point that, in the middle of those six weeks, I got a call inviting me to lead dancing at a women’s dinner in Vienna, in Yiddish. On the one hand, it was an incredible dream come true for me. Here you are, no longer leading dancing only in Israel; they’re inviting you abroad too. But I thought: Until now, all the schools and other places have been able to accept that I’m leading dancing on the spot with a broken leg—basically on one leg. But what will happen there? And they said, “That’s okay, come anyway. If you say you can lead the dancing properly and everything will be fine, we trust you.” So I went to Vienna, and it was simply fun and moving and joyful, and everything was fine. So, I think—

36:44 Speaker 5 Wait, where’s the cast?

36:45 Speaker 2 I took it off. You know when? A week ago. Purim ended; that period ended.

36:49 Speaker 5 Oh, wow.

36:49 Speaker 2 Time to take off the cast. You did your shlichus; now, let’s go.

36:52 Speaker 5 Wow.

36:54 Speaker 2 Now—

36:54 Speaker 5 What an amazing, amazing, amazing lesson for life.

36:59 Speaker 2 For me, first of all, it was a huge upheaval. But that’s when I discovered that when you’re always saying everything is by hashgachah pratis, Divine providence, and you’re always living with faith, then when you need it, you can actually put it to use. I mean, when your leg is broken and everything is falling apart, you suddenly discover: Wow, what peace of mind I have from having always believed that everything is by hashgachah pratis, because now I can practice it. Everything you’ve thought and everything you’ve believed comes into play. It’s as if you say: Well, let’s see you put it into practice. Do you believe it? Then go ahead and stay calm. And we really can stay calm. We really can control that. Earlier, you said... you told me that hashgachah pratis isn’t only—I don’t remember the example you gave—but it applies even when things don’t work out, when—

37:53 Speaker 5 We were talking here about the technical equipment, and I said: when you discover that the podcast didn’t actually record.

37:57 Speaker 2 That’s also hashgachah pratis.

37:59 Speaker 5 Right. I think that—and I say this to the girls in Chassidus B’Kafit too—sometimes we talk about tragedies and crises, and something huge has happened, so let’s believe that everything is by hashgachah pratis and it’s all okay. But if I really practice believing in hashgachah pratis when the most trivial thing happens—I’m driving somewhere and there’s a traffic jam. And you know what? I’m not even late. But how quickly we—

38:25 Speaker 2 No.

38:25 Speaker 5 When there’s a traffic jam? Yes. And to let go, to keep letting go and saying: It’s all Him. It all comes from Him. And as the Baal Shem Tov says—

38:35 Speaker 2 Right.

38:35 Speaker 5 Every leaf that falls is hashgachah pratis. All the more so with us—the whole world was created for us, for our purpose here. So everything around us is hashgachah pratis; the way people treat us is hashgachah pratis. And when you get used to practicing that, then when something like what you’re describing happens—

38:56 Speaker 2 Which is something big.

38:58 Speaker 5 Yes. At first glance you say: What is this? They’ve taken away your profession!

39:02 Speaker 2 Yes.

39:02 Speaker 5 That’s it. Your legs are your livelihood. And that faith in hashgachah pratis also makes it possible—notice how it gave you the ability to think creatively. Suddenly you could say: Wait, what does it actually mean to lead dancing?

39:12 Speaker 2 Yes, you’re the leaf. When you believe that everything is by hashgachah pratis, you spare yourself a lot of distress, a lot of guilt and a lot of panic. I’ll tell you—

39:20 Speaker 5 Right.

39:20 Speaker 2 In my line of work, running activities, you really could say it’s a profession where you need miracles all the time. You need hashgachah pratis too. It’s a very, very stressful profession. You’re on the road all day, you have to get everywhere early, and you have no control. There was a period when I said: I’m calm about everything else; everything will be fine. I mean, I have control over everything else. I know how to lead dancing, I know how to run an activity, I know how to work with dancers and clients. I know how to speak to the girls, how to get them excited, how to fire them up, to say, “Ten, nine, eight,” and everyone’s on their feet. But there’s one thing I have no control over: traffic on the roads.

39:56 Speaker 5 Demonstrations.

39:57 Speaker 2 I have no control over that. I can leave two hours early and still arrive late. I have no control, and it’s terribly alarming and frightening, because if you arrive late, what will you do? So I practice. This example of traffic jams really is a way to practice that: Be—everything is okay, everything is in Hashem’s hands, everything is exactly as it should be, everything is by hashgachah pratis. And it’s not just that. It’s when a cable doesn’t work or your computer doesn’t work, or... you’re working with equipment. You have no stage, the girls scatter, I don’t know. All kinds of things that, on the one hand, can be very, very, very, very frightening and upsetting. But when you believe and are certain that everything is by hashgachah pratis, you say, “That activity didn’t go well—and that wasn’t by mistake. It was precise. It was meant not to go well.”

40:56 Speaker 6 Absolutely.

40:56 Speaker 2 You made the effort, you gave it your all, and it didn’t go well. In a sense, it isn’t your fault. That takes away so much guilt, so much heartache, so much... because you say, “This was precise. It didn’t happen by mistake. Hakadosh Boruch Hu wanted it this way.” And on the other hand, usually we have successes. One success, two, three, four, a hundred successes. Everything goes fine; it’s all wonderful and joyful and successful, and everyone enjoys it. But one activity that didn’t go well sticks in your throat and brings your mood down for two weeks. You feel you’ve disappointed the clients, the girls who took part. You feel like a failure, you feel... If you don’t have that belief—that just as the successes are by hashgachah pratis, when you stand on a stage you say, “It isn’t me, it’s Hakadosh Boruch Hu. Look at the power here, when I’m not doing anything. I’m just a conduit. Baruch Hashem, I merited this, and everything is precise and everything is by hashgachah pratis. Look at the power here.” In the same way, a failure isn’t you either. It isn’t your fault. Of course, you learn lessons; you learn from your mistakes. There’s a saying that you’re allowed to make a mistake, but you mustn’t repeat the same mistake twice. Something didn’t work, you forgot to bring something, whatever it was. You made some mistake, and you learn from it. Next time you won’t do it. But even the mistake you made was by hashgachah pratis.

42:24 Speaker 6 Right.

42:24 Speaker 2 That isn’t your fault either. When I opened the—opened the trailer and my daughter asked me, “Why did you do that?” the first thing I told her was—

42:37 Speaker 6 She’s four?

42:37 Speaker 2 She’s four. I have a four-year-old girl, a two-year-old girl, and a boy who’s almost one. So she says to me, “Why did you open the trailer?” I told her, “I did something foolish. A spirit of folly got into me.” That’s what I said. So she asks, “Who put that spirit of folly into you?” I said, “Hashem told me to open the trailer.” She asks, “How did He tell you?” But I said that so I wouldn’t spend the next six weeks feeling guilty, constantly thinking: Why did I open the trailer? Am I stupid? What was I thinking? My husband had told me not to open it. He warned me. It’s not as though he hadn’t said anything. It could have happened—what if I’d brought two other shoes instead of the ones from that trailer? I mean, what were you thinking, opening a trailer when you could end up with a fracture? How stupid am I? I could have spent that whole time bitter, upset, and full of guilt. Because a broken leg really is hard. My husband had to work very, very hard at home. Everything changes. It’s hard physically, and it’s hard emotionally too. When you fall, it just feels awful. And what was I thinking? What did I do to myself? But from that moment on, I kept saying, “It wasn’t me.” It was by Divine providence. It was meant to happen exactly this way. I was going to break my leg whether I opened the trailer or not. I was going to break it either way. Unfortunately, Hakadosh Boruch Hu made it happen like this: “Don’t look, don’t think, don’t stop yourself. Just open the trailer without thinking.” And that’s what happened to me, by Divine providence. So I didn’t do it. A spirit of folly got into me, that’s all. It’s not that I’m stupid, and it’s not—

44:16 Speaker 2 It’s not me. And I conveyed that so strongly that my husband couldn’t even say, “I told you so.” Because you weren’t the one who—yes, you opened the trailer, but Hashem wanted it to happen.

44:30 Speaker 7 That matters, because he paid a heavy price for it, with all the—

44:32 Speaker 2 He paid a price. A real price. Absolutely.

44:35 Speaker 7 Wow, there’s so much here. First, the understanding that Divine providence isn’t just, “Wow, I was saved from a terrorist attack—Divine providence!” Divine providence is simply everything that happens, everything that takes place.

44:46 Speaker 2 Absolutely.

44:47 Speaker 7 Every—

44:47 Speaker 2 Every single thing.

44:49 Speaker 7 Every single thing. It’s all Divine providence.

44:50 Speaker 2 If you’re late, that’s Divine providence too. And if you’re not late, that’s also by Divine providence.

44:55 Speaker 7 Right.

44:56 Speaker 2 I think the way I put Divine providence to myself is: everything happens exactly as it’s meant to. It isn’t an accident. When I believe it isn’t an accident, I can relax. This and that didn’t happen by accident. That’s how it was meant to be. Maybe you would have wanted something else. You’re just one small part of it. You need to take all kinds of actions, but really, it’s already meant to happen exactly this way. It was written long ago.

45:23 Speaker 7 Relax. It isn’t all on you.

45:24 Speaker 2 Exactly.

45:24 Speaker 7 It isn’t all, all—

45:25 Speaker 2 Exactly.

45:26 Speaker 7 “I did it. If only I’d done this, if I hadn’t done that.” Relax.

45:29 Speaker 2 Exactly right.

45:30 Speaker 7 You’re one small part of this whole thing.

45:32 Speaker 2 And I saw something the Rebbe wrote in Igros Kodesh. I often open it when I need encouragement. This business really does require a lot of encouragement along the way—wondering what will happen and how it will work out. I opened Igros Kodesh, and the Rebbe wrote that even our ideas aren’t our own. They, too, come by Divine providence. For instance, I invested in these individual inflatable bouncers. It was something that could have taken off and been incredible. I brought them into the country, and the costs were enormous. Then they finally arrived, I advertised them, and I had lots of customers who wanted them. I started running an activity with them and discovered that they tipped over. I’d ordered ones that were too big, too tall, and too—

46:21 Speaker 7 Narrow.

46:21 Speaker 2 Narrow. They simply weren’t safe; they tipped over. So I have several hundred individual bouncers sitting in storage. You’ve made an investment that, supposedly, didn’t work out, and now you have to live with it. But I didn’t feel guilty for a moment. I didn’t think, What were you thinking? Why didn’t you check more thoroughly before making the investment? Or, Ugh, this idea won’t work, so now I won’t invest in anything. No. Because the idea to bring in those little bouncers was also by Divine providence. It wasn’t just something you thought up on your own. And in this business you really feel that: Hashem sends you an idea. I need an idea. Hakadosh Boruch Hu, send me something good. I need an idea; I have to have one. And even that idea that failed came by Divine providence. Looking back, here’s what happened: at the time, my husband said, “We’re bringing in little bouncers; let’s bring in one giant one too.” I said, “What? Why do we need a giant bouncer? What for?” But he really wanted to, so we brought it in. And in the end, that giant bouncer has been so popular and so successful—ten times more than I’d expected the little bouncers to be. So the little ones really are in storage. Maybe I’ll still do something with them; I don’t know. If Hashem sends me an idea. But meanwhile, something else was a huge success, without my ever thinking it would take off.

47:44 Speaker 7 Wow. That’s amazing. I want to go back to something that comes up both here and in the story about your broken leg. There’s this idea of holding two things together: on the one hand, I don’t put everything on myself, it isn’t my fault, and it was meant to happen. On the other hand, we keep moving forward because we learn from mistakes.

48:05 Speaker 2 You also take responsibility, in a sense.

48:07 Speaker 7 All the time. Yes, something didn’t work at an event; a cable was missing. On the one hand, it isn’t all on me—that’s exactly what was meant to happen at first. On the other hand, how do I prepare for future events with a backup in case that problem comes up? I think that’s the difficult part, holding both of those things together. Because if I need to learn something from it for next time, then I must have made a mistake.

48:27 Speaker 2 So that means it was okay.

48:28 Speaker 7 Yes, yes. It’s so important to let go of that and say: No, our job is to keep looking forward. All that blame, all that “Look how inadequate you are”—that’s all the yetzer hara. We need good energy to keep going. It’s always: Okay, it happened. It was meant to happen. What’s next? How do we do better?

48:47 Speaker 2 Exactly. Exactly.

48:49 Speaker 7 Amazing.

48:50 Speaker 2 Just a few days ago, I heard Bat Sheva Dargan speaking. She talks a lot about bitachon, about trust in Hashem and peace of mind. She said that everything happens by Divine providence, but she added something I’d forgotten—or hadn’t thought about until now. Until now, I’d say: Everything happens by Divine providence. You’re sort of freed from blame. You’re freed from worry. You don’t need to worry, because everything is already meant to happen exactly as it does for you. Everything will be okay; everything will be good. You don’t need to feel guilty about something you failed at, because you didn’t fail. It happened exactly as it was meant to. It was by Divine providence. That’s how it was meant to be from the start. You think you failed, but that’s how it was meant to be from the start. That’s how I thought until now. But she said: Yes, everything happens by Divine providence—but why did Hashem do this to you? Why did He bring you into this situation? He brought you into it by Divine providence so you would learn something from it. So at every event, sometimes there are technical things I can learn. Something went wrong, and it happened by Divine providence, but I learn from it to change something next time, so things go well and it doesn’t happen again. Sometimes, though, the lesson is much harder. It’s: work on yourself. You need to learn from this situation to work through your disappointment, to work through your anger, to work on your middos. It didn’t just happen for no reason. Yes, it was by Divine providence, but why did it happen? Think a little beyond “Yes, it was meant to happen exactly this way,” and ask—

50:29 Speaker 7 How is this part of my path?

50:31 Speaker 2 Exactly.

50:32 Speaker 7 Wow.

50:32 Speaker 2 Exactly, exactly.

50:34 Speaker 7 Zeldi, there’s a question I keep coming back to, and I have to ask you. You don’t need to have a complete answer from beginning to end, but maybe you can tell me a little. You have very young children.

50:43 Speaker 2 Yes.

50:44 Speaker 7 And you go out evening after evening, dealing with trailers, traveling to Vienna and coming back. How?

50:51 Speaker 2 How does it work? Honestly, I’ll tell you how it works in practical terms. I work either in the morning, while the children are in preschool until four, or at night. At night, they’re home with my husband. My husband is employed at a yeshivah, and he’s home at night. And when I travel, my father works with us.

51:14 Speaker 7 Wow.

51:14 Speaker 2 With me, and with my husband, like.

51:16 Speaker 7 How sweet.

51:17 Speaker 2 He’s the driver. He takes me everywhere, sets up the equipment, packs it away. He’s basically the operations manager. So that’s how I started working with him: I needed someone to travel with at night so there wouldn’t be a yichud issue or any other problems. That’s how it started, and we’ve been working together for two years now. It’s simply the greatest blessing I could have.

51:43 Speaker 7 Mm-hmm.

51:43 Speaker 2 It’s so much fun.

51:44 Speaker 7 So much quality time.

51:45 Speaker 2 Yes. Because I’ll put it this way: I used to have tremendous awe and respect for my father. The Jerusalem style—I don’t know if it was the upbringing or the mentality—was more distant. My father was, and still is, an incredible inspiration to me. He’s the person that, for better or worse, I want my husband to be like. I want my son-in-law to be like my father.

52:12 Speaker 7 He’s the model.

52:13 Speaker 2 Yes, but there was this great awe and respect, more of a distance. Since we started working together, I’ve received such a gift. Long, heart-to-heart conversations, farbrengens, two whole hours on the road, incredible insights. It’s just—and he’s such a happy, energetic person. Besides the fact that he works with me, gets along with all the coordinators and directors, and arrives knowing exactly how to set everything up—he’s really such a friendly guy—I’ve also gained a very, very special relationship with my father. To me, that’s the greatest gift. Just for that, the whole business and everything was worth it...

52:57 Speaker 7 Wow. I wasn’t expecting that answer.

53:00 Speaker 2 So that’s the practical side. Now, about what you said about the little ones and everything: when you do something you love—and not only that, something that burns inside you—I feel it gives me a lot of strength. Running the programs doesn’t drain my strength and energy. It gives me so much strength and energy. You arrive somewhere and feel like you’re painting smiles on the girls’ faces. The feedback—it’s really wonderful. That itself gives me a lot of strength. And I’m very... I don’t know whether to call it stubbornness, because I do give in a little when I need to, but I’m very persistent. So there are a lot of difficulties: before giving birth, after giving birth, a home with teething children, the baby, or—I don’t know. So many things come up.

53:56 Speaker 7 I’m sure there are programs where you realize you didn’t sleep the night before, for example.

54:00 Speaker 2 Exactly. Or you’re in the car in the middle of the night. It happens a lot that you sleep the whole way to a program, then wake up and have to go onstage at peak energy, because the girls haven’t slept and they’ve been waiting for you since the last program, six months ago. You have to give it everything you’ve got. That’s just one example. You go in and you’re—I don’t know whether to call it acting—but you step outside yourself. You’re not tired Zeldi, who wants nothing more than to sleep, even though you really were fast asleep. You want this, so you step outside yourself. You go onstage with all that energy, then come back and fall asleep, completely exhausted. But what I mean is, there are lots of challenges in the business: marketing and sales, a program that doesn’t go well or one that does, getting another booking or not getting one. So many questions, so many things you don’t know will succeed or move forward. It takes so much effort, energy, thought... Baruch Hashem, it’s a big business. And now there are courses too—I teach courses. We’re already coming up to almost the fifth group of trainees learning to run programs. So it demands a lot, but I’m really, really persistent. I don’t let difficulties knock me down; I don’t turn back. Before the second group I opened for my school for program leaders, two days before it began I had only four women registered. The first group had twelve—a full group. And two days before the course, after all the marketing and sales work, only four were registered. What do you do with that? You can’t go back, but you don’t want to go forward either. You don’t want to open a course with four women. You just don’t feel like it. I thought, maybe I’ll just close it.

55:44 Speaker 2 Who says I have to run a course? It’s too hard. The sales are too hard, and then keeping it up for thirteen weeks, an entire evening every week. It takes so much strength and effort, and who says it’s worth it? Look, only four registered. But then I spoke with my business coaches, and they told me: “Don’t look at right now. Look at the long term. In the long term, you’ll see that it’s a miracle you didn’t give up.” So I held an introductory session for the course. Lots of women came, and in the end the group was completely full—just two days later.

56:26 Speaker 7 Wow.

56:27 Speaker 2 Everyone who came to the introductory session registered, baruch Hashem, and they enjoyed it so much. But how did I start? How did I decide to go ahead with it? I said to myself: Why did you open the course? How did it begin? Let’s remember why you’re doing this at all. Then see whether you have the strength or not—whether you even have the option to close it, whether you’re allowed to turn back.

56:55 Speaker 7 That’s the point of...

56:57 Speaker 2 Then I remembered why I’d opened the course. I had started growing and growing, and I needed to bring in more women to run programs, and I needed to train them. So I trained one here and one there. I also got so many questions from students, from girls who wanted to run programs: what should they do, where should they buy things, and so on. I helped them again and again. Then I said to myself: Wow, you have a shlichus. There are so many girls with so much energy and so much power. They want to do this. When someone wants to run programs and isn’t doing it, every day is a missed opportunity. Something burns inside her and she wants to make an impact. She wants to lead; she wants to bring joy. So many girls want to do this, but they don’t have a way forward. They need a roadmap. They need to know how to create a program. When I started, I studied dance instruction, event production, acting, presentation editing, marketing and sales. I studied so many things to become the best program leader I could be—so many different kinds of courses. And I thought about all these girls asking questions. Every day at least a few would ask; there were a lot. I discovered there were so many girls who wanted to run programs. Would all of them have to take the same path I took, trying and making mistakes, trying again, taking so many courses and investing so much money? Put it all together in an organized way. Open one course that brings everything together. Give them a roadmap, a path, so they can run programs too, because this is something that burns inside them. That was it. Then, before the second course, I find I have four women registered and I want to turn back. So I remembered all this, and I said:

58:43 Speaker 2 Wow. If you’re doing it for money, or for some other interest—I don’t know—then maybe it really isn’t worth it. Maybe it doesn’t make enough financial sense. Maybe it isn’t worth it for what you hope to get out of it, whether that’s publicity or a good name. I don’t know. If you open a course for four women, or struggle and work so hard, maybe it won’t be worth it for those other reasons. But if you’re doing it as a shlichus, to help women fulfill their potential, to help women bring joy and run programs, then you have no right to turn back. You have to keep going. So I held an introductory session, and I told the girls those very things: how I’d come to open the course and why I was doing it. And they registered. Today, baruch Hashem, it’s been a year and a half since I opened the school. We’ve completed four groups, with more than sixty students. Most of the women are working in the field, succeeding and enjoying it. Every day they thank Hashem for this opportunity, for this shlichus. Running programs also takes a great deal of effort and determination, but it’s very rewarding, too. We’re not talking about fifty shekels an hour, or a hundred shekels an hour. We’re talking about thousands. Yes, it takes effort to come and learn every week, to invest so much energy, equipment and time, to be as professional as you can and give the very best of yourself. But the satisfaction—when you come down from the stage and see what you’ve done... not what you’ve done, what Hashem has enabled you to do.

1:00:29 Speaker 7 Yes.

1:00:30 Speaker 2 So, so, so it’s worth everything. All the effort and all the investment. And it’s incredibly fulfilling, baruch Hashem. I thank Hashem for the privilege of opening a school. I think that if I didn’t have the perseverance and the belief that I’m not doing this for myself, that I’m doing it as a shlichus, I’m not sure it would be where it is today. And that’s still true now.

1:00:55 Speaker 7 Top three.

1:00:57 Speaker 2 Even more so. I mean, even now, every day I have to choose to keep going, because maintaining a business is hard. You can grow very quickly—great, well done. Baruch Hashem, you succeeded, you had great success, and you became a major provider of activities and more. But keeping it where it is today—keeping the customers, maintaining your reputation... They say a good name travels far, and a bad name travels even farther. So you have to maintain a good name and invest in that, and invest in your customers and in everything. Maintaining what you’ve built is much harder than growing. And it’s a daily thing. Every day, you have to want to get up with the energy to keep serving your customers and carry on.

1:01:42 Speaker 7 Wow.

1:01:43 Speaker 2 And that’s why we need to work with a sense of shlichus, so we’ll have the strength.

1:01:46 Speaker 7 Absolutely. And you got to all of that from my question about the children.

1:01:50 Speaker 2 Yes.

1:01:50 Speaker 7 And now I understand that what you’re really saying is: I’m the mother I am because of everything I do.

1:01:57 Speaker 2 Right.

1:01:58 Speaker 7 Because I’m a happy Zeldy, a recharged Zeldy, someone who lives her shlichus. So she’s a mother with a different kind of energy.

1:02:07 Speaker 2 Completely. And I’ll say this: yes, there are periods—about a month and a half in the winter and another month in the summer—when I’m less than the perfect mother. Definitely. I don’t see the children much. My husband is with them most of the time, or they’re with a regular babysitter. I could really say that if I wanted to feel guilty, I’d have plenty to feel guilty about. Even if I didn’t want to, I’d have plenty. I mean, you’re not with them much, and you only see them here and there. But for most of the year, from after Purim until the end of Sefiras HaOmer, I’m the most perfect mother. I’m with them all the time and I play with them. I’m not making it up to them, exactly, but preparing them for the period afterward, when I’ll be around a bit less. And I spend a lot, a lot of time with them. Then there are the holidays—my work is very seasonal. So there are times when I’m with them less and times when I’m with them a great deal. And that’s okay. This is the work Hashem sent me, and I’m very, very happy with it. I can see that the children aren’t suffering; they’re doing very well. And my husband is an amazing father. That’s also why I can run these activities, because you really can’t run—well, not necessarily activities, but an independent business—

1:03:27 Speaker 7 Right.

1:03:28 Speaker 2 Or work long hours at something you love, if you don’t have support or the right people around you. If it isn’t your husband, then it’s your mother, or your parents, or your sisters, or whoever. You need people around you who can accommodate you, help you, and support you. Because otherwise, really, what are we? We’re women with children, and we have... You have to recognize that.

1:03:53 Speaker 7 I also think that, practically speaking, every job comes at some cost.

1:03:58 Speaker 2 Yes.

1:03:58 Speaker 7 A cost to the family. We’re constantly juggling: what matters more, where do I need to be more, how do I balance it all?

1:04:04 Speaker 2 Absolutely.

1:04:05 Speaker 7 And I remember that when we came to Israel, I gave so many talks. Really, it was about three a week.

1:04:12 Speaker 2 Wow.

1:04:12 Speaker 7 It was like, you’d give a talk and then you could buy socks.

1:04:14 Speaker 2 Wow, good for you.

1:04:15 Speaker 7 That was the level of financial need, too. Afterward, things balanced out a little. And I remember asking myself, is this right? I leave home at seven, say, sometimes earlier.

1:04:28 Speaker 2 Wow.

1:04:29 Speaker 7 And I leave the children, and I’m not there to put them to bed. So either my husband puts them to bed, or sometimes—

1:04:33 Speaker 2 And then come all those nights of yours.

1:04:34 Speaker 7 We fall asleep together. Yes. And I remember that one day, one of my children came up to me and said, “Mom, what did you talk about at the farbrengen yesterday?” And I thought, wow—suddenly I saw it from a different angle. Your child sees what you do. Your child understands what you do. He absorbs values without your saying a word to him, just because he saw his mother go out to speak, and he more or less knows she’s talking about good things, important things, uplifting things. Children see what we do. There’s a cost either way; everyone pays some kind of price for their work. Maybe it’s staying up until the middle of the night grading tests and being tired the next day. Every job has its costs. But when you know you’re doing the right thing, and when you’re with the children you’re fully with them—present, with your mind on them—I think it pays off. It really does.

1:05:28 Speaker 2 And since we talked about hashgachah pratis, Divine Providence, I think—I’m sure—that this, too, is part of it. Whatever work a woman has is exactly right for her, and exactly right for her children. Everyone has their own path, their own journey to go through, and the children also have to go through their journey with their mother and with the work that’s right for her. And just as Hakadosh Boruch Hu gives us strength, He gives them strength. And there’s no getting around it: if this is their journey, then with the work or without it, they would have had to go through it. We try as hard as we can to be the best mothers, the best parents, but this, too, is exactly right. That’s it.

1:06:10 Speaker 7 Absolutely. Like you said before, it’s navigating that complexity: on the one hand, doing my very best, keeping my finger on the pulse, and paying attention to—

1:06:17 Speaker 2 Exactly.

1:06:17 Speaker 7 The fact that the children come first. And on the other hand—

1:06:20 Speaker 2 Right.

1:06:20 Speaker 7 Not everything is in our hands. My child has a journey, just as I do.

1:06:24 Speaker 2 Exactly.

1:06:24 Speaker 7 Wow. We’ll finish here. I still have so many things I could ask you, but I think the real answer to all the questions is just to look at you and say: Wow, Zeldy, how? How do you do it? I’m sure lots of women say that to you and ask you that. How? How are you so successful, and how did you grow so quickly—and, as you said, maintain it all—with the children, the work, the energy, everything? And I think the answer to all of it is really that inner backbone you have, that genuine faith, and—

1:06:54 Speaker 2 Faith helps a great deal along the way. I’ll just add one more thing: I think about my ability to dream big, my desire to dream. Sometimes, if I were to ask someone, “What do you dream of?” she’d be afraid to dream. And then Hakadosh Boruch Hu could say, “I want to fulfill all her dreams,” but He would discover that they’re such small dreams. So when we believe that everything is guided by hashgachah pratis and that there is great abundance, we also allow ourselves to dream big. And after you dream big, you try to think about how to make it happen. Most of all, after the dreaming, the wanting, and the steps you take, you mustn’t give up halfway through. It’s that ability to persevere: yes, things are a little hard right now, but let’s go a little farther. One more step. Hakadosh Boruch Hu will help—He’s helped until now, and He’ll help going forward, too. Not to give up, not to reach the point of saying, “No, I’m throwing up my hands.” It’s that perseverance, because there have been—and still are—so, so many struggles, challenges, and difficulties, and times when you want to give up and say, “What was I thinking?” I wanted to open another kind of course, and it didn’t succeed. It didn’t work out; there were no registrations at all, and I closed it. I don’t know if people even remember it, or how hard I fought for it all, but it didn’t work. I didn’t give up, though. Afterward, I said, “It didn’t work out. Okay, at least I tried. Now I’ll carry on with the other things.” That perseverance—refusing to give up or let things knock us down.

1:08:32 Speaker 8 Right. If everything goes smoothly, something’s probably wrong.

1:08:34 Speaker 2 There’s no such thing.

1:08:35 Speaker 8 When you’re doing, um...

1:08:35 Speaker 2 You see other people’s successes. You have to remember there’s a long road behind them.

1:08:40 Speaker 8 Absolutely.

1:08:40 Speaker 2 There’s no such thing.

1:08:41 Speaker 8 Absolutely. Wow, what you said about dreams is so true. Making them bigger—giving Hakadosh Boruch Hu somewhere to bring the blessing in.

1:08:48 Speaker 2 Right.

1:08:49 Speaker 8 It’s amazing.

1:08:49 Speaker 2 Like building a wide road.

1:08:51 Speaker 8 Amazing. Give us a couple of tips for making dreams come true. Say someone already has a dream, some kind of vision. She wakes up in the morning and says, “Oh, I wish I could be a certain kind of person.”

1:09:03 Speaker 2 First of all, if you have a dream, you have to want to make it happen. Don’t say, “Oh, that dream feels too far away. It won’t happen. It can’t happen.” Put it down on paper. Write it out. Make the dream specific. That’s the first thing: be as specific as you can. Say my dream is to open a store. What will it look like? What exactly do I want there? What do I want to offer? What will it actually be like? Then start looking at how you can try to make it happen, step by step. Sometimes we want to go from zero to a hundred right away, to jump straight to the dream coming true. We don’t have the strength or the patience for the journey, for what it will take. I want to be there already. And sometimes, because we want so badly to be at that hundred, at the goal, it discourages us from even starting to walk, because the road is so long. How will I get there? I’ll never get there. That’s it—I want so badly to be there already. But if we remember that we’ll take one step, then another step, then another, after a while we’ll look back and say, “Wow, I made my dream come true. Wow, I’m already halfway to my dream.” Two years ago—actually, just this week, I opened a notebook and saw that I had written that I wanted to create a school for activity leaders. Back then it was a distant dream, but I wrote everything down precisely: what classes I wanted to teach, what I wanted to do. Today, two years later, I see that I have sixty graduates, boruch Hashem. But it started step by step: setting a goal, breaking it down into tasks, then trying to do one task and then another. That’s the basic idea.

1:10:38 Speaker 8 Amazing. Amazing. Wow.

1:10:39 Speaker 2 With Hashem’s help, and a lot of siyata diShmaya.

1:10:41 Speaker 8 Zeldy, should I let you go clean for Pesach?

1:10:44 Speaker 2 Yes, huh? Now, with all the energy from the podcast.

1:10:47 Speaker 8 Yes, I’m saying, we’re at the end of Adar, so we’ll take the joy of Adar and...

1:10:52 Speaker 2 With Hashem’s help.

1:10:52 Speaker 8 Carry it with us into freedom. With Hashem’s help. Thank you so much, Zeldy Blum.

1:10:56 Speaker 2 Thank you for the opportunity.

1:10:57 Speaker 8 Amazing.

1:10:58 Speaker 2 Wow, wow.

1:10:59 Speaker 8 I learned so, so much from you. And I was about to say, “And from my students, more than from anyone else.” Listen to me—I feel old compared to you.

1:11:06 Speaker 2 Of course.

1:11:06 Speaker 8 But really, I think there’s something about your wisdom about life, and the way you put that wisdom into practice, that is...

1:11:12 Speaker 2 With Hashem’s help.

1:11:14 Speaker 8 Let’s do another episode in a few years, and I’m sure there will be more...

1:11:17 Speaker 2 Let’s do it! Wow, that’ll be interesting, you know.

1:11:20 Speaker 8 It really will.

1:11:20 Speaker 2 Wow, this was so much fun. Really.

1:11:22 Speaker 8 We’ll check in at the next stop in your life and see where things have gone.

1:11:26 Speaker 2 We’ll see where we are. With Hashem’s help.

1:11:27 Speaker 8 Wonderful, and much, much success. Thank you, Zeldy.

1:11:30 Speaker 2 With Hashem’s help.

1:11:48 Speaker 8 Did you enjoy it? Were you inspired? Share this episode now with everyone who matters to you.