Episode 65: The secret that became a shlichus | This time with Mushky Alperin, shlucha in Zhitomir, Chassidus teacher and media coach

00:03 Speaker 1 What happens when a girl growing up on shlichus in Ukraine finds herself the only representative of Judaism in an entire class? What happens when, because of that, she comes to Israel to study alone at age twelve, moves from home to home, and spends long stretches feeling lonely? Mushki never imagined that an ongoing struggle in the most personal area of her life would become the driving force behind a shlichus. But it was precisely her struggle with online content, guilt, and loneliness that led her to establish an initiative supporting teenage girls through those very things. So what’s the connection between a field school in Nes Harim, the war in Ukraine, and a maamar of Chassidus delivered two hundred years ago? As always, there is a connection. It’s deep, surprising, and moving. Come listen to Mushki’s heart and, along the way, discover your own. This podcast was recorded with the sponsorship of Speakolo, the online program that teaches your child to really speak English fluently. For details, write to 055-564-7829. A reminder: If you liked this episode, don’t keep it to yourself. Just share it—with your sister, your mother, your neighbor, a friend, anyone who matters to you. To follow me on Instagram, search for Chani Moskowitz. To book workshops and talks on life-changing tools from Chassidus, Chassidus for life in the digital world, and to follow my status updates, you can reach me at 050-850-5770. First 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, now continuing my shlichus in Karmei Gat, Israel. On this podcast, we’ll meet different women who will share their shlichus in a range of fields and, through their stories, help each of us find and define our own shlichus in the world. Because living the life we were created for is the greatest thing there is. Shlichus as a way of life. We’re starting right now. Welcome to another episode of the Shlichus as a Way of

02:03 Speaker 1 Life podcast. Today we have a guest from Ukraine. Mushki, welcome.

02:08 Speaker 2 Happy to be here.

02:09 Speaker 1 How are you?

02:10 Speaker 2 It’s so nice to be here.

02:11 Speaker 1 It’s lovely that you came all the way from Ukraine just for the podcast.

02:13 Speaker 2 Almost, almost.

02:15 Speaker 1 So, introduce yourself to everyone listening. The microphone is yours.

02:20 Speaker 2 I’m Mushki Alperin, mother of three children, Boruch Hashem. I’ve been a shlucha in Ukraine since childhood. I grew up on shlichus there. I had the privilege of going back there—

02:30 Speaker 1 Were you born on shlichus too?

02:32 Speaker 2 I wasn’t born in Ukraine, but my parents were already on shlichus there when I was born. And after I got married, I had the privilege of going back there on shlichus, leaving when the war began, and returning again a year and a half later. I think I’ll tell you about that later.

02:53 Speaker 1 Take us back, take us back to Ukraine when you were... Wait, when were you born? Let me guess, around 5750, 5755, 5756?

03:01 Speaker 2 5760.

03:01 Speaker 1 Oh, okay, okay. You have this air of life experience about you. I almost placed you in my age group, but I’m much too old already.

03:09 Speaker 2 So yes, I grew up on shlichus there, as I said. When I started first grade, I went to the school my parents had established for children in the community. They came from families that didn’t keep Torah and mitzvos; most of them had non-Jewish fathers. That’s the school I entered. I was the only shlucha. At first, when you’re little, it takes time to understand the nuances and the differences. But I was always the rabbi’s daughter. It was an identity I was born into, not one I chose. As the years went by, it became more challenging. But even at the beginning, just being in school—you know, people always talk about the children of shluchim. I don’t think they ever really consider this particular challenge: from a young age, you’re different from everyone else. On the one hand, it truly is an enormous privilege. You grow up from birth with that privilege and responsibility, and you have a role. It’s amazing. It really gives meaning to the rest of your life. I think I’ll come back to that later, too, because ultimately that responsibility gives you a certain resilience for the challenges you face afterward. Wow, that’s beautiful. Yes, but it’s challenging too. I remember being very young and being the only one who davened Shemoneh Esrei. I would go stand facing the wall to daven, and my classmates would imitate me and laugh at me. Oh, wow. It wasn’t pleasant. It was also— That sounds a little like a scene of antisemitism. Completely. Oh, wow. So on the one hand, it can sound like a scene of antisemitism. On the other hand, in your head you tell yourself, “Okay, I’m setting an example. I’m a shlucha.” But at the same time, you’re a little girl who does want to be like everyone else. So there’s this constant conflict

05:05 Speaker 2 that I think we all know. Yes. Ultimately. Beyond that, you’re also, in a sense, missing out on another kind of childhood. Did you know what you were missing? Did you have a chance to compare? Yes and no. Did you come to Israel, or...? Yes, actually, my parents did something very smart. From first grade on, every year during the last month of the school year in Israel—when it was already vacation in Ukraine—I would come study in Israel. So I knew what it was like— During the chaotic end-of-year month. Right, but I still got to experience an Israeli classroom. I went to a small school in Israel, so it wasn’t a class of thirty girls. Where? Beis Chaya in Bnei Brak. Oh, nice. So it was a class of fifteen girls. A step up. But still, it gave me the chance to be around girls who kept Torah and mitzvos, Chabad girls, and to be in that atmosphere. It also prepared me very well for the next stage of my life. So you could say I knew what I was missing, and in a way I was really, really looking forward to coming to study in Israel. I was very much looking forward to it. In practice, until what age did you study in Zhytomyr? I studied there through sixth grade. And as I said, as I got older, the differences between me and the girls in my class, and the other children at school, kept growing. It became more and more challenging. By sixth grade, it was really hard for me socially, and because of the confusion that comes from being in a social environment that doesn’t keep Torah and mitzvos. It was a challenge for me. Around the time of my bas mitzvah, there was the Kinus Hashluchos. I flew to the Rebbe, and I remember being there and just telling myself, “I have to make some kind of change. I have to do something,” because I was so

06:58 Speaker 2 confused. You know, it’s also that age. Twelve is already adolescence itself. It’s a difficult age. And it goes far beyond whether people keep Torah and mitzvos. It’s a different mentality. It isn’t just, “Okay, you’re religious and they’re not; let’s bridge the gap.” It’s a different culture. Right. A different way of life. It’s... Right. And there was also the way they saw me. I remember one incident: one day I went to the bathroom, and when I tried to leave, a girl from my class held me up and wouldn’t let me out. I couldn’t understand what was going on. I was standing in the doorway, trying to leave, and she kept trying to delay me. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw another girl from the class rush out wearing pants, trying to get away before I saw her. Oh. And I was thinking, “I’m your friend. I’m not looking to tell on you or anything.” But they saw me as the rabbi’s daughter. Like some kind of informant. Yes, someone whose presence meant they couldn’t do whatever they wanted. That was my experience. So they couldn’t be open with you either, and you were always separate from them. Yes. Wow, that really is hard, because it’s as if you have friends, but you don’t. Right. So I remember that after we’d been to the Rebbe, something opened up inside me. I said, “I can’t go on like this.” We came home, and I wrote my parents a letter describing my difficulties and my confusion. That led us to the decision that I would go study in Israel for seventh grade. As I said, to me it was a dream to come study in Israel, in Hebrew, with Chabad girls. I also remember being really excited that there would be lots of sweets readily available, and I had a grandmother

08:42 Speaker 2 That I could go visit her, and family celebrations. In other words, I knew what I was missing when I wasn’t there. For me, it was a dream to get there, to come study here in Israel. And that’s how I began the second chapter of my life. I came to study in Israel when I was twelve and a half. At first, it really was an exciting experience. But when an experience becomes routine, the difficulties start to surface, and... I don’t know, you miss your family. I lived with a family whose daughter was in my class. They were a wonderful family; they opened their door to me. I appreciate every family that opened its door to me, but it was challenging. It was challenging, and the years went by like that. Seventh grade, eighth grade, ninth grade. Each time, for one reason or another, I had to move—to an aunt and uncle, to another friend, to another aunt and uncle. Wow, like a lone soldier. Yes. My parents really cared, I should say that. From a distance, they tried to do everything they could. But Hakadosh Boruch Hu had set out a path for me that apparently nothing could have prevented, and I really did find myself moving around a lot. I didn’t share much, either, so even when things were hard for me somewhere, I didn’t necessarily tell anyone. So nobody necessarily knew. I kept it all inside. Oh, wow. Yes. There’s also something about your parents being far away. They ask how you’re doing, and if you tell them things aren’t okay, that there are problems, what can they do? Right. And you don’t want to upset them, either. Exactly. Just worry them for no reason. “It’s fine, everything’s good.” Exactly. To quiet the... Wow, that’s really tough. Yes. How old were you at this point, after you came? So, over the years, from seventh grade until—

10:33 Speaker 2 Until twelfth grade. I won’t go into all the details of every move I made. I can say that in those six years, I changed where I slept fifteen times. Wow, that’s a lot. And I really was surrounded by people who cared—my parents from afar, and my aunts and uncles, who looked after me and helped me. I always had somewhere to go for Shabbos, a regular aunt and uncle I would visit, and all my other aunts and uncles would say, “Come to us, come.” I was surrounded by care and concern, but ultimately, emotionally, I did feel a certain loneliness. At some point I found myself taking that loneliness to a computer, to the internet without any filtering. In the end, on the one hand, it gave me a space to escape the challenges of everyday life. On the other hand, it only confused me more, because outwardly I was still considered very, very Chassidish. Mushky the shlucha. Yes. But inside, I was terribly confused, because outwardly, here I was, so good and so careful about how I lived. Yet when nobody knew, I was doing things, seeing things that were really bad. What’s important for me to say is what I mentioned earlier about that sense of shlichus. For as long as I can remember, every time I was about to leave home for camp, for the Kinus Hashluchos, or for that month in Israel, my mother would have the same talk with me. At some point I was like, “I know by heart what you’re going to say.” But I really am grateful to her for it. Every time, she would call me into her room and say, “I want you to remember that you’re a shlucha everywhere. Even if you’re going to camp, where everyone is a shlucha, or to the Kinus Hashluchos, or to Israel, where all the girls are Chabad, you are—

12:31 Speaker 2 “A shlucha. You need to remember that you’re a shlucha.” And that helped me so, so much. It really did. It’s that sense of purpose, that you’re here with a role to fulfill. You’re confused, you’re doing foolish things, whether you want to or not. At the end of the day, you have a role, and people are watching you, whether you realize it or not. You have to take responsibility, even if you don’t care about yourself or your own spiritual state. You can’t ignore what the people around you might take from it. That held me together. It really held me together through the crisis.

13:01 Speaker 3 So it kept up your outward identity as Mushky the shlucha.

13:04 Speaker 2 Yes.

13:04 Speaker 3 And that, in turn, kept you afloat, because in the end there has to be some connection between what’s inside and what’s outside.

13:12 Speaker 2 Right. Ultimately, inside, I also knew what I wanted. I always knew what the truth was. At the same time, as we said, there’s adolescence, and there are questions and thoughts, and it’s confusing because no one...

13:27 Speaker 3 No, because what can happen with something like that is that you can very quickly spiral into... I won’t say leaving everything behind, but...

13:35 Speaker 2 Yes.

13:36 Speaker 3 Something kept you grounded: “I’m Mushky the shlucha, and I need to...”

13:40 Speaker 2 Yes.

13:40 Speaker 3 Let’s say you probably felt a lot of guilt about doing it.

13:44 Speaker 2 Doing what?

13:45 Speaker 3 Escaping into media like that.

13:47 Speaker 2 Yes.

13:47 Speaker 3 Meaning, it wasn’t like, “Okay, whatever, I’m just going to...” Which makes it even harder.

13:51 Speaker 2 On the other hand, as unbelievable as it might sound, I do say that it’s a miracle I remained who I am. To me, it was the Rebbe, because I feel I came very close to...

14:03 Speaker 3 Wow.

14:04 Speaker 2 Not being where I am today.

14:05 Speaker 3 Describe a typical day for us. You go to school—where do you come back to?

14:12 Speaker 2 Um, so...

14:14 Speaker 3 Well, it was a different place each time.

14:16 Speaker 2 It depends when. But there was a period when I’d go to school every morning, as usual. School was very hard for me. I felt like I was just one more girl in the class. And, you know, sometimes I felt I had something to offer, that I could do so much more. I’d also come from a place of shlichus. In Zhitomir, I was a star there, too, including when it came to shlichus. Whenever an activity needed doing, I would do it. Every year I ran a day camp for the children of shluchim. I was the first shlucha at the school, but there were many more after me—my siblings and children from other families—and I was the leader. And because I was the rabbi’s daughter, I got a lot of attention and respect: I was the smartest, the most successful, the best. Then suddenly you come to Israel, and you’re just one of...

15:11 Speaker 3 Just another number.

15:12 Speaker 2 Yes. That transition was very hard, and terribly confusing, too. Wait, so who am I, really? Where is there a place for me?

15:21 Speaker 3 A question of identity? Yes.

15:22 Speaker 2 Yes.

15:23 Speaker 3 Wow. You went to school in Kfar Chabad, right?

15:25 Speaker 2 For high school, yes.

15:26 Speaker 3 That’s a huge high school.

15:27 Speaker 2 Right.

15:27 Speaker 3 I feel like every class there probably feels like just another class, another grade, another...

15:32 Speaker 2 I have to say—I’m bringing this up because I sometimes speak to girls from my grade—that personally, when I look back today, I have good memories of high school. I had fun; I enjoyed it there. I had my own struggles, and I’m not minimizing them, but ultimately I enjoyed high school. I would have liked people to notice me more, though, and to give roles not only to girls whose sisters are known to be talented, or to the girl who’s always chasing after the activities coordinator. Give me a role. Really try to give every girl something, because every girl has something to offer.

16:08 Speaker 3 Absolutely. And those are such formative years for your self-image.

16:15 Speaker 2 I saw it so clearly, because in twelfth grade I was one of the girls in charge of the annual show. I felt how much it opened me up. I was very aware of what I was going through even then—not only now, looking back.

16:31 Speaker 3 You had a lot of time to think.

16:32 Speaker 2 Yes.

16:33 Speaker 3 You’d come home from school and basically have time to yourself until the next day. There were periods when you were really alone, right?

16:43 Speaker 2 Yes. When I stayed with an aunt and uncle, there were no little children at home or anything.

16:48 Speaker 3 That’s wild. It can drive you crazy.

16:51 Speaker 2 Yes, and then I really would sit at the computer for hours.

16:55 Speaker 3 Wow.

16:56 Speaker 2 Pretty much.

16:56 Speaker 3 So at what point did you realize something needed to change? Or wasn’t there a moment like that?

17:03 Speaker 2 No, there wasn’t some defining moment. It kept going up and down, up and down, in different periods. There was a time when I lived with a family who welcomed me so warmly—and again, everyone welcomed me warmly. But this family really managed to make me feel comfortable, like I was part of the family. In fact, we were just at their house this Shabbos. We stayed with them for Shabbos.

17:31 Speaker 3 Oh, wow, that really is...

17:32 Speaker 2 Really, they’re family.

17:34 Speaker 3 Like an adoptive family.

17:35 Speaker 2 Yes, very much. Completely. So that was a period when it was a little easier, but even then, every so often something would trigger that urge to escape. So I’d escape again, wherever I had access to an open computer. It was always there. It was always there in the background, coming and going, coming and going. You’re constantly struggling. You don’t really want it. You understand it isn’t good for you, that it isn’t really you. Again, my miracle was that I knew it wasn’t really me, because a lot of girls get confused about that.

18:10 Speaker 3 Why do you think you knew that? Because of, because of what your mother was...

18:14 Speaker 2 I believe it was my parents’ upbringing. In the end, definitely. At home I received, and still receive, so much truth.

18:23 Speaker 3 Speaking of finding your other half, now...

18:25 Speaker 2 Right. Exactly. So that’s why, whenever we come to Israel, we still keep drawing nourishment from there. That Torah and Chassidus are the truth, and there simply is no other way. So I knew that, ultimately, there was no other way.

18:42 Speaker 3 Even when you’re in that place, you know it isn’t right, and that at some point you’ll come back. I just didn’t know how to do it, because it’s like getting stuck in mud and not knowing how to get out. Wait, and when you went home to Zhitomir, did you have, like...

18:56 Speaker 2 There too, there were periods. There were escapes there too. Because that need to escape is something we all experience, more or less. You don’t have to go through...

19:08 Speaker 3 Reach an extreme situation.

19:09 Speaker 2 Reach an extreme situation to look for an escape. It can be the smallest thing. I don’t know. A girl fails a test and finds it hard to face, so she’ll look for an escape.

19:22 Speaker 3 Yes.

19:23 Speaker 2 So it was always there. It was always there in the background. Eventually I carried on, finished high school, went to seminary, and studied in Tzfas. So the wandering more or less ended, apart from Shabbos, when I had to find somewhere to stay. But...

19:43 Speaker 3 You were busy by then, weren’t you? With seminary and everything.

19:47 Speaker 2 Let’s say that even there, I had another kind of escape, which was keeping busy. I was always in the madrichot’s room, finding as much as I could to do.

19:58 Speaker 3 Oh, okay, but in a good way.

20:01 Speaker 2 In a good way, but ultimately you’re still not dealing with what you really need to deal with. You’re still running away from yourself. Also, at the beginning of my first year, my little brother was born. He has Down syndrome.

20:14 Speaker 3 Yossi.

20:14 Speaker 2 Yes, sweet Yossi. It was very, very hard for me. It took me a long time. Today he really is my beloved brother.

20:23 Speaker 3 A star.

20:23 Speaker 2 Very much so. But it took time, and when he was born, I ran away from it.

20:31 Speaker 3 It’s striking that he was born, but you weren’t actually there.

20:34 Speaker 2 He was born in Israel.

20:35 Speaker 3 Yes, but afterward.

20:37 Speaker 2 And afterward, right, I...

20:38 Speaker 3 Like, you have a brother like that and you don’t even know him.

20:40 Speaker 2 I wrote something before my parents came back after his birth, and I saw it again recently. Suddenly I saw what I’d written then: that I didn’t know whether it was good or bad, because on the one hand I wanted to follow his development, and on the other hand I preferred not to know, not to see, to run away from it.

20:58 Speaker 3 Wow, what a challenge. So tell us how you got from that place to where you are now. I’ll give a little spoiler: today you post content on your status. The status is just one way it comes out, but you actually help girls dealing with the problem you experienced for years. As you put it, “I was afraid to really meet myself.” How? How did that happen?

21:22 Speaker 2 I’ll get to that. I was in seminary, got married, finished my studies, and we went back on shlichus to Ukraine. Then the struggle eased a little. You’re married, you’re a mother, you’re on shlichus, you’re genuinely busy. So there were occasional slipups, but that difficulty with the internet was mostly pushed aside. And then the war broke out. A year and a half after we’d gone there on shlichus, the war broke out.

21:56 Speaker 3 The war in Ukraine, we should specify.

21:57 Speaker 2 Yes.

21:59 Speaker 3 There are a lot of wars. We need to be specific.

22:03 Speaker 2 So the war in Ukraine began, and we found ourselves in Israel, like all the shluchim from Ukraine.

22:10 Speaker 3 Somewhere.

22:11 Speaker 2 Yes, you can relate. Wandering around, trying to find our bearings.

22:16 Speaker 3 Were you also in Nes Harim?

22:17 Speaker 2 Yes.

22:18 Speaker 3 Wow, that’s an episode in itself. Put that in parentheses.

22:23 Speaker 2 So yes. Actually, because I was on shlichus—the Rebbe’s shlichus, but also on behalf of the Ministry of Education—we were evacuated two weeks before the war began, when it was still only a concern.

22:33 Speaker 3 Oh, right. We had couples who were sent a message in the middle of Shabbos.

22:37 Speaker 2 Yes.

22:38 Speaker 3 Did that happen to you in the middle of Shabbos too?

22:39 Speaker 2 I saw it after Shabbos. No one came to us. There’s—

22:41 Speaker 3 They sent someone to the shuls with a note.

22:43 Speaker 2 Yes, so no one came to us.

22:45 Speaker 3 Wow.

22:45 Speaker 2 Zhitomir is a village compared to other cities in Ukraine. So no, it didn’t reach me until after Shabbos. We saw so many messages: “You have a flight tomorrow.” We pretty much laughed about it. We said, what? After all, nobody can guarantee anything.

23:04 Speaker 3 It was obvious that... how do you say it? “Nichevo ne budet”—like, everything...

23:07 Speaker 2 Exactly.

23:08 Speaker 3 Nothing, nothing’s going to happen.

23:10 Speaker 2 We said, fine, we’ll fly to Israel. In two weeks they’ll see nothing happened and send us back. Yes.

23:15 Speaker 3 By the way, did you live in Zhitomir or in Zarichany?

23:18 Speaker 2 In Zhitomir.

23:19 Speaker 3 With your parents?

23:20 Speaker 2 Yes.

23:22 Speaker 3 That’s something. No, I was in Zarichany. That’s... okay, that’s for another podcast too.

23:27 Speaker 2 That’s a story.

23:29 Speaker 3 A bit like Nes Harim. Wow.

23:33 Speaker 2 So we arrived in Israel. For about two weeks, we had a really nice time.

23:41 Speaker 3 We’d be going right back.

23:42 Speaker 2 Yes.

23:42 Speaker 3 They’d see that nothing was happening.

23:44 Speaker 2 Exactly two weeks after we flew out—we flew out on a Sunday, and almost two weeks later—

23:50 Speaker 3 Five days.

23:50 Speaker 2 Thursday. I wake up in the morning and see tons of messages in the Ukraine shluchos group. My mother was on her way to Belgium for the thirtieth-day memorial for her father. She was already at the airport, just about to board the plane, when suddenly they heard an explosion and—

24:08 Speaker 3 They had bombed the airports.

24:11 Speaker 2 Yes.

24:11 Speaker 3 Wow.

24:13 Speaker 2 I didn’t understand. I asked my mother, “What’s happening?” She told me, “Apparently, a war has started.” That was it—I panicked. I wasn’t there, so I didn’t experience the fear there, but from a distance: What was happening to our family there? What was happening to the community? We were terribly, terribly worried. In the end, that was Thursday, and Sunday... Wow, it feels like it was much longer, but in reality—

24:37 Speaker 3 It felt like an eternity.

24:38 Speaker 2 The following Sunday. The first thing my father did... We have a children’s home. We had a children’s home in Zhitomir. Today they’re—

24:47 Speaker 3 Maybe we should explain a little: Zhitomir is a city, and next to it, across a river, is Zarichany, which is a kind of—

24:54 Speaker 2 Village.

24:55 Speaker 3 Village, a real village. I was there, actually. We spent a Shabbos there.

24:59 Speaker 2 Zarichany is a village near Zhitomir, and in one part of the village there’s a gated compound.

25:05 Speaker 3 For an orphanage.

25:06 Speaker 2 That’s where the children’s home was. The children were orphans.

25:09 Speaker 3 Yes.

25:10 Speaker 2 A children’s home, and there was also a guesthouse and a restaurant and—

25:13 Speaker 3 A dream of a place.

25:14 Speaker 2 A lot of people lived there.

25:16 Speaker 3 Yes, including families of other shluchim who lived there.

25:19 Speaker 2 Right.

25:20 Speaker 3 So how many children were in the children’s home then?

25:23 Speaker 2 Around fifty.

25:25 Speaker 3 All under your parents’ responsibility.

25:28 Speaker 2 Yes, though there were other shluchim managing things on site. But yes. So my father—the first thing he said was, “We have to take care of these children.” They started looking for buses. That was a whole story too. You’d need to hear it from my mother, but they arranged buses and took them. They told them, “We’re going away for Shabbos, for a Shabbaton in the Carpathian Mountains. We’ll spend Shabbos there and come back.” They had heard an explosion too. There was an explosion very close to the compound. So they went—the children from the home and the shluchim responsible for them. My parents—my mother joined them later on a separate bus. My father stayed. He said, “I’m not leaving,” until Rabbi Kotlarsky called.

26:22 Speaker 3 Yes.

26:23 Speaker 2 He told all the shluchim to leave. Then my father joined them too, and on Sunday they all landed in Israel on a special flight. My parents, all the shluchim, all the children from the children’s home, and other families who joined them arrived in Israel as one group and went to a place called Nes Harim. For anyone who doesn’t know it, it’s between Beit Shemesh and Beitar. There’s a JNF site there, and they welcomed us in an incredible way.

26:53 Speaker 3 Basically a field-study center.

26:55 Speaker 2 Yes.

26:57 Speaker 3 Schools go there, spend the night, get up in the morning, take a tour of the area, and move on.

27:03 Speaker 2 Right. We were there for half a year.

27:06 Speaker 3 That’s wild.

27:06 Speaker 2 Living together, a shared dining hall, a laundry room with a rota: who does the laundry, and when? It’s nice for a day, two days, a month. Half a year was really...

27:18 Speaker 3 Wow, wow, wow.

27:20 Speaker 2 Tough. And through all that time, um, for me personally—Hakadosh Boruch Hu showed kindness to our community in particular: they really came over with the shluchim and continued their shlichus in Israel. Um, personally, it really shook me up. It shook everyone up, of course, but I think it also brought back all the moves I’d gone through in my high school years. Because when I came to Zhitomir, I said, “That’s it. Now I’m here until Moshiach comes. No more upheavals.”

27:53 Speaker 3 And the house, the house in Zhitomir, had always been this steady anchor—

27:56 Speaker 2 Right.

27:57 Speaker 3 Where you knew you’d have a bed.

27:59 Speaker 2 Yes. I was also very connected. It wasn’t just the house and the family. I was very connected to the shlichus there. The whole time I was in Israel, I kept asking them to update me on what was happening—holidays, events. I was very, very connected. There was even a period when I called myself “Mushki Zhitomir” on WhatsApp. It was—

28:17 Speaker 3 Yes, yes.

28:18 Speaker 2 My identity.

28:18 Speaker 3 Like another surname.

28:19 Speaker 2 Yes. Um, so that had always been the dream, and I really did go back there, and that was it—everything was fine. And then suddenly Hakadosh Boruch Hu shook up my life again. It was like, okay, what now? Hakadosh Boruch Hu, what do You want from me now? Um, and it also really brought up my struggle with media. I realized I needed to do something about it, that there was something here that needed more serious attention. So I went to therapy—emotional therapy—which really helped me meet myself and stop running away from myself. It opened up so many new parts of me that I truly hadn’t known.

28:58 Speaker 3 Wow.

28:59 Speaker 2 Somewhere, I’d always known they were there, but I didn’t know how to bring them out. Whether it was feelings, talents, or things I have to offer the world. Hakadosh Boruch Hu gave me the tools, but I had no idea what to do with them. So instead, I ran away. And that’s something I really want to say, by the way: the higher something is, the lower it can fall. When there’s a difficulty, some kind of escape, at the same time it points to some kind of potential. It means you’re capable of doing something here. You don’t know how to do it; you can’t find a way to express it, so you run away. But every time you run away, you can actually say to yourself, “Wait, why am I running away? There must be something that I—”

29:43 Speaker 3 Some kind of unrealized strength.

29:45 Speaker 2 Exactly.

29:46 Speaker 3 Wow. And by the way, you talk about the emotional therapy with such excitement, and I have to say, it’s so not a given. Okay, deciding to go to therapy is one step, but finding the right person and having it really go the way it should—

29:59 Speaker 2 Yes.

29:59 Speaker 3 That’s not a given either.

30:00 Speaker 2 Yes, that’s hashgachah pratis.

30:02 Speaker 3 Wow.

30:03 Speaker 2 Um, no question. And then, while I was—at the same time as the emotional therapy, I was traveling from Nesharim, and I realized I needed to do something, something with myself. So, um, I’ll tell you about something else before the posts about media. Um, I was offered a chance to write for a magazine for girls, a monthly supplement to the Kfar Chabad newspaper.

30:33 Speaker 3 A supplement for—basically for teenagers.

30:35 Speaker 2 For teenagers, right, for girls. Um, they offered me a chance to write there, and I jumped at it. I said, “I’m just looking for something to do.” I really loved—I love writing. So we started thinking, okay, what would I write? The editor had various suggestions, and then she said that the editorial staff felt they needed a little more authentic Chassidic content. So she just threw out, “Maybe you’d like to write points from maamarim or something?” Now, I have to say that until then, I hadn’t studied maamarim.

31:09 Speaker 3 So explain, as an aside, what are maamarim?

31:14 Speaker 2 Well, maamarim are, essentially, divrei Elokim chayim—words of the living G-d. They’re words the Rebbe said, and the earlier Rebbeim too. It’s really—maybe you explain it, because I can’t.

31:29 Speaker 3 I think it’s really the highest level. I mean, okay, we have the Tanya, which was the foundation, and after the Tanya there were explanations of the Tanya and different branches of Chassidus that were presented in various ways. So there were sichos—the Rebbe speaking to the chassidim—and farbrengens, which are a bit freer than a sicha.

31:49 Speaker 2 Sichos are more about nigleh, the revealed dimension of Torah.

31:53 Speaker 3 In connection with nigleh, yes.

31:55 Speaker 2 In connection with nigleh. And sichos are more—um, maamarim have more concepts from Kabbalah, more—

32:02 Speaker 3 They’re on a higher level, and that’s also why they weren’t said on just any occasion. They were said on special occasions.

32:06 Speaker 2 Right.

32:07 Speaker 3 And only a Rebbe can say a maamar.

32:09 Speaker 2 Right.

32:09 Speaker 3 That’s why, when the Rebbe didn’t want to accept the nesius, and then finally began saying a maamar, that was the sign that he was accepting the nesius. So a maamar is something that’s harder to understand, on a higher level. You have to understand the language it uses, and it’s always based on a verse.

32:31 Speaker 2 Right.

32:31 Speaker 3 From Tanach.

32:31 Speaker 2 Right. It always begins with a verse and then explains its inner meaning.

32:35 Speaker 3 Which is incredible.

32:36 Speaker 2 Which is amazing.

32:36 Speaker 3 Exactly.

32:37 Speaker 2 Yes.

32:38 Speaker 3 You know, a verse from Tehillim that you know by heart and have never really thought about the words of—and suddenly whole layers and layers of ideas are built on it. It’s amazing. It’s simply amazing.

32:50 Speaker 2 Yes, and you see how, really—

32:52 Speaker 3 So they suggested the idea of maamarim?

32:54 Speaker 2 Yes. And I started saying that until then, because they really are so deep—maamarim have so much depth and so many Kabbalistic concepts, sefiros, worlds—I had always really run away from that too. I would study sichos. Maamarim, um, that wasn’t—

33:16 Speaker 3 You need someone to make them accessible, yes.

33:17 Speaker 2 Today girls tell me, girls in seminary and high school, “Wow, I love studying maamarim.” And I’m like, wow—when I was your age, I didn’t have that. I didn’t study them.

33:25 Speaker 3 Me too. I only studied maamarim when, say, we once had some preparation campaign for—I don’t know, maybe 19 Kislev—and a rabbi came to give a class every morning, teaching a maamar step by step over the course of a week. Or on the trip for 22 Shvat. But even then, it was with a rabbi teaching it.

33:41 Speaker 2 Yes, and even when rabbis taught them—like, even in our seminary classes, where it was part of the curriculum and there was a test on it—I would pretty much tune out. I was so convinced it wasn’t for me.

33:52 Speaker 3 Yes. You’d already decided in advance—

33:54 Speaker 2 I’d really just sit there daydreaming in class. Um, so when she suggested it, on one hand I thought, “Me? Maamarim? What does that have to do with me?” But precisely because I was searching, searching for meaning, feeling that I had to do something with myself, that pushed me to take on the challenge. I said, “You know what? I’ll try. I’m not that good with maamarim, but I’ll try.” And then, really—

34:21 Speaker 3 You jumped in.

34:22 Speaker 2 I jumped in. What did I have to lose? I wasn’t making a commitment to anyone. I was trying it. So I tried. The first maamar was Ani Ledodi; it was the month of Elul. Um, I took it—I didn’t study the whole maamar. I skimmed through it, got the main point, and wrote it in simple language for teenage girls. Um, I got feedback. They really enjoyed it. I said, “Okay, I guess this is working.” I tried another month. As far as I was concerned, every month was an experiment.

34:48 Speaker 3 So it was basically like an article.

34:50 Speaker 2 Yes.

34:50 Speaker 3 A sort of column—

34:51 Speaker 2 Yes. I took a point from a maamar and simply wrote it in words that connected it to everyday life. How is this relevant? That mattered to me. To this day, it really matters to me to take the message and ask, “How does this relate to my life?” That also came from how sure I’d been that maamarim were something terribly deep and disconnected. So I wanted to show just the opposite: how connected they are to us. The Rebbe said this to us. It speaks to us, to our lives. It’s very practical, and you can study maamarim without understanding every word, and that’s okay. You can understand the point. That’s one of the amazing things about Chassidus in general and studying a maamar: there are so many points and so many angles that each person can connect to it from a different place. And in the end, each person—

35:38 Speaker 3 Takes something from it.

35:38 Speaker 2 Takes strength from it. Yes.

35:40 Speaker 3 In general, when you study something, sometimes you get this feeling—what do I mean, a feeling? A distorted way of thinking—that tells you it’s all or nothing. If you don’t understand the entire maamar, then forget it; it’s not for you. In Tanya too, by the way, in some chapters it says, “for those who know the esoteric wisdom.” And you’re like, “I’m not one of those people.”

35:59 Speaker 2 No, that’s true. It’s really intimidating.

36:01 Speaker 3 With things that you— Okay, so you can learn Tanya on a basic level. You can learn it in greater depth, too. It’s meant for everyone. The question is at what level, and how it’s presented.

36:12 Speaker 2 It can be really intimidating. Suddenly you see words you don’t understand. Okay, I don’t understand any of this, so, like, bye.

36:16 Speaker 3 Exactly. But you approached it differently. You were willing to try even though you hadn’t done a doctorate in maamarim, which is amazing. And I think that’s a powerful message for anyone listening. Sometimes someone offers you an opportunity, and there’s a kind of yetzer hara that says, “No, forget it, you’re not good enough.” But the very fact that you were offered it is an invitation from Hakadosh Boruch Hu. Sometimes we keep wondering what we should do, waiting for Hakadosh Boruch Hu to drop something from the sky, when someone is already approaching us. Like the joke about the man who was drowning at sea. He asked Hakadosh Boruch Hu to save him, and a helicopter came and offered to take him. He said, “No, Hakadosh Boruch Hu will save me.”

36:48 Speaker 2 Yes.

36:49 Speaker 3 It’s like, this opportunity came to me. So I must have something to offer here. And even if I’m not good enough yet, that’s okay—you improve as you go. That’s the…

36:55 Speaker 2 Right.

36:56 Speaker 3 That’s how you move forward in life. Wow, that’s wonderful, because it really is such an original idea. I don’t know. Maamarim.

37:03 Speaker 2 Right. So I tried it for another month and another month, and I really started to love it. And I saw that sometimes—in fact, most of the time—I hadn’t even learned the whole maamar. I’d pick up on a point here and another there, skim through it, take one point and write about it. And then I remember, I think it was in Sivan, I wrote an article and sent it in. Then I said to myself, “Wait—Tammuz, Menachem Av—I’m about to finish a year. A year of learning a maamar every month. That’s incredible.” I was so excited about it that I said, “I have to share this on another platform somehow. More people have to discover it.” Because I grew up in a Chassidic home, with so much content, so many values, Chassidus and everything. But until I started learning maamarim on my own and working at it, I guess I hadn’t really felt that it… It was mine, it was my life, but I’d never really understood what it gave me.

38:07 Speaker 3 You’d kind of taken it for granted.

38:08 Speaker 2 Yes.

38:09 Speaker 3 So it went in one ear and out the other.

38:10 Speaker 2 Exactly. And suddenly I felt, wow, I have to pass this on.

38:15 Speaker 3 Everyone needs to know about it.

38:17 Speaker 2 Really. I really felt I had something to share with the world.

38:19 Speaker 3 Yes. And you were doing the work anyway, so just—2020 and… We’re talking about 2024. No, earlier.

38:28 Speaker 2 Twenty twenty-th—

38:29 Speaker 3 2023, the following year. I mean, come on, by then you could share things in more than one copy of a printed newspaper.

38:36 Speaker 2 Yes. So then I had the idea to open a WhatsApp group. I invited friends, and they invited friends, and that’s how I asked people to spread the word. Once a month I send a link and let everyone know which maamar we’re going to learn. I write about the main point in a way that will spark their curiosity—which maamar we’re learning and when. And now, in Menachem Av, I’m about to finish my second year of learning a maamar on Zoom.

39:10 Speaker 3 Once a month on Zoom.

39:11 Speaker 2 Once a month on Zoom. I really try to finish the maamar within an hour. Sometimes it’s even shorter if the maamar is short. And it’s amazing.

39:21 Speaker 3 So you have a kind of maamarim community.

39:22 Speaker 2 Yes, a community of—

39:23 Speaker 3 I joined once. I don’t remember if it was this year or last year. I think it was last year. It was “Vekibel HaYehudim.” Last year, right? In Adar?

39:33 Speaker 2 Yes.

39:34 Speaker 3 It was just so enjoyable and lovely, and pretty concise, too. You don’t have to… You kind of serve it up on a silver platter.

39:43 Speaker 2 That’s my goal. Precisely because I come from a place of always thinking it wasn’t for me. If I don’t understand something, I still try. My goal is to make it as accessible as possible. Come and learn. You can learn and you can understand, even if you don’t understand everything. I say this on Zoom a lot, too: “Now I’m reading a section with lots of concepts I don’t understand, and that’s okay. The soul will understand it. The main thing is that we understand the message at the end.” And later I also started making booklets—booklets with explained maamarim.

40:16 Speaker 3 Wow, that’s quite an undertaking, like a whole halachic advisory office.

40:20 Speaker 2 Yes, almost.

40:23 Speaker 3 No, it’s work.

40:24 Speaker 2 It is work, but let’s say that now it’s my escape. Where I used to escape to screens and nonsense—

40:30 Speaker 3 Now this is your escape.

40:32 Speaker 2 Today, when I need a little escapism—

40:35 Speaker 3 Wow, lucky you.

40:35 Speaker 2 I turn to the maamarim, work on the booklets or prepare a presentation for the next Zoom session. And it’s amazing. I really feel that Hakadosh Boruch Hu sent this to me. Like you said, I was given an opportunity.

40:49 Speaker 3 And you jumped at it.

40:49 Speaker 2 So it started with writing, and then I felt I had to share it more widely. That’s when I started the monthly Zoom session.

40:55 Speaker 3 That’s what’s special about opportunities, too: we don’t know what they’ll lead to afterward.

40:58 Speaker 2 Right.

40:59 Speaker 3 You start something small, but it can lead to places much bigger than you ever dreamed of.

41:05 Speaker 2 Yes, yes. Someone asked me recently whether, back when things were more challenging for me, I ever thought I’d get to where I am today. Or maybe it was someone else who asked, “Have you reached the point where you feel, ‘Wow, this is what I dreamed of’?” I said, “Wow, honestly, I hadn’t even dreamed of this.” Hakadosh Boruch Hu led me—

41:32 Speaker 3 Wow.

41:33 Speaker 2 To a place that…

41:36 Speaker 3 Yes. And even now you don’t know where you’ll end up. After all, we’re all still in the middle of the journey.

41:41 Speaker 2 All our lives. So I started doing the maamarim. Later, our whole community moved from Nes—yes, it started when we were in Nes Harim. The whole community moved to Ashkelon. The children settled into the Chabad schools there. I started teaching ninth grade at an online school for daughters of shluchim. I still teach there today. And, broadly speaking, that was my shlichus. I had the maamarim and I had teaching. And yes, still—

42:21 Speaker 3 And you were still living in Ashkelon.

42:23 Speaker 2 We lived in Ashkelon. We moved with the whole community; we went along with it. But the whole time, were we going to stay there? We didn’t want to—we wanted something else. The shlichus, what?

42:32 Speaker 3 What was happening in Ukraine?

42:33 Speaker 2 Yes. Going back to Ukraine seemed pretty unthinkable. We really weren’t considering it. Now, during those years, I began—so, as I said, I started teaching ninth grade, and connections with girls also started coming up from all sorts of directions. I started to become… to become acquainted?

42:55 Speaker 3 Acquainted.

42:55 Speaker 2 Acquainted.

42:56 Speaker 3 There you go.

42:56 Speaker 2 I started getting to know more and more girls—good girls from good, Chassidic homes—who were facing this challenge with media. And every one of them felt alone. So many girls were dealing with it.

43:13 Speaker 3 Wow.

43:14 Speaker 2 And every one of them was convinced she was the worst, and that she was all alone. Girls would write, “If you saw me on the street, you’d never dream it was me.” There was a period when I got so many questions about this, and it really overwhelmed me because of my own experience. I said, “It can’t be that so many girls are dealing with the same thing and they all feel alone.” To me, that loneliness is a huge part of the struggle, because you feel alone and want to escape that feeling, so you keep escaping into a screen.

43:46 Speaker 3 Like a snowball.

43:47 Speaker 2 A kind of loop, yes. And I said, “We have to do something about this. This isn’t normal. So many girls are dealing with the same thing, and there’s no support for them.” I tried to think what I could do, and then I had the idea of starting a WhatsApp status—not on my regular number, but on another number—that would talk about the subject. I had no idea what I’d post there, but I said, “I need to bring the subject out into the open. Just make space for it. Let’s talk about it. Let’s stop sweeping these problems under the rug. They’re here, so let’s talk about them or offer some tools.” And the main goal was that no one should feel alone. As far as I was concerned, even if there were no tools and no solutions, at least we could talk about it. Because to me, that’s one of the solutions.

44:32 Speaker 4 Kind of like creating a support group.

44:34 Speaker 2 Exactly.

44:34 Speaker 4 But here it’s like a support group that only broadcasts. You don’t feel alone, but you…

44:40 Speaker 2 So I’ll tell you, a kind of community did form, even though it’s anonymous—

44:45 Speaker 4 Right, so an anonymous support group.

44:46 Speaker 2 But they’re all partners in it; they all write. All of them—a lot. I get a lot of responses, and I post everything, and then people respond to what I posted. In other words, there’s a tremendous amount of conversation on the status. It all goes through me, and it’s all anonymous. But in the end, this has created a conversation that I’m not the only one leading. Not at all, really. It’s based mainly on the responses. I have to say, I was very, very apprehensive about actually doing this. It definitely took—

45:12 Speaker 4 A lot of courage.

45:14 Speaker 2 Also, sometimes you know things and you’re sure everyone already knows them. I mean, there are so many talks on the subject, so many workshops; people talk about it. It’s not as though no one talks about it. So what could I possibly add? But I felt something stirring in me, and I couldn’t put it aside. I said, “I have to do something. I have to do something.” So I said, “Okay, I don’t care. I’m jumping in and doing what I can.” I prepared myself in advance: if it doesn’t work out, okay, then that’s a sign this isn’t my shlichus. No harm done. At least I’ll know I did what I could. So I shared it with girls I was in touch with, and they shared it with friends, and little by little the group grew. Today there are hundreds of viewers—

45:57 Speaker 4 A group?

45:58 Speaker 2 Viewers.

45:59 Speaker 4 A status, right.

46:01 Speaker 2 A number of viewers. Today there are girls, mothers, and parents watching, and I get feedback from all of them about how much it helps and how much it... Ultimately, I also try to give them practical tools.

46:18 Speaker 4 So where do you get the professional knowledge you share there?

46:23 Speaker 2 At first, I came to it with my own life experience and what I’d gained from therapy. When I went through therapy, I received so many tools. The therapist also gave me a lot of knowledge. I don’t want to call it theoretical, because it isn’t, but a lot of background and explanations beyond the practical side. So I gained a great deal there that I could pass on to others, not just use in my own life. I’m also occasionally in touch with professional women, so sometimes I consult them, and eventually that becomes part of what I know. Just a few months ago, when I realized I needed to develop more expertise in this but had no idea how, I saw an announcement about two days later from the Lokchim Achrayut organization. They were launching something new: a course for media coaches.

47:19 Speaker 4 Wow, that’s already a profession?

47:21 Speaker 2 Yes. From my perspective, they invented that profession—

47:27 Speaker 4 Apparently there’s a crying need for it.

47:30 Speaker 2 Absolutely.

47:32 Speaker 4 It’s all supply and demand. Wow.

47:34 Speaker 2 And I felt as though it had simply fallen from heaven for me. Really.

47:36 Speaker 4 Wow.

47:36 Speaker 2 It was about two days after I’d made that decision. I’d said, “Okay, I need more tools. I need to do something more substantial with this,” and suddenly the course was advertised. So I signed up and studied, and I really did gain more professional tools. I try to bring those to the status. But first and foremost, as I said—and I keep writing this—my main goal is that no one should feel alone. I didn’t come into this as a professional. Maybe today I am one, but I didn’t start out that way.

48:04 Speaker 4 But you did run a workshop.

48:06 Speaker 2 Right. Toward the end of this school year, I also put together a workshop. I knew I was going to come to Israel, so I said—

48:14 Speaker 4 And then there was the war.

48:15 Speaker 2 Something—

48:16 Speaker 4 War within war within war.

48:18 Speaker 2 Yes. So I also have a workshop and talks on the subject. We’re all normal, really.

48:25 Speaker 4 Yes.

48:25 Speaker 2 And that’s what I want to tell the girls. Not only the girls, by the way. Women also take part in the challenges and tell me, “Today I managed to spend time with the kids instead of being on a screen.” And I’m like, wow, you did great. In the end, all of us deal with this to one degree or another.

48:44 Speaker 4 Do you talk only about content, or also about, say, how much time media consumes? All the—

48:49 Speaker 2 Everything.

48:50 Speaker 4 Aspects of it.

48:50 Speaker 2 Honestly, the status sometimes branches out into other subjects too, Chassidic and otherwise.

48:58 Speaker 4 In the end, everything is connected.

48:59 Speaker 2 Yes. And it’s also become a place where girls open up about almost any difficulty.

49:08 Speaker 4 They know it’s you. You’re not anonymous.

49:10 Speaker 2 They know. At first I was anonymous. One reason was that I worried that, because of how I appear outwardly, they’d say, “What does this have to do with her? She definitely won’t understand us.”

49:21 Speaker 4 Mm.

49:23 Speaker 2 Which, by the way—

49:24 Speaker 4 That’s actually one of the things that’s most... I mean, once you reveal who you are, that’s what makes it so convincing: “Look, I’m not so terrible. Mushky was there too.”

49:33 Speaker 2 There was one time when—

49:34 Speaker 4 [unclear]

49:36 Speaker 2 Someone once asked me a question, and I was so glad she asked, because it’s a subject I like talking about—though “like” isn’t the word. It hurts that this is the situation. But the truth is, even the best, most Chassidic girl can stumble. We all have a yetzer hara. And what’s important to me is for people to understand something that helped me very, very much: struggling with this, and stumbling along the way, doesn’t mean I’m less good. There’s a reason behind it. Escaping into a screen is a symptom; it isn’t really the problem. That’s why a filter isn’t always the solution. A filter is important, necessary, and obligatory.

50:20 Speaker 4 Yes.

50:21 Speaker 2 It’s essential, but it isn’t enough. It has to be there. If parents put a filter on their children’s devices, they need to have a conversation about it: Why are we doing this? Why is it important? What do you think? Do you think it’s important?

50:34 Speaker 4 So what you called theoretical knowledge is actually the—

50:38 Speaker 2 Yes. And the same goes for teenage girls themselves. Don’t put on a filter just because someone told you to, or because you have to. Stop for a moment and think: What do you want? Are you putting on a filter only because your parents said so, or because school requires it? Or do you truly want it yourself? If you sit with yourself for a moment and think, don’t you want that protection? And why? What draws you to the screen? It was amazing to see how, while I was in therapy and at the same time beginning to study maamarim, so many things fell into place for me. I thought, wow, in the end psychology and Chassidus—lehavdil—are saying the same thing.

51:14 Speaker 4 When you come across the right kind of psychology.

51:16 Speaker 2 Right. Yes.

51:17 Speaker 4 Because some approaches contradict—

51:19 Speaker 2 Right, right. But yes, I came across the right kind of psychology.

51:25 Speaker 4 Wow.

51:25 Speaker 2 And it was amazing to see that. It was around the same time that the therapist told me how important it is not to run away from yourself, but to make room for your difficulties and your less pleasant feelings. Then I studied a maamar. It was the month of Kislev, and I studied the maamar Padah V’Shalom, which talks about making room for the animal soul—not running away from it, but working with it.

51:50 Speaker 4 With the desiring faculty. Yes. Wow.

51:53 Speaker 2 That—

51:54 Speaker 4 It all connects. It all connects.

51:55 Speaker 2 Exactly. And that’s what I’m saying: this is what happens when we’re facing a screen. In the course I learned that there are two voices: one that wants to and one that doesn’t; one that wants to watch the videos and one that doesn’t. I said, “Okay, that’s the G-dly soul and the animal soul.” What is the animal soul? We’re so used to getting angry with it: “Come on, you’re so annoying. You’re making my life difficult.” But the animal soul is our vital soul. It seeks the things that are vital to us, and it’s the same with a screen. When I want to go on a screen, it isn’t really the screen I want. I want something I can get from it—essential needs that every one of us has. We’re all born with a need for love, appreciation, belonging, meaning, a sense of achievement. So many things that the screen supposedly provides. It creates the illusion that I’m getting them while I’m on it, and then, as soon as I leave the screen, that illusion bursts. But understanding that I go there not because I’m no good, not because I can’t control myself, but because I have a genuinely important need and the screen meets it in an easy way—that changes things. Once I understand why I’m going to the screen, I can pause. Suddenly, it also shows me how a person can do teshuvah in a single moment. Sometimes it really takes just one second to collect yourself and say, “Wait, why am I going to the screen? What am I missing right now? Am I missing a sense of achievement? Then I’ll go do something that really gives me that feeling, one that will last, instead of playing a game and getting to the next level.” That’s really fun, and it really does give you a sense of achievement. I say this as someone who was addicted to Snake on button phones.

53:35 Speaker 2 As if it really gives you something. It’s also a kind of escape, and it meets some kind of need.

53:40 Speaker 5 It patches something up.

53:41 Speaker 2 Yes.

53:41 Speaker 5 In Chassidic language, it’s called finding the spark. Everything has some kind of spark, and it can’t be that even something like this has no spark at all. You identify it, and then you realize you can work with it in a healthy way.

53:57 Speaker 2 Yes.

53:58 Speaker 5 To make that assessment: is this the right way to redeem that spark from...

54:03 Speaker 2 Right, that’s one side of it. On the other hand, at the end of the day, the phone really is a tool. That’s also very important to know, because a lot of the time people label screens—whether it’s a computer or a phone—as something bad. Once I’ve labeled it as something bad, it no longer matters what I do on it, and it becomes much easier to drift. When I understand that a screen is actually a tool that I can also use for good things... Once, I put together a questionnaire. I really like sending questionnaires to my followers.

54:32 Speaker 5 What, using Forms?

54:34 Speaker 2 Yes, I made a questionnaire in Forms, and one of the questions was: What good things do you do on a screen?

54:38 Speaker 5 Wow.

54:38 Speaker 2 And several girls wrote, “Nothing.” Now, what does “nothing” mean? You communicate with people, you learn new things, maybe you do design work? There are all kinds of—

54:49 Speaker 5 You follow Mushky’s status updates, for example.

54:52 Speaker 2 For example.

54:52 Speaker 5 Good content you take in.

54:53 Speaker 2 Yes, there are so many good things you can do on a phone. So why do girls say, “Nothing. I don’t do anything good”? Because in their minds, the phone has already been labeled as something negative, so anything I do on it is negative. And if using it at all is negative, then what difference does it make what I do? It really makes it much easier to drift.

55:10 Speaker 5 Wow.

55:11 Speaker 2 Once I understand that it’s a tool, and a powerful, amazing tool, and that you can do so many good things with it, it becomes much easier for me to choose. I really like to say that it’s time to stop escaping and start choosing.

55:28 Speaker 5 That’s very positive. Right.

55:29 Speaker 2 Yes. When I use my phone by choice and not as an escape, it’s okay to use my phone. But when you choose it, you’re not escaping just because you have no energy and reach for it on impulse. You pause for a moment and say, “Wait, do I really want to go on my phone right now? Yes, I’ve had a busy day, a hard day. I’m upset and I want to unwind a little.” That’s okay. And when you do it by choice, it’s also easier to choose the content you’ll see, because you aren’t escaping. You can also set a time limit for yourself: “Okay, how long do I need this quiet time on my phone right now?” Okay.

56:05 Speaker 5 Wow, that’s amazing. Listen, it really is. I think you could say that in our generation—this might sound a bit presumptuous—but at this point, the phone is the ultimate example of kelipas nogah. You can take it to incredible heights, like the things you’re doing, for example, or you can bring it down into the three impure kelipos so easily. And what does “easily” mean? They used to say “at the push of a button,” but today it’s a touch of the screen. You don’t even have to make the effort to press. It’s just...

56:36 Speaker 2 Absolutely.

56:36 Speaker 5 That’s exactly it. And it’s about understanding: I choose. I can choose. That’s really the essence of Chassidus, in every moment. You can choose, and you can choose again.

56:48 Speaker 2 Right.

56:48 Speaker 5 I think one of the difficulties is feeling, “I fell—what’s going to become of me? What kind of person am I?” And understanding that, whatever image you have of yourself right now, in the very next moment you can be a new person. That’s revolutionary. It’s incredible.

57:01 Speaker 2 Right. That’s also something a lot of girls... I say “girls” because I work mainly with girls, but it can certainly happen to women too. It’s those feelings of guilt: “Oh, I’m so awful. I’m no good.” First of all, as I said about escaping loneliness, there’s also an escape from those feelings. I feel awful, and it’s uncomfortable to feel that way, so I keep escaping into the screen. If I want to stop, I have to focus on the good in me. Whenever I start some kind of challenge—I sometimes run different challenges and give assignments—

57:34 Speaker 5 That’s so sweet. That would make a really powerful status update.

57:36 Speaker 2 Yes? So I always start with: “Three good things about yourself.” Because without that, you can’t make a change. Without thinking positively about yourself, you can’t make a change. And sometimes that positive thought can be the most basic thing. If you can’t find anything good about yourself, okay, you have a G-dly soul. That’s enough. There’s a maamar I really like to quote—not word for word, but its message.

58:01 Speaker 5 Tell us from memory.

58:04 Speaker 2 I can say, “A person rises and falls”—those are words from the maamar. The Rebbe says that a person rises and falls, and when he falls, he becomes sad about his spiritual state. So the Rebbe says that this feeling of sadness also comes—yes, this is in Tanya too—from the yetzer hara. It also comes from the animal soul. And my job, when that comes, after a fall, when I’m down, is not to be overwhelmed by that sadness, but to focus on the G-dly soul. I put it this way: it’s like there are two voices, the animal soul and the G-dly soul. The animal soul tells me, “See? You’re awful. You fell again, you watched nonsense again. There’s something wrong with you.” And the G-dly soul is standing off to the side saying, “Hello, I’m here too. Pay attention to me.” Because a lot of girls say, “After watching what I watched, I feel uncomfortable davening.” Wait, what do you mean, uncomfortable davening? The G-dly soul is longing, begging you, “Pay attention to me.” Because if you don’t daven, you’re continuing to give your attention to the animal soul. So it feels like, “How can I daven after what I saw?” It’s hard to recognize where that feeling is coming from. So no.

59:11 Speaker 5 Yes.

59:11 Speaker 2 The Rebbe says in that maamar that the greatest thing is when we’re right in the middle of the difficulty, the test, the struggle, and I tell my yetzer hara, “Do not rejoice over me, my enemy; though I have fallen, I have risen.” It’s like telling the sitra achra, “Don’t get excited that I fell, because even in my fall I can rise.” In the end, it’s precisely when I bring light into the darkness—when, despite having watched nonsense, I go and daven—that the light is greatest. That’s the superiority of light that comes from darkness.

59:43 Speaker 5 That’s beautiful. I think it’s a very powerful point that’s really brought out as something new in Tanya. The maamarim then go into it more deeply and everything. First of all, the Alter Rebbe came and normalized it. He came and told us, “You have two souls, and the fact that you feel or do certain things—hold on, you’re okay.” Today the whole world normalizes all kinds of things: “It’s okay that you’re like this, and it’s okay that you’re like that.” Everyone comes along today and says—

1:00:08 Speaker 2 You’re everything.

1:00:09 Speaker 5 Yes, because if everyone does it, that means it’s normal. And that’s where it ends. But the Alter Rebbe doesn’t stop there. He normalizes it, and then says, “Wait, it’s normal that you feel this way, but despite feeling this way, you can act differently and choose.” The thing about the animal soul is that we identify with it so strongly. It’s part of us. It’s called the first soul because it comes up first and shouts first. So you say to yourself, “Okay, I feel this way, so that’s it—I’m a lost cause.” And the Alter Rebbe comes and says, “No. You can choose anew every moment. This whole thing is actually within your reach.”

1:00:41 Speaker 2 Right.

1:00:41 Speaker 5 And you’ve made it even more within reach for all the girls who... How wonderful, Mushky. We need to add links to your status updates, your group, your number, for anyone who needs lectures and so on.

1:00:51 Speaker 2 Yes.

1:00:52 Speaker 5 Wow.

1:00:53 Speaker 2 I really do get so many responses from girls. First of all, girls who simply write “thank you,” and say that this is the only place where people talk about this struggle. And really, realizing that—

1:01:02 Speaker 5 I think that might be the greatest thing you’re doing.

1:01:04 Speaker 2 Realizing that I’m not the only one really helped me. Lots of girls have written that in one way or another. And there’s been practical action too: girls who put a filter on their phones because of the status updates.

1:01:16 Speaker 5 Wow.

1:01:16 Speaker 2 Girls have written that the tools I gave them really helped them be more aware of what they’re doing on their phones and why they go there. And that—it really is tremendous siyata dishmaya. Sometimes I simply don’t understand how I got here.

1:01:32 Speaker 5 How you merited this. It’s—

1:01:33 Speaker 2 Really.

1:01:33 Speaker 5 Looking at it from the outside, it really seems like a journey that—

1:01:37 Speaker 2 Yes.

1:01:37 Speaker 5 You went through, as if for this.

1:01:39 Speaker 2 Yes.

1:01:39 Speaker 5 You can’t really say that, because what you went through was a negative experience. But in the end, we don’t know what Hakadosh Boruch Hu has planned for us.

1:01:46 Speaker 2 Yes, let me go back for a moment to my journey. Um, after we’d been in Israel for a while, my parents flew to Zhitomir for the holidays. We hadn’t been there at all for a year and a half, and even when my parents flew, we stayed in Israel. Then at some point, on Yom Kippur 578—

1:02:12 Speaker 5 Four.

1:02:14 Speaker 2 Uh, 578—

1:02:16 Speaker 5 Four.

1:02:16 Speaker 2 Four. Uh, yes, the war started—

1:02:20 Speaker 5 Yes, a year and a half ago.

1:02:21 Speaker 2 Right. So, Yom Kippur 5784—

1:02:24 Speaker 5 It’s been two years already.

1:02:26 Speaker 2 My husband came home and said, “What do you think—maybe we’ll fly to Zhitomir for Sukkos?” I was like, “Are you sure?” We were pretty worried about the war. We didn’t know what was happening there. It was a time when, honestly, you still didn’t know what the next day would bring. Any day could—

1:02:39 Speaker 5 Yes.

1:02:40 Speaker 2 Hashem should protect us. We were hoping for the best. Um, he said, “Yes, and maybe we’ll stay there, too.” I kind of laughed and said, “Okay.” And honestly, it was very unsettling for me. On the one hand, I’d always wanted to go back. I felt that was my place. On the other hand, the moment the idea actually came up, I said, “Wait, but I’ve started doing so many things here.” The work I was doing was mainly with girls in Israel. I have girls from all over the world, but my main audience is girls from Israel. I said, “I’ve started to find my place here. After searching, I’ve started to find my place.” So it was yes, no, yes, no. Well, we flew there for Sukkos. After talking it over and going back and forth, we flew with the intention of saying our final goodbyes. We weren’t going to stay there on shlichus. We were there for Sukkos, and then came Simchas Torah. News started coming in from Israel, and our home, our community, was in Ashkelon. Um, then we realized things weren’t going to return to normal there anytime soon. We came back to Israel because my sister was getting married. But because of the war here, we said, “Okay, the kids don’t have preschool in Ashkelon anyway.”

1:04:00 Speaker 5 Let’s choose which war.

1:04:01 Speaker 2 Yes. And while we were there for Sukkos, we saw how much the community longed for shluchim to come. They were really pleading with us.

1:04:15 Speaker 5 They’d really been left all alone.

1:04:16 Speaker 2 They’d been completely alone for two and a half years, and they felt that absence. Whenever my parents came, people would cry to them and beg them. My parents didn’t move back because of my little brother Yossi, whom we mentioned. He needs a special setting. My mother had always said, “I don’t know what I’ll do with him when he grows up.” In the end, Hakadosh Boruch Hu brought them to Israel, and they understood that their shlichus now was to stay there. So the community really asked us to come. They were so eager for someone to be there to lead the community. Their longing really persuaded us, and together with the situation in Israel, we decided that we were going back. But we said, “We’re not going back—we’re setting out on shlichus anew. We never go backward; we always move forward.” For me, the moment we decided to set out on shlichus anew brought my whole life full circle. Suddenly I looked back and said, “Hakadosh Boruch Hu really led me through all those upheavals. He was with me and led me from home to home, from place to place. He’d already brought me to Zhitomir, and then He said, ‘Wait, no, you still need to grow a bit more.’” So He brought me to Israel, and I went to therapy—

1:05:28 Speaker 5 That was the most significant period for you.

1:05:30 Speaker 2 And then I could truly return as a new version of myself.

1:05:34 Speaker 5 Wow.

1:05:35 Speaker 2 It was just moving to realize that. In the end, there really is Someone running the world. And later, when there were—there are always challenges, but today, whenever I face one, I say, “Mushki, you already know that Hakadosh Boruch Hu is with you through all these challenges, and it’s all going to be okay.”

1:05:55 Speaker 5 You also study maamarim, so whatever happens, a few days will pass and you’ll get the message from somewhere. It’s...

1:06:01 Speaker 2 Yes.

1:06:02 Speaker 5 When you study and immerse yourself in Chassidus, it helps so much, because ultimately it answers all the questions and gives you a way to meet every challenge. There’s this anchor holding you steady all the time. It’s amazing. So you’ve arrived there now the way your parents did back then. Alone.

1:06:21 Speaker 2 Yes, alone. Before the war, there were almost ten families of shluchim there, and today we’re there alone. Honestly, maybe it isn’t nice to say this, but after we’d been there for a while, I said, “Wow.” Suddenly I began to appreciate all the shluchim who are alone. I’d never really appreciated what that meant. You always think, “Wow, they’re alone,” but when you experience it yourself, you realize: the children don’t have friends around. I see my nieces and nephews at my mother’s house and think, “Wow, my children won’t have that experience nearly as often.” It gives you a new appreciation.

1:06:57 Speaker 5 A different kind of shlichus.

1:06:58 Speaker 2 Yes, yes. Very different.

1:07:00 Speaker 5 And ultimately, everything you started in Israel is online, so you can keep doing it at the same time.

1:07:06 Speaker 2 Right. It’s just that I’d like to give more talks in person, for example. So I try to combine the two. When I come to Israel, I let the people it’s relevant to know that I’m here. Um, yes, ultimately it’s about remembering that Hakadosh Boruch Hu really leads us to our shlichus.

1:07:26 Speaker 5 Yes.

1:07:27 Speaker 2 To where we need to be.

1:07:28 Speaker 5 Wow. Mushki, a closing message. You’ve shared a lot of messages, but give us the highlight—the one thing you’d want everyone who’s heard you not to forget, to take with them.

1:07:40 Speaker 2 I want everyone to know that every difficulty truly has a purpose. And I said this earlier, but I want to say it again: if you’re dealing with some challenge, some test, it’s a sign that somewhere inside you there’s unrealized potential. It only shows how much strength you have. Once we get used to thinking that way—when I face a difficulty, I ask, “Okay, how can I grow from this?”—it starts on an intellectual level. You tell yourself, “Okay, I’m meant to grow from this. I have no idea how yet,” but even that makes it significantly easier. And truly remember that no one is superfluous in this world. Wow. Hakadosh Boruch Hu put you here, so you have a shlichus here, and you can change the world. There’s something you can do that nobody else can. So even if you have difficulties and challenges, whatever kind they may be, you are needed here. And maybe those very challenges are part of your path to bringing who you are into the world. Right. As we often see in hindsight. But knowing it while you’re going through it is incredibly strengthening. Yes. Mushki Elperin. Elperin or Halperin? Elperin. Elperin, with an aleph. Elperin with an aleph. Okay. Elperin, thank you so, so much. You were incredibly moving. Thank you. And I really hope every woman takes a little of this with her. Sometimes we hear a talk or a podcast and get inspired, and the next moment we go back to our lives. Really take with you that last thing you said: you have something to give the world. You’re not superfluous here. Hakadosh Boruch Hu didn’t bring you into the world for no reason. He creates you anew every day and every moment. So show Him that you appreciate

1:09:19 Speaker 2 that and bring your whole self to what you do. Thank you so much. Enjoy the rest of your stay here. Amen. And may your return to shlichus, with Hashem’s help, go well and be successful. Amen. Thank you, Mushki. Thank you.