Rabbi Yossi Levi - Manila, Philippines - Part 1

00:19 Speaker 1 Tell us about your background. Your parents, your family—where they came from, where you came from. Tell us a little more about that.

00:28 Speaker 2 My father—my father lived through the Holocaust. I’m the youngest child of older parents, and I grew up in Moshav Komemiyus. It’s a charedi moshav where there weren’t even any Chabad chassidim. They were looking for someone charedi to treat them, so they accepted my father. No, no, they didn’t want Chabad chassidim at all. They wanted my father because he worked for Clalit, and they did want someone charedi to treat them.

01:04 Speaker 1 And your father was a doctor?

01:06 Speaker 2 Yes. He lived through the Holocaust. He studied medicine afterward... He was in France, and that’s where he studied. He had actually wanted to go to yeshiva. That was his first encounter with a Chabad chossid. There was a Chabad chossid in his area, sometime after the Holocaust, who came to recruit students for a Chabad yeshiva in Italy. And his father had also survived the Holocaust, but he was already in very, very poor health.

01:40 Speaker 1 Where were they during the Holocaust, if I may ask?

01:43 Speaker 2 They were... They came from a region called Alsace, in France. It’s a very beautiful region, and there used to be many, many Jewish communities there. Today, all those communities have disappeared completely. There’s almost no trace of them. There’s even a town there where, at some point—I don’t know if it was connected to the burning of the Talmud, but there was a decree about that place, and the rabbis of France at the time said it was forbidden to live there. My father lived near one of those places, one of those villages, and there was a Jewish community there. Last year I had a meeting in that part of Switzerland, so I went to visit the place where he grew up. It was half an hour’s drive away. And people really did still remember them. His grandfather was the town’s shochet, and apparently that’s how I—

02:39 Speaker 1 Your father’s grandfather?

02:39 Speaker 2 My father’s grandfather was the town’s shochet. I went looking for their graves. I found his grandfather’s grave. The Jews there told me there were enormous cemeteries, and I searched. Eventually, somehow, I got there. There was a Jewish man who helped me. He said, “Levites have a sign—there are hands above the headstone.” No, sorry, kohanim. I think it’s both kohanim and Levites; I don’t remember anymore. There’s something connected with the kohanim, and that’s how I found the grave. I didn’t find his father’s grave. And...

03:16 Speaker 1 How old were you when you went there?

03:20 Speaker 2 It was last year. I met people who had known my father. My father hadn’t wanted to get a French passport because he hated the French. He’d lived through the Holocaust and Vichy and all that, and he felt a great deal of hatred toward them. He refused until we told him, “Let’s get a passport so you can travel to the Rebbe.” At the time, you didn’t need a visa with a French passport. Eventually he agreed, but he hated the French very much. He hadn’t wanted a French passport. So it was a really fascinating visit, seeing where my father grew up, where the shul had been, and their house, which was closed up. I met older people. I walked around the town asking questions. The language was a bit difficult, but the older people in the town remembered them; they’d heard of them and knew who they were. Anyway, after the Holocaust my father really wanted to go to yeshiva, to Tomchei Temimim in Italy, but his father didn’t want him to go because he was very ill and wanted him to stay. So my father cared for him until he passed away, and then he moved to Israel on his own. He went to one of the kibbutzim there, where they didn’t observe Torah and mitzvos, and that was very... He told me that throughout the Holocaust he never took off his tzitzis. He managed to escape from the camp. They had put them in a small camp near the French-German border, and he managed to escape. That’s how he survived in the forests with partisans. His job was to go and get food—to steal food at night. That was his job with the partisans. That’s how he survived the Holocaust. He told me that when he arrived in Israel, he couldn’t believe what was happening. He said to me, “During the Holocaust, I never once took off my tzitzis. I didn’t always wear a yarmulke, but my tzitzis were my bulletproof vest throughout the

05:10 Speaker 2 Holocaust.” That’s what he said. “They protected me, and with them I survived the Holocaust.” When he first arrived in Israel, he went to that kibbutz, but he left not long afterward. He moved around and even spent a short time on the streets, until he found a job and started working. That’s how things gradually came together. In Israel, they didn’t recognize his medical studies in France, so somehow he studied while working and began to return to medicine. Then he moved to Jerusalem. He worked at Hadassah for many years, until he met my mother. They married. She worked at Bikur Cholim Hospital and was a nurse, and together they raised their children. They had always kept Shabbos and everything, but their strong connection with Chabad began when they sent my brothers to study at the yeshiva in Lod.

06:09 Speaker 3 How many children are there in your family?

06:12 Speaker 2 Eight.

06:14 Speaker 3 Boruch Hashem, wonderful.

06:15 Speaker 2 Yes. My oldest brother went to study in Lod, and that’s how the very strong connection with the Rebbe was renewed. My father had always listened closely to the Frierdiker Rebbe, and these were things that interested him. But he came from a region where they were Yekkes, German Jews, and it wasn’t a place with much of a connection to Chabad. Still, he wanted that connection. It wasn’t a family connection or anything like that, but apparently he had a soul connection to Chabad. As the children went off to yeshiva, one by one, the connection grew stronger and stronger. In the end, he himself never studied in a Chabad yeshiva or anything, but he was a Chabad chossid through and through, as they say. I went to cheder in Komemiyus, where they taught only in Yiddish. You weren’t allowed to speak Hebrew. Of course, when it came to yeshiva, all of us went to Chabad yeshivos.

07:16 Speaker 3 Ah.

07:18 Speaker 2 But during our childhood, we didn’t study in Chabad schools, unfortunately. Anyway, then I studied in Nachlas Har Chabad, and even as a child I was involved in outreach activities.

07:32 Speaker 3 When you say “Nachlas Har Chabad,” you mean Kiryat Malachi, of course?

07:35 Speaker 2 Kiryat Malachi, yes. One important point is that my father always connected Jews with the Rebbe. When people came to him—unlike other doctors, my father would see people at any hour of the day or night, even in the middle of the night for minor things. He never complained to anyone, “Why did you come to me over something so small?” He always greeted them warmly, and that taught me about shlichus. My father told me, “One thing you should never do is go into medicine.” He said that to all his children: “Don’t go into this field.” But he did instill Ahavas Yisroel in us to an extraordinary degree. Always greet people warmly, twenty-four hours a day, even in the middle of the night. Especially then, people would wake him because the clinic wasn’t open and they needed a referral. They wanted to avoid paying for an ambulance or an emergency-room visit; without a doctor’s referral, they would have to pay several hundred shekels. He would gladly get up at three in the morning. People weren’t embarrassed to wake him, because they knew he was awake around that time anyway. He would usually get up at four to learn Chassidus. But he was so welcoming; he never complained or said, “Why did you wake me in the middle of the night?” From that I learned, in shlichus, that wherever you are, you’re always a shliach. He was always writing to the Rebbe. Of my father’s letters, I don’t know of a single one asking for something for our family, apart from the birth of a daughter or something like that. They’re all letters in which my father asks on behalf of other people.

09:24 Speaker 4 Did the Rebbe write any letters to your father?

09:28 Speaker 2 Yes, there were answers, but everything came through my father, for other people. No, not for himself. And afterward, of course, it continued in full force through the Igros Kodesh. My father always connected people to the Rebbe. They didn’t just come for medical help; he would give them books and other things, and connect them to the Rebbe in every possible way. That’s the kind of home I grew up in, and that’s shlichus. Sometimes people wake you up at two in the morning. And I’m not talking about people in Israel who think it’s the same time here. People here wake you up. But you’re not there as a private individual. You have to come with a smile and welcome everyone warmly, whether they’ve woken you in the middle of the night because there’s a problem or not. I remember last Simchas Torah, at about two in the morning, some Israelis woke me up. A Jewish man had arrived here, covered in injuries. What happened? I don’t know. Someone had put something in his drink, and he came here with an open wound. We made sure he was treated and had his forehead stitched up. But he was out of it, and since it was Simchas Torah, we danced and celebrated with him. We still didn’t know what had happened to him. We thought he’d been drinking, and then it became clear that someone had put something in his beer or another drink. This man grew up in Argentina and had never been in a shul. His only connection to Judaism was that, as a child in Argentina, people used to make fun of him for being Jewish. He moved to Israel as a teenager and had never gone into a shul. I told him, “Look at that—they drugged you, and in the end you landed at the Chabad House.” There’s so much light that the camera is pointing upward.

11:43 Speaker 4 Yes.

11:43 Speaker 2 And he came in and put on tefillin for the first time. I told his family, and I heard how happy they were. He’d never wanted anything to do with Judaism—he hadn’t told us that. He works at Alta Alta[?], in the aerospace industry. He’s a serious engineer, but he’d had an aversion to anything Jewish. And suddenly, in a single moment, Hakadosh Boruch Hu pulled him into the Chabad House in this way. From the time I was thirteen, in yeshivah ketanah, I never missed a Tishrei with the Rebbe. For fifteen years straight, I spent Tishrei with the Rebbe. I didn’t miss one. And now, for sixteen years, I haven’t been there for Tishrei. Okay, Rosh Hashanah stings a little, but then Simchas Torah comes around, with the joy of Satmar, and you’re okay. Someone—a Gerer chossid or a businessman—was here last week and saw that we have three services a day, three minyanim a day. He said to me, “You know, what you have here is extraordinary. Sometimes you need someone from outside to come and tell you that there’s almost nothing like it here in the East. Maybe in Thailand, at one Chabad House in Bangkok, at Nechemia’s, they have three services a day, minyanim.” But it’s not something you can take for granted. There are Chabad Houses that don’t have a minyan even on Shabbos. Sometimes people come and point that out to us. But in any case, on Simchas Torah, even when you have Jews here, Jews you’ve brought closer, a community—a small community—and travelers, you dance for an hour and a half or two hours, and that’s it. It’s over. It’s not the dancing of Satmar, forty-eight hours of dancing. You’re here trying to dance with the children on your own. And every year, without exception, there’s a story. Every year the Rebbe

13:39 Speaker 2 sends some Jewish man, or some chossid. Once a Satmar chossid arrived.

13:47 Speaker 5 Maybe an Israeli.

13:48 Speaker 2 Usually, this is how it goes: by around ten at night, everyone has dispersed. The crowd gradually thins out, and then I keep going. We dance a little longer with the children, another hour and a half or so, and then it’s eleven at night. If I told an ordinary Chabad chossid, “I go to sleep at eleven on Simchas Torah,” he’d say, “Have you lost your mind?” But how long can you dance alone? So by eleven or midnight, you go to sleep. Sadly, that’s the situation. Every year the Rebbe sends someone who— and the Rebbe gives you a push, keeps you going until about one in the morning. Two years ago—every year there’s a story; I just have to remember which was which—a Jewish man came and knocked on the door with another Israeli. He asked if they could do hakafos at one in the morning. I said, “With pleasure. Of course, come in. That’s why I’m here.” The Israeli was a little reluctant, but he stayed. The other man was an American named Eliezer Pollak. I danced with him, and of course afterward we went to eat in the sukkah. For us, it was Shemini Atzeres.

15:05 Speaker 5 Yes.

15:05 Speaker 2 We still eat in the sukkah, so we sat there and I brought him food. Then I asked him, “What’s your story?” I could tell there was a story. He said, “Listen carefully. For many years—I don’t remember how many, maybe ten—I hadn’t been to a shul, hadn’t celebrated Simchas Torah, nothing.” He told me, “And now I came. Something woke up in my soul, and I came. I’m not in touch with my parents or my family, anyone. When I left Judaism, I’d grown up in Williamsburg. I knew only Yiddish—no English, no Hebrew, nothing. I wanted to leave religious life, but I didn’t even have the means to do it. I didn’t have the tools. I didn’t know how to communicate with the outside world.” He said that another Jewish man who had left before him had helped him. And that man, that former Satmar chossid who had left, had returned to Jewish observance, become a Chabad chossid, and was now a shliach in Europe. “His name is Yaakov Biederman,” he told me.

16:11 Speaker 5 Amazing!

16:11 Speaker 2 And he said to me, “He keeps after me. For ten years he’s been after me, because he feels that since he helped me leave, he’s responsible for me.” And that’s how the Rebbe looks after people.

16:26 Speaker 5 And are you still in touch with that young man, or has he already...?

16:29 Speaker 2 Yes, yes, I’m in touch with him, and I made sure he reconnected with his family. His father has unfortunately passed away. His mother and I developed a very strong connection, and I helped him restore his relationship with his family. I pressed him to get back in touch, and boruch Hashem, he did. His mother keeps asking him, “How do you manage there without gefilte fish? How can they live there?” Everyone sees things from their own perspective. She doesn’t realize that’s the least of our problems.

17:05 Speaker 5 And the man you told us about, the one who was injured this year and came to you—what’s his story? What happened afterward?

17:14 Speaker 2 He went back to Israel. You know, sometimes you’re so busy running around with the local people, the difficulties, everything—and nothing comes easily. People think there’s an Angel Bakery here and a supermarket where you can just buy the food. They don’t understand how hard it is to put together a Shabbos meal for 150 or 200 people in a place like this. You have to prepare everything from scratch: bread, every single dish. If you want chicken, you have to arrange for it to be slaughtered. If you want meat, you need a shochet. Everything is difficult, and that’s part of the challenge. It’s part of the joy. As the Rebbe explains, the Rema begins the halachos with—how does it go? Something with “always” at the end. “I have set Hashem before me always.” And he ends...

18:14 Speaker 5 “One who is glad of heart has a continual feast.”

18:16 Speaker 2 “One who is glad of heart has a continual feast”—in connection with Purim Katan. So the Rebbe asks: Why doesn’t he begin with “One who is glad of heart has a continual feast”? The Rebbe explains that first you have to work hard until you reach the feast. Then you’re happy, after working a whole day from beginning to end. After all the challenges you’ve faced that day, you reach a place of joy. You faced challenges, you acted, you struggled, and you succeeded. That’s part of the work.

18:47 Speaker 5 How do you actually manage the slaughtering and all those things—the way they smell?

18:54 Speaker 2 So I—I went through a great deal with shechitah. Until I was able to bring in a shochet, I used to bring one from abroad: Rabbi Dickstein from Australia. In those early days, he not only had to pay for his own ticket, he also had to bring some food with him. He came with tremendous mesirus nefesh, raising money for his ticket and even collecting food. He knew what the situation was, and he helped me enormously when I was starting out. And even once you have shechitah and you pay for your chickens, it’s still not simple. You’ve brought someone in on a flight and made all the arrangements. Once, they sold our chickens and said, “There are no chickens. We sold them.” What can you say? Be thankful if they give you your money back. And three times we did a whole shechitah and it all went in the garbage, because the workers didn’t put the chickens straight into the deep freeze. They thought, “We wouldn’t eat chicken that smells like that,” but the locals told me, “That’s normal here. We eat things like that.” I said, “Chicken that’s already starting to turn green? I can’t eat that.” So entire batches of shechitah went in the garbage. After all that, a Jew here passed away and left me a small inheritance—a piece of land. I’m going to make a cemetery there. The Rebbe instructed me to make a cemetery, and I also built a slaughterhouse there. During COVID, Sholom couldn’t come, so I flew abroad, went to Eretz Yisroel and learned shechitah so I could slaughter here. So I started doing the shechitah myself.

20:39 Speaker 6 What do you know!

20:42 Speaker 2 Yes. Today I have a slaughterhouse, and life has become a little easier, but it’s still not simple, because I need to send chickens to the other shluchim. There are six Chabad Houses here, so getting them to each one is a whole story too.

20:55 Speaker 6 You have six Chabad Houses in the Philippines?

20:58 Speaker 2 Yes.

20:59 Speaker 6 Tell us a little about where they are. Who are the people there?

21:05 Speaker 2 During COVID, they all closed. Not all at once, of course. At first, the places that served travelers closed because the travelers stopped coming. The shluchim were sitting there alone, so they closed. Then even those who had a bit of a community gradually closed, and in the end I was left on my own.

21:26 Speaker 6 Were they in Manila or elsewhere?

21:28 Speaker 2 No, no, they’re all outside Manila. The closest one to me is a little over two hours’ drive away.

21:35 Speaker 6 On which island?

21:35 Speaker 2 The others are all about an hour or more by plane.

21:39 Speaker 6 Tell us the names of the places so we can get to know them a little.

21:42 Speaker 2 Two hours north is Clark. After COVID, my nephew came there as a shliach—the son of my brother Avi from Migdal HaEmek. He wrote to the Rebbe. His wife knew two weeks beforehand; they wrote to the Rebbe and received the Rebbe’s blessing. A few days later, they got a passport for their newborn baby, got on a plane and came here.

22:12 Speaker 6 How interesting.

22:14 Speaker 2 That’s Clark. Then there’s Cebu, another city in the central islands. In fact, last week I went to another island I’d never set foot on before. I’ve been to almost all the major islands here.

22:28 Speaker 6 How many islands are there?

22:28 Speaker 2 There are 7,107 islands.

22:32 Speaker 6 Oh, that’s all.

22:33 Speaker 2 A little over 2,000 are inhabited. I haven’t been to all 2,000, but I’ve been to the major islands. Luzon, for example, is the northern island where Manila is. It’s six or seven times the size of Israel.

22:49 Speaker 6 Oh.

22:50 Speaker 2 That’s the island I’m on.

22:52 Speaker 6 It’s not small.

22:54 Speaker 2 Not small at all. And let’s say it has about half the population—maybe 60 or 70 million people. Most of the country’s population is here. The capital has 25 million people. Manila has 25 million. So there are a lot of people here. Then there’s Cebu in the central islands. It’s roughly the size of Israel, give or take, and there’s a Chabad House there too. I think it’s also the second-largest city in the Philippines. Mendy Axelrod runs the Chabad House. He’s the only one who stayed on from the time of COVID. He had only arrived a little before COVID began, and he was the only one who continued. Then there’s El Nido; the shliach there came after COVID, of course, and he’s doing wonderful work. They’re all doing extraordinary work. At first, this whole situation was hard for me, but after COVID there was a big step forward everywhere. Younger people came in and made a lot of changes. They thought outside the box. In El Nido, he took a large building. In Cebu, he took a large place, built a shul and is now finishing a mikvah. Everything here has moved up a level. There have been improvements in every place.

24:25 Speaker 6 Amazing.

24:25 Speaker 2 And there’s Siargao. Siargao is a surfing destination; people come there from all over the world for surfing competitions, and young people come from everywhere. For some reason, there are lots of Israelis there. A small Shabbos meal for him is 200 people. The place is packed with Israelis. And there’s Boracay. That was the last Chabad House to open. It wasn’t there before COVID. We were just about to open it when COVID began at the last minute, and everything in Boracay shut down. Boracay is the most visited island here, the most beautiful island. Some seven or eight million tourists visit it each year. It’s a very small island, with enormous numbers of people passing through. One of the things that happened during COVID—I don’t know if I told you; maybe I’ll tell the story behind it later—is that the Rebbe said every Jew is a shliach. That was in Parshas Chayei Sarah: “My work is finished.” The Rebbe said every Jew is a shliach; the Rebbe was speaking to every Jew. During COVID, there were Jews left on all these islands that had had Chabad Houses. On Siargao, for example, there were always 30 or 40 Jews stranded there throughout COVID. So I found one person who became the shliach for the place, and automatically that whole responsibility placed demands on him. He’s a young man with Israeli parents from Miami. He grew up in America and has a YouTube channel with millions of followers. He automatically became a shliach. I would send him shofars, machzorim, whatever he needed. Becoming a shliach brought him back closer to Yiddishkeit. Now he’s gone to Eretz Yisroel; his family from Miami is there. He’s grown much stronger in his observance, puts on tefillin every day, and the responsibility of the role really changed him. He’s truly become a chossid. Now he’s constantly making

26:46 Speaker 2 videos about Eretz Yisroel and everything that’s happening there. He left behind what he used to do—until then, he’d only made travel videos, and they got millions of views.

26:56 Speaker 6 Very interesting.

26:56 Speaker 2 And he made a living from that. He built a house on that island with the money he made from YouTube.

27:04 Speaker 6 So you took a Jew who wasn’t observing Torah and mitzvos at all. Right?

27:10 Speaker 2 Yes. He wasn’t before. All this started a year ago.

27:15 Speaker 6 That really is amazing.

27:17 Speaker 2 There’s a whole story within the story here. Maybe we’ll finish with that; I don’t know how much time we have left. During COVID, unfortunately, several Jews passed away here. I was about to fly to the Rebbe for the Kinus Hashluchim, but I had to take care of a burial, so I postponed my flight. I managed to leave on the very last flight, on Thursday night, after taking care of the burial. I traveled through California. It was uncertain whether I could make that flight, because it leaves here on Thursday at eleven at night, and lands in California at six-thirty or seven in the evening. When we fly, we cross the International Date Line. Usually, we keep following our own time: if I leave on Thursday evening, I continue counting time from here until I land, and then I adjust to the place I’ve arrived. That means I have a night and then a morning, and my morning is Friday. So I had to make sure I took care of what I needed there beforehand. The landing was just a few minutes before sunset. It was a very close call. I arrive in California, and two young men come up to me and say, “We were at the Chabad House when you moved into the building on Pesach.” One says, “That was our most special Pesach.” They told me about it when they met me at the airport in California. And it really was my happiest day. We built a building here modeled on 770 and moved in for the Seder. The whole move into the building was beyond the natural order, because everyone said, “How are you going to move in by Pesach? What are you talking about? There aren’t even bathrooms in the building yet. There’s nothing!” I had workers going around the clock. I said, “For 11 Nissan [?]”

29:18 Speaker 2 In Nissan, we moved into this building. We made the decision, and in we went. Making the Seder here was the happiest day of my life. Everyone had told me, “Rent a hotel, rent a hall like you do every year. Why insist on using the Chabad House hall now, when there’s nothing in it yet?” I said, “No, no. We’re moving in.” It was the happiest day of my life. Organizing the tables was a whole story, because everything here was closed. They had a holiday, with celebrations that very day. It all came together through miracles. The community of people who observe the Seven Noahide Laws pitched in and arranged everything, and baruch Hashem, through great miracles, we did it. It was packed. There were 300 people here, and despite all the mishaps, people told me it was their most beautiful Pesach ever. They’d been to Thailand, to Nepal, and this was their most beautiful Pesach. I met some of those people four years later, and they remembered that special Pesach here. I didn’t remember them, but they remembered and told me about it. And that shows you something: it doesn’t matter what the setup around you looks like. What matters is whether you bring people joy, whether you’re happy and you pass that on to them. That’s everything. People feel it. And I was so happy. At one in the morning, I was starting to wrap up the Seder. Only a few people were left, and we were about to leave, when all that joy suddenly collapsed. Why? A group of Jews came here wanting to make a Seder. I said, “Gladly, come and do it here.” They said, “No, we have to go back to the hotel.” I told them, “It’s Shabbos today too—Yom Tov and Shabbos. I can’t give you anything to take.” They wanted matzah and wine. I told them, “I

31:09 Speaker 2 can’t give you anything to take, but come here, come.” They said there were more people at the hotel. I begged them to come here. They said, “Okay, we’ll go get them.” I waited until two in the morning, and they didn’t come. I felt terrible. I thought maybe I should have found some way, but you’re not allowed to carry, because it was Shabbos too. I felt so bad afterward that Jews hadn’t eaten matzah on Seder night because of me. In any case, on Shabbos morning, which was also Yom Tov, I was sitting in the new Chabad House learning a sicha. People started coming in, and I began explaining it. One of the Jews who hadn’t come to eat matzah the night before arrived. And what was the sicha about? I’d opened to it at random. I had simply opened a sicha and started explaining it to people. The Rebbe explains there: What is the difference between Pesach and the other holidays? On Pesach, the mitzvos of the holiday are not set aside. If Sukkos falls on Shabbos, we don’t say the blessing over the lulav. On Rosh Hashanah that falls on Shabbos, we don’t blow the shofar. On Purim that falls on Shabbos, we don’t read the Megillah. But on Pesach, the mitzvos remain. The Rebbe explains the deeper meaning: when Pesach and Shabbos coincide, the spiritual light brings about what the other mitzvos accomplish, but not on Pesach. On Pesach, you still need to do the mitzvos. The halachic explanation is that they weren’t set aside on Pesach because everyone sits together in groups, and no one will carry anything. But on a deeper level, the Rebbe explains that Shabbos and Yom Tov aren’t enough on Pesach. You still need to eat matzah and maror. Anyway, at the Yom Tov and Shabbos meal, that Jew told us he used to keep Shabbos. He had lived in Queens, and then, being Israeli, he moved to some place in Virginia, in America, with no Jewish community, nothing. Keeping Shabbos became hard for him,

33:20 Speaker 2 and he stopped observing everything. Little by little, he drifted further and further away. Apparently, it hurt him so much that he hadn’t eaten matzah the night before and had only eaten it that morning. So he made a decision: starting that day, he would come back and start keeping Shabbos. Because of him, another person started putting on tefillin. Someone else resolved to grow a beard. It was a special occasion. Anyway, we’re still on the flight. There’s another story, which started with those two Jews I met here on Seder night. I went on and got to a 7-Eleven, when suddenly someone with a beard came up and jumped on me. He said, “Do you remember me?” I said, “What?” He told me, “It’s thanks to you.” I said, “Thanks to me? I don’t know...” I remembered that he and his family had been at my place on Purim. He had come as an emissary on behalf of an organization from Israel that helps different places after storms, and there had been a storm here. They had sent him and his family. I could see he came from a religious home. His wife dressed like a religious woman. That Purim, his children had to beg him to leave the Chabad House because he was having such a good time there. He and I said a lot of l’chaims, and it was joyful. Baruch Hashem, I got him to resolve to start putting on tefillin again. He took that on, and he really did start putting on tefillin and grew a beard. Then I met him at the entrance to the 7-Eleven. He’s from Moshav Gimzo now. Gimzo? Yes, Gimzo. Latrun.

35:01 Speaker 7 Latrun, yes.

35:02 Speaker 2 He told me there’s a doctor in their community, a very famous professor today. I don’t know. This professor studies Chabad teachings with him, particularly the Rebbe’s sichos, teachings and maamarim. And suddenly he picked up on something: the Rebbe wants every Jew to be a shliach. That’s it. For this doctor, this great professor, his whole focus in what the Rebbe says is that the Rebbe constantly wants every Jew to be his shliach. It’s not something just for Chabad chassidim. So that’s the story.

35:38 Speaker 7 Very powerful. Very powerful. You know, it really is interesting that people sometimes see things in the Rebbe’s words that we haven’t seen. I mean, of course every Jew is a shliach—that’s a wonderful thing. But a Jew comes along and says, “No, for me, the idea that every Jew is a shliach is something to live by.”

35:59 Speaker 2 And that’s why I began this whole story here. People who had been far removed from everything began coming closer precisely because I made them the Rebbe’s shluchim. Suddenly things started falling into place for them, and they began asking me about the most basic things, things they knew nothing about. I’d already made them rabbis.

36:20 Speaker 7 I’d like you to tell us next time about how this community of Noahides, which you mention now and then, came into being. How did it start? What are all the details? All right? Prepare the...

36:33 Speaker 2 I will. Actually, something happened here just yesterday. Maybe we should bring pictures too. Yesterday, at the class for non-Jews, someone came with his son after a two-hour flight. They flew here for the class and then flew back. He heads a community where he lives. He built a building; he has a building too. His son had his first birthday, and he said, “I need to bring my child so the rabbi can bless him.” So he was here yesterday.

37:08 Speaker 7 Very nice. Where did they come from?

37:11 Speaker 2 They’re from a city called Davao. It’s about a two-hour flight. He has a kind of synagogue there. They don’t have Torah scrolls or anything, but they gather as a community. They study the Seven Noahide Laws there. Someone came to him and said, “Come, let’s convert you.” They said, “No, we want to observe the Seven Noahide Laws. That’s how Hakadosh Boruch Hu created us. That’s our mission in the world.”

37:35 Speaker 7 Wonderful. L’chaim, l’chaim, Yossi.

37:38 Speaker 2 L’chaim and blessings.

37:40 Speaker 7 Long live our master, our teacher and our Rebbe, King Moshiach, for all generations. Thank you very much.

37:44 Speaker 2 Long live our master, our teacher and our Rebbe.

37:46 Speaker 7 And we’ll see you next time. Thank you. Thank you very much.

37:49 Speaker 2 Good news.