Rabbi Chaim Binyomin Brod - Playa, Mexico - Part 1

00:20 Speaker 1 Chaim Brod, director and founder of a Chabad House in a place far from Israel—in Mexico, in Playa del Carmen. Am I saying that right, Chaim?

00:30 Speaker 2 Playa del Carmen. Yes.

00:32 Speaker 1 Playa del Carmen. Chaim, you’re a young man who has already accomplished a great deal. As part of this collection of remarkable stories from the shluchim of the King Moshiach, we’d like to hear a little—maybe more than a little—about your life. So first, Chaim, please introduce yourself and tell us where you come from. Where are your parents from? What was your childhood like? Where did you grow up and study? Who were your friends? What did you do together? Please, tell us a little.

01:14 Speaker 2 Thank you very much, Rabbi Shemaryahu. Yes, as you said, my name is Chaim Brod, Chaim Binyamin Brod, and baruch Hashem, we’ve had the privilege of serving here as the Rebbe’s shluchim in Playa for fourteen years, since we opened the Chabad House. We came to this shlichus with a background in shlichus ourselves, from childhood and as young people. I’ll tell you a bit about that. It’s definitely a significant part of the foundation of today’s Chabad House—the foundations both my wife and I received at home. I was born in a city where my parents were themselves shluchim, at a Chabad House they had opened.

02:04 Speaker 1 Where? In what city?

02:06 Speaker 2 In New Jersey, in a city called—

02:08 Speaker 1 In the United States.

02:10 Speaker 2 Yes, I was born in the United States.

02:11 Speaker 1 A place where I also studied in yeshiva. Wonderful.

02:13 Speaker 2 In Morristown.

02:14 Speaker 1 We already have something in common.

02:16 Speaker 2 My father began working in New Jersey as a young bachur. It’s close to New York, and he started developing activities in that area, called Bergen County. Rabbi Herson[?] was the head shliach in New Jersey. When my parents decided to get married and build a home together, it was natural for my father to say he wanted to go there on shlichus, and that was arranged. He received the blessing of the Rebbe, the King Moshiach, and coordinated it with Rabbi Herson[?]. Their last sheva brachos, right after the wedding, was already held in their new home at their place of shlichus.

03:01 Speaker 1 Wonderful. See? Your father was a shliach in Teaneck, and when I studied in the yeshiva in Morristown, New Jersey, we would come to Teaneck every Friday and do mivtzoim there. So we’ve come full circle. Wonderful.

03:16 Speaker 2 Wonderful, wonderful. Yes. By the time I was born, I was the third child in the family. When I was three, my parents wanted, for several reasons, to go away for a year. My father wanted to complete his studies for rabbinic ordination. They asked the Rebbe, and they had several options: studying at 770, perhaps going to Israel, or going somewhere else. The Rebbe preferred the suggestion of going to the Holy Land. So he gave my parents his blessing to travel to Israel for a year and complete the studies. They arranged all the practical details. This is all from their stories, of course; I don’t remember any of it. Apparently, moving to Israel at three and a half was such a major change that I really don’t remember anything from that period.

04:11 Speaker 1 Interesting. Interesting.

04:14 Speaker 2 Yes. So this is what my parents tell me: We first arrived in Kiryat Malachi, where my father’s sister lived, and they helped us settle in. My father began studying in Rabbi Landau’s kollel in Bnei Brak and traveled there every day. My mother says that one day we turned from an American family that spoke only English into a family that spoke only Hebrew. I forgot all my English then, too. I lost it completely. The English I speak now is something I learned anew.

04:48 Speaker 1 All right.

04:50 Speaker 2 They had only come for one year. They rented an apartment for a year, and that was the plan. What happened was that the elections came around in 5749, and the Rebbe instructed people to get involved on behalf of Gimmel. A headquarters was set up in Bnei Brak, and they recruited my father because he had a lot of energy and a very well-developed knack for organizing. He and Rabbi Avi Ben Shimon set up the Chabad campaign headquarters for Gimmel in Bnei Brak. The campaign was very successful. Once my father had those successes under his belt, Tzeirei Chabad in Kfar Chabad immediately took notice and told him he had to join them. So again, my parents asked the Rebbe and received his blessing. A few years later, we moved to Kfar Chabad, where my father worked in the branches department of Tzeirei Chabad. That’s how we ended up staying in Israel. I grew up in Kfar Chabad.

05:53 Speaker 1 So at this point you’re studying in Kfar Chabad? In the yeshiva there, or in the Talmud Torah, or...?

06:00 Speaker 2 Yes, from fourth grade on. I was seven or eight when we moved to Kfar Chabad, and my parents still live there today.

06:11 Speaker 1 Wonderful. Okay, so you grew up in Kfar Chabad. We may have met a few times. We came there with the mitzvah tanks, and we were also at that election headquarters in Bnei Brak. Your father recruited the tanks to help with the election campaign there in Bnei Brak, the one that brought Rabbi Landau back. I remember we did very serious work there with the tanks, the loudspeakers, the music, and so on.

06:35 Speaker 2 Yes. Looking back, it turns out I’ve been on shlichus my whole life: a little while on shlichus in New Jersey, then many years on shlichus in Kfar Chabad, until I found my own shlichus here in Mexico. Even though Kfar Chabad—

06:50 Speaker 1 That shlichus was burning inside you in some way, somewhere.

06:55 Speaker 2 Yes, because that’s what I grew up with, what I was born into, how I was raised. It shaped the way we thought all along. On the face of it, Kfar Chabad is a community, not really a place of shlichus. But my father came there on the Rebbe’s shlichus, to serve in a shlichus role: he ran the branches department. As a child, I remember my father constantly traveling and telling stories of shluchim’s successes from all over Israel. My father also threw himself into everything he did, with all 248 limbs and 365 sinews. He became involved in every detail, serving on the boards of many Chabad Houses, and he knew exactly what was happening at each one. One time he’d travel south, another time north. Then he’d organize conferences, then summer camps for children. As kids, we were like little secretaries, helping him with photographs and with bachurim, and taking part in it all. So we grew up breathing that atmosphere and being educated in it all the time.

07:54 Speaker 1 Okay.

07:55 Speaker 2 That was my childhood in Kfar Chabad. Then I went on to study in yeshivas, and there, of course, you begin to encounter—

08:05 Speaker 1 Which yeshiva did you go to first? For yeshiva ketana?

08:08 Speaker 2 For yeshiva ketana, I studied in Bnei Brak, at the Chabad yeshiva that’s still there today. For yeshiva gedola, I went to Tzfas. I spent three years in Bnei Brak and three years in Tzfas, until I traveled for my year of kvutzah—the seventh year in the Chabad course of study—when you go to 770 in Brooklyn, to the Rebbe’s home, to study in yeshiva with the Rebbe, the King Moshiach.

08:31 Speaker 1 To the Rebbe, yes. You travel to the Rebbe and study there for at least a year. I imagine some stay for two years as well.

08:37 Speaker 2 Yes, I stayed longer than that. I’ll get to it in a moment. I just wanted to say that in yeshiva, you begin studying the Rebbe’s sichos yourself and seeing how the Rebbe speaks about shlichus. It really kindles a fire that starts burning in your bones. And you say, “When will I have the opportunity to put it into practice?”—building on everything we were raised with. The background is that when the Rebbe spoke about shlichus, he said that our generation is the seventh generation of Chabad Chassidus, and our generation’s mission is to bring the Shechinah down into this world. The Rebbe drew a parallel to the seven generations from Avraham Avinu to Moshe Rabbeinu. Avraham Avinu was the first Jew, the first to proclaim in the world the name of Hashem, G-d of the world. Then came the generations—Avraham, Yitzchak, Yaakov, and so on—until the seventh, Moshe. Moshe took us out of Egypt, gave us the Torah, built the Mishkan, and brought us to the threshold of the Land of Israel. The Rebbe drew that parallel and said that likewise, our generation is the seventh generation of Chabad. In parallel with the work and shlichus of Moshe Rabbeinu, we have to bring the Shechinah down into this world. That means going to places where Jews don’t know that there is a Hakadosh Boruch Hu, or where they aren’t managing to live with that awareness in daily life, and proclaiming to them the name of Hashem, G-d of the world—like Avraham Avinu, like Moshe Rabbeinu, like the Alter Rebbe, the founder of Chabad Chassidus. Our generation’s task is to complete that mission.

10:13 Speaker 1 In other words, to complete that mission of reaching every Jew in the world and telling them that Judaism exists and that, as a Jew, there is something to aspire to.

10:23 Speaker 2 Yes, yes, yes. So that is the shlichus of our generation. And the Rebbe didn’t speak only about Jews. We also need to connect the nations of the world, non-Jews. Our work with Jews is to connect them to observing the 613 mitzvos, and our work with the nations of the world is to connect them to observing their seven mitzvos, the Seven Noahide Laws. But we have a role in making the entire world a better place, a more G-dly place. And the Rebbe spoke about the shlichus of our generation being to complete the mission—that is, to bring the true and complete Geulah in actuality. That is the Rebbe’s foundational maamar.

11:02 Speaker 1 Did you have... Let me ask you a question. Did you have friends who shared this idea with you? In other words, did you form a group of people who thought the same way, or how exactly did it work?

11:16 Speaker 2 Well, Chabad education as a whole is geared toward that. From cheder, and then in the younger yeshiva, and then in the older yeshiva, you’re constantly learning the Rebbe’s teachings, his sichos and his maamarim, and watching the Rebbe speak on video. It always revolves around that—around our shlichus. So, for example, in school, some of us came from Chabad communities—Kfar Chabad, Kiryat Malachi, places like that. But some of us came from places of shlichus. There was this boy who had come from one city where his family was on shlichus, and that boy from another, and a boy who had come from abroad, from a city where his family was on shlichus. And there was also a group of us whose parents worked at Tzeirei Chabad then, like my cousin Brod, Rabbi Mendy Brod’s son. Later, when we moved to Bnei Brak for the younger yeshiva, a boy came from Brazil, and another boy came from... I can’t remember the names right now, but it was part of life all the time. It was part of the atmosphere.

12:27 Speaker 1 In other words, shlichus was really the thread running through your lives the whole time.

12:32 Speaker 2 Yes, it was an inseparable part of our education, our way of life, the stories, the farbrengens. And we ourselves had already had a chance to get a taste of shlichus itself. It started on Fridays. Part of a Chabad yeshiva student’s weekly routine is to go out on Fridays for mivtza tefillin, to places where there are Jews who don’t put on tefillin, and put on tefillin with them. I remember that I went with a few other boys to the New Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv. That was our regular place on Fridays for three years. We went there every Friday, and I loved the place and the work there so much that even later, when I was studying in Tzfas, whenever we came to Kfar Chabad for a Shabbos off, I would be there on Friday afternoon. I’d go around to the stalls, making my rounds, and people already knew me. Even after that, too. But it really was a place of shlichus, even though it was only a few hours a week—two, three, four hours, depending on whether it was winter or summer. It was a place with so much energy and so much activity. You’d pass hundreds and hundreds of Jews and try to get each one to put on tefillin. And if he didn’t have time, at least he could take a Moshiach card with a picture of the Rebbe and Tefilas Haderech for his wallet, or a woman could take Shabbos candles to light. Then suddenly someone would stop you and start asking questions or seeking advice—questions you’d need to refer to a rabbi and come back with an answer. I mean, it was like running a little Chabad House for a few hours a week. There were times when we didn’t have enough pairs of tefillin or enough hands to help people put them on. Ten people would be waiting around you, and you’d be trying to rush from one to the next, putting tefillin on someone, taking them off, giving him the sheet with Shema on it, and stopping passersby in the meantime. Yes.

14:21 Speaker 1 Do you remember anyone from there—not by name, but a particular incident? Say, someone who told you, “I’ve never put on tefillin in my life. Come on, let’s do it now,” or something like that?

14:31 Speaker 2 Yes, there were a lot of special moments. A lot. Let me try to pull out a few. There’s one Jew who comes to mind right now who made an enormous impression on me. He looked very distinguished. He was dressed smartly and carrying a smart-looking briefcase, and his mind seemed occupied. He walked very purposefully, as though he knew exactly where he was going. For a moment I even wondered whether to approach him. He didn’t look like he was about to come down from his thoughts and stop. But I went up to him and said, “Please, put on tefillin. Just one minute.” He stopped, looked at me, thought for a moment and said, “Yes, I want to put on tefillin.” And he approached it with complete seriousness. He put his briefcase down, took the pen out of his pocket, rolled up his sleeve, and I watched him give those two minutes of putting on tefillin his full attention. He said Shema with such concentration that it affected me. Look, I’m talking to you twenty, twenty-five years later, and I can still see him before my eyes. I thought, wow—what an impression it made on me, the young man who had stopped him. There he was, concentrating so deeply in the middle of the bustling central bus station, with all the people, the music and the noise. It was as though he was saying: If you’re going to put on tefillin, do it properly, with complete seriousness. So that’s one example. There was another. There was a record store next to us, and—

16:15 Speaker 1 Where, on the third floor?

16:17 Speaker 2 On the third floor. The tefillin stand was on the third floor.

16:20 Speaker 1 Okay.

16:21 Speaker 2 We would make the rounds of the shops on the third floor, but the stand was on the third floor. I think those stands are still there today. There’s a dear Jew there, Yehuda, who’s the unofficial Chabad House of the central bus station. He looks after the stands and the tefillin, the Shema sheets and the talleisim. He himself is a very, very special Jew, a sweet person. So there was a record store there that made a lot of noise, played a lot of music—not religious music, obviously, right? One of the salesmen came over, a young man with a very nonreligious, very flamboyant look that fit the atmosphere of the Tel Aviv central bus station. He was really angry that we’d set up a tefillin stand next to him. He thought we’d taken away the space he needed for his spiky hair, tattoos, records and sales. He tried to confront us, shouting that he hated us and that we should get out of there. I remember one of my friends walking up to him and saying, very simply, “I love you. We love you.” He said it a few times, until the young man softened and melted. We hugged, and he started putting on tefillin regularly too. It was really remarkable. And there were lots of stories like that. There, time makes a huge difference, because people are running to the platforms, rushing to catch their buses. So you say, “Two minutes, one minute. Just put on the tefillin shel rosh. Just say the first verse of Shema Yisroel.” There are lots of stories of running to the platform with someone, then seeing that the bus has been delayed, so he does have five minutes to put on tefillin there before the bus pulls in and he boards. So many stories of Jews determined to grab the mitzvah in the little time they have.

18:12 Speaker 1 In other words... But you know what? Let’s pause for a moment on that moment of hesitation with the distinguished Jew who was striding ahead, as though no one else in the world existed, while you were debating with yourself: Should I approach him or not? These are things we all struggle with every day on shlichus. The Rebbe says—and the Rebbe also writes to several chassidim—that we are given opportunities from Above, from Heaven. The question is whether we make use of them. And here, I think, is the point: Hakadosh Boruch Hu brings a Jew to you. It’s clear he isn’t going to put on tefillin at any other point that day, and you ask yourself, What do I do now? This person doesn’t seem at all interested in what I’m doing; he’s focused on his own affairs. Finding the courage to overcome our hesitation and approach that Jew—I think that’s a very, very significant point, because it stays with us for the rest of our lives.

19:13 Speaker 2 Yes, absolutely. Look, as you said, it stays with us all the time. Today, after fourteen years on shlichus here in Mexico, when hundreds and hundreds of Jews come every Shabbos, I can tell you that just yesterday, at a farbrengen, I found myself facing that same question. A Jew was sitting across from me, describing a situation, and once again I was asking myself how much I could push him, how far I could go with him, and how much I needed to be gentle and give him his time. I think they’re the same dilemmas, the same questions.

19:47 Speaker 1 Yes, absolutely. So now you’re at 770 for that seventh year of study, which is an absolutely magical year for the bochurim. For them, it’s like being in Gan Eden. You’re actually going to Gan Eden.

20:08 Speaker 2 Yes.

20:09 Speaker 1 Now tell us a little about that year. At least something about your friends, the learning, the mivtzoim you did there.

20:21 Speaker 2 Yes. First of all, it really is a magical year, absolutely magical—Gan Eden, as you said. You’re there with the Rebbe, in that atmosphere where you live with the Rebbe. And you keep studying Gemara, halachah, and Chassidus, just as we did for the previous six years. But the vitality is completely different. I think the farbrengens have a profound effect on you: one time there’s the Kinus Hashluchim and many shluchim come; another time mashpi’im come. This one leads a farbrengen, then that one leads a farbrengen, until it becomes part of life. You find yourself trying to make sure that this really will be your life—not just as a student, not just as someone whose rabbis guided him to live this way, but as someone who, with Hashem’s help, will soon build his own home and wants his life to look like this. I want to take on the Rebbe’s shlichus myself and use the ability we have to influence other Jews—to give them this goodness and help them connect. So it’s definitely a very significant year.

21:37 Speaker 1 Listen, Chaim, you’ve told us about the first chapter of your life. Next time, I’d like you to tell us in more detail what the daily routine is like there at 770, with the Rebbe. Tell us about the different things—the mikveh, the learning, the dilemmas. You had to answer amen to every Kaddish in 770. Next time, bring us a little into the atmosphere of 770, and into the experience of a bochur in the kvutzah who arrives there and says to himself, “Wow, where am I right now? And what is my role in the world right now? Do I devote myself to learning, or do I run out into the streets to do mivtzoim?” Okay?

22:21 Speaker 2 With great pleasure.

22:23 Speaker 1 So thank you very much for now.

22:25 Speaker 2 Thank you very much.

22:26 Speaker 1 We’ll pause here and meet again.