Part 2: Rabbi Yaakov Ben Ari - Shliach to the Kibbutzim and Initiator of Degel Chabad, the Crossroads of Life on Shlichus

00:19 Speaker 1 We’re continuing the conversation we had last time, when you told us about your life in general—how you were born, how you grew up, how you came to Chabad, about Rabbi Sofer and Be’er Sheva, and so on. Today we said we’d focus more on the turning points—the turning points in your shlichus and in your life. How did you come to the Lubavitcher Rebbe? What impressed you? What do you think the Rebbe wants from you personally? Tell us some stories about the shlichus itself, in the kibbutzim, people you met, and so on. But let’s start with “l’chaim,” all right? Let’s start with “l’chaim.”

01:03 Speaker 2 L’chaim, l’chaim. Wait, didn’t you want to hear about how I became closer to Yiddishkeit?

01:07 Speaker 1 Whatever you want. Everything connected to you and to your shlichus is important. Tell us what’s on your mind. I just mentioned a few important points, and you can certainly come back to them. L’chaim, l’chaim.

01:21 Speaker 2 L’chaim, and blessings.

01:22 Speaker 1 Blessed are You, Hashem our G-d, King of the universe, by Whose word everything came into being.

01:26 Speaker 2 Amen. Yes.

01:29 Speaker 1 Long live our master, our teacher and our Rebbe, King Moshiach, forever and ever. L’chaim, and blessings.

01:32 Speaker 2 Long live King Moshiach forever and ever. Yes, without a doubt.

01:36 Speaker 1 We’re with you on all of that. Go ahead.

01:39 Speaker 2 You see, this whole thing really began when—I wrote poetry at a young age, and I brought my collection of poems to—I edited them and brought them to a print shop to have them printed. While we were printing the collection, well, something came up... I have the book here, by the way. It’s interesting. I found it after forty years.

02:08 Speaker 1 Show us.

02:10 Speaker 2 Yes? Just a moment. I couldn’t believe... I couldn’t believe I’d still have a copy of the book, but I’ve had it here for—

02:32 Speaker 1 Yes.

02:33 Speaker 2 Here.

02:33 Speaker 1 Wonderful. This is a book you published. How old were you?

02:37 Speaker 2 Yes, I published it, and I insisted that it be perfect, that even the paper be perfect. So I had it done with gold embossing too, all sorts of things that cost me a lot of money. But—

02:48 Speaker 1 How old were you? How old?

02:50 Speaker 2 It was in ’81. Where’s the year? Nineteen eighty. That means I was twenty-two. Twenty-two and a bit.

03:02 Speaker 1 Okay.

03:02 Speaker 2 Because I was born at the end of ’57. So twenty-two and a bit. And this book, you see? Everything is done beautifully, with glossy pages, and I didn’t skimp on anything. I’d been in Scotland and brought back a little money. I’d worked in a non-Jewish restaurant—

03:23 Speaker 1 Read us a poem you think would be fitting right now.

03:28 Speaker 2 Yes. There’s a short poem I wrote that’s really my central theme, the thing that ultimately brought me to do teshuvah. I called it: “A bush burns, and yet it is not consumed.” It fits the parshiyos we’re reading now. “Through years without an answer, through years without an answer, the wanderer grows weary.” In other words, I was something like that burning bush. Inside, I was burning all the time, but I wasn’t consumed. I mean, I kept up appearances, kept my composure, behaved as I was supposed to, but inside I was burning. I longed for G-dliness. I didn’t know what G-dliness was, didn’t know what holiness was, didn’t know about any of these things.

04:27 Speaker 1 In your kibbutz, in—

04:31 Speaker 2 Ma’ayan Tzvi.

04:32 Speaker 1 Ma’ayan Tzvi. Did people even know there was a Hakadosh Boruch Hu? I mean, was there any awareness that—

04:37 Speaker 2 No, no. No, they were Holocaust survivors, people who had suffered terribly and felt that Hakadosh Boruch Hu had caused them suffering through what He did in the Holocaust—something they couldn’t understand. That probably found expression in all kinds of ways. So no, as in the other kibbutzim, He wasn’t—

04:52 Speaker 1 He wasn’t in the area. He wasn’t in the area.

04:54 Speaker 2 He wasn’t in the area.

04:55 Speaker 1 The gate wasn’t open.

04:57 Speaker 2 Yes, yes, yes. They let all His friends in, but they weren’t on speaking terms with Him. I wrote in one of my poems: “Don’t let go, my brother, don’t let go of the windmills. May your hands draw strength from my aged hands, withered and spent. Put on cloth armor; fashion a lance from a wooden branch. The banners are in your heart, and courage is in your mouth. Charge like the wind at the mills’ great arms. Fill their strength with flour once more, and let water be at your feet.” It’s actually quite an interesting poem. I wrote here about banners. Many years later I made flags, but back then I knew nothing about any of that. Somehow the whole idea came into my head.

05:47 Speaker 1 You made Moshiach flags, yes, Moshiach flags.

05:50 Speaker 2 Yes, but the whole idea of this poem was like Sancho Panza—what was his name? Don Quixote.

05:55 Speaker 1 Yes.

05:56 Speaker 2 He didn’t care about anything, and he was stubborn. He was one of the stubborn ones of old, fighting windmills with Sancho Panza, his companion and assistant, and so on. And I tell him, “Don’t let go, my brother, don’t let go of the windmills. Keep up your madness. Fight them.” After all, he was mad, fighting these turning mills, these windmills. “May your hands draw strength from my aged hands, withered and spent.” Meaning, you keep going. I’m growing old, but you keep going. “Put on cloth armor.” Meaning, take cloth like the sails you’re fighting against. “Fashion a lance from a wooden branch”—a branch. Fight it with something from the tree itself. Even then, that idea had struck me: using the tree itself to fight it. “The banners are in your heart, and courage is in your mouth.” Meaning, in your heart you have the banners—the ideals you’re fighting for. And courage is in your mouth: don’t be ashamed to speak. “Charge like the wind—”

06:56 Speaker 1 How does this connect to shlichus? Where does it begin?

06:59 Speaker 2 That’s just it: in shlichus you need all of this. In shlichus you need all these things. “Charge like the wind at the mills’ great arms. Fill their strength with flour once more, and let water be at your feet.” Flour and water are a result—they produce something. So all of shlichus is one great Don Quixote undertaking. Take the Rebbe’s shluchim: they go out to all kinds of remote places around the world, and then—go establish institutions, schools, preschools, a shlichus in a city where you don’t even know the language and you haven’t got a penny. How do you start? I’m not talking about how you finish—how do you start? You’re finished before you’ve even begun. How does it work? That’s where stubbornness comes in. I admired that kind of stubborn determination even when I wasn’t religious at all. Later, when I wrote about... For example, I wrote about the poet and compared him to someone who works the land: “He works the earth as it cries out and groans in its time; he sweats away his time, plows furrows to sow contentment, battles through the harvest and chews his bread.” Meaning, he’s always—I was always that sort of person. I have projects. I start a project, finish it, chew my bread, and go on to the next project. I don’t stay put. I just come up with things and move on. And interestingly, all these things are how I work, how I live—it’s all about projects and challenges for me, breaking through the obstacles and then handing things over to others to carry on, and so on. What matters most to me is like what they said about Reuven Dunin[?]: he was like a D9 bulldozer, cutting through a mountain, but if he then drove onto the road they’d built there, he’d destroy it. There’s something about trailblazers: they have this desire to break through,

08:56 Speaker 2 But afterward they should move away from the area and go break through somewhere else. Why would they destroy it?

09:00 Speaker 3 Let other people get to work.

09:02 Speaker 2 Yes. So here too, there are plenty of people who are more moderate, more settled, enthusiastic in a quieter way, whom I always like to bring into the operation after I’ve broken through. The desire to break through has stayed with me—“and you shall spread forth.” My desire to break through is still there. So I look for places no one has broken into yet, and that’s where I go. But where I’ve already broken through—

09:23 Speaker 3 Tell us about a project you did.

09:27 Speaker 2 Look, I started with the kibbutzim, and with Chetzkel Sofer, who brought me closer to Judaism at that university. When he saw my book and asked me what it was called, I told him, “Foul Grapes of Memories”—grapes of memories. So he asked me about it, and I told him that “foul” meant something that stank, grapes that had gone bad, and I had turned them back from foul grapes into grapes. A resurrection of the dead. That’s how he started talking with me. Suddenly I saw that he understood poetry, understood this and understood that. I really liked the fact that a religious guy understood these things. Then, at some point, when he’d begun drawing me closer and we’d spent many hours talking, he said to me, “Listen.” I told him, “I’m going abroad, to Scotland, to a restaurant, where I made a little money before coming back and publishing the book. I want to start traveling abroad again.” So he said, “Listen, take one mitzvah with you.” I said, “What mitzvah? What do I know about mitzvos?” He said, “No. Take one mitzvah.” “What?” “I don’t know. Tefillin.” I told him I didn’t know anything about it. So he said, “Go and get your tefillin.” I went, brought my tefillin, and he taught me how to put them on. Then I went abroad. Before I left, he said, “Look, take one thing and always stick with it, for your whole life. Whatever you take on, don’t take it on if you aren’t going to keep doing it. But if you want to try something, start with this. If you like it, stick with it, even in a small way.” And that actually became my guiding idea with the kibbutzim. The idea was to give people something small, but something that would stay with them for life. So what I do with the kibbutz members isn’t a lot. It’s an apple and honey, a calendar. It’s shmurah matzah. It’s a very nice birthday certificate that I make for every kibbutz member, and I send

11:10 Speaker 2 him a letter of blessing, and I send him his chapter of Tehillim to accompany him throughout the year, so he can keep it with him. Here, I have mine.

11:20 Speaker 3 You send every kibbutz member a birthday letter of blessing?

11:24 Speaker 2 Yes, here it is.

11:26 Speaker 3 May I mention here, Yankele, that I got the wording for the birthday letter from you back then, and I still use it today.

11:36 Speaker 2 Wonderful. So here is the chapter of Tehillim.

11:39 Speaker 3 Not so close to me, not so close, because it comes out blurry.

11:42 Speaker 2 Ah, okay.

11:43 Speaker 3 There. Wonderful.

11:44 Speaker 2 So this is the chapter of Tehillim. For example, this is mine for this year. Everyone gets the chapter for their year. Every kibbutz member gets one. So there’s shmurah matzah, an apple and honey, a birthday certificate, a chapter of Tehillim—those are the small things I work with. But the strength of my work, of my shlichus, lies in consistency, in persistence, in steadiness, in consistency. That’s exactly what Chetzkel taught me. I mean, I learned from him to value consistency. He called it the korban tamid, the daily offering in the Beis Hamikdash: morning, evening, morning, evening, without stopping. Not for Shabbos, not for holidays, nothing. You do things that would otherwise be forbidden on Shabbos in order to offer it—slaughter it and burn it, acts that are generally forbidden on Shabbos. But for this, they’re permitted. It’s like an ambulance. It’s permitted on Shabbos, permitted on Yom Kippur, permitted at any time. So he helped me understand: Wow, how beautiful it is to do something consistently your whole life, even if it’s small. Its strength is in its consistency. He also told me once that this offering was on behalf of millions of Jews. Take a fifty-kilo lamb and divide it among millions of people. It’s nothing—a pinhead. So he said, what’s its value? Its value is that it’s the korban tamid: its constancy. And when I started working with the kibbutzim, I said, you know what, I’m going to use that formula. I’ll take a small step with them—with people in general—and the strength of that small step will be that it lasts.

13:25 Speaker 4 What, what? Yankele, you’re talking now about kibbutzim and kibbutz members, and I imagine some people won’t understand what this is about. Why? What do you want from them? What exactly do you want from the kibbutz members?

13:35 Speaker 2 Good question.

13:36 Speaker 4 Are they missing something?

13:38 Speaker 2 They aren’t missing anything. Really, they’re living in their own paradise, their own Bnei Brak, their own ghetto—just as each of us lives in our own ghetto, and so on. But they’re a close-knit society that has set high standards for itself in Ahavas Yisroel, ideals, dedication, work, craftsmanship, diligence, loyalty, sharing—really beautiful things. And they, seemingly, have said, “We don’t need Torah.” I say to someone, “Come, put up a mezuzah.” He says, “Why do I need that? What is it? Am I not protected? Am I somehow less good than you? I don’t understand tefillin and all that—what do I need it for? I’m not missing anything. I’m doing fine. What’s wrong with my life?” So that’s who these people are. I saw that, given the great divide between the religious, charedi sector of the Jewish people and the kibbutz members, I had to break down the fence. Break down the fence. What could I do about their fences? No. I would go in as a religious Jew, dressed like one, walk around the kibbutz and make connections with key people, important people, people with some connection to Judaism who didn’t want to become religious, didn’t want to become baalei teshuvah, didn’t want any of that. But I would be their friend. I would simply appreciate them. I would truly see their good qualities, live with that, and ask for nothing more. I wouldn’t try to bring them back to religious observance or anything else. I would simply want to show them that we—that I, representing religious Jews—love you. We’re with you. We’re with you on ninety percent of what there is to talk about and do, and so on. We appreciate you because you really are good people, so let’s be friends. Listen, we have a lot of things

15:37 Speaker 2 in common.

15:38 Speaker 4 Has that worked for you? Is it working? Is there a kibbutz where that’s happened?

15:43 Speaker 2 It’s working, yes.

15:44 Speaker 4 Tell us about a kibbutz you went to where it went wonderfully, or something like that.

15:49 Speaker 2 Listen, when a person makes no demands, and he hasn’t come to make people religious or change their opinions, but to talk about the big questions in life—things an ordinary person thinks have no answer—the other person says to you, “Listen, tell me something: What do we need all this kashrus for? What does it accomplish? Or what does a mezuzah accomplish? Or tefillin—why do we need them?” He starts asking questions that have really been weighing on his mind, and he doesn’t understand why things are this way. Why do we need it? Why be religious at all? Why observe this and that and the other thing? And then you give him sensible answers, things that make sense to him. It’s the way you speak, the way you present it to him, and he says, “You know what? All right, listen, I’m not religious, but you’re saying interesting things. It’s good to hear, nice to hear,” and so on. And that’s it. You don’t try to do something with his agreement. You don’t say, “Oh, you agree? Great, come put on tefillin, come keep kosher, come…” You don’t go and—

16:52 Speaker 5 Wait a moment, what was the first kibbutz you went to?

16:56 Speaker 2 Look, it was before Pesach, and I took it upon myself to go from kibbutz to kibbutz and bring shmurah matzah. I would give it to the secretary to pass on to the person leading the Seder, so he could show it to the whole kibbutz. Back then, they ate matzah, but there was also bread on the Seder table. They were honest people. They weren’t embarrassed about not being religious. If they ate bread, they ate bread; they didn’t hide it. But they were respectful. They put matzah on the table. It’s Pesach, so they ate both matzah and bread. In their honesty, they’d say, “Listen, we eat bread, but we’re aware that it’s Pesach, so we eat matzah too. Whoever wants both can have both. Whoever wants only matzah can have only matzah, or only bread. But our way is to include everything, so we do both.” With a microphone and everything. They told me, “Listen, we don’t observe Pesach or the Seder night the way you do.” I told them, “That doesn’t matter. The Lubavitcher Rebbe wants everyone to know what shmurah matzah is: that it has many special qualities, and that great care was taken to make it strictly kosher. According to Kabbalah, eating a piece of it—even just a kezayis, which is less than a whole matzah—is beneficial for many good things, for health, for faith, and more. So let the person leading the Seder show everyone the gift the Lubavitcher Rebbe gave to all the Seder participants. That’s all I ask. Whether they eat it or not, whether they want to or not—let everyone see the gift and know what it is.” That was it. And so it went, year after year, until something interesting happened. Little by little, they felt that, how do you put it, the enemy wasn’t an enemy anymore, and he

18:54 Speaker 2 wanted to be their friend, and so on. So deep down they probably said to themselves, “Listen, let’s eat only matzah.” Not shmurah matzah, but only matzah at the Seder. “If someone wants bread, we have no problem with that; let him eat it at home. But at the Seder, let’s have a ceremony the way it should be. We’ll eat only matzah.” And a very large number of kibbutzim switched to eating only matzah. That meant there was now a demand for more matzah. I wasn’t bringing just one box of three matzos for eight hundred people anymore. I started bringing a kilo—fifteen matzos—and they’d put half a matzah or a matzah on several tables. Then I went up to two kilos, then three kilos for each public Seder—fifty matzos. After that I said, “You know what? I’ll have my telephone operators ask how many people are coming to the Seder.” Say there are four hundred people. Each one should eat a quarter of a matzah—that’s the mitzvah, a quarter of a matzah. Four hundred quarters means you need a hundred matzos. At fifteen matzos per kilo, that’s about six or seven kilos. So I began bringing matzos to the Seders according to the number of people: a quarter of a matzah per person. I made sure they distributed them among the tables and gave everyone some to eat. Little by little, people got used to it. They ate their square matzos, but anyone who felt like it would seek out the round, handmade shmurah matzah. And it was all done pleasantly and kindly, without forcing anyone, completely free of charge.

20:36 Speaker 6 Tell us, is there a kibbutz you can name where the secretary wouldn’t mind your mentioning its name? Tell us about one particular kibbutz.

20:44 Speaker 2 What was that?

20:44 Speaker 6 I remember you worked—we worked together giving classes on kibbutzim for several years. You were in Ma’agan, I think, near the Kinneret, right? Could that be? Either Ma’agan or...

20:57 Speaker 2 Where was I born? I was born in Ma’ayan Tzvi.

21:00 Speaker 6 Ma’ayan Tzvi is where you were born. I’m talking about when you reached bar mitzvah age and started working on the kibbutzim. You worked on several kibbutzim in the area. Do you remember where?

21:12 Speaker 2 Yes, right. I worked in Ma’agan, Kibbutz Ma’agan. I gave a class there on the weekly parsha and so on. I worked in Kibbutz Gonen. I gave a class in Gonen.

21:26 Speaker 6 In Gonen you had that fellow, Bini—Bini from Gonen. Remember Bini from Gonen?

21:32 Speaker 2 Bini Yaakov, of course. He’s like a brother to me.

21:35 Speaker 6 Bini from Gonen.

21:35 Speaker 2 Bini has six sons who are pilots, and his other daughters are married to pilots. And his grandchildren too.

21:44 Speaker 6 I already, I already...

21:44 Speaker 2 His grandchildren are pilots too.

21:46 Speaker 6 The best become pilots, and the best women marry pilots. But do you remember that Bini sent an esrog to the Lubavitcher Rebbe through you?

21:57 Speaker 2 Right.

21:58 Speaker 6 He gave you esrogim he’d grown and said, “Take these and bring them to the Lubavitcher Rebbe.”

22:04 Speaker 2 Right.

22:04 Speaker 6 You brought them to Dovid Nachshon. Dovid Nachshon traveled to the Lubavitcher Rebbe and brought the esrogim to the Rebbe’s secretariat. Then, in the middle of Sukkos, he got a phone call. The Rebbe’s secretary called him and said, “The Rebbe asked whether the esrogim are grafted, because he wants to make the blessing on them.” So we called you, and you called Bini. Bini said they were grafted, and the answer reached the Rebbe. Now, what happened there? I don’t know. But that was one of the—how do you put it—one of the defining things you did.

22:43 Speaker 2 Right.

22:44 Speaker 6 And it’s possible Bini still remembers you fondly for it to this day.

22:48 Speaker 2 Could be. Yes. Look at that, I’d almost forgotten about it. I also had a very interesting experience with putting on tefillin. There was a kibbutznik in southern Israel, not far from Eilat. A secretary I knew there was a descendant of the holy Shelah.

23:04 Speaker 6 Which kibbutz? At least tell us the name of the kibbutz.

23:07 Speaker 2 Yot—Yotvata, Yotvata.

23:08 Speaker 6 Yotvata. Well, that’s a wonderful kibbutz.

23:11 Speaker 2 Atzmon, Atzmon Horowitz.

23:13 Speaker 6 Good.

23:14 Speaker 2 He passed away a few years ago.

23:16 Speaker 6 Well, then surely he...

23:19 Speaker 2 That Atzmon...

23:19 Speaker 6 appreciates what you did for him.

23:22 Speaker 2 In short, I used to visit him every time. He had a white beard and didn’t wear a kippah, but it was an impressive white beard. He was always proud to be a descendant of the holy Shelah, of the Horowitz family, of Rabbi [unclear]. I made a real effort to draw him closer, invited him to put on tefillin, and things like that, but we were friends. He was very happy when I came, and I was very happy to see him. One day I said, “Listen, Atzmon, after so many years of knowing each other...” I didn’t want to say, “You’re getting older, and who knows...” So I said, “Atzmon, perhaps you could give me a gift just once.” “What do you want from me now?” “Put on tefillin once. That’s all. I won’t ask you again.” He thought and thought. “What do you need from me? What do you want?” “Atzmon, tefillin, just once.” “You know what? Let’s put on tefillin once, okay—but only once.” I put tefillin on him, then took his picture and went home. Pesach ended, and I put the picture up on our wall. Suddenly, during the Shabbos meal, my son looked at it. He saw that there were only six windings around the arm instead of seven. There should be seven, with another winding going toward the hand. So he said, “Dad, why didn’t you make seven?” I told him, “Wow, you’re right. Thanks to you, I’ll put tefillin on him again.” I called Atzmon. There was a problem—not that it really was a problem, but I made it into one so he’d put on tefillin one more time. I told him, “Listen, Atzmon, we should have wrapped it around the arm seven times, but we did six.” He said, “So what?” I said, “Look at the picture I gave you at home.” He looked. “So what? So what? Six. So what? Does that mean it doesn’t count?” So I played it up. I told him, “No, I’ll do it...” It

25:32 Speaker 2 No, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t count, but, you know, it isn’t complete.

25:36 Speaker 7 Not a hundred percent.

25:38 Speaker 2 Yes. So he said, “Oy, oy, oy, what am I going to do with you? What am I going to do with you?” Fine. When I came back six months later, I said, “Listen, I did say once, but...” “All right, all right, all right, I know you.” He rolled up his sleeve and put them on again. After our half-hour visit ended, I said, “Atzmon, one last request. A mezuzah on the door, as a gift from me.” “What for? A mezuzah, of all things? Am I supposed to keep kissing the wall? [unclear].” Then he said, “You know what? Put up a mezuzah.” So I put one up. His friend, who worked in the accounting office in the next room, said, “What about me?” So I put up a mezuzah for him too. There you have it: things that took twenty years and more—yes, twenty years—before they finally came to pass.

26:38 Speaker 7 Listen, these are really, really inspiring stories. Look, we’re going to now—