Part 3: Rabbi Yaakov Ben Ari - Shliach to the Kibbutzim and Initiator of Degel Chabad, the Story of Kibbutz HaArava

00:19 Speaker 1 …

00:21 Speaker 2 Yaakov Ben-Ari, we’re continuing with the story of the Chabad House for kibbutzim. Your stories are wonderful, really wonderful. Please, I’ll let you choose the next story. Or—

00:34 Speaker 1 We’re in the Arava. Not far from Yotvata, there’s a kibbutz not far from Eilat. After many years, I said to its secretary, “I’d like you to put on tefillin just once. That’s it. I haven’t asked you for this in years.” He’s a very important person in the kibbutz, very important—on its board and involved in its business affairs. I said, “Listen, here’s what we’ll do. Put on tefillin once. That’s all. I won’t ask you for anything more. Just as a... you know, give me that gift.” So he thinks and thinks, then says, “You know what, Yankele? I won’t put on tefillin, but I’m willing to promise you that the moment Moshiach comes, I’ll put them on immediately. Five minutes later.” I made a face. “What? What’s the trick in that? The trick is to put them on before he comes.” He says, “Ah, Yaakov, leave it. If you managed to get a statement like that out of me, it means tefillin are even on my mind. Was that ever something we could discuss? You’ve done your job.” I said, “Okay, maybe for you that’s true, but I haven’t done my job.” As the Rebbe says, “We’ve done everything to bring Moshiach, but Moshiach still hasn’t come. So everything we’ve done has been for nothing. Bottom line, he hasn’t come yet.” He says to me, “That’s exactly what I’m telling you.” Well, time passed—about a year—and suddenly he developed an illness. He had all kinds of limitations and needed someone to help and support him, and so on. I kept visiting his home about twice a year. Before Rosh Hashanah—

02:43 Speaker 2 Twice a year, before Rosh Hashanah and before Pesach.

02:47 Speaker 1 Yes.

02:48 Speaker 2 …

02:48 Speaker 1 I had a little room there. They told me I could sleep in it, and that’s what I did every year. I’d finish the whole route down to Eilat, sleep at his place, daven in Eilat the next morning, and then start back through the Arava to the kibbutzim I hadn’t reached.

03:08 Speaker 2 Heading north.

03:09 Speaker 1 Yes. Then, one day, his wife calls me and says, “Listen, Yankele, your friend isn’t feeling well. He’s got some... he keeps falling, he’s unsteady, and so on. Daven for him.” I said, “Of course, certainly.” And I really did say several chapters of Tehillim for him and a Mi Shebeirach. I mentioned him in shul several times. Whenever I came by, I’d go over to him and say, “Listen, treat me like a doctor. I know that what I’m about to tell you to do is the best thing for you. Let’s put on tefillin.” “No! What are you talking about?” But I told him, “Listen, the doctor doesn’t ask you questions, does he? So I’m not asking you questions either. Give me your arm.” And I put the tefillin on his arm. While I was doing it, he said, “Yankele, this is religious coercion, you know. Just be aware that this is religious coercion.” I told him, “Absolutely. Of course I’m aware. But some things are imposed for a person’s own good, like what doctors do, and so on.” And so it turned out that Dr. Ben-Ari would put tefillin on him twice a year for quite a few years. One day he even had surgery, and his wife wanted me to bless him. I happened to be in Be’er Sheva just as he came out of surgery. I went in to see him afterward and gave him a big blessing. The problem with his head really did improve, and they managed to bring him home. Baruch Hashem, he lived for several more years. Later his condition deteriorated, and his wife told me he had passed away. Of course, I said Kaddish, as I do for the kibbutz members on my list who have no one else to say Kaddish for them. I say Kaddish for them for eleven months, three times—

05:18 Speaker 1 a day, at the prayers, as is customary.

05:22 Speaker 3 That’s a very big responsibility.

05:24 Speaker 1 Yes, that’s how it is with me. I always have fifteen or twenty such people on my list. One day his wife calls me—a prominent woman in her own right—and says, “Listen, Yankele, something happened here. I said something to a man who was putting on tefillin in the dining hall. I told him that wasn’t the place to do it in front of everyone. I understand he’s Sephardi and all that, but it isn’t fitting for our kibbutz to have someone doing things like that in front of all those people.”

06:01 Speaker 3 Such terrible things.

06:03 Speaker 1 Yes, strange things. So what happened? She told him, “Listen,” and he said, “I don’t have money. I use the tefillin belonging to the head cook here, the chef.” So I said to her, “Well, what’s the problem?” “He doesn’t have tefillin. I told him, ‘If tefillin are your problem, I’ll buy you tefillin.’ Then I went to find out how much they cost and saw I’d got myself into something. It’s not a hundred or two hundred shekels; it’s two thousand. What am I going to do? I don’t have it.” So I told her, “Listen, I really appreciate this. But you know, our whole people are fundraisers. Collect some money, I’ll help you, and we’ll buy the young man tefillin.” She said, “But I’m terribly embarrassed. I don’t do that sort of thing. How can I...” So I asked her, “Where do you work?” In an office—a fancy office. “Ask everyone on the staff to give a hundred shekels. I believe you’ll have the money for tefillin in no time. What’s two thousand shekels? I’ll make up whatever’s missing.” She said, “All right, I’ll try. I’m uncomfortable with it, but I’ll try.” She went and collected money from them. I didn’t wait for her, because I was about to travel to the south. I went into a Chabad House and said, “Give me a pair of tefillin. How much does it cost?” He said, “Two thousand shekels.” I gave him two thousand shekels in cash, [unclear], took the tefillin with me and started driving toward the Negev. About two hours later, as I was driving out of Be’er Sheva toward Sde Boker and so on, she called: “Yaakov, you have no idea! I got the money. Everyone gave me something and helped. I have two thousand shekels.” I told her, “Wow, you’re something. Well done, what a righteous woman.” Then I said, “The tefillin are right here beside me. I’ve already bought them.”

07:53 Speaker 1 Well, I arrived, and we had a little ceremony. I brought her the tefillin, and she said, “No, give them straight to the young man who works in the kitchen.” So I took the tefillin to him in the kitchen. He said, “What’s this?” They’d called him over and told him there was something interesting and he should come. When he came, I said, “Here’s a pair of tefillin for you, as a gift.” “A gift? From whom?” “From the woman who shouted at you yesterday, ‘Why are you putting on tefillin here?’” He said, “Seriously?” He remembered her name. “Wow, I can’t believe it.” I said, “You see? You thought she was against you, but in the end she collected the money and bought you tefillin. Look at these kibbutz members!” He was deeply moved by it. Then I suddenly remembered how the story had begun. Her husband had told me seven, eight—maybe ten—years earlier that he wouldn’t put on tefillin for anything; he’d only put them on if Moshiach came. Then what happened happened: he got sick and put on tefillin once, twice, three times—about fifteen times, twice every year. Eventually he passed away, Kaddish was said for him, and in the end his wife bought someone a pair of tefillin. It brought the whole story full circle with all these tefillin. So you see, in my work, in my shlichus... There was once a kibbutz where I wanted to put up a mezuzah, and a woman told me, “I can’t put up a mezuzah.”

09:32 Speaker 4 Yankele, if you can’t give the person’s name, at least give the name of the kibbutz.

09:39 Speaker 1 …

09:39 Speaker 4 Nobody’s going to do anything.

09:42 Speaker 1 The kibbutz was Sha’ar HaAmakim. Yes.

09:46 Speaker 4 Sha’ar HaAmakim—it’s near us, by [unclear].

09:50 Speaker 1 Right.

09:50 Speaker 4 They grow the tomatoes.

09:52 Speaker 1 So this woman in Sha’ar HaAmakim tells me, “Listen, I can’t put on tefillin—I mean, put up a mezuzah.” “Why?” “My father is a Holocaust survivor. If he sees that mezuzah, it’ll devastate him. It’ll traumatize him. It won’t end well. I’m worried about his health. I can’t put up a mezuzah.” I said, “Okay, there’s honoring your father and mother here. There’s no mezuzah, but there is honoring your father and mother.” Anyway, I’ll finish in a few minutes. So I was saying to her—what was I going to tell her? Sweetie, wait a second, just a second. I need some quiet. I’ll finish in another fifteen minutes, okay?

10:33 Speaker 5 Finish what you’re saying.

10:34 Speaker 1 So I said to her, you know what? Okay, what could I tell her? “I’ll wait until your father passes away”? G-d forbid. G-d forbid. One year went by, then two, three, four, five, six years. One day I stopped by, just like that. Enough years had passed that I could ask her, “What about the mezuzah?” So she said to me, “Listen, my father actually passed away a few months ago, and... I can put one up. But give me time to get ready for it. Next time you’re here—say, in another six months.”

11:13 Speaker 4 Well, well.

11:14 Speaker 1 So I waited another six months, and after six months I brought the mezuzah and put it up. As a gift, of course. So there’s an example of why you need patience. You’re not going to turn people’s lives upside down. People need to move in a—what do people call it?—an organic way. Right, that’s it. So that’s another story. I also had a story with an ordinary kibbutznik who told me, “Listen, Rabbi, I started putting on...” Yosef! I’m speaking here. Quiet. He told me, “Listen, I’ve started becoming observant, and I was putting on tefillin, but suddenly I stopped, and I don’t want to put on tefillin. I daven every... but tefillin, I don’t want to.” I didn’t understand it. What? Why not? You’ve become observant, you have tzitzis, you have all that, but you don’t put on tefillin? He said, “I can’t explain it. I just don’t put on tefillin.” I told him, “Listen, from the way you’re talking, I’m going to have your tefillin checked. I think something’s wrong with them. Otherwise, this wouldn’t have gotten into your head.” Fine. I took the tefillin to be checked. I told the sofer checking them, “Listen, this man doesn’t want to put on these tefillin, and they’re new. I don’t understand why, but I’m sure they’re invalid. Here’s a straightforward person who became observant and wants to put on tefillin, and something is definitely wrong with them. Check them with an eye toward finding what makes them invalid.” I mean, look for the defect. That evening or the next day, I got a call from him. He said, “Yaakov, I haven’t come across anything like this in a long time.” “What happened?” He said, “An entire letter is missing.” Not a word—a letter. A missing letter means the tefillin are invalid. You can’t add that letter afterward. That’s one of the rules: you can’t fill it in later. Once you’ve written it,

13:31 Speaker 1 it has to be in sequence. You can’t come back afterward and squeeze a letter into the middle. So there’s an example of a kibbutznik who may look like an ordinary person, but he’s a tzaddik. In other words, he has these healthy instincts, healthy Jewish instincts. You understand? He sensed something was wrong. He didn’t want to put on tefillin, and he couldn’t even explain why. He just wouldn’t put on tefillin, you understand? Or... a great many miraculous and [unclear] things happen to them too, and sometimes they connect those things to the bond between us as well.

14:12 Speaker 6 [unclear] You started in 5741, I think—that would have been 1991 by the secular calendar.

14:19 Speaker 1 No, 1990. I started in 1990.

14:21 Speaker 6 You started a project called the Moshiach Flag.

14:27 Speaker 1 Yes.

14:28 Speaker 6 You decided—

14:28 Speaker 1 No, no, you’re making [unclear], aren’t you?

14:30 Speaker 6 You decided that Moshiach needed a special flag of his own.

14:35 Speaker 1 There was a demonstration called the Million-Person Demonstration. People came to protest giving back parts of the Land of Israel. I think it was in Jerusalem or Kiryat Arba, somewhere like that. It was during Chol Hamoed Pesach 5754.

14:51 Speaker 6 Ah.

14:52 Speaker 1 I saw everyone walking around with Israeli flags. I said, “Wait a minute, what’s going on here? Chabad has so much to say. How is it that it doesn’t have a flag?” Renault, Volkswagen, Audi—every company has its flag, its central emblem on a piece of cloth that represents it. That’s the way things work in the world. Not just countries; companies too. How is it that we don’t have a flag? Do we have nothing to say? We have more than enough to say. Then I suddenly had the idea of putting a crown on it. I didn’t know; I thought Moshiach had some recognized crown. It turned out he didn’t. So I wrote “Moshiach” next to it. I said, this crown represents Melech HaMoshiach, and I thought it would make a fitting flag. And since Chabad had started using yellow two years earlier, I said to myself, let’s stick with yellow. No need to reinvent the wheel; it’s already there. Yellow means Moshiach, so let’s continue with it. I colored it yellow, orange and red, and people snapped it up. The first flags were ready a few months after Chol Hamoed Pesach—on Tisha B’Av, in fact. By Tisha B’Av I already had the first hundred flags. People were very excited about them. It really expressed the idea; I gave them a banner to wave. It conveyed the whole idea, and boruch Hashem, it took off. After that I said, wow, we need to put up the biggest flag in the world. So I made a huge flag, ten meters by fifteen meters—really the size of a building. And—

16:30 Speaker 7 Fifty square meters. Fifty meters high, that’s—

16:34 Speaker 1 A hundred and fifty square meters, right.

16:36 Speaker 7 Basically five stories high. Five stories high.

16:41 Speaker 1 No. It’s three stories high and two or three apartments across. I mean, fifteen meters high and ten meters wide. Each story is about two and a half meters. That’s about four stories. Four stories times fifteen, which the other way around is six stories. Six stories by four stories, something like that. A big flag. And I wanted to put it in the most beautiful place possible: on Mount Hermon. So I went and pestered a manufacturer—not a manufacturer, a company that had, what do you call them, pipes. I got two twelve-meter pipes from them, put them on a truck and took them up to Mount Hermon. I spoke to the management there, and they gave me a spot at the far end, where the cable car terminates, on the mountainside to the right. They said, “Go ahead and put it there.” They brought a tractor, dug a hole—they’d already prepared the hole—and I was supposed to put in foundations and so on, and then erect the flag. So I brought in a Druze welder, Mahmoud. At the time, more than twenty years ago, I paid him about five thousand shekels, and he welded the two poles—the two, the two, uh, not poles—the two pipes together.

18:00 Speaker 7 Pipes.

18:01 Speaker 1 He turned them into a twenty-four-meter pole. He added rungs so someone could climb it, and I waited for a good opportunity to hoist the flag on the mast and put it up. Then suddenly a journalist appeared—I don’t know where he came from. He came down just as I was about to check on the preparations, and I saw him approach me. He said, “Are you Ben-Ari?” I didn’t respond. “They told me your name is Ben-Ari.” “Yes. What do you need?” “I don’t know. They told me the biggest flag in the world is going up here, and...” I said, “Who told you? That’s not...” “Don’t hide it from me. Everyone already knows.” Well, I realized the trouble had found me: a journalist had discovered it. So I said, “What do you want?” “No, don’t worry, I won’t write anything. I won’t do this, I won’t do that...” By the next day it was already in the newspaper.

19:01 Speaker 7 That’s good. That’s very good.

19:02 Speaker 1 That Chabad wanted—yes, that Chabad wanted to put up the biggest flag in the world on Mount Hermon, and so on. And that was what happened. They didn’t let it happen. The base commander immediately—

19:16 Speaker 7 They didn’t let it happen? No?

19:18 Speaker 1 No. The base commander summoned me and said, “Listen, listen. This is a very dangerous area. For our helicopters, all the ski equipment, all those cables and cable cars, are already like a thorn in our throats. But there’s no choice; the place makes its living from them. And now you want to put up a twenty-four-meter flagpole right at the end, exactly on the route the helicopters take when they lift off from here and head toward Syria. You want to put something like that on the edge of the mountain? Do you know how cloudy it gets here, when you can’t see a thing? You want—” And just a few weeks earlier, the helicopters had crashed, twenty helicopters. So he said to me, “You want something like that to happen here? Under no circumstances will I let that happen. I will not approve this flag here. It’s in the wrong place.” Well, that flagpole lay on the ground, forlorn, abandoned for an unbelievable fifteen, twenty years. Only four or five years ago, someone came along, saw a piece of real estate there—sorry, a piece of metal—cut it up, took it away and went to sell it. I don’t know what he did with it, but it’s something that... Yes, so maybe you should put it near the palace of King Moshiach in Kfar Chabad, which, with Hashem’s help, we’ll have soon. I believe there will be something beautiful like that. If they made a flag like that in Eilat, in Aqaba, and they made—there’s a crown there too. They put up a flag for the king there, yes, and they maintain it. It’s tremendous! A flagpole about a hundred meters tall, and the flag itself isn’t fifteen meters; it’s nearly eighty meters, a hundred

21:20 Speaker 1 meters. I don’t know; you can look up its size on Google. It tears every other day, and they take it in for repairs, and it costs the royal palace—how do you say it? Maintaining that flag costs the king a lot of money. But if that’s what they do for his servants and for people who aren’t his servants, then all the more so for his true servants: we need a flag. That will come too, in its time. Meanwhile, we have these flags people put on their jackets and on their kippahs, and put up everywhere. Listen, even on my visa—even on my visa, yes, even on my visa—there’s a Moshiach flag emblem. So, all right, we need to live with Moshiach and do everything we can to keep this going. Look, there are many more stories, but we—how do you say—wait, wait. Many times we... Okay. We’ve heard this story. A very beautiful story. Very powerful stories about your shlichus. I still want to hear more from you—not now; we’ll meet again. I want to hear about your personal connection with the Rebbe, and how you see your shlichus as a shliach of the Rebbe: not just as a person who does things, but how it connects to the Rebbe. So, with Hashem’s help, we’ll do that. Let’s say l’chaim. We wish you l’chaim, l’chaim and blessings, blessings for all the Jewish people. May the next words we hear already be the Rebbe’s, and may the whole world have tremendous success, when Moshiach has already come. The continuation will be after Moshiach comes. L’chaim and blessings. Long live our master, our teacher and our Rebbe, King Moshiach, son of David. Long live our master, our teacher and our Rebbe—five times. L’chaim and blessings, l’chaim and blessings. Good Shabbos, and we’ll see each other in the Beis

23:12 Speaker 1 Hamikdash, with Hashem’s help. Amen, amen.