Part 3, Section B - Moti Garmach, Tokyo, Japan - India, a Spiritual Experience Etched in You Forever

00:19 Speaker 1 So that’s how we got to India. I went to Israel for my sister’s wedding, then came back for the summer, for another six months, with Mendy Vaknin. I think he’s a rabbi at a yeshiva in Menachemiah.

00:36 Speaker 2 Yes.

00:37 Speaker 1 Anyway, by then it had really become a second home. People there are, I’d call them, vacuum cleaners for Chassidus. They come and ask questions about everything. They’re interested; they want to know. You go out to put tefillin on a Jew, and he listens to you for five minutes. You come home, and there’s been a topic, a discussion, a conversation. Someone asked questions beyond just putting on tefillin. I feel that in that place, every conversation revolves around this. You talk about the trip and all that, and then they ask, “Wait, how did you end up on shlichus? What is shlichus? What is a Rebbe? What is Chabad? What is Moshiach? What are you people about?” And straightaway you get to Tanya and… There’s no place like it in the world. Nowhere in the world are Jews so open—their hearts open, their minds open to learning and listening.

01:34 Speaker 2 Very interesting.

01:36 Speaker 1 So it was natural for me to open a Chabad House there. But I had concerns: running a Chabad House costs a lot of money. So I was sure I wasn’t going to open one, because I’m not good at raising money. A car won’t move without fuel, and if you have no fuel, it won’t work. I remember speaking to the shliach in Pushkar, Shimi Goldstein, and he told me, “I’m exactly like you.” He’d already been in Pushkar for twelve years then, I think. He said, “You get started, and then there’s no bread or milk for the children, and you have to pay the electricity bill. When you have no choice, you have to find something. Then Hakadosh Boruch Hu puts the words in your mouth, and it starts to work.” It still didn’t seem possible to me. But let me jump ahead to something two years later. Betzalel Kopshitz is a veteran shliach in India. Around Pesach, for the Seder night, all the Chabad Houses in India are open. Rosh Hashanah and the holidays, and Pesach—because India is divided between summer and winter. It’s like a migrating herd: when it’s freezing and snowing in the north, everyone goes south; when the south gets insanely hot in the summer, everyone goes north. Anyway, Pesach is when all the Chabad Houses are open. It’s the overlap between the seasons. After Pesach, during Nissan, there’s a Kinus Hashluchim in Delhi.

03:24 Speaker 2 Oh, there’s a gathering especially for India?

03:29 Speaker 1 Yes, they get together for [unclear] and stories, and just to be together.

03:35 Speaker 2 I see.

03:38 Speaker 1 Yes. India had reached a point where there were seventeen or eighteen Chabad Houses there. That’s a respectable number.

03:48 Speaker 2 How many Chabad Houses are there in India today?

03:50 Speaker 1 Today? I mean, how should I count? The Chabad House where we were still exists. It was open last year, but this year there still isn’t a couple to take it on and be there permanently. I think there are fourteen or fifteen.

04:07 Speaker 2 So you mean Ran Shamir’s Chabad House?

04:11 Speaker 1 Ran Shamir’s is open every year too.

04:14 Speaker 2 But that’s not yours. It’s not something you opened.

04:17 Speaker 1 No, no, I… How many hours away is it? It’s twenty hours from there.

04:23 Speaker 2 Twenty hours walking, driving, flying? How?

04:26 Speaker 1 Driving, driving.

04:28 Speaker 2 Driving.

04:28 Speaker 1 You fly from Israel to Bangalore, then it’s another drive, another drive, and you get there. But my father-in-law and mother-in-law go to Ran Shamir’s Chabad House every year.

04:38 Speaker 2 Oh, your father-in…

04:38 Speaker 1 My father-in-law and mother-in-law.

04:40 Speaker 2 Your wife’s parents are the ones who run Ran Shamir’s Chabad House.

04:46 Speaker 1 They go there in person, yes, for a few months every year. My father-in-law retired; he was a banker all his life.

04:54 Speaker 2 Remind me of his name.

04:57 Speaker 1 Yaakov Marom, and his wife Pessi Marom. They’re from Bat Yam. So they retired and… now what?

05:07 Speaker 2 Decided to spend more and more time in India.

05:10 Speaker 1 Yes, they go for a few months every year to be with the travelers, for Shabbos and so on. It’s a special atmosphere. A Jew with a white beard shows up—who knows? Listen, maybe I really should escape to India too.

05:31 Speaker 2 I’m not retiring, so that’s a bit of a problem. But Ran told me it reaches fifty degrees in the shade there in summer.

05:41 Speaker 1 Where we were, yes, in that region. It’s not pleasant. People leave; people can’t manage without air conditioning.

05:49 Speaker 2 In winter it’s pleasant.

05:51 Speaker 1 Let me jump ahead to when we were actually on shlichus in our own place. We stayed there one Pesach, in a leap year, in the heat we’re talking about, and you couldn’t sleep because of it. You just couldn’t sleep in that heat. So the Indians leave their homes and sleep outside. That’s what the streets are like in summer: everyone sleeps outside. There’s no air conditioning, and there isn’t always electricity either. Sometimes turning on a fan makes you hotter, because it blows the hot air right onto you. It’s hotter than having no fan. Our solution was simply to take a cold shower and get into bed wet, without drying off. Then we improved on that: we’d go into the shower in our pajamas. You’d get yourself wet, and that gave you a few more hours of cool sleep. I’m talking about nighttime. We got to the point of taking five showers a night just to get through the night.

06:52 Speaker 2 In other words, you sleep for an hour and a half, get up for a shower, and go back to sleep.

06:58 Speaker 1 You go back, and then you wake up again, sweaty and hot, and you can’t… There’s no insulation, and the house just turns into an aquarium of heat.

07:08 Speaker 2 Listen, that’s incredible. Incredible. So go on, tell us about Delhi. All right, at this point you’re in Delhi, at the Chabad House in that [unclear] of the hotel, with the whole laid-back, spiritual atmosphere.

07:22 Speaker 1 That was a long period, almost two years, with all the back-and-forth, and spending time with Zalman Scharf. He joined me too. I was with him there for a few months in Delhi, and we traveled to Rishikesh. In short, all sorts of shlichus assignments around India. But I’ll skip ahead to how we got to our own place. Betzalel Kopshitz led a farbrengen at the Kinus Hashluchim. There were the older, married shluchim, and all the young single men who had come to help the Chabad Houses. Pesach is a lot of work—really, the whole period is. So Betzalel Kopshitz was speaking at the farbrengen about Dor Yeshorim. What is Dor Yeshorim? It’s an organization that does blood tests to check for genetic diseases. They don’t tell you the results. They give you a number, and your number is linked to the result in their database. Before you meet a young woman, you call the database, give them the two numbers, and they tell you whether they’re compatible or whether there’s a risk of a genetic disease. If there’s a risk, you don’t begin; you don’t meet at all. That way you don’t reach a point where it’s hard to separate afterward. In the United States there was—

08:51 Speaker 3 Explain, because you’re jumping between topics and people won’t understand what you mean. What you’re saying is this: before a young man and woman meet—because in our community they don’t meet just to spend a Shabbos together; they meet with marriage in mind—you do this genetic test so they won’t meet and start developing affectionate feelings and mutual attraction beforehand. That’s what you mean.

09:14 Speaker 1 It’s a filter. What I was going to say is that in New York, in the United States, there was a ward for Tay-Sachs patients. Tay-Sachs is a genetic disease found among Jews, mainly Ashkenazi Jews who married within their communities. The children would live for a few years and then pass away, Hashem protect us. The man—I don’t remember his name—had three children, all of whom passed away from the disease. It’s a genetic disease. So he established this organization called Dor Yeshorim, and today, he says, that ward has closed. In other words, after thirty years of this work, I think—I don’t know how many years Dor Yeshorim has existed—there’s no longer a need for that Tay-Sachs ward. There are probably isolated cases, but not the numbers there used to be, because the organization has actually prevented the birth of children with the disease. That’s how important it is.

10:15 Speaker 3 Boruch Hashem.

10:16 Speaker 1 Now that’s the practical side of it. So Rabbi Tzvi—Rabbi Tzvi Kupchik—joked that there’s a chassidic Dor Yeshorim. What does a chassidic Dor Yeshorim mean? Before you meet a young woman for marriage, you ask through the shadchan, through the family, whether she’d be willing to come to India, to go on shlichus in India. If she’s willing, then there’s something to talk about. If not, look for someone else. Another young woman. In other words, it’s a filter: she’s surely a chassidic young woman, a good, caring person who cares about those around her—someone who would agree to go on shlichus in India. So he joked about that. Right, yes. How long ago was that? We were, uh, a few young men talking about it seriously. I think Yossi was among them too—Yossi the groom.

11:11 Speaker 3 Yes, Yossi still hasn’t told us his story about India, but he’ll get to it at some point.

11:16 Speaker 1 Wow. I think I have a picture with him in Delhi.

11:20 Speaker 3 Wonderful.

11:20 Speaker 1 Yes. We were there during the same period, within six months—part of the six months he spent mainly there. Anyway, no, he was there twice. He was also in Goa. Goa the second time. Anyway, when it came time to get married, that was the plan: we would open a new Chabad House in India. So, of course...

11:50 Speaker 3 You didn’t tell her about the fifty-degree heat and things like that.

11:54 Speaker 1 No. But that doesn’t have to be an issue. Really, when you have enough money, you can find solutions to everything in India too. There’s a saying in India: “Everything is possible.” India is a subcontinent; it’s a country that has everything, right? Now they’ve reached the moon, right?

12:14 Speaker 3 They reached the moon? They reached the moon?

12:17 Speaker 1 Yes. They landed a spacecraft a week or two ago. Something like that.

12:21 Speaker 3 I’m not... Yes, I don’t know. I’ll tell you, there’s a young man from my kibbutz named Michael Paz—Michael Paz, Mikey Paz—who founded a company in India that provides internet to all of India. Apparently it’s satellite internet. I don’t know exactly how it works there.

12:45 Speaker 1 The question is whether that means all of India or individual states in India.

12:47 Speaker 3 I don’t know. I don’t... India isn’t exactly a small country like Israel.

12:51 Speaker 1 Yes.

12:52 Speaker 3 It’s a little bigger.

12:53 Speaker 1 It’s divided into states, so it could be... Yes, it goes on and on.

13:01 Speaker 3 India has now become the country with the largest population in the world. More than China.

13:05 Speaker 1 Yes, yes. I mean, people speak different languages and eat different foods. It would be like saying that people in Israel and Turkey speak the same language, or have some connection. The distances are just unimaginable.

13:18 Speaker 3 No, but there is a central government.

13:21 Speaker 1 Yes, but still, a lot of things are very... I mean, there are different laws, all kinds of things. The army is probably one army. Anyway, let’s get back to our subject.

13:33 Speaker 3 You proposed to the young woman and told her, “Listen, first things first: India.” What happened next?

13:39 Speaker 1 Yes. No, I think, first of all, she knew where I was coming from. And she’s also a good friend of my sister’s. She knew the whole background, the... what do you call it? The addiction. So, no, we went back. But as I said earlier, I said I wasn’t going to open a Chabad House of my own, because taking on all the financial responsibility—especially the financial responsibility—seemed too hard. That was what intimidated me. So we went to an existing Chabad House, to help at Chabad Houses that were already large and needed help both with educating the children and with running the place. So then we arrived—how long was it? Five months after the wedding? Four months after the wedding—we arrived at the Chabad House in Dharamsala, run by Rabbi Drush Olam [unclear].

14:31 Speaker 3 Dharamsala. Where is Dharamsala? What region?

14:34 Speaker 1 North. Northern India.

14:36 Speaker 3 Northern India. Okay.

14:39 Speaker 1 Right by—the Himalayas.

14:41 Speaker 3 Ah.

14:42 Speaker 1 But that was two months after the attack in Mumbai. We got married in Elul, and the attack was in—on Rosh Chodesh Kislev. Meanwhile, we were working on the shipping container, on what we would send to India. After the wedding, we didn’t buy any furniture, just secondhand things to fill the house for those few months, things we could throw away afterward without it hurting. We knew from the start that was the plan. And... I think by Shvat we had already arrived in India. So it was after the attack, and the atmosphere... I mean, there were some concerns. No, wait, no, no, sorry. I’m getting ahead of myself. No. No, that’s right, yes, yes. Sorry, I’m... Yes, that’s how it was. We got married in 2008, then the attack happened, and we arrived two months later. Yes. With Anat.

15:59 Speaker 3 Okay.

16:01 Speaker 1 Anyway, we arrived at the Chabad House in Dharamsala, and there we really got involved in a different kind of work. I mainly knew Delhi. I hadn’t been to Dharamsala before.

16:11 Speaker 3 How was Dharamsala different from Delhi?

16:14 Speaker 1 Delhi is a transit point. People are constantly coming and going, coming and going. Someone goes to Pushkar, comes back to Delhi, goes to Agra, comes back to Delhi, goes to Rishikesh, comes back to... Delhi is a central hub. On the one hand, the drawback is that people generally don’t stay long. But you meet people you met two weeks or a month earlier, and then you meet them again and again. They’re friends who come back, not people you saw just once. So there’s a special advantage to that. But it’s like a tefillin stand with a constant stream of people, as well as dinners and classes in the evening. And the atmosphere, the atmosphere is special. You’re also welcoming people who’ve just arrived in India and are really getting that first shock, as they say. They arrive for the first time and, from the pressure or because of things they were told or because someone tricked them... The Indians are experts at looking at your Shoresh sandals and checking the dust to see how new you are. If you’re new to India, they’ll immediately take advantage of you in all kinds of ways. They fool you here, fool you there. That’s their specialty. So when you arrive in India, get your Shoresh sandals dirty so they won’t see they’re new. Then you have a better chance... And there’s also the finishing touch: the guys who, after six months or a year in India, are going back home or traveling to Nepal. They’re leaving India, and you’re there at the moment when they ask, “What’s next? Okay, you’ve been traveling for six months. What are you taking home with you? What happened here?” It’s a place where you can sum it all up. Many of those guys came to yeshiva, and many others... It’s at that point that you can really connect all the threads,

18:14 Speaker 1 connect all the lines, because you go through so many special, fascinating things...

18:19 Speaker 3 All the pieces of the puzzle, all those different experiences you had along your way there.

18:24 Speaker 1 Yes.

18:24 Speaker 3 So you’re basically saying that India is a spiritual experience that becomes etched in the soul. It doesn’t just pass, like, “Okay, we’re done, we’ve moved on, nothing happened.” It really becomes etched in the soul.

18:39 Speaker 1 For most of the guys. Today, I’d say less so. Now that everyone has WhatsApp and Instagram and Facebook, people aren’t really disconnected. People today also look for comfort; they want hot water and all that. I’m talking about earlier times, when you really... People would wash with a bucket, a bucket of water. You’d use a floor-washing bucket to bathe, with hot water and...

19:11 Speaker 3 You wash the floor, and then you bathe with the water. Got it.

19:15 Speaker 1 Yes.