Rabbi Shmuel Yizhar, Varanasi, India - Part 1

00:18 Speaker 1 Well, hello, Shmuel. Shmuel, uh, Yizhar. Shmuel Yizhar—

00:23 Speaker 2 Hello and blessings.

00:24 Speaker 1 A shliach of the Rebbe shlita, Melech HaMoshiach, in Varanasi. Am I saying that right, Shmuel?

00:30 Speaker 2 Yes, yes, Varanasi.

00:31 Speaker 1 Varanasi, India. Could you describe what part of India that’s in? Because India isn’t a country like Israel; it’s a little bigger.

00:40 Speaker 2 Varanasi is in eastern India, close to the border with Bangladesh and a little below Nepal. Below the Nepalese border. It’s really the northeast. That’s the poorer part of India. The farther east you go in India, the poorer it gets. The farther west you go, toward Bombay and places like that, the wealthier it gets. So we’re talking about an area that’s fairly undeveloped. Very, very poor and quite, quite—

01:12 Speaker 1 So what brought you specifically there? Why Varanasi? You could have picked anywhere in India—it’s practically a whole continent.

01:21 Speaker 2 Yes, that’s true. But you know, as we know, we don’t choose. “A person’s steps are guided by Hashem.” Hakadosh Boruch Hu decides where each person should go and what they should do. And that’s how it was with us, too. I was sent there to study music. That city is where all the musicians who come to study Indian music gather. It’s India’s biggest center for music.

01:50 Speaker 1 Ah.

01:51 Speaker 2 And as a musician, I got there a little over thirty years ago and lived there for many, many years to study music.

02:01 Speaker 1 When you first got there—sorry to interrupt you, Shmuel—were you already a Chabad chossid?

02:08 Speaker 2 No, I wasn’t a Chabad chossid. I wasn’t. I wasn’t anywhere close to that.

02:12 Speaker 1 I see. So tell us about that first encounter there with the music, and then we’ll try to take it from there.

02:19 Speaker 2 I came to Varanasi because of a recording I heard at a friend’s place. It featured one of the greatest players of an instrument called the tabla, an Indian drum. It’s a very, very complex drum. I heard it and really liked it, so I asked him where you learn to play it. He told me, “In Varanasi.” We were in India at the time, in the south, around Goa. So I packed my suitcase and went to learn tabla. From then on, I generally went there every year for a few months of study. And one of the times I went back, the whole question of doing teshuvah began stirring inside me. It really began there. It had started a little before that, but it grew much, much stronger there. And after, boruch Hashem, I managed to draw closer and study Torah, I decided it would be right to go back and open a place there. Because my whole process of teshuvah—or at least the beginning of it—had happened right there, and I had nobody to talk to. Nobody understood what I wanted. Nobody understood what I was going through. I had nobody to share what I was experiencing with. So when I got married, I told my wife, “I think we should go there, so that the next Jew something like this happens to will at least have someone to share the experience with, someone to talk to.” And since then, boruch Hashem, many young people have come through who’ve had things to share. We’ve reached the point where we actually help awaken that experience again and again.

04:06 Speaker 1 That sounds absolutely extraordinary. We’ll come back to it. I want to ask you, Shmuel: you said you were born into a Jerusalem family, and I gather it wasn’t a particularly religious family. Is that right?

04:21 Speaker 2 No, no. Not a religious family at all.

04:25 Speaker 1 Where are your parents from?

04:28 Speaker 2 My mother’s family has been in Jerusalem for four generations. My father immigrated from Russia. He’s a Holocaust survivor who managed to flee Russia ahead of the Nazis, and during that flight he eventually reached India, too. He was five years old when he fled. He reached Bukhara, Tashkent and Samarkand, and then they kept going. They weren’t religious. They continued until they reached India, and from India he came to Israel by way of Poland. All on foot. All on foot.

05:06 Speaker 1 Wow.

05:06 Speaker 2 At age five.

05:07 Speaker 1 That’s no small journey.

05:09 Speaker 2 We don’t understand that generation, living in the generation we do. When we look at the previous generation, for them it was about yeshivos, it was mesiras nefesh, life itself. That’s what they gave everything for—not for things. That was what mattered most to them.

05:30 Speaker 1 So your father reached Israel, you’re saying, and he came to Jerusalem.

05:35 Speaker 2 No, he came to Rechovot. I don’t know exactly how they met, but apparently a friend of his knew the family, and that’s how they got married. Afterward, they moved to Rechovot when I was less than a year old.

05:52 Speaker 1 Ah. So tell us a little about your childhood, Shmuel. What sort of kid were you? Mischievous? Quiet? Studious?

06:00 Speaker 2 I was a very, very mischievous kid. Very. I was an athlete for many years—handball, soccer, running—and I was mischievous. I was also very studious. I really loved learning, but I never felt I needed to do anything with it. Especially the material you learn in school—there isn’t much to do with it.

06:30 Speaker 1 Who wants to do well in school?

06:34 Speaker 2 Well, in a secular school, there really isn’t much to do with that material, unless you want to go into that sort of world. And I was also very, very spiritual as a child. After my bar mitzvah, I put on tefillin every day and davened every day, and—

06:55 Speaker 1 How did you come to that? You come from a nonreligious family, so how did you get into something like that?

07:00 Speaker 2 Because I felt very, very connected to it, and I was very attached to davening. At home they made fun of me all the time: “Rudi, what happened, you’ve become religious? Rabbi! Honorable Rabbi!” Things like that. Eventually, with the social pressure, I really did stop. I was only thirteen, after all. But I felt a very, very strong connection to Torah and Judaism. I loved Torah. I would study Mishlei and Koheles on my own, and I was always looking through sacred texts. But it never translated into anything practical for me, especially since my family really didn’t like religious people. That was a very strong attitude in our home. In my opinion, secular Jerusalemites are very, very opposed to Judaism. Very much so. It’s not like a secular person from Tel Aviv who doesn’t mind it. For secular Jerusalemites, religious people bother them. It’s almost like—G-d forbid to say it—like they’re another people. I grew up in a home where religious people were very much disliked, and people spoke very unkindly about religious Jews. That’s how I grew up. So naturally, that’s what I heard at home. Even so—by the way, when I started drawing closer and was in yeshiva, I brought my parents to hear the Megillah reading there.

08:43 Speaker 3 Which yeshiva were you in?

08:45 Speaker 2 Sorry?

08:46 Speaker 3 Which yeshiva were you in?

08:48 Speaker 2 Yeshivas Daas, with Rabbi Erez. When they came to the yeshiva, one of the guys came over to us and said, “Well, which is better—that he’s religious, or that he’s doing drugs in India?” Without missing a beat, my mother told him, “Doing drugs in India.”

09:05 Speaker 3 So all those things happened together, you’re saying.

09:08 Speaker 2 Yes. She thought doing drugs in India was preferable. The truth is, it took them a very, very, very long time to come to terms with it. The whole family was against it; they couldn’t grasp it. The first time I saw a sign that it had clicked for them was when my mother was here, while I was in Israel, in Kiryat Malachi. It was during COVID, so we weren’t traveling to India. She was here for some conference, so I picked her up and brought her to see the children, her grandchildren. She came over to our house. We made sufganiyos and everything. Then there was a Convoy of Light parade, and the children really wanted to go out. So we got in the car, took a big speaker for music, and drove in the convoy through all the communities, with music playing and a menorah on the car. She sat in the car for two hours.

10:06 Speaker 3 Wow.

10:07 Speaker 2 With the music. I also had to drive her home afterward, so she ended up sitting through those two hours whether she wanted to or not. After two hours of driving through the communities, I dropped her off at home. A month later she called me and said, “I want you to know that I saw the great light you have—your children, their joy, the joy you brought people.” She told me, “I’m so happy you became religious.” This was after almost eighteen years. It took her a month from seeing it to making that call, and I give her a lot of credit for calling. That takes a lot of courage. She called and said she took her hat off to us.

10:56 Speaker 3 That’s a moving story.

10:59 Speaker 2 Yes, thank G-d. Thank G-d we’ve reached this day. So that’s how I grew up. I grew up in a place where religious people weren’t exactly... I was even like that myself. After hearing it so much, I was against religious people. Not against Judaism—against religious people.

11:19 Speaker 3 Right. In other words, Judaism spoke to you, but you had certain ideas about religious people.

11:28 Speaker 2 The religious people in the neighborhood, and religious people in general—you know, the idea that they take advantage of others and all that. The usual stories you hear in nonreligious homes. So we were very much against them. I grew up in a neighborhood where—only later did I realize that I’d grown up right across from Rabbi Gluckowsky’s[?] shul in Rehovot. Right across the street. And over the years, that neighborhood became more and more and more religious, until today it’s a completely chareidi neighborhood. My mother still lives there.

12:07 Speaker 3 Well, maybe that will influence her for the good. You never know.

12:11 Speaker 2 Yes, it already has. It’s all happening. Whenever the Chabad guys come by to give her something, she gets excited every time. “Wow, those Chabad people are so nice.”

12:23 Speaker 3 It’s really interesting how the image people have in their heads keeps them from seeing the truth, so to speak.

12:31 Speaker 2 Yes. It’s brainwashing. It’s simply brainwashing. Today you realize that most Jews in Israel really have been brainwashed. One of the clearest examples was when I’d have discussions at home. I’d say to my mother, “But look, it’s like this and like that, and it’s very good.” She’d say, “Yes, yes, but...” I’d say, “But what? Why ‘but’? It’s good. Being religious is a good thing. It’s a good education, good values, a healthy life...” “Yes, yes, but...” What “but”? That “but” kept coming up. It’s part of the brainwashing they’ve gone through since those stereotypes were put into their heads, even though they understand that Judaism really is the right path. I’ll tell you a story. Once, when I was a young married man in Tzfas, I used to go out with Rabbi Kobi Ben Ari’s group, which visits kibbutzim.

13:36 Speaker 3 Yes.

13:36 Speaker 2 So another young married man and I went to a kibbutz to celebrate someone’s birthday, but he wasn’t home. We knocked on someone else’s door and went in. It was a dark, gloomy room—a dark, gloomy apartment, full of cigarette smoke, with beer bottles on the table. We went inside, pulled up a chair for him and started trying to cheer him up. He was a Jewish man of about 52 or 53, sitting there smoking cigarettes and drinking beer. We started talking about his life. He told us that his youngest son was being accused of sexual misconduct with other children at school, and that he had all sorts of problems, one after another. Then he said to me, “Look at you religious people. Your children are so well brought up. You have good values. You raise your children in a healthy way. That’s your life. It’s such a good life. I really envy you.” So we said, “If you envy us, come with us. Let us help you live that way too. Come.” He said, “Uh... it’s not for me.” And that’s the point about brainwashing: you understand that it’s good, but you don’t understand that you, too, belong to that good.

15:00 Speaker 3 Yes, that disconnect. In any case—

15:03 Speaker 2 One side.

15:04 Speaker 3 In any case, you’re growing up there and going to school in Rehovot. At some point, I assume, you join the army.

15:11 Speaker 2 Yes, I was in the army. I wasn’t in a combat unit, but I was in the army.

15:15 Speaker 3 So tell us a little about how you left, what you did, what...

15:20 Speaker 2 What did I do? I served in an army liaison unit in Jaffa, at a place called Beit Hantel[?]. I dealt with attached soldiers and so on. Nothing special. I really didn’t like the army. And four days after I was discharged, I flew to India. Just like that.

15:41 Speaker 3 Four days after your discharge, you flew to India.

15:43 Speaker 2 Four days after my discharge, I flew to Thailand, not India.

15:47 Speaker 3 Oh, Thailand.

15:49 Speaker 2 Thailand. From there to... And then I started traveling around—for 17 years.

15:54 Speaker 3 What were you actually hoping to find?

15:58 Speaker 2 Well, you know, when a Jew starts searching, it’s because something is missing spiritually. If he hasn’t found it in his familiar surroundings, he’ll go looking for it somewhere else. It’s that simple. A person who travels around and leaves his familiar surroundings does so because something is missing spiritually. Always, always, always. Now, if he doesn’t understand that, he can tell himself it’s because he loves climbing mountains, or seeing scenery, or surfing. He can tell everyone all kinds of stories about why he’s doing this or that. But the only reason he left his familiar surroundings and started searching is that he didn’t find an answer to his soul’s spiritual need—his soul is crying out for a connection with Hakadosh Boruch Hu. That’s why so many Jews in Israel today travel around... Once, an Indian man came up to me and asked, “Tell me, how many Jews are there in... how many Israelis are there in Israel?” I told him about six million. He said, “Not here. How many are there in Israel?” Why? Because he sees, say, Americans. You can be traveling in areas packed with Israelis and see two Americans, three French people, six Germans, maybe three Austrians. And then you see 700 Israelis. So what does this Indian man think? He says to himself: there are, say, 250 million Americans, and I see two here, three there, another couple somewhere else. But there are 700 Israelis here, or a thousand, or two thousand, or five thousand. There are places with five thousand Israelis at any given moment. So how many Israelis must there be in Israel? You see so many Israelis traveling around and searching, because they aren’t finding the spiritual answer they need as Jews here in Israel,

18:09 Speaker 2 because, of all places in the world, this country is the most hostile to Judaism. That’s what I came to believe. So they run away. They leave. They leave their familiar surroundings and go sleep in hotels. I can tell you that back in Israel, if you offered one of them a mattress like that, he wouldn’t touch it with a stick. But there he’ll sleep in rooms with mosquitoes, diseases, contaminated water and who knows what else. They travel around in enormous numbers, all to find the spiritual answer they aren’t getting in their familiar surroundings. And that’s also why I was searching. That’s why I flew all over the world and traveled around. Each time I had a different excuse for going here or there, for choosing one place over another, for suddenly deciding to study music in India, and so on. But really it was—

19:08 Speaker 4 So you arrive, and your first stop is Thailand. What do you find there?

19:14 Speaker 2 Look, Thailand is a place to have fun. It’s a place to relax for a few weeks or months. After that, we went to Australia to make a little money, because you need money. It’s not as though... our country isn’t overflowing with money.

19:29 Speaker 4 Oh, you went—

19:30 Speaker 2 And from there—

19:31 Speaker 4 From Thailand you went to Australia.

19:33 Speaker 2 Yes, to work.

19:35 Speaker 4 Okay.

19:36 Speaker 2 After that, Europe, also to work. Then Brazil, then Ghana, then here and there, then Africa. And one day I made it to India too.

19:48 Speaker 4 One day you made it to...? India.

19:50 Speaker 2 India. I got to India after two years. And—

19:55 Speaker 4 Where did you go when you first arrived?

19:58 Speaker 2 At the beginning? The funny thing is, I arrived... I didn’t know where... I never know where I’m flying to. I fly somewhere without knowing where I’ll go or where I’ll stay. So I flew off like that—

20:14 Speaker 4 You just leave it up in the air and say, “Wherever I end up, it’ll be fine.”

20:17 Speaker 2 You land in India and figure it out. Hashem will help. So I landed in Bombay. There were some Israelis on the plane, and I asked where they were going. They told me Goa. I asked, “What’s in Goa?” They said, “Parties, the beach, that sort of thing.” I said, “Come on, I’ll go with you.” Then they got to the taxi and started talking again. They said, “No, we’re going to Pune.” “What’s in Pune?” “Pune.”

20:41 Speaker 4 Oh, Pune.

20:43 Speaker 2 Pune is the place off to the side.

20:45 Speaker 4 Yes.

20:46 Speaker 2 And I said, “What’s there?” They told me, “There’s an ashram there, and it’s fun.” I said, “Okay, I’ll go there with you.” So I went to Pune and arrived at the ashram. I wanted to see what it was all about. But for some reason, it didn’t work for me. I couldn’t connect with it. I watched videos of the guru there, and I couldn’t connect with that either. Everyone else was very enthusiastic about it. I remember—I’ll never forget—I was sitting in this little bakery where people ate, and across from me sat an Israeli woman of thirty-four who looked sixty. I said to her, “What did you find here?” She answered, “Ever since I came here, my life has changed.” But she looked so miserable to me. So I thought to myself, “This is what it looks like when your whole life has supposedly changed and you’ve found this great light? This is what it looks like when there’s such a great light?” Anyway, I went back to the people I was staying with at the apartment and asked them, “Where did you say the parties were?” They said, “In Goa.” So I went to Goa, and from there, after a while, I made it back to my city. Then I went to study music.