Rabbi Shmuel Yizhar, Varanasi, India - Part 2

00:17 Speaker 1 Studying music—what does that mean? Surely it’s not classes where you study music.

00:22 Speaker 2 No, no. Usually it’s a private teacher.

00:25 Speaker 1 Ah.

00:26 Speaker 2 A private teacher. You buy an instrument that you... you get a place there... I arrived, found a place to live, and arranged a teacher, who was very, very young. And... what?

00:46 Speaker 1 I’m listening, I’m listening.

00:48 Speaker 2 A very young Indian teacher, who later became something of a friend. After a few decades, we became friends too. He had a hard time with me because I wasn’t the usual sort of music student.

01:04 Speaker 1 You were very exacting and demanding.

01:08 Speaker 2 Demanding and, you know, creative, like a kid. He couldn’t quite handle the intensity of what was going on. He was always startled by us. But that’s how it works: you take a teacher, and he teaches you. He teaches you how to play, and little by little you practice. After that I took a somewhat more serious teacher and kept playing there. That’s how I would come every year. My main pattern was to be in Europe during the summer months and travel to India during the winter. Within India, too, I had a regular circuit of places to go and things to do, but my main place for studying music was Varanasi.

01:54 Speaker 1 And did you travel alone the whole time, or with other friends?

01:59 Speaker 2 No, that’s the thing. India is very dynamic. There are always friends around. It’s like—you don’t travel with friends; everyone there is a friend.

02:09 Speaker 1 ...

02:09 Speaker 2 All the travelers, from every nation in the world—they’re all there as one people, of one mind. There’s a great sense of fellowship there.

02:22 Speaker 1 That’s very interesting.

02:24 Speaker 2 Among the travelers, because they’re all searching, on a spiritual search. So they’re all on the same wavelength, with that same feeling of searching.

02:36 Speaker 1 Uh-huh.

02:37 Speaker 2 So naturally you can connect with everyone, and everyone wants to connect. They’re usually very, very open people. The moment you... When a person starts traveling, he sheds all the—today I call them kelipos, because that’s what they are. He sheds all the obstacles and inhibitions he has, and all the everyday habits that keep him from breaking out, the sort you find in Western society, for example. Here in Western society, a person is constantly subject to expectations and obligations, things he’s always required to do. That puts him in a kind of confinement, so he can’t really get in touch with himself. Take India, for example. When a person travels to India, all those expectations and limitations—everything he has to do, must do, and so on—aren’t there. Suddenly he can discover who he really is. Not what he needs to do, but who he really is, what he feels is right for him to do, and how he thinks. Suddenly he discovers a little about himself, and that helps him break free of many, many limitations and kelipos that have been placed on him. That’s why, in India, it’s very, very easy to talk to a Jew about Yiddishkeit. He begins to discover who he really is, and then he feels that deep down he has a warm feeling for it, because it’s the real thing. It’s the right thing. So it’s much easier to reach a Jew specifically in India than in other places, where he’s under the constraints of work and so on. He doesn’t even have time to lift his head and ask the simple question of why the sky is blue. So many people don’t ask it. They don’t ask. It’s just taken for granted that the sky is blue. But why is it blue? Nobody asks

04:54 Speaker 2 that. But when they come to India, they start asking. Why is this like that, and why is that like this? Why is this happening to me, and what am I going through? Suddenly they start taking an interest in themselves, because they don’t have all the obligations they have here.

05:12 Speaker 3 All the... basically, the whole image that someone builds for himself from the outside—that’s what you mean.

05:17 Speaker 2 Yes. The things he’s bound to. Listen, I feel it here in Israel even now. When I’m in Israel, I have tasks. Every day I make a new to-do list, because otherwise I can’t keep up. I need to register the children for school and for summer programs, sort out this and that with National Insurance, arrange this matter, get documents from somewhere, go pick something up from the post office. There’s an endless list of tasks. Every day I make a new list, and every day it fills up. Now, you don’t have... We’re relatively practiced at this, because we’ve spent many, many years on shlichus, and I traveled for many years too. So we’re practiced at taking for ourselves, if necessary, the time we deserve—the time my soul deserves to contemplate G-dliness, to think about what it really needs, what it wants to be like, how it wants to break out, what really bothers it and what doesn’t, what it enjoys. To take time for what’s truly good for me. So I know how to carve out that time and make it happen. But so many people simply can’t. They’re caught up in a system of expectations, in everything people expect them to do and everything they have to do. They can’t break out of it. When a person arrives in India, automatically he has none of that. He has nothing he has to do. There’s no one there. Nobody wants anything from him. He owes nobody anything. He can get up whenever he wants and go to sleep whenever he wants. He doesn’t have to answer to anyone for anything, and he has no obligations. Just be yourself; be who you are. And then suddenly it starts to interest him that besides

07:10 Speaker 2 himself, there’s someone else here too. [unclear] There really is a soul too. Yes, it’s very...

07:16 Speaker 3 Very interesting. So tell me—tell us a little, Shmuel. At some point you met Chabad, I assume. Somewhere along the way.

07:27 Speaker 2 That was many years later. When I arrived in India, Chabad wasn’t there yet. There was no Chabad in India.

07:34 Speaker 3 Ah, so you’re in India, you have your music, and you have this pattern of going back and forth, coming back and so on. But I gather that through all this, you were still putting on tefillin—or not anymore?

07:47 Speaker 2 No, not anymore.

07:50 Speaker 3 Not anymore. So you must have stopped putting on tefillin at some point in your teens.

07:55 Speaker 2 Yes. A little after my bar mitzvah, a few months later.

08:00 Speaker 3 You saw your family didn’t like it, and said, “That’s it, guys. Okay, I get it.”

08:04 Speaker 2 No, no, it wasn’t like that. They just bothered me about it too much, and little by little it falls away. Between the teasing and everything else, you say, “Okay.” When I arrived in India, there was still no Chabad there. Chabad came to India, I think, maybe eight years later. I think the first Chabad House opened here eight years after I arrived. And when I first came to Chabad, it was after the time when, at one point along the way, I tried to come back to Israel. After ten years of traveling around, I tried to return to Israel.

09:03 Speaker 3 To settle in Israel again.

09:07 Speaker 2 Yes. I rented an apartment in Tel Aviv, started studying computers, and did very well. But adjusting to life in Israel was very, very hard. Extremely hard. I started working. I taught software engineering at universities and various colleges in Tel Aviv, until the big high-tech crash came in 2000. There were four hundred people willing to do my job for twenty percent of what I was earning. So people from the university came to me—because high-tech had taken a very big hit—and said, “Listen, we’re very, very happy with you, and you’re a very good lecturer and all that, but we can’t employ you at this rate. Either you go down to twenty percent, or there’s nothing we can do.” So I thanked them, left, and traveled back to India. I realized that was probably the better thing to do. The army was also after me to return for reserve duty, and there were all sorts of things like that. So I decided to leave. I took the money I had and flew back to India, and that’s when the whole process of teshuvah really began.

10:24 Speaker 3 Can you tell us a little about that?

10:27 Speaker 2 Yes. It began, of course, with me going straight to Varanasi when I arrived from Israel. It was a period of major terror attacks in Israel. There were so many attacks.

10:44 Speaker 3 The nineties?

10:47 Speaker 2 The early 2000s. 2000, 2003.

10:53 Speaker 3 Ah.

10:54 Speaker 2 There had been a period of terror attacks in Israel just before I left. I got there, sat down and had a drink. I’ll make the story a little shorter.

11:09 Speaker 3 You don’t have to shorten it.

11:11 Speaker 2 I didn’t get there. No, it’s a very, very long story, with a lot of details, so I’ll shorten it a bit and tell you what’s relevant. In short, I arrived in the city during one of the Indians’ festival days. They have several of them. Now, their biggest festival is for... The Indians are idol worshippers. They worship statues, but there’s one above all the others whom they call Eloka d’Elokaya, the G-d of gods. He has no statue or image. The greatest of them all is also called by a name like Avraham—it’s the same letters as Avraham, rearranged.

11:59 Speaker 3 Interesting.

12:00 Speaker 2 So that’s the greatest one, the one with no image, no statue. And the biggest festival in India is for him. They set off firecrackers and explosives, with terrible booms. I think what goes on in Gaza is small compared to what goes on there. For a whole week they set off explosions throughout the city. I arrived right in the middle of it, and there were a few incidents where I felt like things were exploding right beside me. I was trying to sleep, because I hadn’t slept for about a day and a half because of the flights—maybe even two days. So I felt these explosions, and I ended up in a bad state mentally. Everywhere you looked there was idol worship, people dancing before statues in the streets. It was like a dance of demons. I was in a bad state, and I ended up at some house of idol worship. I don’t know how I got there; there was some kind of music concert. The guys took me along and said, “Come on.” With the feeling of impurity all around, I didn’t feel physically safe. I was walking around with a hammer tucked into my robe. I had this robe-like garment, and there was a hammer inside it. Not exactly a robe—it’s called a lungi in India. It’s like a sort of blanket you wrap around yourself when it’s chilly. So I had a big hammer tucked into it, right here. I didn’t feel safe. There was this feeling there... A few guys had dragged me to a very big concert inside a house of idol worship, and I felt that the Samech-Mem was literally there. The feelings and sights there seemed like the absolute height of impurity. By the way, in India there are four cities, just as in the Land of Israel there are four holy cities: Jerusalem, Tzfas, Chevron and Tverya. In India, too, there are four impure cities, each corresponding to one of those elements. Just as we have the elements, so does that world—

14:19 Speaker 2 elements. So Varanasi corresponds to the element of fire, just as Jerusalem does, lehavdil, right?

14:26 Speaker 4 Ah.

14:27 Speaker 2 Just as Jerusalem corresponds to the element of fire, Varanasi is really the city where impurity is strongest. It’s like the source, the root of all that impurity. Anyway, I’m sitting there and I feel that the Samech-Mem is sitting there with us, and I felt I was losing it. I was losing my soul. And I cried out inwardly. Yes, “a still, small voice” was heard within me. An inner voice that couldn’t be heard—the deepest cry of a Jew. And suddenly I felt as though something touched me here, spiritually.

15:07 Speaker 4 Yes.

15:07 Speaker 2 And suddenly everything calmed down. I had been tense for two days; my muscles were tight the whole time. Suddenly I felt everything relax. I got up, left and went to sleep. I woke up the next day like a new person, as though nothing had happened. Those two days, those two nights without sleep, wandering around amid all that impurity—it was as though none of it had happened. I woke up the next day feeling normal. Everything was fine. And from then on, a very, very long but very precise process began. A few days later I got sick, very sick, with a fever and all that. I had very long hair. When I recovered, I started taking a cold shower every morning. After my shower—because the drums I played required sitting cross-legged for many, many hours; I would play ten, twelve, fourteen hours every day—

16:23 Speaker 4 Really?

16:25 Speaker 2 Sometimes I would sit there for fourteen hours.

16:28 Speaker 4 Wow, my friend. With an audience? Without one? Just by yourself? How?

16:31 Speaker 2 Without an audience, without an audience. Practicing. A performance for an audience is half an hour, maybe an hour at most, but most of the time it was practice. And because I spent most of my time sitting, I would go for a walk by the river in the morning, to move my muscles. There’s a very big river there. My hair would still be wet, so I’d put a hood over it to keep from getting chilled and sick again. And I began to notice that every time I put the hood over my head, someone would speak to me. I’d be walking and they’d speak to me, explain things to me, tell me things: “Look, see it this way. Look here, look there.” Then I’d come back to my room, take the hood off, and they’d stop talking to me. The next day I’d put it on again, and they’d talk to me. Without it, they wouldn’t. It was kind of funny. You know, you think, maybe I’m a little crazy, maybe I’m imagining things, maybe I’m not quite normal, maybe I’m losing my mind. I didn’t know what was happening to me. Then one morning I went out and sat in this place, something like a fortress, a little above the city. You can see the whole city from there. I sat down and suddenly started singing Shabbos songs, Shir Hamaalos and Adon Olam and other songs like that. I just started singing them. I said to myself, “What happened? What’s going on here?” Then I went back and asked someone, “What day is it today?” He said, “Shabbos. Saturday.” Aha! And some time later I left the city and arrived in Goa. I met a friend there.