Somachat Alayich - Episode 1 - Behind the Scenes

00:00 Speaker 1 Shomachat Alecha. Michal Levitin’s podcast.

00:03 Speaker 2 Shomachat Alecha.

00:04 Speaker 1 Hi, Michal.

00:06 Speaker 2 Hello!

00:07 Speaker 1 So we’re starting something new, with curiosity.

00:11 Speaker 2 Absolutely.

00:12 Speaker 1 Where it’ll take us and what we’ll do with it.

00:13 Speaker 2 Something new is starting now.

00:16 Speaker 1 Do you want to sing? We can do that too.

00:18 Speaker 2 La li, la li, la li, la la. Listen, this really is something new.

00:21 Speaker 1 Right.

00:21 Speaker 2 Yes, we can sing about it.

00:22 Speaker 1 So, what do you say to a podcast?

00:25 Speaker 2 Um, what do I say to a pod—depends which character I’m playing. If it’s an elderly Moroccan woman, you know, a psychologist without a license, then let’s go.

00:32 Speaker 1 Uh-huh. By the way, you already do that today.

00:34 Speaker 2 Yes, absolutely.

00:34 Speaker 1 But come on, let’s understand what we’re doing here, what we want to do.

00:37 Speaker 2 We actually want to introduce the wider public to something new that I—

00:43 Speaker 1 That you’ve brought into the world.

00:44 Speaker 2 That I’ve brought into the world, and I think every woman in Israel deserves to know about it. And outside Israel too.

00:51 Speaker 1 Israel and the Diaspora.

00:52 Speaker 2 And the Diaspora.

00:53 Speaker 1 So let me tell you how I see it.

00:55 Speaker 2 Mm-hmm.

00:56 Speaker 1 You’ve launched a club that women have joined. Leaving aside the demand for it—and we’ll talk about that too, how it was something born out of—

01:10 Speaker 2 The audience.

01:10 Speaker 1 The audience’s requests.

01:11 Speaker 2 Absolutely, absolutely.

01:12 Speaker 1 People often say, “I got thousands of requests.” Here, that’s actually true.

01:16 Speaker 2 Yes. It really is.

01:19 Speaker 1 But the club is also something you pay for. To really work and learn there—there’s a method and all the things we’ll talk about—you have to pay and join. Because when you pay, you get the value; you’re more serious about getting that value.

01:39 Speaker 2 Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely.

01:40 Speaker 1 With a podcast, I listen while I’m driving, while I’m exercising, washing dishes, cooking. That’s more a time when my mind is taking in knowledge, learning, but I’m not actively doing anything with it right then. I think through this medium we can really talk and teach that there’s a different language here. The people who saw you at home and saw what you do said, “Wow, what is she doing? Come teach us. Teach us.”

02:14 Speaker 2 Right.

02:15 Speaker 1 And then we realized there’s a whole language here.

02:16 Speaker 2 There really is.

02:17 Speaker 1 And there’s a method. But we’re not going to turn this into a training room or a rehearsal room.

02:22 Speaker 2 No, that’s what someone who pays to join the club gets.

02:25 Speaker 1 Because I really want us to understand it and do the work.

02:27 Speaker 2 Yes.

02:27 Speaker 1 But I think we can have the kind of conversation we have anyway, sitting around and talking. We’ve been seeing each other a lot lately; our daughters are friends too, and we—

02:36 Speaker 2 Listen, we’re renewing our friendship like in the old days, and it’s—

02:39 Speaker 1 Exactly.

02:39 Speaker 2 So lovely.

02:40 Speaker 1 So let’s just talk. Why shouldn’t other people enjoy listening to it too?

02:45 Speaker 2 Absolutely.

02:45 Speaker 1 So that’s the difference between the podcast and the club.

02:48 Speaker 2 Mm-hmm.

02:49 Speaker 1 And that’s how we’ll start, and we’ll see where it goes. Maybe later we’ll bring in other women, other mothers, other things.

02:55 Speaker 2 Right, absolutely.

02:57 Speaker 1 What I’m saying is, let’s bring curiosity into it.

02:58 Speaker 2 Bring curiosity into it, and bring Hakadosh Boruch Hu into it: “Hashem, open my lips.” Because I really am coming from a place of—

03:04 Speaker 1 We didn’t come with a syllabus or some kind of plan.

03:06 Speaker 2 I don’t have one. No pages, nothing. I don’t even—I don’t know. Maybe the goal is for people to understand that now, in this generation of Geulah, it’s possible to raise children differently. I don’t even call it “educating,” because I’m not sure that’s the word—

03:20 Speaker 1 To be a parent. Motherhood.

03:21 Speaker 2 To be—exactly. To be a joyful parent and raise children who are happy and emotionally healthy. I think that’s the overarching goal of every mother in her home right now.

03:32 Speaker 1 What she aspires to and wants.

03:32 Speaker 2 What she aspires to. Because we understand and see how that whole pyramid is collapsing—all the strictness and rigid parenting and that kind of authority that’s—

03:45 Speaker 1 Controlling.

03:45 Speaker 2 Controlling authority no longer has a place in the world. We’re not there anymore. I mean, there’s one person like that left, and it’s Trump, and we’re all going a little crazy around him. The one ruler we still see. I mean—

03:55 Speaker 1 Achashverosh is really getting started.

03:56 Speaker 2 Exactly, exactly. We’re not there anymore. Parenting now is more about aligning expectations, more about speaking eye to eye. I think more and more parents see that. So yes, there are lots of therapists today—

04:12 Speaker 1 But come on, there’s also a lot of confusion. I want us to sort through that confusion too.

04:16 Speaker 2 Exactly, right.

04:16 Speaker 1 Because so often we come to our children carrying the things we lacked as children—

04:23 Speaker 2 Definitely. No question.

04:24 Speaker 1 And then we make mistakes too. In the end, we repeat mistakes, and there’s a lot of confusion.

04:29 Speaker 2 Right. So what we do in the club is put things in order. First and foremost, we restore the mother to her place of authority: she’s the director at home. Of course, the great Director is Hakadosh Boruch Hu; He writes the script. But the mother—

04:45 Speaker 1 Has free choice.

04:46 Speaker 2 Absolutely. And we restore her to her place—a good, comfortable, joyful place, where she has influence. She’s not trying to please everyone, not the household doormat, not a victim. So it’s a process, and the language is so much fun, because I think every mother feels that, at the end of the day, she’s putting on the performance of her life. At dinner.

05:10 Speaker 1 So let’s start talking about the language. Because I really will keep bringing you back to—we’re not here to talk about the club. I want anyone listening to come away with something practical, at the level you can convey in a podcast. I want it to genuinely offer value. If she later decides it’s right for her and she wants to join the club, she’s always welcome. But ultimately, that’s the point.

05:35 Speaker 2 Okay.

05:36 Speaker 1 So what’s it called? The Stand-Up Mom.

05:39 Speaker 2 The Stand-Up Mom is the model. Shomachat Alecha is the name of the community, which—

05:45 Speaker 1 What does that mean?

05:45 Speaker 2 Shomachat with a—

05:48 Speaker 1 With a shin and a ches.

05:49 Speaker 2 With a shin and a ches, from the word simchah, joy. Well, that was your stroke of genius. I—

05:54 Speaker 1 After we’d sat and talked about it, suddenly Shomachat Alecha came to me.

05:59 Speaker 2 And I feel so connected to it, because what I teach is that you can have authority and be joyful at the same time. They don’t contradict each other.

06:06 Speaker 1 That’s the amazing thing. I told you that yesterday I wrote someone a message saying “Shomachat Alecha,” and I wrote it with a shin and a ches.

06:13 Speaker 2 With a shin and a ches.

06:14 Speaker 1 That’s it. It’s become ingrained in me. Because it means trusting with joy.

06:20 Speaker 2 Exactly, exactly.

06:21 Speaker 1 So the community is called Shomachat Alecha, but the method and the model are The Stand-Up Mom. What does that mean?

06:27 Speaker 2 I believe every mother has an audience. Actually, that’s a fact; it’s not even a matter of belief. You have an audience. You’re performing in front of your husband, your children, your family. Everything you say leaves an impression on that audience.

06:43 Speaker 1 But it’s not just mothers. That’s true of every person.

06:46 Speaker 2 Every person. But there’s something more with a mother. There’s—

06:52 Speaker 1 Why? Because for a mother, it’s every day. Once you’re a mother at home, these things happen every day.

06:57 Speaker 2 And there’s also something we receive from a mother that, to my mind, goes a bit deeper. Let’s say a father loses his sense of proportion. You might say, “Okay, leave it, that’s Dad.” But with a mother, it’s something that reaches into the soul. After all: “Hear, my son, your father’s instruction, and do not forsake your mother’s teaching.” Why is the father’s called instruction, while the mother’s is called Torah? Which is greater? Torah is roots, depth, the soul. It passes from generation to generation.

07:22 Speaker 1 It’s a teaching that gets passed on.

07:22 Speaker 2 It’s a teaching. With instruction, you can say, “Okay, there’s something to learn from this,” and move on. You can learn from it or not. But a mother’s teaching—what a child experiences with their mother, they’ll pass on too. I mean, it becomes part of them—

07:38 Speaker 1 Okay.

07:39 Speaker 2 So I see the mother’s role as much more crucial in the home. If a mother changes her approach, her husband will learn too. She’s the one who influences things and directs the show. That’s why it’s so, so important for a mother to know how to run the show at home with the most joyful tools available.

07:57 Speaker 1 We’ve established that a mother is a stand-up comedian. My immediate thought is, “Okay, but you’re a stand-up comedian, and you know how to do this.” I’m sure you hear that too.

08:05 Speaker 2 Right.

08:05 Speaker 1 And let’s also acknowledge that we’re in survival mode. Our lives are full; there’s pressure, there are challenges.

08:15 Speaker 2 Absolutely.

08:15 Speaker 1 And children today—raising them really is, I think, more challenging than it used to be.

08:21 Speaker 2 Because they’re more sophisticated, and you could even say a little smarter.

08:23 Speaker 1 And we have—

08:24 Speaker 2 Maybe not smarter, but yes, more... yes.

08:25 Speaker 1 And we have our own distractions.

08:28 Speaker 2 Right, right.

08:28 Speaker 1 And, and, and we have the—anyway, there are a lot of reasons, too—

08:33 Speaker 2 Right.

08:34 Speaker 1 Not even to dream or imagine that I could be a stand-up comedian mom.

08:37 Speaker 2 Right.

08:37 Speaker 1 Now let’s understand what a stand-up comedian mom is. It’s not—

08:39 Speaker 2 Okay, so a stand-up comedian mom—

08:40 Speaker 1 Does it mean you’re going to be funny all day now?

08:42 Speaker 2 No. A stand-up comedian mom—first of all, when I come to a show, I’m really focused on my performance. I mean, I’m not going to hold a phone and talk to someone. When I’m there, I’m all in.

08:51 Speaker 1 Mm-hmm.

08:52 Speaker 2 I come ready to pay attention and to give what I want to give.

09:00 Speaker 1 Explain that a little more.

09:00 Speaker 2 I mean, I’m very, very focused on what I need to do. I’m very focused on myself, on my reactions, and on what’s happening in the audience.

09:09 Speaker 1 Tell me, what about distractions?

09:11 Speaker 2 There can be lots and lots of distractions. So if they work in my favor, I use them, and if they don’t, I know how to ignore them.

09:20 Speaker 1 And over the years you’ve been doing stand-up, has that—

09:23 Speaker 2 It gets more refined.

09:24 Speaker 1 So you see it as a muscle you’ve developed?

09:26 Speaker 2 Yes.

09:26 Speaker 1 Yes?

09:26 Speaker 2 Absolutely. At first, I couldn’t handle it when someone was— I’d see everything. I’d see everything happening in the audience. One woman’s eating cholent, another one’s doing this, another—

09:34 Speaker 1 And what did that do to you?

09:36 Speaker 2 I’d have to refocus myself, refocus myself. Okay, either respond to it or ignore it, or ignore it. I mean, I was occupied with it.

09:42 Speaker 1 Okay, let’s go back a bit and talk about you.

09:44 Speaker 2 Let’s go.

09:44 Speaker 1 We’re on the podcast about you. How did you get into stand-up?

09:49 Speaker 2 Wow. Honestly, it sort of happened by mistake. No, not a mistake, G-d forbid. But I never dreamed of being a stand-up comedian. It wasn’t something I had in—

09:57 Speaker 1 You were funny, and all that—

09:59 Speaker 2 Right. I always loved doing impressions.

10:01 Speaker 1 Okay.

10:01 Speaker 2 I did impressions all the time, but no one ever told me that could be a career, or something I could take onstage, because that wasn’t an option.

10:08 Speaker 1 There was no such thing in our community.

10:09 Speaker 2 Right.

10:09 Speaker 1 In the chareidi community. And I don’t think there were women doing it in the broader public either—or were there?

10:13 Speaker 2 Well, there was—

10:14 Speaker 1 Women stand-up comedians.

10:15 Speaker 2 No, there weren’t. Well, maybe in the broader public. Maybe Noya is older than I am. It’s possible, but that wasn’t something we knew.

10:21 Speaker 1 Mm-hmm.

10:21 Speaker 2 Okay, because Noya Mandel is from the Religious Zionist community.

10:25 Speaker 1 Mm-hmm.

10:25 Speaker 2 She wasn’t someone we invited to our Chabad events. I mean, that just wasn’t a thing.

10:28 Speaker 1 Okay.

10:28 Speaker 2 In later years, I knew she was out there.

10:29 Speaker 1 Okay.

10:30 Speaker 2 But maybe she was the first in the religious community.

10:32 Speaker 1 So you were getting onstage—when did you start performing? How long have you been at it?

10:37 Speaker 2 I’ve been onstage since I was ten. Mostly singing and things like that—

10:40 Speaker 1 There was singing too, and—

10:41 Speaker 2 Yes, I started out as a singer too.

10:43 Speaker 1 And acting. Okay.

10:44 Speaker 2 Singing was fine in our community. You know, it was, “Go on, sing,” no problem. Though even then it wasn’t clear whether it was heading toward a career. It was very much on the borderline.

10:52 Speaker 1 Okay.

10:54 Speaker 2 But stand-up wasn’t even part of the conversation. It wasn’t—

10:57 Speaker 1 Okay, when was the first time you realized you were going to—when did you first go onstage and get paid for stand-up? I don’t know, I’m trying to understand how it happened.

11:06 Speaker 2 Wow, wow, wow. I’ll tell you. I had started performing as a singer with Yifush. We were a duo, and we sang together. Okay, we were doing shows.

11:17 Speaker 1 Yifush Barkan.

11:18 Speaker 2 Yifush Barkan. We went out and performed. I was fourteen, she was thirteen—we were really young. And we got paid for it. I mean, we were already doing it professionally.

11:27 Speaker 1 Okay, but that was as a singer.

11:28 Speaker 2 And while I was singing, I’d sometimes do a little improvising as part of introducing things. Okay?

11:36 Speaker 1 Hosting with a few punchlines—

11:36 Speaker 2 Hosting with a few punchlines. Going with the flow, depending on the audience. You know, suddenly a microphone doesn’t work, so until it starts working, I’m improvising and joking around about it—

11:47 Speaker 1 What kind of feedback did you get from the audience?

11:49 Speaker 2 The audience was like, “Sing! Keep going!” That sort of thing.

11:52 Speaker 1 Oh, okay.

11:53 Speaker 2 By then I was starting to get a feel for it. I knew I could do really funny impressions, but I couldn’t see how they fit in when I was there as a singer. I didn’t know where that part of me belonged. So let’s say there was a sweet woman in the audience who couldn’t hear very well. I might answer her, “Wait, wait, slowly, slowly, one second.” And then—ah!—the audience would laugh, like, where did that come from? It slipped in—

12:18 Speaker 1 The audience wasn’t expecting it.

12:19 Speaker 2 They weren’t expecting it.

12:20 Speaker 1 Okay.

12:20 Speaker 2 So it came in as very, very little touches like that. Anyway, we were performing and were supposed to put out an album and everything. We’d actually gone into a recording studio to make the first CD by chareidi women singers anywhere. It was a serious production.

12:38 Speaker 1 Which, back then, also cost thousands of shekels.

12:40 Speaker 2 Yes, we’d already settled on seven songs. Then Yifush [?] got engaged, and that was it—everything stopped. Everything stopped. She decided to take a break.

12:49 Speaker 1 How many years ago are we talking?

12:50 Speaker 2 Twenty-three. More. More. Yes. No, no, not twenty-three. She got married—yes, now I remember, she just marked twenty-three years. And everything stopped, and I remember feeling I had nothing left. I mean, all our backing tracks were shared, and our connection and our performances were together, together, together. I said, “I’m not going out as a solo singer.” She did the accompaniment, and we already had this rhythm together.

13:17 Speaker 1 You’d also developed a kind of dependence.

13:19 Speaker 2 Yes. Very, very much.

13:20 Speaker 1 Okay. How did you take it?

13:22 Speaker 2 It was very, very hard for me. Around that time I’d also gotten engaged, and I’d already met my husband, Yossi. I remember he said something to me: “Okay, so why do you need to be a singer? Make people laugh.” And I thought—what do you mean, make people laugh?

13:47 Speaker 1 How did he know you had that potential?

13:48 Speaker 2 He knew because I was—I am very funny. I mean, I do those impressions. I did—

13:56 Speaker 1 So at every family gathering and anywhere like that, you were the one doing it.

13:59 Speaker 2 Yes, and I’d also done projects with various Chabad women that included comedy sketches.

14:05 Speaker 1 Mm.

14:05 Speaker 2 Okay? Very focused sketches, very—

14:08 Speaker 1 Where they wrote the scripts for you.

14:09 Speaker 2 They wrote the scripts, and I’d come in to play a particular part. So I had done that.

14:15 Speaker 1 But you were beginning to get a reputation: there’s Michal Levitin, and she’s funny.

14:19 Speaker 2 Yes.

14:19 Speaker 1 Okay.

14:20 Speaker 2 So then someone called to book me for a singing performance, and I said, “I don’t sing anymore, but would you like me to make you laugh? I could do—”

14:29 Speaker 1 Wow.

14:29 Speaker 2 I didn’t even think to call it stand-up. “I could do a show with humor?” Something like that. “Would you like a humorous show?” “So what would it be about?”

14:37 Speaker 1 Did you even know the word “stand-up”?

14:38 Speaker 2 At the time? No. No. Later they started calling it stand-up, stand-up. I didn’t even really know what that word meant.

14:44 Speaker 1 You thought “stand up” meant getting up—that’s what I learned in English.

14:48 Speaker 2 I knew what it meant, but I still didn’t think it had anything to do with me, because I also played characters, including Lilula. So I said, “I don’t know—who’s your audience? I’ll get up there and do Shira, and I’ll do a character who really wants to join a Torah class but doesn’t know how,” things like that. And listen, it started to catch on. I started doing all kinds of characters, and suddenly there wasn’t really room for singing anymore. At a certain point I tried to bring it back and combine the two, and so on.

15:12 Speaker 1 By then it was your own blend.

15:13 Speaker 2 Exactly.

15:14 Speaker 1 But even today, you keep your singing very separate from your stand-up.

15:17 Speaker 2 Yes. Though these days, when I perform with Yifush, we do musical stand-up, and that’s really fun.

15:23 Speaker 1 It’s no longer a “humorous show,” and it’s no longer just singing.

15:25 Speaker 2 It’s incredibly fun. Incredibly fun.

15:26 Speaker 1 It’s amazing that you two eventually came back to what you had.

15:29 Speaker 2 Yes, yes, yes, yes.

15:29 Speaker 1 Okay, but I still want to go back.

15:31 Speaker 2 But anyway, that was when I really saw the effect humor has on an audience. Look, singing is incredibly enjoyable. You see the audience connect, everyone together. But when you give them humor, you see different expressions on their faces.

15:49 Speaker 1 How so?

15:50 Speaker 2 Let’s say that with singing, it’s emotion and connection, or joy. With humor, it’s—and their faces make the most incredible expressions—

16:02 Speaker 1 And what does that do for you?

16:03 Speaker 2 I feel a kind of release, as though people—

16:09 Speaker 1 Let go.

16:09 Speaker 2 Something like that. They take the burden they’ve been carrying and throw it off.

16:12 Speaker 1 Wow.

16:13 Speaker 2 Really.

16:14 Speaker 1 Wow.

16:14 Speaker 2 You see women who came to the show one way and leave with an energy I don’t recognize. I said to myself, “Wow, what did I do for them?” Even today, I don’t let myself fully take it in, because it’s too much. It’s too much. The stories I get—“Listen, you saved me from suicide,” and “You saved me from…”—it’s not something I can—

16:37 Speaker 1 So what do you do with it?

16:37 Speaker 2 I feel that—

16:38 Speaker 1 What does happen? What happens to you?

16:40 Speaker 2 It gives me strength to keep going.

16:43 Speaker 1 Okay.

16:43 Speaker 2 A lot of people ask me—

16:43 Speaker 1 You’re like a conduit.

16:45 Speaker 2 Yes. A lot of people ask, “Aren’t you tired of doing the same show again? Aren’t you tired of getting up onstage again?” No. I’m not tired of making another woman happy, and then another woman, and another audience, and giving people a good feeling. No, that’s really my fuel to keep going. People say, “Well, you make money from it.” True, but first of all, I don’t even deal with the finances. That’s not what it’s about for me at all.

17:10 Speaker 1 Yes, but you keep moving us forward to today.

17:12 Speaker 2 Oh, okay.

17:13 Speaker 1 I want us to take a moment and—

17:14 Speaker 2 No problem. I started talking and took over.

17:16 Speaker 1 No, I’ll explain why. Because we were talking about training, and muscles, and…

17:22 Speaker 2 Great.

17:22 Speaker 1 We’ll also come back to the training room of the mother listening to us, but I want to see the process by which you developed those muscles.

17:32 Speaker 2 Wow.

17:32 Speaker 1 That’s what interests me. That’s what I’m curious about right now.

17:34 Speaker 2 Okay.

17:35 Speaker 1 So you—

17:36 Speaker 2 So I’m saying that at the beginning it was very, very hard.

17:39 Speaker 1 No, so you became a stand-up comedian.

17:40 Speaker 2 Yes.

17:41 Speaker 1 Meaning what? You started with sketches, and then it became a show.

17:45 Speaker 2 Yes.

17:45 Speaker 1 Basically, I took the sketches and—

17:46 Speaker 2 At first they included me in conferences. There would be an event, and they’d bring me in for, I don’t know, a ten-minute sketch or a twenty-minute sketch. It gave people a break and set things up for a particular topic.

17:59 Speaker 1 So you were funny from the start.

18:00 Speaker 2 Yes.

18:00 Speaker 1 People were in stitches, and you realized there was something there.

18:05 Speaker 2 Yes.

18:06 Speaker 1 You still didn’t understand quite what it was, but—

18:08 Speaker 2 Today they book a whole theater just for me. They don’t need a speaker before me and a singer afterward—

18:14 Speaker 1 Because you can—because you bring all of it yourself.

18:17 Speaker 2 And I don’t even sing. Today there are theaters that book an hour of stand-up with Michal Levitin. That’s it. People come to laugh for an hour.

18:24 Speaker 1 See, you keep bringing us back to today. We’re still back there.

18:26 Speaker 2 Oh, back then. Yes, sorry.

18:27 Speaker 1 I know.

18:28 Speaker 2 I’m very focused on what’s relevant now, yes.

18:30 Speaker 1 That’s perfectly fine. It’s all good.

18:32 Speaker 2 Okay.

18:32 Speaker 1 But why is it frightening for you to go back? I keep getting this feeling—

18:37 Speaker 2 No, it doesn’t frighten me. It doesn’t frighten me. It’s just not something I do, and I’m not practiced at going back. I live very much in “Okay, what’s next?”

18:45 Speaker 1 Okay, no problem.

18:46 Speaker 2 I need to practice that.

18:47 Speaker 1 Okay, we’re training. We’re working those muscles.

18:48 Speaker 2 I’m here. We’ll practice. Yes.

18:50 Speaker 1 Because I’ll tell you why. I feel that if we understand the journey and the process—

18:56 Speaker 2 Wow.

18:56 Speaker 1 Then we’ll really be able to understand why we need to practice.

19:00 Speaker 2 Okay.

19:01 Speaker 1 Because just sitting here and saying, “Hey, I’m a stand-up comedian,” and saying, “Do this, and do that, and do that”—at the end of the day, it takes work. We have to work at it.

19:13 Speaker 2 So you want to see how I worked at it.

19:15 Speaker 1 Yes. Now, because you’re a very intuitive person, it can seem as though everything in your life just happened out of the blue, along the way. But that isn’t true. I don’t think that’s true.

19:27 Speaker 2 Of course it isn’t true. Look, my desire to make people laugh and bring them joy comes from a very, very deep and painful place. I’ve talked about it many times, but it began in the oncology wards, where I saw my father on his deathbed. My mother told us, “Just humor. Only humor.” And I knew I was the funniest one in the family.

19:45 Speaker 1 So that fell to you too.

19:46 Speaker 2 It fell to me. So there’s an element of survival in my humor. I don’t deny that. I mean, come on, when I’m just chatting with people, I’m not that funny.

19:55 Speaker 1 Right.

19:55 Speaker 2 But suddenly, when someone says to me, “Okay, sweetheart, we have to cheer people up here”—do you know what comes out of me? It’s unbelievable. Afterward I say to myself, “Wow, was that me?”

20:03 Speaker 1 Wow.

20:04 Speaker 2 Wow, what came out of me? Oh my goodness, what came out of me? There’s something there.

20:07 Speaker 1 What happens there? What happens?

20:11 Speaker 2 There’s a tremendous sense of responsibility. It’s the responsibility little Michal carries. A very, very great responsibility.

20:18 Speaker 1 Wow.

20:19 Speaker 2 It’s on my shoulders, and I can give someone another day, more life.

20:23 Speaker 1 And you’ve actually seen that happen.

20:25 Speaker 2 I have. I saw it happen with my father, and I see it all the time.

20:29 Speaker 1 And how does that affect you? On the one hand, you’re giving life, which is wonderful, but it must also drain you.

20:34 Speaker 2 It does.

20:35 Speaker 1 And you encounter difficult things.

20:36 Speaker 2 That’s right. I also find myself in very, very difficult places.

20:40 Speaker 1 Do you feel a sense of mission there?

20:42 Speaker 2 Yes, absolutely. Very, very much so. I know how much people need me, how much it’s oxygen, air to breathe.

20:54 Speaker 1 They need you and what comes through you.

20:56 Speaker 2 What comes through me, of course. I could have been in any other body; it isn’t about me.

21:01 Speaker 1 No, no, okay.

21:02 Speaker 2 It’s about what I have to bring. It comes from a place of “it’s now or never.” Right now you can save a soul, and you don’t know whose.

21:10 Speaker 1 Wow.

21:11 Speaker 2 So yes, I do have that—

21:13 Speaker 1 You’ve received a great gift. It’s a very great gift from Hakadosh Boruch Hu.

21:18 Speaker 2 Absolutely. I find myself thinking, how—

21:22 Speaker 1 Okay, but let’s go back and understand how you got to that point. Because getting up there with something new also takes courage.

21:33 Speaker 2 Yes.

21:34 Speaker 1 You get up there and—

21:35 Speaker 2 Look, I’m very authentic. If I have something new, I’ll share that with the audience too. Do you mean new material? What do you mean?

21:42 Speaker 1 I want to go back to the beginning of your career as a stand-up comedian.

21:47 Speaker 2 Wow. Yes. What, the criticism I got?

21:51 Speaker 1 Yes.

21:51 Speaker 2 The rabbis who shut down the—

21:53 Speaker 1 Tell me what it was like. Yes, take me there.

21:56 Speaker 2 Everything happened. It was chaos.

21:58 Speaker 1 What happened? Take us back there.

22:00 Speaker 2 To the point that…

22:01 Speaker 1 Only what you want to share, of course.

22:03 Speaker 2 No, I’m happy to share everything, because everyone is in such a different place today. I’m sure that if I brought in the rabbi who called my grandfather and said harsh things about me, he would say, “Well, I didn’t know.” I mean, he’d apologize. I have no doubt.

22:17 Speaker 1 Wow. You’ve already forgiven him.

22:18 Speaker 2 I’ve already forgiven him, yes. And if I brought in the Rebbetzin who canceled my performances in America, she would say, “Well, we didn’t know that was the clip, that this was what it was.”

22:28 Speaker 1 In a way, you were ahead of your time.

22:31 Speaker 2 Yes. I was born just a little too early for—

22:36 Speaker 1 Okay.

22:36 Speaker 2 All right. Okay.

22:37 Speaker 1 So what happened?

22:38 Speaker 2 I faced very, very harsh criticism.

22:42 Speaker 1 About what?

22:43 Speaker 2 About the very fact that I dared to bring up certain subjects. The home, the mother—the most sacred things—and portray a woman that way. I exaggerated her a bit, okay? I showed friction; I aired dirty laundry, so to speak. I showed a mother struggling with all her children. And the response was, “Why? What are you talking about? Why bring all that up? What do you mean, you’re not telling me everything’s perfect? That being a mother is wonderful, that it’s such a joy to raise so many children, and Shimi and Chani and Dubi, and everyone’s having fun and home is wonderful?” And I’m saying, “It’s a catastrophe. I’m falling apart. I can’t do it. It’s crushing me.” How can someone from our community come out and say that a woman is having a hard time? How is that going to encourage people to have children? They were afraid of me holding up a mirror to the difficulties, to the parts that aren’t pretty. Where was this leading?

23:43 Speaker 1 How did you take that?

23:43 Speaker 2 They didn’t understand that what I was doing was exactly the opposite.

23:48 Speaker 1 What do you mean?

23:48 Speaker 2 Exactly the opposite. By showing the difficulties, I was actually encouraging people to have children.

23:53 Speaker 1 When we talk about it—

23:53 Speaker 2 It’s hard for us, but it’s still worth it.

23:57 Speaker 1 Wow.

23:58 Speaker 2 And that was a change. When they saw the feedback, it came from the audience. The organizers—I remember how brave they were, really brave, to invite me to those events—were on edge.

24:12 Speaker 1 Terrified.

24:12 Speaker 2 By the stage, on the stage.

24:13 Speaker 1 Terrified.

24:14 Speaker 2 That’s how they were. Just let it go over well, let it go over well. Looking at the rebbetzins, looking at the whole—you know, the whole row of supervisors, the row of... Just let it go over well. And I remember them all in front of me, in the first row: an entire guard of distinguished women.

24:30 Speaker 1 The whole hierarchy.

24:31 Speaker 2 The whole hierarchy looking at me critically, almost in horror, wide-eyed.

24:37 Speaker 1 Ready to eat you alive.

24:38 Speaker 2 The audience was behind them, right? They couldn’t see the audience’s faces.

24:42 Speaker 1 And the women back there were rolling with laughter.

24:43 Speaker 2 They could only hear the roars of laughter, the energy, and the applause at the end. But the women in front stayed stone-faced.

24:50 Speaker 1 But how do you—

24:51 Speaker 2 Stone-faced.

24:51 Speaker 1 How do you handle seeing both the first row and all the rows behind them?

24:54 Speaker 2 Look, it’s really hard to—

24:55 Speaker 1 That’s some pretty intense juggling.

24:57 Speaker 2 Very, very. I really did face some formidable criticism. But I was so connected, and I’m still so connected, to the feeling that I’m doing the right thing, because it is right. I don’t know. I have this sense of calm amid all that chaos: I’m doing the right thing, and they’ll deal with it. I don’t know. They’ll accept it.

25:25 Speaker 1 But then, after a performance like that, you come off exhausted, drained. You’ve been up there putting out so much energy.

25:32 Speaker 2 Right.

25:33 Speaker 1 What happens then?

25:33 Speaker 2 First of all, my heart’s pounding. You know you’ve made it through. I’m sweating like crazy, because it really is like running a marathon in your head, too.

25:46 Speaker 1 Completely.

25:47 Speaker 2 Because I’m running through every scenario, running through the whole script so I don’t make mistakes—

25:51 Speaker 1 And you’re seeing everything, taking it all in.

25:51 Speaker 2 I see all those faces. I want to make the big audience happy. I want to please the women in front, too. I want to do all of it at once, and I have to command the stage. And I’m talking about big stages. You have to go out there and make people go, “Wow.” Again, I’m not saying that once I went on, there weren’t things to refine or criticisms. There were.

26:17 Speaker 1 And you were willing to accept—

26:18 Speaker 2 Very.

26:18 Speaker 1 Criticism.

26:19 Speaker 2 Very.

26:19 Speaker 1 You actually wanted it.

26:20 Speaker 2 All the time.

26:20 Speaker 1 You wanted all kinds of... yes.

26:21 Speaker 2 To this day, all the time. I listen, I take it in, and I keep refining things. It’s something that...

26:28 Speaker 1 Okay, and when did you realize this was a career? Or have you still not realized it?

26:34 Speaker 2 I still haven’t. I haven’t realized it yet. I worked at Behind the Honey. I was the bee.

26:40 Speaker 1 As in, you played a character?

26:42 Speaker 2 I literally got into a bee costume and did a presentation for children, which is also a kind of performance. Yes, I worked there, and I was an employee. I mean, I was a guide. It’s a visitors’ center.

26:53 Speaker 1 And you liked it there?

26:54 Speaker 2 They teach about honey. I loved it.

26:57 Speaker 1 Mm-hmm.

26:57 Speaker 2 Yes. But then another event got booked, and another, and another. I said to Shoshi there at Behind the Honey, “Listen, I can’t get up in the morning anymore. I can’t—I just can’t do this now.” She said, “What? But there’s a group waiting for you, and another group.” It was in the mornings; schools would come there to visit. I told her, “Listen, that’s it. Enough. I have performances all week. I can’t.” It really happened gradually.

27:21 Speaker 1 And then suddenly you realized that—

27:22 Speaker 2 I’d embarked on a career.

27:22 Speaker 1 And you realized that...

27:23 Speaker 2 Yes. Yes, absolutely. And I realized this was it.

27:26 Speaker 1 How does that work? How do you have a performance every night? What does it mean, every night? Are people going out all the time? How does it happen?

27:32 Speaker 2 Listen, back then, I think only Chabad women had women’s conventions. That didn’t exist in other communities. It didn’t. Ask a Chassidic woman, ask a Litvish woman: what kinds of events did they used to have?

27:47 Speaker 1 So how did you get so many bookings?

27:49 Speaker 2 Exactly.

27:49 Speaker 1 Only in Chabad, you mean—

27:50 Speaker 2 No, no, no. First of all, Chabad Houses—across the country and around the world—could already fill your whole year. And then other communities started holding women’s events too.

28:04 Speaker 1 Women’s events, vacations, and all those things.

28:06 Speaker 2 Yes, yes. The vacations came later. But communities and shuls started holding women’s events, all kinds of things like that. Nowadays, the International Convention Center gets booked for women from every community, with each community taking its own day. It’s gotten wild. It’s become huge. But it wasn’t like that then. It really happened gradually. And there’s still so much more for women...

28:32 Speaker 1 Of course. We’re only beginning to get a taste of it. But when you realize it’s a career, what skills do you realize you need to develop?

28:42 Speaker 2 A lot of political correctness, as they say. First of all, not to be a Chabad woman—

28:49 Speaker 1 Openly.

28:50 Speaker 2 Openly. I remember that in those days you couldn’t even say the word Moshiach, okay? It wasn’t something people accepted.

28:59 Speaker 1 Mm-hmm.

29:00 Speaker 2 Today there isn’t an event where people don’t talk about Moshiach and Geulah.

29:04 Speaker 1 Of course.

29:05 Speaker 2 In every community.

29:06 Speaker 1 Really?

29:07 Speaker 2 So I had to keep that part quiet. People would even say to me, “You’re a Chabad woman? Don’t say a word about Moshiach.” Okay, first of all...

29:13 Speaker 1 Wow.

29:14 Speaker 2 First of all, who said I wanted to? But fine. It’s not that I come in wanting to tell you about Moshiach. It comes from somewhere deep inside: if we’re already putting in the work, and we want something, and we’re tired of all the anxiety and everything else, then let’s really pray for precisely what we want—Moshiach. But it’s not that I come in from the outset and... There was a lot. Help me focus.

29:40 Speaker 1 No, we need to finish the episode.

29:42 Speaker 2 Oh.

29:43 Speaker 1 But what I see here, and what I want to understand better, is what you went through. And I’ll jump with you to the present, too. In the next episode, we’ll talk about how you haven’t lost your spark. People see Michal Levitin, and they know—

30:02 Speaker 2 We’ll skip that episode. I have no idea how it happens.

30:05 Speaker 1 We’ll figure it out, because there’s something here we need to understand. I think it’s connected to your whole approach, too. So thank you, Michal.

30:14 Speaker 2 Thank you, Chani.

30:15 Speaker 1 For the first episode of the podcast.

30:16 Speaker 2 Let’s go.

30:17 Speaker 1 And we’ll see you in the next episode.

30:18 Speaker 2 I think this might help me, too.

30:20 Speaker 1 Yes.

30:20 Speaker 2 I think I’ll get some therapy out of this myself.

30:23 Speaker 1 We’ll start, get into it, and see where it goes.

30:26 Speaker 2 Let’s go.

30:26 Speaker 1 Thank you.