Somachat Alayich - Episode 06 - Haram on the Cherem

00:00 Speaker 1 Happy for You, Michal Levitin, hello.

00:01 Speaker 2 Happy for You, Chani Marzel, hello and blessings.

00:04 Speaker 1 Another episode.

00:05 Speaker 2 Another episode.

00:06 Speaker 1 I think we have fun together.

00:08 Speaker 2 Yes.

00:09 Speaker 1 So let’s keep going.

00:10 Speaker 2 Let’s do it.

00:11 Speaker 1 We’ve been getting good feedback, so, uh—

00:13 Speaker 2 Thank Hashem.

00:13 Speaker 1 Keep sending feedback. It matters. It really does.

00:16 Speaker 2 Yes, yes, the responses definitely—

00:17 Speaker 1 And pass it on.

00:18 Speaker 2 Right.

00:19 Speaker 1 If the episode speaks to you and all that.

00:20 Speaker 2 Right.

00:21 Speaker 1 There are some interesting things here. So, we talked about trust in Hashem, and taking that on is work, but—

00:32 Speaker 2 It’s personal.

00:32 Speaker 1 I think you offered some perspectives here that people can learn from.

00:38 Speaker 2 Yes.

00:39 Speaker 1 And along the way, you showed respect for your parents. You spoke about your mother, which is important too.

00:43 Speaker 2 Yes.

00:43 Speaker 1 I think we should do an episode about that too. Hakadosh Boruch Hu can open up more episodes for us.

00:46 Speaker 2 Right.

00:47 Speaker 1 We touched on something last time, and I want us to talk about it.

00:52 Speaker 2 Mm-hmm.

00:52 Speaker 1 The subject of ostracism.

00:55 Speaker 2 Wow.

00:56 Speaker 1 Ready?

00:57 Speaker 2 Mm.

00:58 Speaker 1 Hold on, have a drink.

01:00 Speaker 2 You should have prepared me for this. Yes. Okay. All right, let’s do it.

01:04 Speaker 1 I’ll tell you—

01:05 Speaker 2 It’s important.

01:05 Speaker 1 I’ll tell you why I want to bring it up. Because I think you bring a perspective to this subject—as you do to everything—that’s different and important, and it’s important to talk about it.

01:18 Speaker 2 Let’s do it.

01:18 Speaker 1 Full disclosure: we were in the same class. We were classmates.

01:25 Speaker 2 Right.

01:25 Speaker 1 I don’t know how many girls were in the class, but we’re the same age, we were classmates, and you actually joined us in eighth grade.

01:34 Speaker 2 Right.

01:34 Speaker 1 During the summer after seventh grade.

01:36 Speaker 2 Right, I was at the day camp.

01:37 Speaker 1 You were at the day camp. Now, I remember that during that same summer, I had surgery. I had my appendix out.

01:43 Speaker 2 Oh, wow.

01:44 Speaker 1 Then I came back to the day camp afterward, and suddenly there was someone new. We didn’t know what to make of you.

01:51 Speaker 2 Yes.

01:52 Speaker 1 You had a presence. I don’t think you could read our social dynamics, and we couldn’t read yours. We should have brought in an astrologer or something. I don’t know what was going on there.

02:02 Speaker 2 Yes. Wow, it was tough.

02:05 Speaker 1 Yes.

02:05 Speaker 2 Yes.

02:06 Speaker 1 And at that age, finding your place is probably very, very significant for everyone.

02:11 Speaker 2 Absolutely.

02:12 Speaker 1 Mm-hmm, and... I don’t know, maybe we can unpack it a little and talk about it, but I think something happened there that nobody had the tools to handle.

02:21 Speaker 2 Right.

02:22 Speaker 1 People talk about it a lot today, and I think they still aren’t giving anyone tools.

02:26 Speaker 2 Right.

02:26 Speaker 1 Because in the end, people talk a lot about those who hurt others and those who ostracize them—about how they aren’t aware, and how we don’t know what they’re going through. And my prayer to Hakadosh Boruch Hu is that people come away from this episode with strength. I mean, whether it’s a teenage girl listening, or adults—today, adults experience loneliness and ostracism too.

02:49 Speaker 2 Right, right.

02:51 Speaker 1 So that’s where I want to take this.

02:53 Speaker 2 Okay. Wow. Um.

02:59 Speaker 1 What happened there?

03:00 Speaker 2 What happened there? Well—

03:01 Speaker 1 What was it like before that? What was life like for you in Kiryat Malachi?

03:05 Speaker 2 In Kiryat Malachi, I already had my place. I had friends. I was never someone who needed to find one very, very close friend and be with only her. I got along really well with everyone.

03:20 Speaker 1 Very sociable.

03:21 Speaker 2 Sociable, and I was especially drawn to the quiet girls, the ones who were less... I would even get projects from the school administration. I mean—

03:32 Speaker 1 They put that on you—

03:33 Speaker 2 “Michal, this girl needs help. Bring her in, spend time with her.” So I would—

03:39 Speaker 1 Listen, that’s something else.

03:39 Speaker 2 Yes?

03:39 Speaker 1 It’s not every day that you’re given that kind of recognition.

03:41 Speaker 2 Wow. So that was my place. I mean—

03:44 Speaker 1 It gives you—

03:45 Speaker 2 Very much, very much.

03:46 Speaker 1 It gives you a sense of purpose.

03:47 Speaker 2 Look, I would bring girls home with me in the afternoons—

03:49 Speaker 1 You approach it from a... beautiful place.

03:52 Speaker 2 From a good place, a place of shlichus too. I mean, I felt—

03:55 Speaker 1 We can also look down on people when we’re doing shlichus.

03:57 Speaker 2 No. Not then. No, absolutely not.

03:59 Speaker 1 That’s why they chose you.

04:00 Speaker 2 Oh.

04:01 Speaker 1 Okay.

04:02 Speaker 2 I genuinely enjoyed the privilege. I mean, that they trusted me, that I could be in a position to have an influence. Again, that’s something I—

04:12 Speaker 1 So you were in a position to influence others from a very young age. If you didn’t need to look for that one close friend and all that, you could also have ended up lonely.

04:21 Speaker 2 Um, but I wasn’t lonely, because I was very, very loved. Very. I could come into the classroom in the morning and find a candy from one girl on my desk, a note from another—

04:31 Speaker 1 Oh, wow.

04:31 Speaker 2 A letter from someone else.

04:33 Speaker 1 Were you loved, or popular? Or both—

04:34 Speaker 2 Loved, because I wasn’t the queen of the class. I mean, no, that wasn’t me.

04:39 Speaker 1 Mm-hmm.

04:39 Speaker 2 “Today we’re going to do...” No, no, no. I wasn’t that girl. There was a girl who decided what we were playing that day. I wasn’t in that position at all. If I liked what she decided, I’d join in; if I didn’t, I’d sit and talk with the girls. I really wasn’t the—

04:53 Speaker 1 You had the high IQ—the sensitivity IQ.

04:58 Speaker 2 Right, yes.

04:59 Speaker 1 Beautiful.

04:59 Speaker 2 Yes. And it filled me up. I mean, my friends saying good morning, and... I would bring girls home with me. Now, you have to understand: the Chabad school in Kiryat Malachi back then—and I think this is still true today—was a school that accepted everyone.

05:16 Speaker 1 Okay.

05:17 Speaker 2 I mean, even girls who wore pants in their everyday lives could come to the Chabad school, because they wanted the values, or because it was close to home, or for all sorts of reasons. There was a core group of us—say, out of a class of thirty, about seven of us were from Chabad homes.

05:36 Speaker 1 Only seven?

05:37 Speaker 2 Something like that, yes.

05:38 Speaker 1 But I think the community has grown since then, and—

05:39 Speaker 2 Today the community—today it’s different. But back then, I’m telling you, most of the girls came from all sorts of homes and immigrant families, you know. And I brought girls who wore pants home with me. Nobody saw it as something strange. It was more like, “How lovely!” They welcomed them warmly. And you should know that several of the girls who came into my home now have Charedi homes of their own.

06:05 Speaker 1 That’s incredible.

06:06 Speaker 2 It’s incredible. Really incredible. And over the years, girls came back to me and said, “Listen, because I spent afternoons at your house, I saw how a home runs. I saw what it was like, and I wanted that for myself.”

06:17 Speaker 1 Well, we did a podcast in Kfar Chabad.

06:20 Speaker 2 Right? Right, right. One of the girls who used to come to my house showed up.

06:25 Speaker 1 To your house, yes.

06:26 Speaker 2 It’s incredible. It was such a surprise. Oh my goodness, I hadn’t seen her since... But she says I taught her Tanya on the stairs of the building.

06:35 Speaker 1 At age ten.

06:36 Speaker 2 At age ten.

06:37 Speaker 1 Yes.

06:38 Speaker 2 It’s incredible. Do you see? I already had some kind of influence and shlichus there.

06:42 Speaker 1 You were influencing people.

06:43 Speaker 2 Even back then.

06:45 Speaker 1 Okay.

06:45 Speaker 2 And I had my place, and I had... I felt very at ease there.

06:48 Speaker 1 Beautiful.

06:48 Speaker 2 It’s true that the school staff never understood my sense of humor, and I spent more time in the principal’s office than in class, but I was still very, very loved.

06:56 Speaker 1 You went to school happily.

06:58 Speaker 2 I did, yes. Yes.

06:59 Speaker 1 When were you told that you were moving to Kfar Chabad?

07:01 Speaker 2 It was always in the background, all the time. My mother dreamed of returning to the village where she’d grown up.

07:06 Speaker 1 Mm-hmm.

07:06 Speaker 2 All the time. Now, she really enjoyed living in Kiryat Malachi. She had standing there; she had her place among the Chabad people. She also performed there. There were performances for the community once a month, and I performed with her too.

07:17 Speaker 1 She had her place.

07:17 Speaker 2 She had her place, and she did broadcasts. My mother was a radio host, by the way. There was a community radio station in Kiryat Malachi. Yes, yes. She’d do five songs, songs she’d publicize... She really had a lot going on there. But all her friends, her childhood friends, lived in Kfar Chabad. That was always in the background. And her parents asked her, “Come live with us. After a hundred and twenty years, you’ll get the house.” You know, all sorts of promises like that. It drew her back to the home where she’d grown up, and we had no say in it at all. I mean, none of us wanted to go.

07:59 Speaker 1 Wow.

08:00 Speaker 2 None of us. It was—

08:01 Speaker 1 I think you were at a very critical age.

08:02 Speaker 2 Sixth grade. I was in sixth grade, yes.

08:04 Speaker 1 A very critical age.

08:05 Speaker 2 So let’s say everyone else was more or less okay with it. One sister got married just before we moved, another right after we moved, the third was already in twelfth grade, and the boys went off to yeshivos.

08:19 Speaker 1 But you—you were really—

08:21 Speaker 2 It hit me the hardest, because I was right at that critical age.

08:23 Speaker 1 You’re starting to sound like a victim.

08:25 Speaker 2 Yes, okay, I do have that tendency. Come on, I’m not entirely free of playing the victim.

08:30 Speaker 1 Okay.

08:31 Speaker 2 But I’m the only one in the family who ultimately gained something from it too.

08:38 Speaker 1 What do you mean?

08:38 Speaker 2 Because for everyone else, the move barely affected them. It was because of the difficult process I went through there that I got to where I am today.

08:45 Speaker 1 Ah, I see. Look at that.

08:48 Speaker 2 So you understand?

08:48 Speaker 1 By the way, that sentence alone is empowering.

08:51 Speaker 2 Exactly. Because it’s—

08:52 Speaker 1 Because when you deal with something, it toughens you up.

08:55 Speaker 2 Yes, completely. I went through every kind of toughening-up possible—different audiences, different reactions. I mean, even when you girls, say, ostracized me, it held up a mirror to my face: people might not like me. And that’s something very, very important for someone who’s going to get up onstage.

09:14 Speaker 1 When you didn’t yet know you were going to get up onstage.

09:16 Speaker 2 I didn’t know—

09:16 Speaker 1 But really, it—

09:17 Speaker 2 But I—

09:17 Speaker 1 It toughens you up for every relationship, too.

09:20 Speaker 2 Absolutely.

09:20 Speaker 1 And it makes sense to me that today you have a mothers’ club.

09:23 Speaker 2 Look how incredible that is.

09:24 Speaker 1 No, you see, we don’t know. Suddenly you’re saying to me, “Come on, I want to find strength in this, because we’re going through something difficult right now.” Try to open up, to see some horizon ahead. Try to see that there’s—

09:35 Speaker 2 That there’s more to the story.

09:36 Speaker 1 There’s more to the story—

09:36 Speaker 2 There’s something good in it.

09:37 Speaker 1 There’s a reason for it, too.

09:38 Speaker 2 There’s a reason, and it has to be a good reason.

09:40 Speaker 1 But—then I go back to the previous episode. I have work to do there.

09:44 Speaker 2 Right.

09:44 Speaker 1 Okay, and then you move to Kfar Chabad.

09:47 Speaker 2 And then I move to Kfar Chabad, and what starts for me is like a horror movie.

09:53 Speaker 1 Really.

09:54 Speaker 2 A horror movie in every way. Now, I loved rollerblading. Back then, I think I was the first in Kiryat Malachi to have them, because my father traveled abroad and always brought us new things, whatever was in fashion. Then the four-wheeled kind came out—they were called roller skates. So I got the first roller skates—

10:11 Speaker 1 With the wheels in a row.

10:11 Speaker 2 No, not in a row. That was the advanced kind. Four wheels.

10:14 Speaker 1 Oh, wow.

10:15 Speaker 2 Four wheels, on a sort of sandal that fit over your own shoe.

10:18 Speaker 1 Ah, okay.

10:18 Speaker 2 That was the first kind—

10:20 Speaker 1 Right.

10:20 Speaker 2 That came out, and I got the first pair.

10:23 Speaker 1 Yes.

10:23 Speaker 2 I started skating on them, got better and better, and became great at it. But I was skating alone, so I said to my father, “Listen, you can’t buy these in Israel yet. You have to buy me another pair so I’ll have a friend to skate with.” Eventually I collected thirteen pairs, because I had lots of friends who wanted to skate with me. So my father kept bringing me more and buying me more. I had thirteen pairs.

10:44 Speaker 1 No problem—my father will be back next month.

10:46 Speaker 2 He’d buy them. Yes, yes.

10:47 Speaker 1 Okay.

10:48 Speaker 2 So I skated with a group of girls. We lived across from a shopping center—I think it was called Lev Ha’ir back then, I’m not sure. It had a parking lot that was always empty because the shopping center wasn’t doing very well. So I taught girls to roller-skate there in that parking lot. It was so much fun. So much fun. And it was something that gave me a sense of freedom. I get to Kfar Chabad, and out of habit, you know, I put on my rollerblades. The roads in Kfar Chabad are deserted. And then I get a phone call.

11:17 Speaker 1 It wasn’t allowed?

11:18 Speaker 2 It wasn’t allowed. What’s this? A girl rollerblading in Kfar Chabad?

11:22 Speaker 1 Okay.

11:23 Speaker 2 And that was the first slap in the face I got, because I think it was our second day in Kfar Chabad.

11:28 Speaker 1 Take a breath.

11:28 Speaker 2 Wow. What do I do now? There’s no parking lot. It’s a village—there’s nowhere to go. I can’t just go outside the—there’s nowhere, nowhere, nowhere. Where would you do it? My grandparents have this little porch—

11:38 Speaker 1 What did you do with thirteen pairs of roller skates?

11:39 Speaker 2 First of all, I gave them away.

11:40 Speaker 1 Ah, I see.

11:40 Speaker 2 No, I didn’t bring them to Kfar Chabad. I left them with my friends.

11:44 Speaker 1 Oh, nice.

11:44 Speaker 2 I left behind lots of gifts. My children are upset with me about it today. I had the most expensive Barbies in the world, brought from all over—a crazy collection—and I left them with a friend. She tells me her children play with them today.

11:59 Speaker 1 You understand why your children are upset?

12:02 Speaker 2 Who thought about that? I gave everything away. You know, I was like, “Here, take them.” And—

12:07 Speaker 1 And what happened with your friends?

12:08 Speaker 2 So, I didn’t have my rollerblades, I couldn’t do that, and then I got to school. What I went through there, Chani, was unbelievable. I remember one incident that really made me think, “Come on, this is abuse. This is something beyond the usual.” I don’t know if you remember the day when the teacher was late, and all the girls decided to punish her by writing something—I don’t remember what—on the board, and simply leaving the classroom.

12:37 Speaker 1 Okay.

12:38 Speaker 2 That was quite a year.

12:40 Speaker 1 No, no. First of all, it was a year that—

12:42 Speaker 2 I’d never seen a jungle like that. A jungle, a real jungle. I’d walked into a jungle.

12:46 Speaker 1 But the parents there were okay.

12:48 Speaker 2 There was something going on there. I don’t know, I don’t remember what. There was something. I don’t know. I was new, arriving in this jungle, and everyone went out into the courtyard. Now, you remember the steps there, the courtyard, and the benches? Remember? Right. So everyone was on the benches, sitting on each other’s laps. You remember that age, when all the girls sit on each other’s laps? And I was standing at the top of the stairs, thinking to myself: Who will accept me? You know, I was trying to figure out where to go.

13:14 Speaker 1 Wow.

13:15 Speaker 2 I felt so helpless. Nobody saw me. Then a teacher came along who didn’t teach me. I don’t remember who she was; I have no idea. Maybe she’d come into a class once, maybe she knew me or had heard about me. I didn’t know her personally. She stood next to me and said, “Girls, Michal wants a round of applause.” And then they all applauded me. I thought I was going to die right then. Die.

13:38 Speaker 1 I can’t believe it.

13:39 Speaker 2 Why humiliate me? What did I do? I was just standing there.

13:42 Speaker 1 But what did the teacher want? Oh, because you were standing there?

13:44 Speaker 2 Nothing. Because I was standing there.

13:46 Speaker 1 But look, you must have had a presence without even—

13:48 Speaker 2 I was standing there because I was trying to figure out where to go.

13:50 Speaker 1 But nobody knew that.

13:52 Speaker 2 And she said, “Michal wants a round of applause,” and in my heart I said: One day I’ll pay money for that applause.

13:58 Speaker 1 You had that thought back then?

13:59 Speaker 2 Yes.

14:00 Speaker 1 Wow.

14:01 Speaker 2 Yes.

14:02 Speaker 1 How did you manage that? How could you feel that in the middle of such a humiliating experience?

14:07 Speaker 2 I don’t know. That thought just came naturally to me.

14:10 Speaker 1 That’s a gift.

14:11 Speaker 2 Yes.

14:11 Speaker 1 I mean, it’s—

14:12 Speaker 2 Yes, yes.

14:13 Speaker 1 It’s a kindness from Hashem.

14:14 Speaker 2 It really is. I remember coming home that day thinking, “What? Why? Why did you do that? What was that about?”

14:22 Speaker 1 That’s the story with the teacher, and the girls, too. But what happened in your interactions with the girls? Because you’re very outgoing and very well liked.

14:31 Speaker 2 Again, I—

14:32 Speaker 1 From what you’ve experienced.

14:35 Speaker 2 In my interactions with the girls, I tried. Remember? I tried to make them laugh, and after every joke I told, they’d give this silly, exaggerated little giggle. They wouldn’t let themselves enjoy being around me.

14:47 Speaker 1 Really.

14:48 Speaker 2 They just wouldn’t let themselves.

14:49 Speaker 1 They pay for it today, too.

14:51 Speaker 2 Yes. That’s right—each one, through a Chabad House, has paid me nicely. But listen, I could really see that they were afraid for themselves.

15:00 Speaker 1 Exactly. It was really a fight for their place.

15:02 Speaker 2 Yes, absolutely. I upset the order of things, and anyone who dared get close to me was ostracized too.

15:11 Speaker 1 Wow.

15:13 Speaker 2 I mean, in the end I did have one girl with me, but even she’d say, “You know I’m with you, but this one has left me, that one won’t talk to me...” That’s how it was.

15:21 Speaker 1 Now, I don’t remember it being out in the open.

15:24 Speaker 2 It wasn’t out in the open. I didn’t give it space, either. I mean, I didn’t tell anyone about it, and I didn’t give it space.

15:30 Speaker 1 Now we want to come back to where you were emotionally, and what you did to find strength.

15:37 Speaker 2 First of all, I felt a lot of compassion for everyone. I mean, I had—

15:40 Speaker 1 You weren’t angry?

15:41 Speaker 2 I felt anger and compassion at the same time.

15:43 Speaker 1 How could you feel compassion?

15:44 Speaker 2 Because I thought, “Come on, they’re really missing out. They won’t let themselves enjoy this.” I’d come there with good intentions. I’d come to bring something good.

15:50 Speaker 1 Okay, so you had high self-esteem.

15:52 Speaker 2 Yes. Yes.

15:54 Speaker 1 Look at that—she had high self-esteem, and she was ostracized. But try to put yourself in the place of someone whose self-esteem isn’t high and who goes through that experience.

16:02 Speaker 2 Listen, I think that’s something I may have grown up with. So perhaps this is something for parents, too: I’m good no matter what. I’m loved no matter what. My worth doesn’t depend on the people around me. My worth doesn’t depend on whether someone says one thing or another. I think that’s something built from the day you’re born.

16:23 Speaker 1 Okay.

16:23 Speaker 2 Yes, yes. So I simply felt sorry for them. I never told myself I wasn’t good. I knew my joke was funny. I mean—

16:33 Speaker 1 They just don’t get it yet.

16:34 Speaker 2 They don’t get it.

16:35 Speaker 1 When they grow up, they’ll understand.

16:35 Speaker 2 Right.

16:36 Speaker 1 And that happened.

16:37 Speaker 2 Yes. So I told myself, okay, I enjoyed it, and it’s their problem. They’re missing out; that’s their problem. Of course, it hurt.

16:46 Speaker 1 What’s it like to be ostracized? Because today, very much—today—

16:50 Speaker 2 It was a hard experience. I didn’t know to call it being ostracized, but—

16:54 Speaker 1 Now, today, when you hear about ostracism everywhere, how—where does that meet you?

16:58 Speaker 2 It meets me where people blame the other kids, blame the parents, blame the school administration, but don’t give the child being ostracized the tools and the strength to deal with it.

17:12 Speaker 1 Okay, you have the floor now.

17:14 Speaker 2 So—

17:14 Speaker 1 What? Go ahead.

17:15 Speaker 2 So I think every child needs some kind of workshop, with parents and at school, to reduce that dependence and take the responsibility and blame off the people around them. Nobody is to blame for the fact that you didn’t eat breakfast this morning. Nobody is to blame for the fact that you woke up on the wrong side of the bed. Nobody is to blame for the fact that people don’t understand you. Speak up.

17:38 Speaker 1 Okay.

17:39 Speaker 2 Now, again, I’m not saying there’s no responsibility—

17:41 Speaker 1 When you say that, I hear a bit of blame directed at the child. So how do we teach a child to take responsibility?

17:48 Speaker 2 First of all, um, you teach them from the very beginning—

17:51 Speaker 1 To give them that strength, firmly and powerfully.

17:54 Speaker 2 Let me tell you where parents go wrong from the very beginning of raising their children. Maybe, maybe it’ll make it a little clearer. A child gets hurt. What’s the parents’ instinct? Either to say, “Nothing happened. Nothing happened.” First of all, something did happen. Give it a name, acknowledge that it hurts, make room for the pain. When you make it disappear and blur the pain like that, the child doesn’t learn how to identify their feelings from the very beginning.

18:16 Speaker 1 Mm-hmm.

18:17 Speaker 2 What are they feeling? The second thing parents do: a child gets hurt. “Bad floor! Shame on you!”

18:25 Speaker 1 Yes.

18:26 Speaker 2 They look for someone to blame. The child grows up looking for who’s to blame for their situation, because that’s how they were raised. So already—

18:33 Speaker 1 What are you saying we should do when something happens to a child?

18:35 Speaker 2 When something happens to a child? First of all, what happened? Deal with what happened specifically. You bumped into the table.

18:42 Speaker 1 And then learn how not to bump into the table again.

18:44 Speaker 2 Exactly. The child also learns—

18:45 Speaker 1 You put the responsibility back in their hands.

18:46 Speaker 2 Right, the child also learns. The child learns on their own. Who did it? How did it happen? Because the floor was wet, because the floor was wet. The child understands the floor was wet. So what should happen next time? The floor shouldn’t be wet. Not to leave the blame for what happened—I mean—

19:04 Speaker 1 On someone—or something outside of me.

19:06 Speaker 2 Exactly. To make room for the pain and take responsibility, not make room for blaming others. Now, again, I’m not saying there isn’t work to do with the children who hurt others, and with children who aren’t sensitive, and so on.

19:21 Speaker 1 Talk about it, but at the end of the day, staying in a place of “Look what they did to me; it’s everyone else’s fault” doesn’t get you anywhere.

19:29 Speaker 2 Exactly.

19:30 Speaker 1 I mean, you can stay there—

19:30 Speaker 2 When, G-d forbid, a teenager died by suicide, and people blamed the entire system and everyone else—it hurts me to see that.

19:39 Speaker 1 Yes.

19:40 Speaker 2 Because, first of all, you can’t always recognize a child who’s in such a—

19:48 Speaker 1 No, and there are struggles. There are—

19:49 Speaker 2 There are struggles, no—

19:51 Speaker 1 Because in the end, when you blame people, you don’t know what kind of distress you’re passing on. I mean, it can become a chain reaction.

19:56 Speaker 2 The message, when you frame it as “We’re all to blame” and that becomes the campaign, is a message to the next person contemplating suicide. In other words, if I’m hurting—

20:06 Speaker 1 When it comes to suicide—

20:07 Speaker 2 Everyone will pay for it.

20:08 Speaker 1 When it comes to suicide, I think the message has to be: no matter what, don’t do it. I mean, you can always get help.

20:16 Speaker 2 Exactly, exactly.

20:17 Speaker 1 That place of—

20:18 Speaker 2 But blaming—

20:19 Speaker 1 Going and taking responsibility. Just—

20:20 Speaker 2 By blaming the...

20:23 Speaker 1 The people around you.

20:23 Speaker 2 The people around you—that’s more frightening than anything.

20:30 Speaker 1 What does today’s Michal Levitin—who, boruch Hashem, is in a good place, is loved and accepted, gets applause, and gets paid, boruch Hashem—say to a girl, a teenager, a woman, whoever might be listening or might hear this from someone else, who’s struggling today?

20:50 Speaker 2 If you’re in a place where you feel that people don’t see you or hear you enough, then it’s probably because there’s something very, very good inside you.

20:59 Speaker 1 Wow.

21:00 Speaker 2 And the people around you—

21:01 Speaker 1 What should she do?

21:05 Speaker 2 First of all, know it, recognize it, discover it, understand that there’s something very, very, very, very good in you. We have to remember, “The inclination of man’s heart is evil from his youth.” I mean, among the people around us at those ages, the animal soul is very, very strong. That’s not who they are; they’re not just that. They have a G-dly soul too.

21:28 Speaker 1 What they’re dealing with—

21:29 Speaker 2 Each one is dealing with her own difficulties.

21:33 Speaker 1 Not everyone is dealing with it.

21:34 Speaker 2 Exactly.

21:34 Speaker 1 That’s another, another thing.

21:36 Speaker 2 And taking responsibility—I mean, you may be going through something really, really awful right now. Take responsibility for discovering who you are. Don’t look right now for someone else to discover you.

21:49 Speaker 1 Wow. And really, go and talk to someone, because today you can, and—

21:53 Speaker 2 You have to talk.

21:54 Speaker 1 There are people—

21:55 Speaker 2 You have to talk. If you deal with it alone, that’s, that’s not good.

21:59 Speaker 1 Like I said, the torment, the pangs of—

22:01 Speaker 2 Pangs of conscience. Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely. Talk, share it. By the way, I shared things with my parents all the time, too. All the time. I’d tell them, “Listen, they don’t laugh at my jokes, come on.” So they’d say, “Come tell us—we’ll laugh.” It was like...

22:17 Speaker 1 Did your sisters see it?

22:19 Speaker 2 Um...

22:19 Speaker 1 Did they support you, or was each of them also—

22:21 Speaker 2 Each one had her own struggles. But again, I had that space at home, and it filled me up. It filled me up.

22:29 Speaker 1 You moved me—

22:30 Speaker 2 Really.

22:31 Speaker 1 No, you’re wonderful, and I think this really, really is an episode and a subject—look, we could talk about it for hours more, but wow, it’s an important subject.

22:40 Speaker 2 Yes.

22:40 Speaker 1 That everyone can take to heart.

22:42 Speaker 2 Really, and—

22:42 Speaker 1 For the little girl, the little girl inside me.

22:44 Speaker 2 Right.

22:45 Speaker 1 And for my little boy, too.

22:46 Speaker 2 Right. And parents, it’s your job at home to tell your children that the most important thing is that they have you.

22:52 Speaker 1 Thank you, Michal.

22:53 Speaker 2 Thank you, Chani Merzel.

22:54 Speaker 1 I guess we’ll see each other in the next episode.

22:56 Speaker 2 With Hashem’s help, we’ll do it and succeed.