Ep. 96 // "My Journey to Bittul" w/ Rabbi Moshe Genuth

00:00 Speaker 1 There is a danger for all of us when someone has a clearer picture of reality than we do. That really undermines the ego. That's-- What, what is the ego? The ego is my perspective is holy. I have to protect it. I have to. I-- A person who doesn't protect his ego is not normal. In, in the end, the issue was how can there be someone else who has not just a clearer picture of reality, but more importantly, has a "" from that picture, that has some, some, as Rashanzos used to call them, marching orders.

00:40 Speaker 2 Welcome to Homesick for Lubavitch, a podcast where we explore Lubavitch identity in the year two thousand and twenty-six. My name is Ben Zion Finson, and I will be your host. Let's begin. Alrighty. We are here in Crown Heights for another episode of Homesick for Lubavitch with Rabbi Moshe Ganoth, a special guest who is visiting Crown Heights from Eretz Yisrael. Uh, Rabbi Ganoth liv-lives in-

01:13 Speaker 1 In Ramot in Jerusalem

01:14 Speaker 2 ... lives in Ramot and works at The Galei Nahar Yeshiva of Rabbi Yisroel Ginsburg, where he helps publish, uh, those-- Rabbi Ginsburg's teachings in English and also works in the institute that teaches therapy and, um, works in the therapy space with people over there as well. Thank you very much for joining.

01:36 Speaker 1 Thank you very much for having me.

01:37 Speaker 2 And thank you very much to my good friend, Zalman Labovic and family for hosting us in their home for this episode. Wanted to make sure that-

01:46 Speaker 1 And the big thanks is to my wife who made this trip possible.

01:51 Speaker 2 All right. So the thank you's are-

01:53 Speaker 1 All over

01:53 Speaker 2 ... have, have, have, have been made, Baruch Hashem. A lot of people to thank. We start every day with Middot Hani. That's how we should start the podcast. And before we continue, uh, for all those who like the podcast, please like and subscribe on the various platforms. It's ninety-- We're recording at this date. We already published ninety-four episodes. If you haven't liked and subscribed, it's about time. And if you really like the podcast, please sub- please contribute to the podcast at hflpodcast.com/donate. I'm very, very much looking forward to this conversation. I have been for a while. I've-- We've never met before. I also never hold my phone in my hand during a podcast. I'm not doing that because I'm not interested. It's because this is a reason that we are sitting here today. Um, I was on the Facebook, um, a while ago. I actually don't go on it much at all-

02:44 Speaker 1 Same with me

02:44 Speaker 2 ... today.

02:45 Speaker 1 That was probably the only thing I responded to in four or five years.

02:48 Speaker 2 Oh, really?

02:49 Speaker 1 Yeah.

02:49 Speaker 2 How about that? So I, I used to go on more often, to be honest, but whatever. I waste my time on the internet in different ways today, uh, for better or for worse. And, uh, um, I guess a mutual friend of ours, a mutual Facebook friend of ours, um, Pesach Summer, posted something on Facebook, and I don't remember exactly what he posted, but I have your comment here saved. And so I guess we can thank Pesach as well for facilitating this in this way as well, if he's listening. Um, so in this, in this, in this comment, I don't wanna read the whole th- the whole comment 'cause it's a very, very long comment, but if I can paraphrase, and we'll get, get to it in the story, I just wanna explain to people what caught my eye, is that the c- the, the... And I remember, the post was about, uh, taking the teachings of Lubavitch up to, but not including the Rebbe's teachings.

03:44 Speaker 1 Right.

03:45 Speaker 2 Being comfortable with Chassidus Chabad, but not being comfortable with the teachings of the Rebbe for whatever reason. Um, there are a number of reasons that people in the world are uncomfortable with, with certain changes in Lubavitch and so on in the so-called Darashvi, right? And, uh, you responded to this, you responded to this post by telling your story. And you write that you used to feel that way as well, right? And that you had, you had-

04:16 Speaker 1 Well, it starts by giving away that I was in Lubavitch at some point.

04:19 Speaker 2 You were in Lubavitch at some point. We're gonna get to your story.

04:22 Speaker 1 Mm.

04:22 Speaker 2 But I wanna get to the lines here, where you basically say that you weren't Lubavitch, then you got involved in Chabad. You had become-- you had learned more and more of the, of the, of Chassidus Chabad, but not the Rebbe's Torah. Even though you had his Seferim in your house, something was holding you back from learning the Rebbe's Torah. And it wasn't a lack of time or interest in Chassidus Chabad. That's the point. And then you write that one day it just happened. "I absentmindedly picked up a Torah Min Hachaim and while eating dinner started reading on some random page." I'm gonna skip a little bit. "I randomly opened to a farbrengen that shocked me. It wa- it was about the first Lebanon war from the early mid-'80s. I was in my mid-teens during that time and remembered it well, especially what my younger mind felt was a state of general confusion that permeated everything and everyone in Israel at the time." So, and you go on to explain that. We'll, we'll, we'll hear that later from you. I don't wanna read it all. "As I am absentmindedly, as it were, reading the farbrengen, I feel something happening. The air of confusion was clearing. There was an immediate effect, yes, but it really took all night and much of the next day as I read through the farbrengen and reread and took it in and thought some more and more to really, to really happen. This was the first time in my life that a

05:41 Speaker 2 book of Torah had brought clarity to a serious event and debacle I'd experienced and had filed away as damaged goods. That random farbrengen opened the door for me to read, learn Torah Min Hachaim, and I did pretty much from the first volume to the last, about forty-three volumes if I remember correctly. Even during the process, I realized what had held me back. Relative..." And this is, to me, was The key of the, of your post. Relatively speaking, all the chassidus I had learned until now was about a spiritual life that on the one hand was perennial, but on the other hand was gone. If I wanted to do something with what I had learned, I needed to reinterpret, rehash, rethink how this applied to me in the nineteen-nineties. The world of the Rashab, certainly the world of, the world of the Alter Rebbe was gone. They were not dealing with my world. Of course, some of the spiritual issues were the same, but my avodah was not theirs. In short, I was in the driver's seat when it came to applying the teachings. I was a final say. Being as intellectually minded as I was, this also satisfied me. It was also an ego thing, but I couldn't articulate that at the time. Learning from the Rashab, and certainly from the early Rebbeim, was in effect like learning from a chacham who shared my interests, spoke my spiritual language, s-spoke my spiritual language, but in the end was my tour guide. He was a Rebbe

06:57 Speaker 2 just by name for generations who were safely gone. Reading and listening to the Rebbe was entirely different. I couldn't reinterpret. I was no longer the driver. Our realities were the same, no assembly required, which is why what he said turned me off for so long. This was Torah about my reality, my life. He was not just talking about the world I live in, he was leading me through it, telling me how to navigate it. I realized slowly that I couldn't stand being led, even when I recognized that the person doing the leading was infinitely holier and more pious than me, not to mention smarter. I simply couldn't stand being told what I needed to do.

07:34 Speaker 1 It's enough. I don't know if the post ends there.

07:37 Speaker 2 It doesn't end there.

07:38 Speaker 1 Yeah.

07:38 Speaker 2 It, it, that, that, that you, you-

07:40 Speaker 1 Yeah

07:40 Speaker 2 ... you go on to talk about your journey to Lubavitch-

07:42 Speaker 1 Yeah

07:42 Speaker 2 ... after that, which we'll get to in person. I don't wanna-

07:45 Speaker 1 Right

07:45 Speaker 2 ... I, I, I don't wanna do the reading for you. But, you know, this has been a topic that has been touched upon in the podcast in the past, and I, it's certainly a topic that resonates with me, and I'm sure with a lot of people listening. That, you know, the, the idea that, that, you know, is, is chassidus an abstract idea that you basically take the values, the fundamentals of it, and interpret it into your life? Or is it something that, like you said, leads you, and sometimes against your will, and tells you what to do? And it's something that I think even s-people that grow up Lubavitch grapple with, especially as you mature and you try to make it your own, which is what you're supposed to do. It's hard to, at the same time, you know, what you describe as that Kabbalas Ol Bitul. I, I'll let you describe it better. But for, but for that reason, those lines really, really resonated with me. It wasn't just, "Oh, look at another guy who's impressed by the Rebbe." That, that personally doesn't... That, that didn't excite me. But it was you addressing something from your v-your story, something that was, to me, very, very resonant and very relevant. So I, I think for anybody listening, we know now why this conversation is a good, will be a good one and why it's an important one. But now let's go to the beginning to give the background to the story. Where does the story

09:06 Speaker 2 of, uh, Rabbi Moshe Ginott begin?

09:09 Speaker 1 So it begins in Eretz Yisrael, uh, fifty-five years ago. And, uh-

09:15 Speaker 2 So just bring the mic a little bit closer to you

09:17 Speaker 1 When I was, um, a child, we moved to the United States.

09:22 Speaker 2 So you were born in Eretz Yisrael?

09:23 Speaker 1 Born in Eretz Yisrael. We moved to the United States. We moved to Cleveland for a while. After three years, we moved back to Eretz Yisrael. And when I was thirteen, we came back to Cleveland.

09:35 Speaker 2 Your father was a professor?

09:36 Speaker 1 My father was a businessman.

09:38 Speaker 2 Uh-huh.

09:39 Speaker 1 And, uh, he never did business in the United States really. He, he, he did it all in, in Eretz Yisrael. But there's a long and varied history of, of his, um, of his, uh, call it, um, frustration with, with the government. My family is a Etzel family, so through and through, from all directions. You have to know a little about, about the different underground movements in Eretz Yisrael before the mandate ended.

10:06 Speaker 2 So they weren't the ones that won, right?

10:07 Speaker 1 They weren't the ones that won. They were too right-wing and too...

10:12 Speaker 2 Remind me what was the name of the one that won?

10:14 Speaker 1 The Haganah-

10:15 Speaker 2 The Haganah, right

10:16 Speaker 1 ... was the one that-

10:16 Speaker 2 Became the Tsahal.

10:17 Speaker 1 Right.

10:17 Speaker 2 And, and, and-

10:18 Speaker 1 And, and everybody was swallowed into it and, and there was a... It wasn't a, uh, it wasn't a, a fluid process, but in the end, uh, the Etzel gave down its weapons and became part of the Tsahal.

10:29 Speaker 2 Etzel was the one that had its ship blown up?

10:31 Speaker 1 Right. Altalena.

10:32 Speaker 2 It's that one.

10:33 Speaker 1 Right. Right. Right.

10:34 Speaker 2 Okay.

10:35 Speaker 1 My, uh, my father's favorite, second favorite cousin was someone they called in the Etzel Nimro- Nimrod, was his, was his call name. So if anybody knows the history, then they know also what he did and, uh, and, uh... So we, we grew up in a, in, in s-sort of like a close-knit family with the other members, and he was one who took it... The, the others, others became professors, so they were able to travel to different places. He was a businessman, so he had to find a different way to do it. And, uh, he liked the freedom in the United States. And, uh, so we moved here and he, we became citizens, and he went through the whole process. And after high school in Cleveland, the first time I was there, I went to Hebrew Academy, which in Cleveland in the seventies, early seventies, was very, very Litvish. I don't know how it is now. It was like a cheder. It was basically all the Rebbeim were from, uh, from Telz.

11:33 Speaker 2 Yeah. Still is. Still-

11:35 Speaker 1 Maybe it still is. I, I don't know

11:36 Speaker 2 Well, there's, there's other parts of the community-

11:37 Speaker 1 Right. There's a-

11:38 Speaker 2 The yeshiva is still there

11:38 Speaker 1 ... it's grown a lot.

11:39 Speaker 2 Yeshiva is still there.

11:40 Speaker 1 The Hebrew Academy maybe become more eclectic maybe.

11:43 Speaker 2 Oh, maybe. I don't know.

11:43 Speaker 1 They have a Mizrachi school. They have some other stuff now. Probably today they would've sent me to Mizrachi, not to Hebrew Academy. Um, anyway, it's a, it's a long process, and the second time I came, I, I went to public school. I went to Beachwood Public School.

11:57 Speaker 2 Oh, you, you went back and you came back.

11:59 Speaker 1 When I was thirteen, we moved back to Cleveland. This time I went to public school, and w- I did my high school in there at Beachwood.

12:05 Speaker 2 Why is that? Because-

12:07 Speaker 1 Because he, uh, we had this whole idea. He had this whole idea, and I just was thirteen. What do I know? So, uh, he wanted me to finish a, a degree, uh, in college before I went back to the army.

12:19 Speaker 2 Uh-huh.

12:19 Speaker 1 Which is what I did, because I was for three years in high school-

12:22 Speaker 2 But your parents were religious?

12:23 Speaker 1 They were frum, but, uh, netivei hamikra, as we call.

12:26 Speaker 2 Right.

12:27 Speaker 1 Um.

12:27 Speaker 2 Kipah sruga.

12:28 Speaker 1 Kipah sruga. And, um, when I finished high school after, I, I, I didn't do the senior year because I was supposed to finish as fast as I could, and I wanted to get back there to Israel, even though by that time, I don't know how much I remembered. But I still had a lot of friends and still had a connection-

12:45 Speaker 2 So you-

12:45 Speaker 1 And I used to go back every summer.

12:47 Speaker 2 So your father wanted you to serve in the army?

12:48 Speaker 1 Yeah. He wanted me to, but he wanted me to-

12:51 Speaker 2 No, see despite-

12:51 Speaker 1 Serve under-

12:52 Speaker 2 Despite the past.

12:53 Speaker 1 Yeah. No, no, th-that wasn't never an issue.

12:55 Speaker 2 Uh-huh.

12:56 Speaker 1 It was more an issue of, of, um, a feeling, especially before '77, uh, when the Likud became, uh, the dominant party, that the country was going in a terrible direction. They were socialist and communist, and they didn't want any part of that.

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14:16 Speaker 1 In any case, after that, I went to Johns Hopkins. I did a degree in electrical engineering. And basically, the day I finished and I got the degree, I went back there to Israel.

14:25 Speaker 2 But-

14:25 Speaker 1 But by then, I already was a little bit different than what they, what I'd started out as. Uh, I'd started out as a kid who doesn't know very much about his life and this and that, and during the three years in, at Johns Hopkins, um, I became more and more, um, Yeshivish, let's call it.

14:42 Speaker 2 Really?

14:43 Speaker 1 Yeah. It's not a place to do it.

14:44 Speaker 2 Right.

14:45 Speaker 1 But it was more a counter, uh, argument to what I was, uh, encountering there. And so, um, I was hanging out around New York a lot. I never-

14:55 Speaker 2 But Johns Hopkins is in Baltimore.

14:57 Speaker 1 Baltimore.

14:57 Speaker 2 Right.

14:58 Speaker 1 I never made it to Brooklyn. The only place I came to in Brooklyn was Sheepshead Bay. That was... And I had friends there. But I never came to Crown Heights, didn't know where it was.

15:08 Speaker 2 Right.

15:08 Speaker 1 And given the background that I was connected to in Eretz Israel, which was Mercaz HaRav Yeshivat, Rav Kook Yeshivat.

15:16 Speaker 2 Wow.

15:16 Speaker 1 So I didn't want to have anything to do with it. What, what do I have to do with this crazy meshugas called, uh-

15:21 Speaker 2 Chabad

15:22 Speaker 1 ... Chabad.

15:22 Speaker 2 Oh, so you had it-

15:23 Speaker 1 And this Moshiach, this Moshiach thing. That's, that's all we knew about the Rebbe.

15:26 Speaker 2 Which years were this?

15:28 Speaker 1 Talking about I started, uh, college in 1988, and I finished in 1990.

15:34 Speaker 2 Okay. So th-this is in-

15:35 Speaker 1 This is the height.

15:36 Speaker 2 The height.

15:36 Speaker 1 The height. And what I kept hearing from Eretz Israel was, "He's a big, uh, person, but he's nuts. He's, like, not normal. What is this whole Moshiach thing?" So I stayed away.

15:49 Speaker 2 You're hearing that from who?

15:51 Speaker 1 From Rabbanim and, uh, Talmidim that I used to learn with in the summers.

15:56 Speaker 2 Of the, of the Tilumi-

15:57 Speaker 1 Yeah

15:57 Speaker 2 ... crowd.

15:58 Speaker 1 Right. Was very, very against it. Um, probably not as much as I remember, but it was very, like, very clear that this is off limits. It's not, it's not for us.

16:08 Speaker 2 This is not our way.

16:09 Speaker 1 Yeah. Um, I didn't know how much it wasn't their way yet. Like, uh, and just to, to some extent.

16:16 Speaker 2 Wait, they were so publicly against it? But they brought it famously-

16:18 Speaker 1 I don't think they were publicly against it in the sense that they would put up a paskevil and say, "This is, uh, something you don't do." But these were the conversations. When I talked to people and said, you know, "I go to New York. Wh-where do you think I should go? Who should, who should I see?"

16:32 Speaker 2 Right.

16:33 Speaker 1 The, the-

16:34 Speaker 2 Stay away

16:34 Speaker 1 ... point I'd say, "Wait, that's not, that's not normal."

16:36 Speaker 2 Uh-huh. Yeah, 'cause, like, Mordechai Eliyahu, Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu-

16:40 Speaker 1 Yeah, but he came. He was different

16:41 Speaker 2 He, he's not Tilumi.

16:41 Speaker 1 He's different.

16:42 Speaker 2 He's not Til-

16:42 Speaker 1 He's very different.

16:43 Speaker 2 No.

16:43 Speaker 1 Yeah. Um, even Rav Shapira, who was eventually the head of the Rav Kook Yeshivat, he's also very different. He also-

16:51 Speaker 2 He also came to the-

16:51 Speaker 1 He's a Rishoni.

16:52 Speaker 2 He came to the Rebbe as well, right?

16:53 Speaker 1 Yeah. But he, he came in the capacity of being the chief rabbi.

16:56 Speaker 2 Right.

16:57 Speaker 1 I don't think he came before or after.

16:58 Speaker 2 So yeah, it's more political.

17:00 Speaker 1 It's more, uh, I don't know political, but it's more like, uh, it's an official visit.

17:04 Speaker 2 Right.

17:05 Speaker 1 Mordechai Eliyahu was different. Mordechai Eliyahu was... He saw the Rebbe as something more than the way that Rav Shapira saw him.

17:12 Speaker 2 Yeah.

17:13 Speaker 1 And you can see from the conversation, it's a, it's a different type of conversation.

17:16 Speaker 2 Right.

17:16 Speaker 1 He asks him for a bracha. It's, it's a different world.

17:20 Speaker 2 It's different, yeah.

17:21 Speaker 1 Um, but getting back to the story, the story was that, uh, eventually, I, I went back in 1990 to the army, but I didn't go directly. Now I was more interested in first learning. So I went to the Rav Kook Yeshivat and was there for a while.

17:35 Speaker 2 What, in like a, in like a mix learning and-

17:38 Speaker 1 No, no, just learning.

17:39 Speaker 2 They let you-

17:39 Speaker 1 Just learning

17:39 Speaker 2 ... they let you take a, take a-

17:41 Speaker 1 Yeah. The army wasn't, uh, ready yet. Put it that way. I had meetings with them because I was an engineer, so they want to find the right position.

17:50 Speaker 2 Uh-huh.

17:50 Speaker 1 So they said, "Take your time. We'll, we'll figure it out."

17:53 Speaker 2 You were coming in as an officer or something.

17:54 Speaker 1 Right. I came in as an officer. Everything was, uh, was different. That, that was my father's big, uh, plan.

18:00 Speaker 2 Idea.

18:01 Speaker 1 In any case, uh, I bless him for him because it gave me many things, but, uh-

18:06 Speaker 2 Right

18:06 Speaker 1 ... in, in retrospect, it was the wrong thing for me to do. I'm not an engineer. Uh, I'm not the type.

18:12 Speaker 2 Uh-huh.

18:12 Speaker 1 You have to be a certain type. I'm not. I can do the math, but I can't do what they actually do. In any case, um, so I went through the army, and the time in the army just strengthened my interest in learning Torah more deeply. Another thing that was very important was that I had a cousin, who's already niftar many years ago, but he was . And I used to spend Shabboses in their home.

18:40 Speaker 2 Where is this? In Israel?

18:41 Speaker 1 Yeah. They, they used to live in Jerusalem, then they moved to Beit El, and he was a s- he was a student of Rabbi Mordechai Tiah, whoever knows him. And over the years, very interesting hashkafa practice was discovered about that connection. In any case, so I also learned with him a lot. And he was very interesting character in and of himself. He was Sephardi. He was actually not even a Ashkenazi. It was interesting how we were cousins, how, how that actually happened. But when I finished the army, I started working, and I wasn't sure if I wanted to go back to yeshiva or not. I started working in my cousin's, uh, business in engineering. And a new yeshiva came to town. This was in Ramat Gan, which is a suburb of Tel Aviv. And the yeshiva was headed by a very important rav now in the Dati Leumi world, whose name is Yehoshua Shapira. No relation to the elder Shapira. This is a different Shapira, which is actually a Hassidic family. His father was Rav Steinsaltz's best friend, Moshe Shapira.

19:42 Speaker 2 Mm-hmm.

19:43 Speaker 1 And he had studied for many years under Rav Ginzberg in Shechem. There was a yeshiva in Shechem called Od Yosef Chai. It was very militant yeshiva, very, very, um, stark, and the, the most right wing you could have.

20:00 Speaker 2 Wait, Jews were allowed in Shechem back then?

20:01 Speaker 1 Yeah.

20:02 Speaker 2 Today, no, right?

20:03 Speaker 1 Today, they can come in with the army, uh-

20:05 Speaker 2 Right

20:06 Speaker 1 ... this is sort of-

20:06 Speaker 2 But there's no yeshiva in Shechem today.

20:08 Speaker 1 It's gone. Fr- from two thousand when there was, uh, the whole-

20:11 Speaker 2 Intifada

20:11 Speaker 1 ... the whole r- second Intifada, they, they closed it down. They're now trying to reopen it now, but we'll see if it happens. In any case, so he came, and I started hearing him. And-

20:24 Speaker 2 So he was, he wa- his... So just to recap.

20:26 Speaker 1 Yehoshua Shapira-

20:26 Speaker 2 He was a student of Rav Ginzberg-

20:28 Speaker 1 Right

20:28 Speaker 2 ... and the son of the best friend of Rav Steinsaltz.

20:31 Speaker 1 Of Rav Steinsaltz. He's full of Hassidus, but he doesn't recognize himself as a Hassid. He recognizes himself as a Dati Leumi or Haredi Leumi, as they call it now.

20:40 Speaker 2 How are Rabbi Ginzberg and Rabbi Steinsaltz seen in, by your friends? Are they seen as Chabadniks, or are they seen as-

20:45 Speaker 1 Yes.

20:46 Speaker 2 They are seen-

20:46 Speaker 1 Both of them. Completely.

20:48 Speaker 2 So they're, they're part-

20:48 Speaker 1 I once asked Rav Steinsaltz, "So are you a Lubavitcher or not?" So he told me like he says to everyone, "Well, if it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it must be a duck." But every- anybody who knew him knew he was a Lubavitcher. It wasn't, like, such a big, uh, secret. He was just too big for the usual, uh, call it uniform.

21:08 Speaker 2 Oh, no, no, I don't have any doubts about it.

21:09 Speaker 1 No, you-

21:10 Speaker 2 My, my question is more, my question is more if you, i- if you're describing how your world saw Chabad, and this is already-

21:17 Speaker 1 Right

21:17 Speaker 2 ... this is already post-stroke?

21:19 Speaker 1 This is... No, this is much, much... This is, we're talking nineteen nine... Oh, the Rebbe's stroke?

21:24 Speaker 2 Yeah.

21:24 Speaker 1 No, it's after the R- after, after Gimmel Tammuz.

21:26 Speaker 2 After Gimmel Tammuz. So in a way, Chabad has gone even, for some people, even kookier.

21:31 Speaker 1 Can, but again-

21:33 Speaker 2 So, so how did your people, how did your people see-

21:35 Speaker 1 They saw the teachings of Chabad. Again, that there was-

21:38 Speaker 2 But how did they see Rabbi Steinsaltz? How did your friends see Rabbi Steinsaltz and Rabbi Ginsburg? How did you see them?

21:42 Speaker 1 I didn't know Rav Steinsaltz at the time. It was later that I met him. So I didn't know what Rav Steinsaltz was. He, for me, he was just the redactor of the Talmud into Hebrew.

21:51 Speaker 2 I see.

21:52 Speaker 1 That's how I saw him. I didn't even know if he was alive. I didn't even know there was such a person-

21:56 Speaker 2 Uh-huh

21:56 Speaker 1 ... walking the globe at the time. It was a couple of years later that I met him.

22:01 Speaker 2 Okay.

22:02 Speaker 1 But the point was that I started hearing Hassidus from someone who was absolutely not a Hassid in a certain sense, like almost had to distance himself from it because he had such a strong connection. But he wanted to teach Hassidus because he saw that the generation needed it.

22:18 Speaker 2 Is it Chabad specifically, or Breslov, the whole-

22:21 Speaker 1 Whether they like it or not, it's all Chabad. They can add all kinds of things, but the, we call it the, the, uh, spinal column of what they teach, what he taught, what others teach today is Chabad.

22:33 Speaker 2 Right.

22:34 Speaker 1 There's no... The, the... It's very hard to make Hesed tales-

22:37 Speaker 2 Right

22:37 Speaker 1 ... without Chabad. That's the point, that Chabad is the only place where, or almost the only place where Hassidus was explained to the level that you can act- actually understand it as a system.

22:53 Speaker 2 Right.

22:54 Speaker 1 In other places, you get bits and pieces.

22:56 Speaker 2 Right.

22:56 Speaker 1 But you don't understand what, what it was. I, the way I teach my, my talmidim now is that the Alter Rebbe didn't know the Baal Shem Tov, but everybody knew there was such a person. So the question became, how can you become such a person? Everybody knew what he did, but nobody understood what-

23:17 Speaker 2 How he got there.

23:18 Speaker 1 Yeah. How, how do you become that? The, the, the famous statement from the Rebbe Rashab, that the Baal Shem Tov showed you what to do, but the Alter Rebbe showed how to be, how to be able to do that. How do you, how do you actually do that? To, to show someone how to actually be able to do that is not to, like, take them into a shop and show them you move this, uh, tool this way and that tool that way. That would be like engineering. You have to explain in Torah. You have to understand what was his outlook. How does he, how does he see the world? How did the Baal Shem Tov understood the world? For many gen- many generations, actually, a lot of people thought, especially in academia, they thought he was a, a, an ignoramus. He didn't know anything. He just did what he did.

24:01 Speaker 2 People said about the Baal Shem Tov.

24:02 Speaker 1 About the Baal Shem Tov.

24:03 Speaker 2 Right.

24:04 Speaker 1 The, and the Alter Rebbe developed the language to explain in some... It's a little philosophical, but in the end, it's Torah language to understand what, what it is that the Baal Shem Tov saw differently about the world. He understood differently about the world. It allowed him to invoke Hashem in a way that nobody had invoked him for many, many generations, or at least not openly.

24:28 Speaker 2 Right.

24:28 Speaker 1 And to change people using that to... Meaning, the Baal Shem Tov is not a miracle worker in the sense that he's some kind of magician, which is why he's called the Baal Shem, because the Baal Shem was, in that time, like a magician. He was like somebody who was a wizard. It was-

24:41 Speaker 2 Right

24:41 Speaker 1 ... who could do all kinds of tricks. So no, no, this is much simpler. This is a, a direct relationship with Hashem using a language that was not known at the time, and the Alter Rebbe gave the words to that language.

24:57 Speaker 2 Very interesting. Yeah, I don't want to get... I, I don't want to go down too far down this path.

25:01 Speaker 1 So everybody needs Chabad in that sense, that if you want to understand, ev- everything else is like, um... The way I see it is almost like the Baal Shem Tov also. And say, "I can do this. I can do this. I can do this." But there's no explanation of what is the framework.

25:14 Speaker 2 Right.

25:14 Speaker 1 Like, how you actually understand things so that you can also be like the Baal-- You're gonna be able to be the Baal Shem Tov. You're not as holy.

25:22 Speaker 2 Right.

25:22 Speaker 1 You're not as great. You're not as j-a genius also in terms of understanding. You're not as innovative maybe, but he forged a path. It's a path you can walk, and, and, and the Alter Rebbe gave us the language to be able to get there.

25:39 Speaker 2 Yeah, but-

25:39 Speaker 1 Each one according to his abilities.

25:42 Speaker 2 Well, wait, wait. What you're telling me, why you're telling me, I'm thinking, and, and I, again, I don't, I don't want to detract from your story. We'll get back to it very, very quickly. But, like the irony that what you're describing to me is Chabad demystifies the tzadik.

25:57 Speaker 1 Yeah.

25:58 Speaker 2 Right?

25:58 Speaker 1 Right.

25:58 Speaker 2 And today, you know-

26:01 Speaker 1 It's the opposite

26:01 Speaker 2 ... it's the opposite.

26:01 Speaker 1 Right.

26:01 Speaker 2 It's all about mystifying. Like God forbid, and I mean, the obvious counter claim would be, yeah, the Alter Rebbe can demystify the Baal Shem Tov, and really by demystifying, he's mystifying. But I, I think it's just an interesting framework that you're suggesting, which I think is also true. I mean, it's a basic idea that Chabad takes the etzem of, of, of, of, of, of Torah, the etzem of Chumash and Torah, and puts it into the, is masa- is, is Demystifying is a little hard for Hashem. Why?

26:50 Speaker 1 But because Hashem in the end is untenable. You cannot understand Hashem. There's always-

26:55 Speaker 2 Godliness. Maybe Godliness

26:56 Speaker 1 ... But Godliness. What does it mean to be a godly person?

26:59 Speaker 2 Right.

26:59 Speaker 1 What does a Go- what inner language does a godly person have?

27:04 Speaker 2 Right.

27:04 Speaker 1 That inner language is what the, the Alter Rebbe begins to develop. He develops it very far. I mean, say after that, you can almost say it's all, uh, just further explanations. The problem is that for us, uh, in a certain sense, the, the Rebbe was like a second Baal Shem Tov.

27:22 Speaker 2 Interesting.

27:23 Speaker 1 He's, he's not following normally the same rule book that was set up already.

27:31 Speaker 2 What do you mean?

27:31 Speaker 1 He changes. He changes a lot of things.

27:33 Speaker 2 For example.

27:35 Speaker 1 It's like you said, the, the generations before, it's exactly the, the issue you started with. Generations before all seem to be very involved in the sechel. They all, they were all involved in trying to understand and trying to serve Hashem, serve Hashem through the sechel.

27:50 Speaker 2 Right.

27:50 Speaker 1 Obviously, there's action, but, but, but, um-

27:52 Speaker 2 An interior life

27:53 Speaker 1 ... Right, right. An, an inner life. And the Rebbe suddenly puts a stress on action-

27:59 Speaker 2 Right

27:59 Speaker 1 ... that doesn't seem to have been available to everyone the way that the, that he proposed it in, in previous generations.

28:12 Speaker 2 You mean like a certain transparency where, where, where-

28:14 Speaker 1 Right

28:14 Speaker 2 ... the interior has to shine through? Is that what you mean?

28:17 Speaker 1 That the interior is not as important.

28:20 Speaker 2 Oh, that's what you mean.

28:20 Speaker 1 Hmm. That the actions, Right ... and whether you understand or don't understand, it would be nice if you understood, but you don't have to understand.

28:30 Speaker 2 Ah, so you mean, so he's like the Baal Shem Tov, where-

28:33 Speaker 1 Right

28:33 Speaker 2 ... the what is more important than the how.

28:35 Speaker 1 Important than the how. Right.

28:36 Speaker 2 Interesting.

28:36 Speaker 1 Right. And that's why there's a, there's a gap. And the same thing with the Baal Shem Tov. There was a gap. The Maggid was a gap. The Maggid tried to explain, and the Alter Rebbe heard him. He said, "But somehow this doesn't, uh, doesn't grasp it. It doesn't transfer. It's not translatable." The, the w- the, the work that the Maggid did was too obtuse. It was too difficult.

28:58 Speaker 2 Right.

28:59 Speaker 1 And the Alter Rebbe found a language to bring it down. And I, I think most of what the Alter Rebbe says is already you can find the, the roots of it in the, in the, in the Maggid, but, but it's very hard to understand there. It's, the langu-- It wasn't written... He di- he didn't have the same gifts that the Alter Rebbe had. And it was a different set of, uh, uh, of tools that Hashem gave him.

29:23 Speaker 2 Right.

29:23 Speaker 1 His, his gift was to get people. He was very good at getting the top, top people to the town.

29:29 Speaker 2 The Alter Rebbe? The Alter Rebbe.

29:30 Speaker 1 Everybody. Everybody was around him.

29:31 Speaker 2 Yeah.

29:32 Speaker 1 You know, they, they, they took him out of Vilna also. They, they took them for everyone. Wherever they saw and wherever the Maggid felt it was a, like someone who, who had a good cup, he got him. He wanted him.

29:43 Speaker 2 Right.

29:44 Speaker 1 And they followed him. But in the end, the Alter Rebbe understood it differently than they did. And they followed the Maggid the way people followed the, the Baal Shem Tov. And I think the Alter Rebbe already saw how do you explain this? How do you, how do you create a, a real movement out of this?

30:04 Speaker 2 Yeah.

30:05 Speaker 1 By the way, it's very common. I've, I've heard this from many Hasidim in Eretz Israel, Belz and Gur and, uh, uh, other places. They say there's really only two Hasidic movements, like movements in the sense of something's moving.

30:17 Speaker 2 Right.

30:17 Speaker 1 This is Chabad and Breslov. They're the only ones that are really moving. Everybody else is, uh, preserving the past, not going anywhere.

30:25 Speaker 2 So Breslov does offer an alternative.

30:27 Speaker 1 It's an, it's a different type of alternative. It's not based necessarily on action. It's based on something that's very hard to understand, but it's, um, it's a type of... It's a type of very, um, you would say, simplified version of the Baal Shem Tov. Like you can be like, you, you, you can be holy and, and so on and so forth. In Chabad doesn't... You don't talk about being holy. What, what am I gonna talk about? They're about the actions. Can you do, can you do what you need to do, what needs to be done? In any case, getting back to the story, so I started, I started then hearing really Chabad from, uh, from Rabbi Yehoshua Shapira. He didn't call Chabad. He taught Rav Kook. It was only later that I understood that he's, he's playing a game here. He's, he's teaching Rav Kook. But really, really he's explaining what he learned in Hasidus. And he's, he's, he's, uh, he's enclothing it in the language of Rav Kook, which is a very interesting understanding as it is because Rav Kook was, in the end, even though he came from, you know, he came from a Chabad family from his mother's side. His grandfather from, from his mother's side was the main Lubavitcher. It wasn't called Lubavitch back then. It was called Chabad because he wasn't from Lubavitch. He was from, um, one of the other sons of the Samach Sidik.

31:56 Speaker 2 Kapust? Not Kapust?

31:58 Speaker 1 It wasn't Kapust. I don't remember. It w- it was... I don't remember who, which one it was.

32:03 Speaker 2 Right.

32:04 Speaker 1 And they had a mashpia in his, when he grew up, that used to teach Torah Or and Likutei Torah that were already out, and he used to ma- he used to chazar Torah Or and Likutei Torah.

32:16 Speaker 2 Rabbi Kook.

32:17 Speaker 1 Rabbi Kook, on Shabbos and Shabbos Sidis.

32:20 Speaker 2 Hmm.

32:21 Speaker 1 And this mashpia, as it turns out, his name, if I'm not mistaken, was, um, like the Etrogan, um, Yaniver. He was a talmid of Rabbi Isaac of Homel. So Rav Kook had two big ideas that he said were, were, were the most important in his teachings or the biggest innovations. He didn't claim they were his, but he claimed in terms of introducing them to the world, he did the work, and they both come from Rabbi Isaac.

32:52 Speaker 2 Really?

32:53 Speaker 1 Mm-hmm.

32:53 Speaker 2 Which are?

32:55 Speaker 1 He calls one of them Shlimut ve-Hishtalmut, which means being and becoming, basically. That's the way, uh, you know, the philosophers would call it. There's a state of being where everything is shlem, everything is already whole. There's no need to do anything. There's a state of becoming, which is... In Chabad, we would call it the big difference that the Alter Rebbe introduces and probably the most important maamar that he explains the Baal Shem Tov's shita. He says one's called Helim ve-Giluy, and the other one's called Etem ve-Hisпахdus. So th- that, that's equivalent to that. Then the second idea, he calls it Daat Elokim. It's, um, it's a, it's a article that he wrote. And basically, it's one of the ideas from the Baal Shem Tov that Rav Isaac explains. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a subheading of His- Hisпахdus, what Hisпахdus is exactly. But he explains it in terms of the psyche, in terms of the psychology of a person, how we start out knowing Hashem perfectly, and then at some point in our development around age three or four, we lose that ability, and we begin to see a fractured world in which Hashem only shows up as, like, in the language of the Ariza"l, like sparks of holiness in different places. And we spend our whole lives trying to put back that picture that we had as a child. Rav Stanzel once to- once told me a beautiful story, and I told this to everyone because it's such a beautiful story. He

34:23 Speaker 1 says he was once, uh, hosted somewhere, and I think it was in Philadelphia. And he was up in the, in, in... At night, he was learning, and then he hears there were two little kids. One's, like, four. The, there's five, something like that, in the, in the, in the ch- children's room, and they're talking in the middle of the night, and he went to hear. He loved children, you know, the whole thing. So he listened to them. He hears that the older one, the five-year-old, is saying to the four-year-old, "I wanna talk to Hashem. Remind me how you do it." So the older one's saying to the younger one how... They have a language. The-- We all have language, but we lose it at some point.

35:01 Speaker 2 Right.

35:02 Speaker 1 It, it fractures because we have a fractured existence at some point. We, we begin to see objects. We don't see the, the, the wholeness of reality.

35:10 Speaker 2 Hmm.

35:11 Speaker 1 So anyway, so I was learning from him. It took me about a year to figure out that he's not talking from himself. He didn't invent this language because it came from somewhere.

35:21 Speaker 2 Right.

35:22 Speaker 1 And so slowly, I began to understand he's, he's talking from what he learned from Rav Ginsberg. So after a year, somebody invited me to a shiur in Rav Ginsberg's house. It turns out, I think that was when he first came back after he had been arrested, and after the arrest, he came to America for, like, a month to, you know, to tour here and-

35:42 Speaker 2 For those who don't know, he was arrested. It revolved with, with relation to-

35:44 Speaker 1 Nobody knows why he was arrested. He was arrested by Peres, who had nothing to do... And people think it's related to Baruch Goldwasser. It's not related to that at all.

35:51 Speaker 2 No, I, I don't know Baruch Goldwasser. I just know that he was very, he was very involved with, with, with, uh, at the time, with the settlements, right?

35:57 Speaker 1 He's always, you know, he's always been.

35:59 Speaker 2 But at the time, it was more of a th-- It, it was a smaller movement at the time, wasn't it?

36:02 Speaker 1 Yeah, but that wasn't the reason. We don't know what the reason was.

36:04 Speaker 2 That wasn't it.

36:05 Speaker 1 It was what they call a, um, a, a technical detention or something like that. They have this law from the Turks that you can put somebody in jail without any due process.

36:15 Speaker 2 In Israel?

36:16 Speaker 1 Yeah.

36:16 Speaker 2 Yes.

36:16 Speaker 1 They can keep them in there for, for a year, I think.

36:18 Speaker 2 Right.

36:19 Speaker 1 So he was there for thir- uh, for seventeen days, I think, and, uh, afterwards, he was r- he was, uh, released because the Supre-- 'cause his case came up before the Supreme Court. You can appeal to the Supreme Court. And he had a hearing, and they, they listened to him, and they said, "Well, there's no reason."

36:34 Speaker 2 They never explained why he was-

36:35 Speaker 1 It was, it was never released. And it was Peres's fear of-

36:39 Speaker 2 Peres. I thought you said Paris. Peres.

36:41 Speaker 1 Peres. Shimon Peres.

36:43 Speaker 2 Right.

36:45 Speaker 1 In any case, getting back to that. So I think he, he just had come back, and I went to hear the first shiur after he came back. And the first time I heard him, I said, "This is, this is what, what I need." Now, the truth was, I had heard him many times before. I didn't realize because there were tapes going around, and I didn't understand who this person was. I had no idea. I certainly had no idea that he had anything to do with Chabad. I was listening to him, and he's, uh, he's... The Kabbalah I know from my bro- from my cousin He's the depth of philosophy that I like from other places, and he's a genius in Torah. It's great. And I listened to it, and he spoke to me. It was very, very, very premium. I really loved the language and connected to it immediately. And then I suddenly put it together that he is a guy who I was listening to about, uh, Shechinah B'Nehem, about his marriage, uh, book. Um, pretty much the next day I started working for him.

37:37 Speaker 2 Really?

37:38 Speaker 1 Yeah. They called me up. They said, "We heard that you know English. Would you be willing to translate something into English?" I said, "Sure." This is-- Remember, this is 1995 or '6.

37:48 Speaker 2 So a little over thirty years ago.

37:50 Speaker 1 And there's no AI. There's only... You have to translate everything yourself. And, uh, so I translated and I started working right away. And over the next, uh, until I got married, the next five years, I started working more and more for him until eventually I even was there every day, and, uh, we were working on books and so on.

38:10 Speaker 2 And where was he based?

38:11 Speaker 1 In Far Chabad. He lived in Far Chabad.

38:12 Speaker 2 Far Chabad. His yeshiva is also based in Far Chabad?

38:14 Speaker 1 No, he's not-

38:15 Speaker 2 Is it-

38:15 Speaker 1 He has a yeshiva

38:16 Speaker 2 Oh, he doesn't have a yeshiva?

38:17 Speaker 1 His yeshiva used to be Ode Yosef Chai in Shechem.

38:20 Speaker 2 And Gal-Ed. Oh, Gal-Ed is an institute, not a yeshiva.

38:22 Speaker 1 It's, right. It's what publishes his work.

38:24 Speaker 2 Right.

38:24 Speaker 1 And over the years, yeshivas have been, uh, started. So there are now two yeshivas in Jerusalem, and there's a yeshiva here and there, and there's Kollel and-

38:32 Speaker 2 Under his auspices.

38:34 Speaker 1 Right. He's like the Nasi. He's not the, he's not the, uh, he's the president. He's not the, uh-

38:38 Speaker 2 Principal

38:39 Speaker 1 ... he's not the principal or something.

38:40 Speaker 2 So he lives in Far Chabad.

38:41 Speaker 1 He lives in Far Chabad. He does his thing, and he teaches.

38:46 Speaker 2 Teaches where?

38:48 Speaker 1 Now, he mostly teaches in Far Chabad, in his home.

38:51 Speaker 2 Like online-

38:52 Speaker 1 Mm-hmm

38:52 Speaker 2 ... or people come to his classes?

38:53 Speaker 1 No, people come to his classes. He doesn't... I mean, everything's broadcast. It's all on YouTube. But, um, but, uh, his, his style has always been just to teach in different places. Now, since he's older and he went through a transplant a year and a half ago for a kidney, so he's mostly at home. But he, he just now, on Tuesday, he was in, uh, Netanya. So sometimes he does, does travel. And when I started working for him, I started beginning to understand there's something called Chabad, which I wasn't told about. I didn't realize Chabad was a philosophy. I didn't realize it was Torah. I didn't re-realize it had anything to do with the real world. Otherwise, again, my, my very, very distant understanding was Mashiach, Mashiach. All the songs about Mashiach. And like all the Mashiach groups in the world that ever were, it seemed to be something very... A-again, I was very young also. I was, like, twenty-four, twenty-five. I didn't have the depth of understanding human experience and Mashiach can be something more than just a catchphrase. It can actually be something. But I didn't understand that. Um, the world was also very black and white back then. There's the good guys, and there's the bad guys, and anybody who ever dealt with Mashiach ended up being a bad guy, and anybody who didn't deal with Mashiach was a good guy, and that was-

40:11 Speaker 2 Right

40:11 Speaker 1 ... pretty much how I saw the world. Eh, I guess that's how you see the world when you're in your twenties, early twenties.

40:15 Speaker 2 That's right.

40:15 Speaker 1 Maybe I was more extreme than other people. But from Rav Ginsburgh, it began to, sort of, sort of It's interesting. I'm, I'm writing, and I need citations, and I need sources. So he points me, and he's terrible at sources. He doesn't remember where anything is.

40:31 Speaker 2 Really?

40:31 Speaker 1 Yeah. He, everything is in his mind. He doesn't-- He integrates it so powerfully that in the end, he doesn't remember where it's from. So he's the most terrible person in the world to ask for sources. So he would just send me randomly to somewhere he knew probably he talks about it. So I began to, to learn. So he told me, "This is in Torah Or, this is in Lipote Torah, this is in, uh, Imrei Bina, this is here, this is there." I began, I began to buy the books. And I love learning, so I started learning. And I realized this is something completely different than everything I've ever seen. I mean, I didn't really know what Chasidus was. I said, "This is Chasidus. This is great." I want to be a Hasid.

41:08 Speaker 2 So until this point, you were getting Chasidus as ideas but not as texts. You weren't, you... This was-

41:13 Speaker 1 I didn't even know about, uh, Hasidic ideas. I, I didn't even know they were connected to Chasidus.

41:18 Speaker 2 No, but you... Oh, so even when you came to Rav Ginsburgh, you just knew it as the ideas that had-

41:22 Speaker 1 Yeah

41:22 Speaker 2 ... ta-spoken to you-

41:22 Speaker 1 Right

41:22 Speaker 2 ... but not as Chasidus.

41:23 Speaker 1 So I didn't know Chasidus at that... Some of it I recognized as Kabbalistic ideas from him, his Chasidus.

41:29 Speaker 2 Right.

41:29 Speaker 1 But most of it, I had no idea where, where, where this came from. I, I, I certainly couldn't tell you how this was descended, how this descended from the Alter Rebbe and, and, and maybe even from the, from the Maggid. And I certainly didn't know where this was, uh, written or anything like that. This was all new to me. This was completely, completely new. I couldn't even tell you back then that Chasidus had anything to do with the psychology of a person. I, I couldn't even tell you that. There was no... I, I didn't know anything. Because I grew up in a Dati Leumi house, Haredi Leumi house. There's no knowledge. The... It's changed. Over the last thirty years, it's changed a lot. Because of Rav Ginsburgh and Moshe Shapiro, who I mentioned before, the father of, of the rabbi in, uh, Ramat Gan. And Rav Steinsaltz al-also, but not as much as these two. They, they did most of the work.

42:21 Speaker 2 Yeah, because he wasn't, he wasn't in that world.

42:22 Speaker 1 Right. He, he didn't... No, he was in the world, but he didn't, he didn't... Rav Steinsaltz had a more holistic picture of Yiddishkeit.

42:32 Speaker 2 Mm-hmm.

42:32 Speaker 1 He wouldn't say this is Chasidus or this is that, even though he taught Chasidus every week.

42:37 Speaker 2 Right.

42:37 Speaker 1 And in his Chasidus shiurim, he would teach a Hasidic text.

42:42 Speaker 2 Right.

42:42 Speaker 1 It's a Hasidic or whatever he was teaching. So if you were very close to him, you knew he was taking from Chabad. That's why people kept asking, "Is he really Chabad or not?" Because he's such an eclectic guy, so, so... You know, he had, in his house, he had a, a Shul library, just responsa. There was like, um, I don't know, seven hundred books. When he was sick, I remember this, when he, he, he got cancer when he was in, in his, uh, seventies, early seventies. So he was at home a lot. He didn't, he didn't ha- He wasn't able to keep up the same schedule. He still worked every day, but he was home a lot. He told me at the end, it was like a seven-month period, a eight-month period, the, he went over the whole, all the Shutim again. He has, people don't know this, he has a book that is Perushim on Chumash from Shutim.

43:34 Speaker 2 Really?

43:34 Speaker 1 It's collected. This is before there was any search. Then he wrote this in the '60s.

43:38 Speaker 2 Right.

43:39 Speaker 1 It's very, very eclectic. He didn't understand the world is divided into this and that. He saw everything.

43:45 Speaker 2 Wow.

43:45 Speaker 1 But as I, at some point realized, the Rebbe was something else. For him, the Rebbe was something else. It's like everybody's great. He, he knew everyone, but somehow the Rebbe was something entirely different, and he kept speaking about it in a completely different way. By the way, he also spoke about the Friediker Rebbe the same way.

44:07 Speaker 2 Really?

44:08 Speaker 1 Yeah. Not, he didn't know him.

44:10 Speaker 2 Right.

44:10 Speaker 1 But he, he, he's... From different points of view, not, not from the total greatness. In terms of heartfelt connection and, uh, mesirus nefesh that the Friediker Rebbe had and things like that. He s- he thought it was something different in this generation. But in the terms of the people that he knew, and he really knew everyone, he said the Rebbe was a completely different, uh, level. I didn't understand that before the, when, before he started telling me that. Then I realized if he thinks this way, and Rav Ginsburg thinks this way, and they're the two smartest people I know, so what, w- where's the Rebbe? W- w- what's going on here?

44:50 Speaker 2 And all this is in the same-

44:52 Speaker 1 This was all before-

44:52 Speaker 2 This is pushing you away. This is all pushing you away.

44:55 Speaker 1 It was, it was making me more, more accustomed to the idea, but not yet able to connect me to it.

45:02 Speaker 2 But you were deliberately staying away from his far.

45:04 Speaker 1 Right. Why? That's what I wrote in the post. In the end, when I look back on it, it's an ego issue. This... Maybe my ego is bigger than other people who come from the same place. Maybe the other people are more, uh, accommodating, they're willing to learn other things. I don't know so much. I, I don't think it's just me. I think in general-

45:25 Speaker 2 Couldn't it be that you had, when you were younger, been told to reject him, so to, to, to, to accept his ideas later on, that, that itself is like an admission that it's, it's hard to admit that you made a mistake because A, A, the ego, and B, it's like if now I start regretting my past, and I don't wanna regret my past.

45:48 Speaker 1 I learned a lot of things that were from people that I was told to reject.

45:52 Speaker 2 Uh-huh.

45:52 Speaker 1 I never had that problem.

45:54 Speaker 2 Uh-huh. So it's like that-

45:55 Speaker 1 I've learned a lot of things, which I'm not gonna repeat here.

45:58 Speaker 2 Uh-huh.

45:59 Speaker 1 I'll, I will tell a few stories about a particular period of time that really changed me, and there's... The, the rest of the post was just, I didn't have time, I didn't have the strength to write. Uh, but, but it's a story that needs to be told. Um, so I, I don't think it was that I was told to reject him. Um, my parents actually went to Seven Seventy at some point when we were in the United States. I'm not sure exactly when it was, but the, but they did come.

46:28 Speaker 2 What? For Yechidas?

46:29 Speaker 1 No. It was another thing-

46:31 Speaker 2 Dollars. Dollars.

46:32 Speaker 1 It was somewhere in between. Maybe it was dollars. Could be that it was beginning of dollars.

46:36 Speaker 2 Mm-hmm.

46:37 Speaker 1 Um, I'm not sure. I wasn't there. I, I was in, in school. I didn't travel with them to New York. Um, when I look back on it, it's, it's ego, and it's a particular type of ego, and it's exactly what you quoted there, that there is a danger for all of us when someone has a clearer picture of reality than we do. That really undermines the ego. That's... What, what is the ego? The ego is my perspective is holy.

47:08 Speaker 2 Right. To protect-

47:08 Speaker 1 My perspective is special. I have to protect it. I have to. I, a person who doesn't protect his ego is not normal.

47:13 Speaker 2 Right.

47:13 Speaker 1 You have to have some measure of ego.

47:16 Speaker 2 Right.

47:17 Speaker 1 Um, you can't fight it entirely. You, you have to lessen it. You have to work with it. You have to make it secondary. Whatever you want, but, but in the end, you have to re- retain a sense of self, and the ego does that for us. So there wa-- In, in the end, the issue was how can there be someone else who has not just a clearer picture of reality, but more importantly, has a This year marks seventy-five years since Yud Shvat and the first Basse LeGani. If you're looking for an event that is memorable, meaningful, and affordable, let me recommend This World Is a Garden, a film and live concert production created by us here at Uvlah Media, inspired by Basse LeGani, the first Rebbe said. If you're a regular here at HFL, you know that Basse LeGani is something that we think about and talk about a lot, and in this production, we use the power of cinematic filmmaking and a live concert by a string quartet to bring the beauty of Basse LeGani to your community and your audience in a way that they've never seen, heard, or experienced it before. The production has already been hosted by Chabad houses around the country and has drawn wonderful reviews. Our package comes with everything that you need to put on the production, the film's original arrangements for string quartet, publicity materials, everything besides the string quartet, which we recommend that you hire locally to save on travel costs. To find out more about

48:56 Speaker 1 this production, please visit thisworldisagarden.com. Again, thisworldisagarden.com. And now, back to the show. One second, one second. I wanna drill down on that a bit for a second. You're saying that a person that, that finding out that someone has a cl... You, you've made one point that everyone needs to have a sense of that my vision is or my- My perspective

49:19 Speaker 2 ... concept of reality is, is, is sacrosanct.

49:21 Speaker 1 Right.

49:22 Speaker 2 I, I need to have a sense of, of, of self, right?

49:25 Speaker 1 Right.

49:25 Speaker 2 Like, who am I? Like-

49:27 Speaker 1 Mm-hmm

49:27 Speaker 2 ... do I have any agency? Am I, do I, do I know how to do anything?

49:31 Speaker 1 Right.

49:33 Speaker 2 Right? Then you make the second point, which is if I find out that someone has a clearer version of reality, I can't accept that.

49:40 Speaker 1 It's very hard.

49:41 Speaker 2 I mean, don't we all learn from people that have-

49:44 Speaker 1 Yeah

49:44 Speaker 2 ... ideas?

49:45 Speaker 1 Of course. It's an idea that I incorporate into my perspective.

49:48 Speaker 2 Right. So but someone... But we also learn from people who are much smarter than us. We do that all the time.

49:53 Speaker 1 That's knowledge.

49:55 Speaker 2 Okay. So as I'm trying to-

49:56 Speaker 1 It's mostly knowledge. It's not perspective. It's very hard to g- to, to give over perspective. That's what... Th- that's why people say, "Don't argue about religion and politics," because those have to do with perspective. It's how you see the... If, if you think you're the only one who understands the world, then that's a little crazy.

50:15 Speaker 2 Right.

50:16 Speaker 1 Right? Everybody understands the world, they understand it the way they understand it. And people can't give it up because they have a lot at stake with their perspective. So when it comes to politics or religion, which have to do with my conceptual scheme of reality, it's not just, it's not just the knowledge how this works, how that works.

50:35 Speaker 2 But, but the Rebbe, let's, let's, let's accept that the Rebbe has a better grasp of reality. Why can't he have his grasp and I have my grasp? Why is it such a, why is it such a challenge the same way that there are other people who have more sophisticated grasps than me? Why did you feel that his grasp was, was particularly the one... But Rabbi Steinsaltz had a grasp of reality I'm sure that you respected and you felt was higher, was bigger than yours. Why was his not as, um, challenging-

51:09 Speaker 1 Demanding

51:10 Speaker 2 ... challenging to you as the Rebbe's? Why was it... Why, why were you able to accept his?

51:16 Speaker 1 Because he makes no demands.

51:18 Speaker 2 Okay, so that's what it is. Just hit closer to the mic.

51:22 Speaker 1 The, the Rebbe's picture of reality translates into action. It's not a picture of reality that is just descriptive. It's prescriptive. It's telling you, "Look, if this is the right picture, then there's something you need to do." If it's not the right picture, you can ignore him.

51:40 Speaker 2 Right.

51:40 Speaker 1 Fine. You don't have to do that. Go do something else. Go do whatever you want. There's a story that I saw, you know, we're talking five years ago. So this is long after the fact. I, I'd not heard this story, but it was such a beautiful story that it, it, um, in a certain sense, it, it, it, like, described everything I had gone through. Um, I believe it was Shliach in Buffalo, but I'm not 100% sure, who ha- who was giving a shi- a Shiur in Tanya, and he had someone there who was very, very smart, and he said, "You know, from everything you've taught us," says to Shliach, "I want you to ask the Rebbe two questions when you re- when you see him again. Like, when you go back to New York next time, ask him this for me." So the one question was, "Why is it that you're the only one who says that our duty is to bring the Shechinah down into the world? Like, this is the generation of Geulah. Why, why is it you're the only one? I haven't heard this from anyone else." And second thing is, "From everything I've heard from you, there's, there is a need in Yiddishkeit to follow a lot of advice." Like we say, Ro- uh, teshuva be'rov yoetz.

52:53 Speaker 2 Right.

52:53 Speaker 1 That, that teshuva, that real, real salvation comes from having many, many, uh, opinions in the same, uh, place. Why is it the Rebbe has no advisors? I've never heard that he has an advisor. So the, the Shliach, I guess, I, I hope it's really someone from Buffalo. Uh, I think it's upstate New Yo- New York somewhere. So he, next time he came down, he had a yechidus with the Rebbe and he asked him. And the Rebbe said, "The one... The answer to one answers the other also." He says, "Because the Friediker Rebbe left us a maamer that is the roadmap for this generation. And that maamer, VaEtchanan, that's what it says. It says that we're the seventh generation, and our duty is to bring the Shechinah down to bring the Geulah."

53:46 Speaker 2 Right.

53:47 Speaker 1 And why don't I have advisors? Because I haven't found anyone else who understands that. I haven't found anyone who also understands that that's the most important maamer that was ever written, because that's the roadmap of this generation.

53:59 Speaker 2 Ah, I like that.

54:00 Speaker 1 It's a very interesting answer, especially when you consider, and this I only considered lately, I don't know. Again, I, I, I'm not an insider, so I have no idea that it could be that I'm completely off. But who wrote VaEtchanan? 'Cause the Friediker Rebbe couldn't write at that time.

54:15 Speaker 2 It wa- it was written earlier. That's actually-

54:16 Speaker 1 Okay. But how much earlier?

54:17 Speaker 2 No, it was written, it was written-

54:19 Speaker 1 Many years earlier?

54:19 Speaker 2 Yeah, it was-

54:20 Speaker 1 Okay

54:20 Speaker 2 ... it was published, it was published, um, I think even 18 years earlier.

54:25 Speaker 1 Okay. So it was handed out. You're saying it was handed out.

54:27 Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah. It, it was, this was a re- this is a publication-

54:28 Speaker 1 So he told him, "This is what I want you to hand out."

54:31 Speaker 2 Yes. Yes. This is a-

54:31 Speaker 1 For, for this Yahrtzeit of-

54:33 Speaker 2 Yes

54:33 Speaker 1 ... Rebbe and Rivka.

54:34 Speaker 2 Yes. You can find-

54:35 Speaker 1 Right

54:35 Speaker 2 ... I'm pretty sure.

54:36 Speaker 1 Okay.

54:36 Speaker 2 Someone listening, if they know it's, if they know I'm wrong, they, they will correct me, but I'm, I'm q- I'm quite sure it could be Tzadok Beis. I don't know. It was one of the... It was an earlier, it was an earlier... Most of the maamarim in those years, I believe, were republications. But he, wa- wa-

54:52 Speaker 1 But the point is-

54:53 Speaker 2 The Rebbe was involved with publishing it, that's for sure.

54:55 Speaker 1 Right.

54:55 Speaker 2 If that's what, if that's what you're, if that's what you're leading to.

54:58 Speaker 1 Insinuating. But, um, the point was that when the Rebbe reads the reality, he doesn't just read it as, "Here is the picture of what's going on."

55:11 Speaker 2 Yeah.

55:12 Speaker 1 "I'm gonna tell you what needs to be done." And, uh, my picture until then, I want you to understand, my picture until then was that the moment that all of Eretz Yisrael will be under Jewish, um, autonomy, th- that we'll, we'll, we'll be able to build here the Beis Hamikdash and everything will change, and it has nothing to do with bringing Yiddishkeit to people. Wh- which is what it means that the Shechinah is coming down. Shechinah coming down means-

55:43 Speaker 2 Well, this is religious Zionism, what you're describing

55:45 Speaker 1 Right, right. That's, that's the picture of... that I had. The Mashiach in, in my world was a-

55:52 Speaker 2 Halachic

55:53 Speaker 1 ... a, a zeitgeist. Meaning there's a, there's a spirit of the times. It wasn't a person.

55:59 Speaker 2 Right.

56:00 Speaker 1 It wasn't that somebody had to give inspiration or show what it looks like. Uh, I also wasn't 100% sure, even though I'm more conservative in my outlook I wasn't a hundred percent sure that there was that much need to build Yiddish quite around the pillars of the past. Meaning things can change, they can be like this, like that. Again, it's very, very staunchly from, but I didn't think that, that, you know, Ɣa kreeg tsoshad yud, everything has to be exactly the, the way the Shulchan Aruch says that's the most important thing. Even though I, I'd learned Dayanut already by that time, and I learned many, many things like that. But I didn't see it that way.

56:42 Speaker 2 Mm-hmm.

56:42 Speaker 1 And suddenly when I, when, when I, when I realized that what the Rebbe is saying is, is very, very different from that picture, and it demands something very different. It's nothing to do with how many acres of Eretz Yisrael you're going to control or not. That could happen, it's very important. It's not, it's not something to be discounted, it's so on and so forth, but that's not where the core is.

57:07 Speaker 2 It's almost the opposite. It's to not give up an inch, right? It's not about the, it's not about the, the ta-

57:11 Speaker 1 Don't... The, that I argued them. I argued a lot with Reb Ginsberg about that.

57:15 Speaker 2 Yeah.

57:15 Speaker 1 The Rebbe mostly talks about security, but he showed me that he also talks a little bit about the, uh, essence of it.

57:21 Speaker 2 Right.

57:22 Speaker 1 That it's not just security. It's not just that not to give up because it's a value-

57:26 Speaker 2 No, no, I am not making that argument. I'm just saying that the, the distinction of the idea versus the literal is you see that play out-

57:31 Speaker 1 Right. Right

57:32 Speaker 2 ... where like the literal is halachas.

57:33 Speaker 1 Right.

57:34 Speaker 2 The whole like... I'm not an expert on this topic, but the whole... Uh, it seems to me, uh, from, from reading a little bit about it, the Shelem HaAretz, a lot of it comes down to a Sif in Shulchan Aruch.

57:44 Speaker 1 Hmm.

57:44 Speaker 2 Like the Rebbe comes back-

57:46 Speaker 1 No, no, no

57:46 Speaker 2 ... to that si- famous Sif that's a sh- about Shabbos. It's not, there's no siman called Shelem HaAretz. It's a Sif about Shabbos and, and, and-

57:54 Speaker 1 That's also security, by the way.

57:56 Speaker 2 What's that?

57:56 Speaker 1 It's about security.

57:57 Speaker 2 That's what I mean. But it's like a Sif in Shulchan Aruch, and from that the Rebbe builds in a, a very radical-

58:03 Speaker 1 Right

58:03 Speaker 2 ... perspective and, and viewpoint, but it's literal. Like it, it's actual life and death based on a Sif in Shulchan Aruch.

58:11 Speaker 1 Mm-hmm.

58:11 Speaker 2 Like that brings out what you're talking about.

58:13 Speaker 1 Hmm.

58:14 Speaker 2 Y- this... I mean, you, you may think that your story is an outsider story, but I'm quite convinced that this, what you're talking about is, is a conundrum that many people have, many Lubavitchers have as well with Rebbe's Torah. Um, you know, may- maybe it's not to the extent that they don't learn it as a result or that they feel a- alienation as a... But maybe there is a... Maybe, maybe they do feel some kind of alienation because like you said, when you talk about Chassidut ideas, it inevitably is filtered through, "This is how I take it in. This is how I understand it. This is how I formulate it." Right? And the Rebbe's approach to Torah in general is very, very literal. Like I was, I was thinking about it, it's almost like, you know how today the modern style is like you expose the walls and you show everything for what it is, right?

59:15 Speaker 1 Transparency.

59:16 Speaker 2 Right. And like, and like there's no, there's no... Like, like we do away with the forms, let's see the bricks, let's see the pipes, let's see it for what it is.

59:24 Speaker 1 Mm-hmm.

59:25 Speaker 2 And there's like, uh, I don't even know what the technical term for that is, but almost like that there's no space, there's no, there's no, there's no space in between, right? And so the Rebbe does the same thing where Torah is like placed... You know, Torah says this, this is the... And this is a logical outcome of what the Torah says, therefore, there's no questions, right? It's just-

59:48 Speaker 1 The lack of questions is very powerful, and, and it was a big turn off for me.

59:52 Speaker 2 But, uh, what I'm saying is I think it's a-

59:54 Speaker 1 Right

59:54 Speaker 2 ... I think it's a challenge for a lot of-

59:56 Speaker 1 Right

59:56 Speaker 2 ... I mean, myself included.

59:58 Speaker 1 Mm-hmm.

59:58 Speaker 2 I don't mean to talk about other people-

59:59 Speaker 1 Hundred percent

59:59 Speaker 2 ... but I don't think it's just me. It's, it's... Your point, you're, you're touching on a very relevant topic. This isn't just a person from the outside. This is a recognition that the Rebbe's Torah is demanding something that's not demanded elsewhere.

1:00:15 Speaker 1 Right. It's not demanded elsewhere.

1:00:17 Speaker 2 It's very-

1:00:17 Speaker 1 That's the main thing

1:00:18 Speaker 2 ... it's very, very radical and it's, it's... To use it not in a negative way, but the word to me it's almost like a totalitarian-

1:00:27 Speaker 1 Mm-hmm

1:00:27 Speaker 2 ... totalitarian approach to life, which is-

1:00:30 Speaker 1 In many ways

1:00:31 Speaker 2 ... right? Which is Torah is totalizing.

1:00:33 Speaker 1 Yeah.

1:00:34 Speaker 2 Torah literally does not give you a room, uh, an inch to move outside of it.

1:00:39 Speaker 1 Mm-hmm. I, I... Torah itself I had no problem that it would do then. Again, as long as I was the driver.

1:00:46 Speaker 2 Right.

1:00:46 Speaker 1 The problem is some- somebody here was driving. It's not me.

1:00:49 Speaker 2 I see.

1:00:50 Speaker 1 That's where it's really problematic. Now again, I don't think the Rebbe thought that if you didn't do what he said, you're not worth, uh, like Reb Hillul would say, y- you're not even worth burning with chametz before Pesach. That's not the way I think the Rebbe thought about people-

1:01:08 Speaker 2 Right

1:01:08 Speaker 1 ... at all. But I think that his viewpoint was like that, meaning the viewpoint he was espousing, he was showing was that, "Look, you have to take this as is. It's very hard to, um, to drive, be the driver once a year." And that's what turned me off. Now again, um, when it comes to ideas, um, I think it's different. I think the Rebbe also has an idea side to him in his Maamarim. To this day, I don't connect to it the same way that I connect to the Rebbe's other aspects.

1:01:42 Speaker 2 The Torah Sh'bichtav.

1:01:43 Speaker 1 Yeah. Torah Sh'bichtav I like more. Torah Sh'bichtav has everything. I'm talking about Maamarim.

1:01:48 Speaker 2 No, but you like the Sichas that-

1:01:49 Speaker 1 The Sichas I, I, I connect to much more.

1:01:51 Speaker 2 And the letters?

1:01:52 Speaker 1 The letters also. Love them. Um-

1:01:55 Speaker 2 The Maamarim too-

1:01:56 Speaker 1 I didn't like the style so much

1:01:57 Speaker 2 Of the, of the what?

1:01:58 Speaker 1 Of the letters.

1:01:59 Speaker 2 Why is that?

1:02:00 Speaker 1 The style is over the top. It's not, it's not the way a person would speak to someone else.

1:02:06 Speaker 2 Uh-huh.

1:02:07 Speaker 1 The English ones are much better in my opinion.

1:02:09 Speaker 2 Uh, they're coming out with a new set, you know that?

1:02:11 Speaker 1 Mm-hmm.

1:02:11 Speaker 2 Did you hear about it?

1:02:12 Speaker 1 No.

1:02:12 Speaker 2 No, I'll give a shout-

1:02:13 Speaker 1 We'll work on some

1:02:13 Speaker 2 ... we'll give a shout-out. They, they, they're a whole new, a whole new bunch of letters that haven't been published. They-

1:02:18 Speaker 1 From English

1:02:19 Speaker 2 ... they, that were written in English.

1:02:21 Speaker 1 So Nisim Mindel wrote differently.

1:02:23 Speaker 2 Yes.

1:02:23 Speaker 1 He had a very different style than the other Maskir.

1:02:25 Speaker 2 Ah.

1:02:25 Speaker 1 It, it, I think it boils down to that. I don't think that the l- that the Rebbe dictated the style. I see from Rav Ginsberg that he never dictates the style. He has different people writing in different styles, and he changes it-

1:02:37 Speaker 2 Right

1:02:37 Speaker 1 ... the content, but not the style. He'll n- he'll never talk to you about the style.

1:02:40 Speaker 2 Also, the Hebrew style of the letters.

1:02:42 Speaker 1 The Hebrew style is over the top, the English style is very face to face, and it's, it's, it's normal. It sounds like a letter someone would write to someone else.

1:02:50 Speaker 2 Right.

1:02:50 Speaker 1 It's my opinion, like-

1:02:51 Speaker 2 Fair enough

1:02:51 Speaker 1 ... how, how I hear it.

1:02:53 Speaker 2 Fair enough.

1:02:53 Speaker 1 Um-

1:02:54 Speaker 2 This is what this podcast is for. Opinions.

1:02:57 Speaker 1 But the Maamarim I've never connected to, even t- to this day. Why? It's, well, it's still not my exact, uh, spiritual language. There's something about it doesn't, doesn't connect exactly. And again, I never had a problem with the Maamar. The Maamar were fine. They don't seem to, um, have a Uvchin at the end. A little bit, uh, the repeats and... But the, the discussion is something else. It's a different type of discussion. It's not, it's not like the Sichos.

1:03:27 Speaker 2 What, so what do you think... How, like, so you're describing here that you were at one point in a place where the ideas, you were, you were okay with entertaining ideas-

1:03:39 Speaker 1 Mm-hmm

1:03:39 Speaker 2 ... from anybody, including the Rebbe.

1:03:40 Speaker 1 Mm-hmm.

1:03:41 Speaker 2 May- maybe you're curious about his ideas, but you're not open to being told, "This is reality, and this is what you must do about reality."

1:03:50 Speaker 1 Mm-hmm.

1:03:50 Speaker 2 Basically, a sense of removing your autonomy.

1:03:53 Speaker 1 Right.

1:03:55 Speaker 2 And now it's reversed. The ideas are not... The ideas are ideas still, but they don't, they don't engage you.

1:04:01 Speaker 1 Mm-hmm.

1:04:01 Speaker 2 But now you are specifically drawn to the thing that used to push you away.

1:04:06 Speaker 1 Right.

1:04:07 Speaker 2 How do you think that happened?

1:04:08 Speaker 1 So I know exactly how that happened. It was a particular moment, which I said I, I didn't have the strength to write about.

1:04:15 Speaker 2 Oh, so wasn't that reading of the Lebanon War?

1:04:18 Speaker 1 That was the moment that I realized that I'm not gonna be able to ignore this.

1:04:23 Speaker 2 Uh-huh.

1:04:23 Speaker 1 But from there to the point where put on a hat and a suit and become a card-carrying member and, and this and that, there, there's still a lot of gap.

1:04:33 Speaker 2 Uh-huh.

1:04:33 Speaker 1 It still took some time. It didn't take much time. I think it was about eight, nine months, but, but there was a gap still. And the gap was a time in my life that w- I was in, doing my master's in, uh, history of, uh, science. I, some, at some point I realized I, I have a scientific mind, but I'm not... Um, I shouldn't be doing engineering. That's not my That's not my, my calling. I need to do something much more, uh, related to the humanities and writing. So I started a, a master's in, uh, Hebrew. And I had a, um, a very close connection to some Rav. His name is Menachem Fruman. Probably most people don't know who he is. He's a character in and of himself. He passed away a few years ago. Um, by the way, I, I forgot to mention, today's Yud zain is the Yahrtzeit of Rav Steinsaltz.

1:05:30 Speaker 2 Oh, no.

1:05:31 Speaker 1 So, so we're-

1:05:31 Speaker 2 Okay

1:05:31 Speaker 1 ... we're taping exactly on his Yahrtzeit, so I, I wanted to farbreng today with some people, so I'm farbrenging with you-

1:05:38 Speaker 2 Oh, beautiful

1:05:38 Speaker 1 ... about Rav Steinsaltz. Um, many stories about him still, but, uh, we didn't even-

1:05:42 Speaker 2 Oh, we, we-

1:05:42 Speaker 1 ... figure ou- figure out how he works into this, uh, picture.

1:05:45 Speaker 2 We, I had a, I, I had a episode with many.

1:05:48 Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. Again, right. It's fine, so.

1:05:50 Speaker 2 Yeah. Very nice.

1:05:52 Speaker 1 So today's is, uh, Yahrtzeit. In any case, so, so Rav Fruman, he, he was very out there in different ways. And, um, I was very close to him at the time. I was, I told you I, I always looked for different Rabbanim to learn from. I always liked learning from, uh, very different people. So he took me... This is a story that I think is important to know, that not about me, it's just to know that these things exist. People should know that they exist. Um, he took me to a new group which shown up in Tel Aviv at the time. We're talking about nineteen ninety-nine. It was headed by a guru from India. They were all Jewish, not necessarily Israeli. Some, most of them were Israeli, but the guru himself was a Jewish guru from Chile.

1:06:48 Speaker 2 Hmm.

1:06:48 Speaker 1 And he had an interesting story in and, in and of himself. I think they now are in America. I don't know if he's still alive. It's, it's marked down. We're talking about twenty-eight, seven years. It was, he was at least fifty back then, the guru, maybe even sixty. And they, he suddenly decided he was mo- moving to Eretz Yisrael, that everything was now in Eretz Yisrael. Now, now, if you don't know gurus, gurus are crazy people in the end.

1:07:12 Speaker 2 Yeah.

1:07:13 Speaker 1 And everything is off the cuff. Like they decide this, they decide that, and whoever follows them is in a cult, so they just come with them. So he just decided-

1:07:21 Speaker 2 That's part, that's part of the stick

1:07:22 Speaker 1 ... that's part of the whole thing.

1:07:23 Speaker 2 Yeah.

1:07:23 Speaker 1 Part of the whole stick.

1:07:24 Speaker 2 Right.

1:07:25 Speaker 1 That it's off the, off the rocker.

1:07:27 Speaker 2 Right.

1:07:28 Speaker 1 Like it's not normal.

1:07:29 Speaker 2 Right.

1:07:29 Speaker 1 But people like that. They, they liked it. In a, in a certain sense, it's the opposite of the Rebbe. It's the same, same, uh, same idea. Like, so you're building, uh, people are gonna follow you regardless of what. But the whole thing is crazy. Like he, there's no... It's, it's not for you, it's for him. It's all for him.

1:07:48 Speaker 2 Why is it opposite of the Rebbe? Why can't the Rebbe say the same thing?

1:07:50 Speaker 1 'Cause by the Rebbe, it was all for you. He was all trying to give you a, a path through life. He's not often... He didn't, didn't move. It's, for forty years, you could say he's, he's the most unmovable mover that there was. He never moves. He's always, he's always the same. He's always, uh, constantly the same person, same place, same time. Everything is... And, and he is serving Hashem all the time. The guru is entirely serving himself You see that 100%.

1:08:17 Speaker 2 No, that, that I understand. Uh, my point is the t-the to- the totalizing, your, is also opposite?

1:08:23 Speaker 1 No, they, they do the same thing.

1:08:25 Speaker 2 Uh-huh.

1:08:25 Speaker 1 They, they want to completely manipulate you to, to a certain degree that you become... You lose your ego entirely, and you become their, their extension, who they are. Yeah.

1:08:36 Speaker 2 Right. So, so why, why wouldn't one be critical of Chabad for that, for that difference?

1:08:41 Speaker 1 A lot of people are because they don't see that the rebbe is connected to Hashem.

1:08:44 Speaker 2 So, so the, so that-

1:08:46 Speaker 1 You could say that of Moshe Rabbeinu also

1:08:48 Speaker 2 ... Right. So the first difference you said was that it's about you, but ultimately that's not enough. It has to be because it's-

1:08:53 Speaker 1 'Cause it-

1:08:54 Speaker 2 ... based on truth, on, on-

1:08:55 Speaker 1 Not just... What do you mean truth? Truth is a very slippery word today.

1:08:58 Speaker 2 Right.

1:08:59 Speaker 1 It's based on connecting you to Hashem.

1:09:01 Speaker 2 Uh, interesting.

1:09:02 Speaker 1 That's what the rebbe wants.

1:09:03 Speaker 2 Right. God's a reality, not a truth.

1:09:04 Speaker 1 Okay. So a, a true rebbe, any kind of true rebbe, like Moshe Rabbeinu, any, any, anybody of, any, any of the great leaders that we've had is transparent in the connection. Meaning in the end, he wants you to connect to Hashem. He's not interested in you connecting to him. The connection to him is only to facilitate your connection to Hashem, and he's what we call memut- memutza mechaber. He's, he's connecting you. He's not connecting you to him. He's not interested in that. He doesn't need that.

1:09:34 Speaker 2 But so what, what, what, what do you say to people that say that, A, the rebbe had a very strong personality, and B, that Chabad seems to be very connected to the rebbe as a person? Is that, is that a mistake? Is that how it's supposed to be?

1:09:54 Speaker 1 I don't see it that way.

1:09:55 Speaker 2 You don't see that Chabad is connected to the rebbe?

1:09:57 Speaker 1 No, no, I don't see the connection to the rebbe that way.

1:10:00 Speaker 2 I see.

1:10:00 Speaker 1 I don't see the connection to the rebbe as being to be connected to the rebbe.

1:10:05 Speaker 2 Right.

1:10:05 Speaker 1 It's to be connected to the rebbe to be connected to Hashem.

1:10:08 Speaker 2 Right.

1:10:09 Speaker 1 Because, again, this is, goes back to the question: Where does the rebbe get the idea that he can tell you what your life is about?

1:10:17 Speaker 2 Right.

1:10:17 Speaker 1 He's telling you, "Look, Hashem brought you into the world in this generation. What is your purpose?" That's what bothered me in the beginning 'cause I was gonna say, "I'll, I'll say what my purpose is."

1:10:28 Speaker 2 Right. You don't tell me what my purpose is.

1:10:31 Speaker 1 Right. But when I suddenly see that someone says something, and he's saying it based on something, based on a real an- analysis that is much better than my analysis, looking at reality in the, in the, in the most straightforward way that you can with all the meshugas that comes around from politics and other things, just, just looking at it straight and saying, "Really, my purpose is to, to connect you."

1:10:55 Speaker 2 It's a very, very hard thing to swallow. It's a very... When, when you, when you think about it from, you know, for, for, if you take a step back, it's a very hard kind of love to swallow. Like, you know, lehavdil, you would talk about parents that way. You'd say that's a domineering parent. Like, that parent is not giving any space to the child, right? Meaning, it's one of those things that either works entirely or it's completely broken.

1:11:25 Speaker 1 Mm-hmm.

1:11:25 Speaker 2 Right? If, if, if you're not 100% sure or if it isn't 100% true that everything that the rebbe is telling you to do is because God is telling you to do that, if it's one inch off that, it's terrifying. Meaning, it- it's like an all or nothing kind of-

1:11:45 Speaker 1 I'm not sure that-

1:11:46 Speaker 2 No?

1:11:46 Speaker 1 ... it has to be exact. I, I think the rebbe was exact, but I don't think that it has to be exact. When you love someone and you want them to go in a d- in a particular direction, you can be oppressive and you can be descriptive, prescriptive even, but in the end, coming from a place of love. You feel that, that the person loves you. They care for you. It's very different. They're not doing it for themselves. When a parent is doing it wrong, it's usually because the parent feels that if somehow this kid is off the derech, that means that I've failed, and that reflects on me. It may reflect on you, but he has his own life. I, I don't... I never felt from the rebbe that he's taking away your life, that he's taking away your choice, that he's taking away your agency, as you called it before, your ego even.

1:12:47 Speaker 2 So what is he taking away?

1:12:48 Speaker 1 Reb Ginsburg is much stronger about taking away the ego than, than the rebbe is, and even he, he does it in a very, very, call it a soft way.

1:12:59 Speaker 2 So what's the rebbe taking away?

1:13:01 Speaker 1 Suggesting that this is a good idea for you. What?

1:13:04 Speaker 2 So what's the rebbe taking away then?

1:13:05 Speaker 1 He's taking away your perspective. In that sense, he's also, he's not taking away in the sense that he's, uh, somehow replacing your mind with his.

1:13:15 Speaker 2 But how do you have an ego without a perspective?

1:13:19 Speaker 1 You retain your life's mission in the sense of exactly what shlichus is. You have to define how you are going to enact, how you are actually going to do and follow through with these, uh, prescriptions. You have to decide in the end what, what you, what you choose. But I'm telling you that the direction has to be to bring Yidden closer. The direction has to be to spread Yiddishkeit. The direction has to be to bring the Shechinah down. That, that's the direction.

1:13:49 Speaker 2 So the optional-

1:13:50 Speaker 1 And you do it

1:13:50 Speaker 2 ... the optionali- the optionality is taken away

1:13:53 Speaker 1 The... If, if you're going to go fight for more land, then the rebbe would say, "No, you missed the point. You didn't understand." It, take the same energy and invest it in Tel Aviv, in getting people closer to Yiddishkeit. You will, once you see it, you see it's true, you will, you will have more impact 100 times than go- going and, and fighting somewhere. 100 times more. But if your, your talents that Hashem gave you are diplomacy and so on and so forth, as the rebbe says, there's no reason why diplomacy can't be used in the same, w- with the same, uh, uh, goal in mind. You could bring it into any area of life. There's no reason why you can't. Tell, l'chatchilah, if I ask you, "What are your talents? What are you capable of doing?" There's probably a better way to have, to, to have used those talents. But if this is where you find yourself, and you have impact, and you have, uh, importance, you are a general in the army. Okay, you already are. Well, what can you do? That's, that's where life took you. And you hear about this, you can bring the Shechinah there.

1:15:09 Speaker 2 So what you're suggesting, from what I hear, is that the rebbe is presenting a, a, an, a, a path of absolute clarity.

1:15:20 Speaker 1 Mm.

1:15:21 Speaker 2 And for some reason, we all prefer confusion. Why is that?

1:15:27 Speaker 1 Because, because it's a problem.

1:15:30 Speaker 2 Is it because-

1:15:31 Speaker 1 Because we want to be the navigators. We want to be the captains. And, and it's not enough for us.

1:15:36 Speaker 2 So we make up confusion just to be-

1:15:38 Speaker 1 So we, so yeah, we obfuscate the confu- the, an entire issue many times and say, "But it has to be exactly like this." What do you mean? It doesn't have to be exactly like that. He's not telling you to do A, B, C, and D. He's telling you, "This is the idea. Now go and figure out how to do it in ways that I haven't even thought of."

1:15:57 Speaker 2 So this goes back to your idea that children have it right-

1:15:59 Speaker 1 Of course

1:15:59 Speaker 2 ... because of the clarity.

1:16:00 Speaker 1 They, they have the clarity, and, and we are fractured.

1:16:03 Speaker 2 We think that we're better or more mature or more sophisticated-

1:16:07 Speaker 1 We're more fractured

1:16:08 Speaker 2 ... because we, we're confused.

1:16:10 Speaker 1 Be- Right, because we see the complexity.

1:16:12 Speaker 2 And that-

1:16:13 Speaker 1 Complexity is good. It's not wrong.

1:16:16 Speaker 2 Right.

1:16:16 Speaker 1 The world is complex. But in the end, Hashem is one.

1:16:19 Speaker 2 Right. Ah.

1:16:21 Speaker 1 Meaning underneath the complexity, there is a unifi- unifying reality.

1:16:25 Speaker 2 So complexity shouldn't lead to confusion.

1:16:27 Speaker 1 Right. It, it leads to, there's almost nothing to do. But for that, you need somebody like the Rebbe. You need someone who sees beyond-

1:16:33 Speaker 2 Right

1:16:33 Speaker 1 ... all the complex different issues and so on and so forth. Again, to be able to put your finger on what it is that we need to do, there's so much you could do. The, especially today, or maybe until today. Maybe AI is gonna do everything from now on. We don't know. But there seems to be so many things you can do. I don't think the Rebbe is telling you, "Don't do these things." He's just telling you, "Whatever you do, it should be with this in mind."

1:16:59 Speaker 2 Right.

1:17:01 Speaker 1 And if you have that in mind, and, and you should have one mind about that, then in the end, my goal is not to make money. My goal is not to, to have health for the sake of health. My goal is not to aggrandize my name for the sake of aggrandizing my name. Maybe, maybe a person needs to be like Elie Wiesel. He needs to be a Nobel Prize winner. He nee- everybody needs to know his name. Great. So now what do you do with that?

1:17:25 Speaker 2 Right.

1:17:26 Speaker 1 That's, that's the question he's always asking. So, okay, so you have all this, what, what are you gonna do with it?

1:17:31 Speaker 2 Hmm.

1:17:32 Speaker 1 And that doesn't seem to be, to me, something that is difficult to, to, to accept. But on the other hand, it's very challenging because we have to get through the idea that he has a better picture of what needs to be done. He has a better picture of what in the end it all means.

1:17:51 Speaker 2 So how did you get there?

1:17:53 Speaker 1 So what I saw by this guru was that everybody was completely battle. But again, the difference is, if you do something wrong, you're out. You c- you can't be your own per- You can't do it the way you wanna do it. You can't, you can't... You can suggest an idea, maybe the guru will accept it, but in the end, the guru will say, "I thought of it," and that'll be the end of it, and then he'll do it. And I was amazed by it. I, I couldn't believe it. These, they look like normal people. How can they live this way? I'll give you an idea w- w- how crazy this is. He decided that we're becoming Baalei Teshuva.

1:18:31 Speaker 2 This guru from Peru.

1:18:32 Speaker 1 This guru from Chile.

1:18:34 Speaker 2 From Chile.

1:18:35 Speaker 1 Who was in India for 20 years, 30 years. He learned all the tricks of the gurus, and all the tricks.

1:18:39 Speaker 2 And all the students were Jewish?

1:18:40 Speaker 1 Almost all of them were. Everybody who came there to Israel was Jewish.

1:18:43 Speaker 2 Ah.

1:18:43 Speaker 1 Like you tell me, he's decided to move, so all the Jews came with him.

1:18:46 Speaker 2 Right.

1:18:47 Speaker 1 He decided at some point that they're becoming Baalei Teshuva. So he said, "Tomorrow everybody has to have tefillin." And tefillin's not easy to find. It's not, it's not from today to tomorrow you have to go.

1:18:58 Speaker 2 Yeah.

1:19:00 Speaker 1 They did it.

1:19:01 Speaker 2 How much did it cost?

1:19:02 Speaker 1 I don't know. Like $30,000, whatever it cost. There were 60 of them, 70 of them. Half of them were men, half of them were women. So they all suddenly had tefillin, and we're all keeping Shabbos now. But the way I say how we keep Shabbos. Okay, so everybody kept Shabbos. The craziest one was they're men and women because part of the way it is in India is it's very much related to sexual relations.

1:19:26 Speaker 2 Sure.

1:19:26 Speaker 1 That's what keeps it going.

1:19:27 Speaker 2 That's what every guru thinks of that also.

1:19:29 Speaker 1 Mm-hmm. And he has his seven-

1:19:32 Speaker 2 Sure

1:19:32 Speaker 1 ... or eight different women there.

1:19:33 Speaker 2 Of course.

1:19:35 Speaker 1 So he decides, "Oh, this is not gonna work." He needs something else. So he decided they all have to marry.

1:19:41 Speaker 2 Yeah.

1:19:41 Speaker 1 This reminds us the story with the princess, with Rabbi Akiva. She said, "What has Hashem been doing since he created the world?" He said, "Shidduchim." Ah, I can make shidduchim also. She decided she, he's marrying her, and he's marrying her. They, they literally put up a chuppah, and one after another, they got married. I don't know what it meant and whatever, but these people were willing to do that, 'cause the guru said. And I watched this.

1:20:06 Speaker 2 What was your involvement again?

1:20:07 Speaker 1 The rebbetzin brought me there because he was like the, he was crazy enough, in a certain sense, um, on the human level, to be able to interact with this guy and to help him, like, understand. He tried to get him closer and this and that. So the children came for him, they have to get married. He didn't mean they'd have to get married tomorrow. He meant that-

1:20:27 Speaker 2 Yeah

1:20:27 Speaker 1 ... this thing, this promiscuity is not gonna work. You have to think about something else. So he, um, he does all this, and I'm watching this happen. And I'm there once or twice, three times a week sometimes, watching it happen. And I went one Erev Shabbos to that group in Tel Aviv, and I left after they davened and, um, I was with them for a little bit. I didn't eat with them. I couldn't, I couldn't stand. There was still a lot of avodah zarah there. You can- As much as I said it was all kosher, I couldn't, couldn't be with them that much. Like, I was just there to, uh, gently, uh, watch. And then I went back home, and it's a long walk. It's about a two-hour walk from where they were in Tel Aviv to my, my parents' house in Ramat Gan. And along the way, I remember exactly where it happened. I said, "So, so what does this mean? Why are people willing to give up their ego so, so effortlessly to follow this guy? And he's clearly not normal. Why is it that when the Rebbe says we should do so and so, I can't, um, I can't do it? What, what is it? What, what's, what's with me?" So I think about it. I say, "What would happen-"

1:21:47 Speaker 2 Well, why can't that be that you're normal?

1:21:50 Speaker 1 The Rebbe's not that abnormal. He's not asking things of-

1:21:53 Speaker 2 No, no, no, no, no, no. The people that are doing that are not normal, and you're normal. You do... You-

1:21:57 Speaker 1 Seven. Okay, that's an option. But I now know that there are Lubavitchers in the world, and they are normal. I know Rav Ginsberg, I know Rav Steinsaltz, they're normal. So I'm going to say, "Oh, they're not Mekusher enough." Nonsense. I kn- I know how much Rav Ginsberg gives Mekusher to the Rebbe. Rav Steinsaltz, you could say about him that not everything the Rebbe told him to do, he usually did. Not everything, but in principle, it was the most important opinion in his life.

1:22:21 Speaker 2 Sure, yeah.

1:22:21 Speaker 1 About, about everything. I, I don't think there was a, a topic that he did not discuss with the Rebbe and want to know what the Rebbe thought. I think on maybe one occasion he had a different opinion, but in principle, everything he did exactly what the Rebbe told him to do. And Rav Ginsberg is even way beyond that in many ways. Not only in terms of what to do, but also in terms of thoughts. He has different opinions about different things, and in the end, he, he accepts the Rebbe's opinion. So I know that there are people who will do this one. Why am I having such a hard problem? And I had to... And I'm thinking about this. It's a long walk, and I'm going over. I remember exactly where I was, next to the diamond exchange in the, in Ramat Gan when, when the thought came. I said, "What if the Mashiach comes tomorrow and everybody in the Jewish world says, 'This is the Mashiach,' and you have to do what he says?" So what's Moshe Ginott going to say? I know what he's going to say.

1:23:22 Speaker 2 You're not, you're not, you're not going to tell me what to-

1:23:24 Speaker 1 You're not going to tell me what to do.

1:23:25 Speaker 2 Yeah.

1:23:26 Speaker 1 I already know this. I... So what's the difference? What's the difference? Becau- I- it's still the same me.

1:23:33 Speaker 2 Right.

1:23:34 Speaker 1 In both situ- situations, it's still the same ego. You're tell- telling me the conditions are a little bit different? Not that different. Not that different, not in the sense the Rebbe's Mashiach or not Mashiach. Not, not connected to that. But again, what would be the, uh, uh... What's the point here? The point is that even if everyone else would be doing s- one thing, I would need to retain my autonomy and do something else. This is... That's crazy. That's just as crazy. I also don't believe that he would say it that way, but the... But let's say he did. What would I do? I know my ego is big enough. Now that I know who he is, now that I know what he looks like and what he really wants, which is that he'll call the shots, even if in the end, why is it easy for us to keep what Hashem said? Because we're the captain. Because Hashem's not coming down and telling you it's like this or like that. He's giving you something so general that you can feel that you're doing everything it says, but it's not because you would really do what Hashem told you to do.

1:24:42 Speaker 2 That's right.

1:24:42 Speaker 1 It's, it's because, it's because it fits you.

1:24:45 Speaker 2 That's interesting.

1:24:45 Speaker 1 It, it, it, it works. It works for you. At this moment, it works for you. And when it doesn't work, you don't bench. And when it doesn't work, you don't do Ma'ariv. And you don't... Remember there was a-

1:24:55 Speaker 2 You're explaining the argument of Dawson and Revira or Kara or those people.

1:24:58 Speaker 1 Yeah, something like that.

1:24:59 Speaker 2 That we, we believe in God.

1:25:00 Speaker 1 Yeah, in general.

1:25:01 Speaker 2 We believe in God, but Moshiach ben Yosef, it's pretty far.

1:25:04 Speaker 1 Moshiach ben Yosef, yeah. It's not, not for us.

1:25:06 Speaker 2 Very far.

1:25:06 Speaker 1 As long as it's-

1:25:07 Speaker 2 I want to be my own leader

1:25:08 Speaker 1 ... ephemeral, as long as it's something that's undefined. Hashem Yeah. That, the, the... For some reason, I've been, I've, I've been thinking precisely along those lines in recent weeks. Um, like this idea that, like a Rebbe's, the Rebbeim's way of talking is literally like the way you're going to think on your deathbed. Like the, the, the clarity of life and what you should've been doing, what you shouldn't have been doing. The Gemara says a person doesn't lie on his deathbed. They, they... If you're at, if you have that kind of moment where you know you're going to pass away, but your mind is with you

1:27:12 Speaker 2 There's absolute clarity. The lies are over. The game is over. And chassidus, what the Rebbeim are telling you, and not just the ideas, the directives are, "We're telling you things that if you follow them, you'll have no regrets." And yeah, and y- you know, move on. Like, 'cause it's just, uh, like you described.

1:27:34 Speaker 1 So yeah, I, I have an ego just like anyone else. I went through the whole process. I understand. I still have it. It's not, it's not, it hasn't gone anywhere. It's not like it-

1:27:41 Speaker 2 Right

1:27:42 Speaker 1 ... but I saw it face to face. It's like once you see it face to face, and, and you're-- it, it was- I was zoche to see this moment. I think, I think I, I saw it clearly. I can remember this moment.

1:27:53 Speaker 2 Right.

1:27:54 Speaker 1 And any, any time that I'm faced with, uh, okay, so what do I wanna do? What do I wanna do with my life? I'm older now, so it doesn't, I can... it's not that many options. But, but the question's always there. Is this serving this purpose or not?

1:28:09 Speaker 2 It's so interesting 'cause you, you're, you're, you're coming from a walk from a guru place where these people are an ultimate turn-off. And instead of them turning you completely away, they force a question back on you-

1:28:24 Speaker 1 Mm

1:28:24 Speaker 2 ... that, okay, these people are crazy, but what about the normal people who act this way? And what's going, like it's, it's amazing.

1:28:33 Speaker 1 If I wouldn't have known Rav Ginsburg and Rav Steinsaltz, maybe I wouldn't have thought it was so normal.

1:28:38 Speaker 2 Right. That's what-

1:28:38 Speaker 1 But it suddenly was normal.

1:28:40 Speaker 2 That's-

1:28:40 Speaker 1 More than normal

1:28:40 Speaker 2 ... right. That's what I asked you earlier-

1:28:42 Speaker 1 Mm-hmm

1:28:42 Speaker 2 ... and you explained. It's very interesting. I, I love in general, you know, we have this idea that, that, uh, you know, holy acts come from holy idea. And we know everything's linear. We know we can trace everything back in a very straight line, you know, to Har Sinai. Like, you know? And sometimes, yeah. I mean, I, I know the, the literature have a, uh, even they speak this way or a Daf Yomi they speak this way where, you know, the shiur that they hear from the Rosh Hashanah, they hear it from his Rosh Hashanah and so on and so on.

1:29:08 Speaker 1 Atike Hashmu'ah, they call it.

1:29:10 Speaker 2 And, and all the way back to Moshe Sinai.

1:29:11 Speaker 1 Mm-hmm.

1:29:12 Speaker 2 And they believe that, and in a way it's true, right?

1:29:14 Speaker 1 Yeah.

1:29:14 Speaker 2 In a way it's true. But then, like, these story, I love these stories where, like, you got your inspiration, right, from Rabbi Ginsburg and Rabbi Steinsaltz via these-

1:29:25 Speaker 1 But I couldn't understand this until I saw it somewhere else

1:29:27 Speaker 2 ... these mechubalim. I mean, these are Baal Shem Tov ma'asis, right? Learning lessons from-

1:29:31 Speaker 1 Right

1:29:31 Speaker 2 ... from those famous stories of the Baal Shem Tov where you learn stories from, uh, people carving things in the ice that, that are hefsek haterua, right?

1:29:40 Speaker 1 But I want to stress again that the way I see education and, and the way I read the Rebbe talking and, and, and communicating this is consistency. It's not about forcing someone.

1:29:53 Speaker 2 Yeah.

1:29:53 Speaker 1 Again, I, I don't see that as... I, I don't hear the coercion in his language. What I hear is consistency and repetition.

1:30:04 Speaker 2 I, I, I think, I think where... I, I, I understand what you're saying, and from your story, I buy that because ultimately you volunteered into this, so-

1:30:14 Speaker 1 I never met him also.

1:30:15 Speaker 2 Right.

1:30:15 Speaker 1 I don't know what his personality was like.

1:30:17 Speaker 2 That's my point.

1:30:18 Speaker 1 I can only guess.

1:30:18 Speaker 2 No, my point is that you volunteered into this. Nobody coerced you into this.

1:30:21 Speaker 1 Mm.

1:30:21 Speaker 2 Right? Um, I think, I think that's, that's part of the reason why you're able to see it the way you do, which doesn't make it untrue. To the contrary, it's a, it's a valid perspective, uh, uh, precisely because you're, you're seeing it from that background.

1:30:37 Speaker 1 Mm-hmm.

1:30:38 Speaker 2 One of the challenges, not just in Lubavitch, in general of raising religious children is how do you teach them to want something without imposing it on them, because that's the opposite of them wanting it, right? But at the same time, can you just let them loose and, you know, basically go and get lost so that they come back? That's also not the way. Or is it?

1:31:02 Speaker 1 Then there's no repetition either.

1:31:03 Speaker 2 There's no hinuch.

1:31:04 Speaker 1 There's, it's not hinuch at all.

1:31:05 Speaker 2 Right. So that, so that challenge-

1:31:08 Speaker 1 But what you didn't achieve until 13, you're not gonna achieve afterwards.

1:31:11 Speaker 2 Right. So-

1:31:12 Speaker 1 That's the way I see it

1:31:13 Speaker 2 ... so that challenge, that challenge in Lubavitch is that you have, you have a, a very domineering idea of what life is about, and when you receive that as a child and as a bachur, it can feel very like, "Oh my goodness, you're literally giving me no space."

1:31:36 Speaker 1 Mm.

1:31:36 Speaker 2 "And I'm not even..." And also, what they don't have that you had was, "I didn't choose this. I've been told this is..." It's... And so then it feels my way or the highway. That love that you describe where the Rebbe is simply taking from his time. He could have lived a private life, and he is dealing with all the troubles that came as... like all the tzaros that came his way, and all the politics and all that, simply because, like you said, that beautiful story where I know what the previous Rebbe told us. I have this clarity about what our generation's mission is. And of course, it's, it's, it's also his ideas, right? But he has this clarity, and I'm going to share it with whoever wants. That, that's a very mature approach. How do you, how... You know, I, I just think that that's why so many Lubavitchers, not, not-- I don't know what the percentage is, but I know it's not just me, you know, struggle with it sometimes, which is... or struggle, you know, you have to... It's a process. In my case, I had to... I, I don't wanna make this podcast about me, but I had to s- in a way step away from it to come back to it.

1:32:46 Speaker 1 Mm-hmm.

1:32:47 Speaker 2 Because I... And, and, and I didn't feel that my parents forced it on me, but I, maybe I forced it on myself in a way that was unhealthy in yeshiva where it w- at some point, as I got older, I didn't choose this, right? And it has to be a choice, at least for it to be the way that you're describing.

1:33:07 Speaker 1 Of course.

1:33:08 Speaker 2 So I, I think that's where the difference is.

1:33:10 Speaker 1 Mm-hmm. But I think that that's the whole point of you don't have children till you're supposed to be mature.

1:33:16 Speaker 2 Melachartav achaiyn. You're, you're supposed-

1:33:18 Speaker 1 Right. If, if you're not mature Okay, as children, you force stuff one on the other.

1:33:25 Speaker 2 Right.

1:33:25 Speaker 1 But as an adult and has a child, especially like a ten-year-old, an eleven-year-old, twelve-year-old, the whole concept of Chinuch has to be that I'm preparing you. I'm not forcing you. I'm preparing you to deal with your life.

1:33:41 Speaker 2 Right.

1:33:42 Speaker 1 And I, and I tell you very clearly, these have been my experiences. Now, if you haven't had that experience, there's a problem. But okay, so share it from someone else who chose. And, and, and sh-- That... In a certain sense, the stories of the Baalei Teshuva are more important than the stories of people who, who grew up firm. Because-

1:34:01 Speaker 2 They're definitely as important.

1:34:03 Speaker 1 Definitely as important. I think they're more important.

1:34:04 Speaker 2 Yes.

1:34:04 Speaker 1 Because they, they demonstrate choice.

1:34:07 Speaker 2 Right.

1:34:07 Speaker 1 They demonstrate there's something that has to be retained, otherwise the whole thing is not, is not real. That-that's a whole question, by the way. What if someone is, just does Torah and mitzvahs just because he's forced to?

1:34:22 Speaker 2 Right.

1:34:23 Speaker 1 Does it have any value? Th-that's something that has to be discussed. I'm not gonna say either, either way-

1:34:30 Speaker 2 Right

1:34:31 Speaker 1 ... 'cause there's a lot of discussion. But children have to feel that their parents are choosing. They have to f-feel that I'm an agent. I have agency. I could-

1:34:43 Speaker 2 That the parents are choosing for themselves-

1:34:44 Speaker 1 Right

1:34:44 Speaker 2 ... not for the kids.

1:34:45 Speaker 1 Right, right. I, I myself am confronted-

1:34:48 Speaker 2 Right

1:34:48 Speaker 1 ... with life, and this is my story.

1:34:50 Speaker 2 Right.

1:34:51 Speaker 1 And I, and I had to choose.

1:34:52 Speaker 2 Right.

1:34:53 Speaker 1 What's my choice? It could be that my choice is not to become firm, because I, I, I didn't choose that. Like I ne- I never chose to become firm, so I never, I never-

1:35:00 Speaker 2 That wasn't on the table for you.

1:35:01 Speaker 1 It was never on the table. I was always firm. Okay. But the things that I did choose, I share with them. I tell them, "Look, this, I could have done this way, I could have done that way. I could have been continued in America's Rav and then the places I were. I, I had learned Dayanut. I was gonna do the tests. I was gonna pursue that direction also." But when I heard... By the way, it could be that I would've been a good dayan. Who knows? And maybe I could have done what the Rebbe, Rebbe wanted also as a dayan. Could be. But the moment I heard about what he wanted, and I had this opportunity to work with R-Rabbi Yitzchak and with, uh, Rebbe Rabbi Steinsaltz and it, so it seemed to me that that was much, much clearer. It was, just seemed like it wasn't a very windy path to something that I don't know how it's gonna end up. I, I, I could do it, maybe, but I'm not sure.

1:35:58 Speaker 2 Right.

1:35:58 Speaker 1 I'm not sure. Here I have something that I know I'm good at. I, I, I see it. I enjoy it. Maybe not as much as I would enjoy something else, but I, I have some enjoyment, and I can't say I don't get pleasure from. And, and I share that with them. I tell them, "Look, you also have to do the same thing. You have to find the thing that you have pleasure in. You have to find out what you're good at. You have to find out. Don't go do something that you're not good at."

1:36:21 Speaker 2 Right.

1:36:22 Speaker 1 And that can be instilled with these same values. There's no reason why not.

1:36:27 Speaker 2 Right.

1:36:28 Speaker 1 I, I think that, that people feel, like you said, especially, you know, I'll share something maybe you said people don't like it when, when Messianism is talked about. The way I see our people over the last three thousand three hundred years is a story of almost one after another missed opportunities to bring Gulug to the world.

1:36:58 Speaker 2 No kidding. That's, it's part, it's this whole Sefer Midbar is about it.

1:37:02 Speaker 1 It just comes again and again and again and again.

1:37:04 Speaker 2 Right.

1:37:04 Speaker 1 So even in the Torah, it's, we're full of it. But, but after that, it, it, it keeps happening.

1:37:09 Speaker 2 Yeah.

1:37:09 Speaker 1 Why? Because it's never exactly what I wanted.

1:37:13 Speaker 2 Right.

1:37:13 Speaker 1 It's never exactly what I... It'll never be exactly what you wanted because-

1:37:17 Speaker 2 It's all ego, you're saying

1:37:18 Speaker 1 ... because your ego wants something which we confuse. We, we confuse two things.