Ep. 99 // "What Will Bring Moshiach?" w/ Rabbi Heschel Greenberg

00:00 Speaker 1 In our zeal to promote our own beliefs in either side, we're forgetting that the, th-that the last sicha of the Rebbe, Vayakhel, was about achdus. All the sichas before were talking about Mashiach, Mashiach. They, they were never like never before. The Rebbe answered every question you have about Mashiach, I think. And then all of a sudden, the last sicha, he, it, it's hardly about Mashiach, it's about achdus. So the Rebbe, I think, was giving us the eires, and then the last sicha, he gives us the keili. Without, without achdus, you don't have the keili. So all your-- all our discussions are all, all very nice, and sometimes they're not so nice, but they're, they're, they're, they're not, they're not bringing the geulah. I mean, everyone has to do a cheshbon hanefesh. We didn't bring the geulah.

00:53 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 Benji Afson, and I will be your host. Let's begin. All righty, we are here in Carnites with a-another episode of Homesick for Lubavitch, one that I'm looking forward to, I've been looking forward to for a while, with Rabbi Heschel Greenberg, rabbi and rav of the Jewish Discovery Center in Buffalo, where he's a shliach for more than fifty years.

01:29 Speaker 1 That's correct.

01:30 Speaker 2 Correct. I got it. Rabbi Greenberg, thank you very much for joining the podcast. Um, like I said, I've been looking forward to this for a long time. But before we begin, let me ask all those listening to like and subscribe the, the, to the podcast on the various platforms. It helps with the podcast. We're almost a hundred episodes in. If you've been listening all this time, it's time to like and subscribe. And if you really like the podcast, please help support the podcast at hflpodcast.com/donate. Rabbi Greenberg, there's a lot of places we can start this conversation. Let's begin from the beginning of your story, if we can. Where does the story of Rabbi Heschel Greenberg begin?

02:14 Speaker 1 Well, probably, I mean, when I was born.

02:17 Speaker 2 Yeah.

02:17 Speaker 1 I was born in nineteen forty-eight in Worcester, Massachusetts.

02:22 Speaker 2 No kidding.

02:23 Speaker 1 Right. My father was the Rav Harashi of Worcester, Massachusetts. And, uh, we were there till I was five.

02:32 Speaker 2 Can you introduce your father to those who-

02:34 Speaker 1 Yeah, my father was Rabbi Meir Greenberg. Uh, he was a rav in a few places. Uh, if you're interested, I can go into the different places. He was also a Rosh Yeshiva. He was once-- Before he became a rav, he was the mashgiach in seven seventy, the mashgiach in charge of, uh, talking and learning with the bachurim. And, uh, years later, he became a Rosh Yeshiva in Newark, New Jersey, and later on in Morristown.

03:02 Speaker 2 Right. I, I... That's when I first heard of his name, the Rosh Yeshiva in Morristown.

03:06 Speaker 1 Right. So that was-- But he was-- At the same time, he was the rav for, uh, at least five years. He was in Worcester, Massachusetts. Then he became the Rav Harashi in Paterson, New Jersey. Now, some people might be wondering, "What's this Rav Harashi business? It's not Israel."

03:21 Speaker 2 Right. And Paterson today is not a very large community either.

03:23 Speaker 1 No, it, it has one Litvish yeshiva. That's the only Jews in Paterson left. It's all Arab.

03:28 Speaker 2 Today. Right.

03:30 Speaker 1 Uh, but there were certain communities in Amer-- North America that had kehillahs that would have several shuls, and the shuls would get together to hire one rabbi, who was the Rav Harashi. I think Montreal was one of them, Cincinnati was another, and Worcester, Massachusetts, and Paterson, New Jersey, as, uh, ordinary as they may seem, had a Rav Harashi. So my father was the rav in Worcester. I don't remember how many shuls, but in Paterson, he had seven shuls that he was the rav of. And, uh, what's interesting, on Yom Kippur, he would daven in all the shuls. He would walk from one shul to another.

04:08 Speaker 2 On Yom Kippur?

04:09 Speaker 1 On Yom Kippur. I would s-tag along with him. But he had one Yid who was making an appeal for Israel bonds that would also tag along, 'cause my father didn't want him to torture him. He should hear the same derasha seven times, six times. So my father had to have a different derasha for every shul on Yom Kippur.

04:26 Speaker 2 No kidding. For this Yid?

04:28 Speaker 1 Yeah, just for this Yid, obviously so, yeah. Uh, not to bore him to death.

04:32 Speaker 2 That's a great story. Is that-- That was in Paterson or Worcester?

04:35 Speaker 1 That was in Paterson.

04:35 Speaker 2 That was in Paterson.

04:36 Speaker 1 I don't remember too much in Worcester. I was five when we left.

04:38 Speaker 2 Where did your father come from?

04:40 Speaker 1 Well, my father's father was a Nusach HaAri Yid. He came from a town near Bobruisk called Azarit. It was, uh, a famous Talmud of Rabbi Hillel Paricher, Rabbi Tzadok Azaritza, Azaritza. So my grandfather came from there. He wasn't a, a card-carrying Hasid, but he davened Nusach HaAri. They didn't know any other Nusach. I remember there was a Russian Jew who came to Buffalo. He knew very little about Yiddishkeit, but he knew about davening. So he, so he went to Young Israel. He says, "This is a reformed temple. They're not davening our Nusach." He didn't know that there are other Nusachas. So my grandfather was a Nusach HaAri Yid, and, uh, he was a shtikkel, uh, be-- You know, he knew how to learn Gemara, and he probably went through Shas in his lifetime.

05:25 Speaker 2 Your grandfather's a Nusach HaAri Yid. What makes someone a Nusach HaAri Yid?

05:28 Speaker 1 That's the Nusach he davened. I mean-

05:29 Speaker 2 But for what reason?

05:30 Speaker 1 'Cause he-- The-- Everyone davened Nusach HaAri. W-In Belarus, the wh- the wh- the whole place was Chabad. Not, not, not, not just Lubavitch. It was Lubavitch, Kopust. But not everyone was-- At Tzemach Tzedek they said had six hundred thousand Hasidim.

05:44 Speaker 2 Right.

05:44 Speaker 1 Does it mean everyone learned Halikhot HaTehorah and everyone, uh, was steeped in, in the Ha-Hasidism? Well, bevka, but they davened Nusach HaAri. They had Chabad minhagim.

05:53 Speaker 2 I-I'm so fascinated by that, by that time in history. I know that's a detour from your story, but, but what, what, like... W-What w- what was it like to have this world where people were Chabad Benat Lubavitch or Nusach Hari Benat, even Chabad, like, w- w- how did that happen, and how did it stop happening? Like, how, why is it not the case anymore?

06:15 Speaker 1 Well, it's, you s- you see that phenomenon amongst all the Hasidim, like, they'll tell you they're a Hasid of this and this Rebbe. And you say, "Well, what do you do? You go to his Tish?" "No, I don't go to his Tish." "So why are you a Hasid?" "Well, that's my family. We're-

06:25 Speaker 2 Right

06:26 Speaker 1 ... we belong to that, that, uh, group."

06:28 Speaker 2 And what's Bashtet? Simply the Nusach.

06:30 Speaker 1 There's th- it's just the Nusach, and, uh, there's no real, uh, Has kaasrus, anything pnimistic. So I, I'm assuming, you know, I'm, I'm not really 100% sure. I never interrogated my grandfather. But when-- his connection to Lubavitch, to the Rebbeim came when he came to America. He was, uh, he davened in, uh, by Jacobson Shul, and Rabbi Jacobson introduced my father to, to the Friediker Rebbe. My fa- my father had a chassid, chiddush with the Friediker Rebbe when he was here on a visit. It was his bar mitzvah, my father's bar mitzvah.

07:02 Speaker 2 Your grandfather brought your father?

07:04 Speaker 1 My, my grandfather took my father to the Friediker Rebbe.

07:08 Speaker 2 Mm-hmm.

07:08 Speaker 1 But who arranged it? Rabbi Jacobson.

07:10 Speaker 2 Uh-huh.

07:11 Speaker 1 So my father was one, well, probably the first talmid of Rabbi Jacobson. Uh, in ter- when he, he sent him to Torat Vodaas.

07:18 Speaker 2 Uh-huh.

07:19 Speaker 1 My father didn't go to yeshiva until he was 13. He w- he went to public school.

07:23 Speaker 2 Hmm.

07:24 Speaker 1 And why he didn't go to yeshiva, uh, th- there was a yeshiva around, Chaim Berlin, I think, but for some reason, my grandparents didn't want him to go. They, they, maybe they... I, I'm speculating. They, they lost a few children, and as little babies, so maybe they were overpr- overly protective. That's speculation. But my father was-

07:42 Speaker 2 And where did they live? Where did they live then?

07:43 Speaker 1 In Brownsville.

07:44 Speaker 2 In Brownsville.

07:45 Speaker 1 That's where there were several Chaba- uh, Nusach Hari shuls in Brownsville.

07:48 Speaker 2 Right, the Groners, the-

07:50 Speaker 1 There was-- They, I don't think the Groners davened in the, uh, I forgot the name of the shul. It, it was a shul like that name in, in Crown Heights on Carroll Street. Uh, I'm having a, a senior moment. But there were, there was a, the lo- one of the largest shuls in the country was on Watkins Avenue.

08:07 Speaker 2 In Brownsville.

08:08 Speaker 1 In Brownsville. The Friediker Rebbe said a maimar there, and my grandfather was there.

08:12 Speaker 2 Oh, really?

08:12 Speaker 1 He was outside. He said w- people were able to hear him speak outside.

08:16 Speaker 2 That was a Rosh Hashanah maimar, right?

08:18 Speaker 1 It, it, uh, it could be, but it was, it was a very power-- The Friediker Rebbe had a powerful, powerful voice, and there were thousands of people.

08:25 Speaker 2 Mm-hmm.

08:25 Speaker 1 His voice carried even outside.

08:28 Speaker 2 This was a, the sec- when he came back to, when he came to live in America?

08:31 Speaker 1 No, no.

08:31 Speaker 2 Or the first time?

08:32 Speaker 1 He came to visit.

08:32 Speaker 2 Oh.

08:32 Speaker 1 When he came to back to live, he wasn't able to go anywhere. He, he was paralyzed.

08:37 Speaker 2 Uh-huh.

08:37 Speaker 1 And his voice was not able to project.

08:38 Speaker 2 That's what I'm trying to understand.

08:40 Speaker 1 But in those ten years, the Friediker Rebbe's condition deteriorated.

08:43 Speaker 2 So the first visit, your, your, your, your f- your father was there, or your grandfather was there?

08:47 Speaker 1 My grandfather took my father to the Friediker Rebbe for yechidas.

08:50 Speaker 2 In the first time he was here.

08:51 Speaker 1 In the first time he was here, yeah.

08:53 Speaker 2 Uh-huh. How did your father d- did your father ever describe the Friediker Rebbe to you?

08:58 Speaker 1 Uh, my father was, uh, to him, he was a malach. I mean, that's what-

09:02 Speaker 2 Right

09:02 Speaker 1 ... that, that was the reaction everyone had. The Friediker Rebbe-

09:04 Speaker 2 Right

09:04 Speaker 1 ... gave a, a pr- projected a, a, an otherworldly, uh, image. I mean, in, in, in some ways similar to the Rebbe, in some ways different.

09:14 Speaker 2 Seems very different. 'Cause like, y- the, the Rebbe, you have so many people being mitayir, the like, the blue eyes, the smile, gentle, kind. And the Friediker Rebbe, there's like a remus that people describe-

09:25 Speaker 1 Yeah, the, uh-

09:26 Speaker 2 ... like he was scary almost

09:27 Speaker 1 ... that's true. I think that the, um, that the yiras Hakodesh they had was incredible. Also, the fact that his condition was, uh, compromised, as physically he was paralyzed, and it was hard to even see the Friediker Rebbe. The, the bachurim weren't allowed in for brengens.

09:46 Speaker 2 But that was the reason.

09:47 Speaker 1 So there was a c- there was a certain yiras Hakodesh that, that was created by m- being distant in a way.

09:53 Speaker 2 They weren't allowed in because they didn't wanna see him in this condition? That was the reason?

09:57 Speaker 1 No, no, I think it's because they didn't want too many people.

09:59 Speaker 2 Right.

09:59 Speaker 1 It was not good for his health.

10:00 Speaker 2 Right. Right.

10:02 Speaker 1 So my father grew up in, in a Nusach Hari environment. Uh, as I was saying, in Brownsville, there were a few Nusach Hari shuls. I knew of three. The Watkins Avenue, there was a Lubavitch shul. Then there was a Tzharas shul. I davened there once or twice.

10:17 Speaker 2 Which is where your family came from originally.

10:18 Speaker 1 That's where my grandfather came from, and there was a Rav there, Kadish Romanov.

10:22 Speaker 2 Mm-hmm.

10:22 Speaker 1 He was a t- he learned in Lubavitch, and you could see pictures of him by farbrengens.

10:27 Speaker 2 I've heard the name, yeah.

10:27 Speaker 1 And then there was the Bobroiska shul. That's where Rabbi Jacobson was Rav.

10:31 Speaker 2 Mm-hmm.

10:31 Speaker 1 So my grandfather, I don't know why he didn't go to the Tzharas shul initially. He went to the Bobroiska shul, where Rabbi Jacobson came.

10:39 Speaker 2 Mm-hmm. And that's, and that's what brought him back, or brought him c- closer-

10:42 Speaker 1 And that's what brought him-

10:43 Speaker 2 ... to like a Lubavitch connection

10:44 Speaker 1 ... he became a follower of the Friediker Rebbe.

10:47 Speaker 2 That was your zeide already.

10:47 Speaker 1 My zeide, yeah.

10:49 Speaker 2 So your zeide always had a, basically a, a general connection with Chabad-

10:53 Speaker 1 Right. Right

10:53 Speaker 2 ... going back generations, but it became more-

10:55 Speaker 1 But it wasn't, it w- if not for Rabbi Jacobson, my father would not have been given a, a chassidish shuchinuch. I mean-

11:00 Speaker 2 Right

11:00 Speaker 1 ... it, it beyond. But he used to teach him Tanya, and my father brought other talmidim from Torat Vodaas, and-

11:08 Speaker 2 Oh

11:08 Speaker 1 ... the menahol of Torat Vodaas was not so happy about it.

11:12 Speaker 2 Right. I always wondered. I figured-

11:15 Speaker 1 So, but he started, what he did is he started teaching Tanya himself, Rabbi Mendelovitch.

11:19 Speaker 2 Right. But he, he himself had learned Tanya before-

11:22 Speaker 1 Right

11:22 Speaker 2 ... Rabbi Jacobson. He was a, he was a, he was like a renaissance man like that.

11:24 Speaker 1 He had a keshah with the Munkatch Rebbe, the Minchas Elazar.

11:27 Speaker 2 Right.

11:27 Speaker 1 And there's a sheilah, he asked him about Nusach Hari, and the M- Minchas Elazar was noncommittal about it. It was like, it was, he didn't wanna give a definitive answer as far as I remember.

11:39 Speaker 2 Right. Rabbi Mendelovitch was a very interesting figure. He, he at least-

11:43 Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah, he took from everyone.

11:44 Speaker 2 Yeah.

11:44 Speaker 1 He was eclectic.

11:45 Speaker 2 Right. I don't think he, like, taught Tanya to kilul f- uh, p- to, in order to obviate, uh, Rabbi Jacobson's shiur.

11:53 Speaker 1 Well, there was a, there was, there was a little-

11:54 Speaker 2 He was learning it himself, right?

11:55 Speaker 1 There was a little friction between Lubavitch and, uh, and, and Torat Vodaas. There was competition.

12:01 Speaker 2 Right.

12:01 Speaker 1 My father was sent by the Friediker Rebbe to Scranton, Pennsylvania- Because there were parents who had kids who wanted to send them to yeshiva, but Torat HaDas wouldn't take them without paying, and they didn't have the, the money. So they came to the Rebbe, and he said, "Yes, we'll take them." And if sent my father, and he prepared them, and then when Torat HaDas found out about it, they went to the train station, and they took them all away to, uh, to Torat HaDas, except for two. One of them was Eliya Gross.

12:32 Speaker 2 Who became?

12:33 Speaker 1 He became, was a Lubavitcher. He was very active in Crown Heights.

12:36 Speaker 2 Ah, I see.

12:37 Speaker 1 He has a son who's very active.

12:39 Speaker 2 I see. Oh, okay. That, that Gross family.

12:41 Speaker 1 Yeah. So-

12:41 Speaker 2 So Torat HaDas ended up taking them for free?

12:43 Speaker 1 Took... Yeah, they took the, the other ones. My father, I think, still had a kesher with them.

12:48 Speaker 2 Uh-huh.

12:49 Speaker 1 One of them, uh, what's the, the, the guy, uh, who debates the, uh, Christianity, uh-

12:56 Speaker 2 Uh, in, in California.

12:58 Speaker 1 No, the one, he's in Israel. He used to be in Indonesia.

13:01 Speaker 2 Uh-huh.

13:02 Speaker 1 I can't remember names, but anyhow-

13:03 Speaker 2 Yeah

13:03 Speaker 1 ... hi-his father was one of those, I think, from Scrantons, and my father had... He was, lived in Passaic, New Jersey, and my father had a kesher. So my father grew up-

13:13 Speaker 2 Well, what brought your grandparents or your father's family to N- to America? They came before the war, it sounds like.

13:18 Speaker 1 They came before World War I, right.

13:20 Speaker 2 Oh, before World War I.

13:22 Speaker 1 Yeah.

13:23 Speaker 2 Uh-huh.

13:23 Speaker 1 They came where... Why, why did, uh, all Jews come from Russia? Because-

13:25 Speaker 2 Oh, for the pogroms

13:26 Speaker 1 ... po-pogroms and conscription in the army.

13:29 Speaker 2 Right.

13:30 Speaker 1 I don't know exactly what year my grandfather came.

13:32 Speaker 2 He came married already?

13:34 Speaker 1 Uh, I don't think so, no.

13:35 Speaker 2 Ah.

13:35 Speaker 1 He was not married.

13:36 Speaker 2 So he escaped as a young man, basically.

13:37 Speaker 1 Right, and my grandmother also, uh, she came from a family of Triesker Hasidim, Chernobyl.

13:44 Speaker 2 Which had a Lubavitch.

13:47 Speaker 1 Yeah. They, they, they were Misratan. They were, they were-

13:50 Speaker 2 No, I was just talking to someone, uh, also for the podcast. He told me there was a whole community in Kremenchuk, I believe, where there was a group of people who were both Chabad and-

14:01 Speaker 1 And Chernobyl

14:01 Speaker 2 ... Chernobyl Hasidim, a mix. It's a very interesting thing that... It's interesting how back then in, in Russia, there was, like, um, it seemed like there was more tolerance for, like, identity. Like, uh, Lubavitcher was not so specific. Like, there were-

14:15 Speaker 1 I'm sure that yesh ve'yesh. There were some I'm sure who would, were probably militantly against them.

14:20 Speaker 2 Zalman Malachi is, yes, famously but it seems like there was, like you said, y-your, your father, your grandfather had a Chabad, but it was not like-

14:31 Speaker 1 It was not a

14:32 Speaker 2 No, but he used to-

14:33 Speaker 1 But later on, he used to come to learn. There was a shiur of Tanya he would participate in. Rabbi Zach, the mashpia in, uh, 770's father, used to come to Brownsville, where my grandfather lived, and he gave a shiur in Gemara and a shiur in Tanya.

14:48 Speaker 2 Uh-huh.

14:48 Speaker 1 My grandfather was a regular there.

14:49 Speaker 2 Uh-huh. And so you said your grandfather was a, was a himself.

14:53 Speaker 1 He was a

14:55 Speaker 2 Right.

14:55 Speaker 1 He was someone who, who, uh, w-could s- l-learnt a lot. He, I, I... He went through most of Shas. I, I know from shiur. And I lived with my grandparents for many years.

15:05 Speaker 2 I see.

15:06 Speaker 1 So, uh, I used to go to different shiurim.

15:08 Speaker 2 But he was a businessman.

15:10 Speaker 1 He was a landlord.

15:10 Speaker 2 Oh, okay.

15:10 Speaker 1 He had a few small houses-

15:12 Speaker 2 Uh-huh

15:12 Speaker 1 ... and he rented out, and, uh, that's how he made his parnasa.

15:15 Speaker 2 Right. And your father, your father, your father studied-

15:19 Speaker 1 My father went to public school until he was 13.

15:21 Speaker 2 Right.

15:22 Speaker 1 Rabbi Jacobson influenced my grandparents to send him to Torat HaDas, which he did, and my father became the best talmud of Rab Shlomo Heiman. Rab Shlomo Heiman was the-

15:31 Speaker 2 I'm sure, sure

15:32 Speaker 1 ... gon.

15:33 Speaker 2 Sure.

15:34 Speaker 1 Um, how do I know he was the best talmud? I, I'm biased, obviously, because there was a famous rosh yeshiva, Rabbi Scheiner, I think his name is. He was a rosh yeshiva, I think, in Slonim, in Israel. So he told a nephew, a great nephew of mine, that my father was the greatest talmud of Rab Shlomo Heiman. There's a cute little story. Today is my father's yahrtzeit, actually, so it's appropriate for me to tell a story. My father was sitting at a shiur of Rab Shlomo Heiman, and Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner-

16:02 Speaker 2 Sure

16:03 Speaker 1 ... comes, comes in, and he says, "I have a kasha. No one can answer it. If anyone can answer it, I'll eat my hat."

16:10 Speaker 2 No kidding.

16:11 Speaker 1 So he said the kasha, and my father, on the spot, without hesitation, gave a beautiful answer, and Rab Shlomo Heiman says, "Nu, eat your hat." So my father, well, well, yeah, my father had, had, had an head, and he was not just-

16:29 Speaker 2 I was going to ask. This sounds like an

16:31 Speaker 1 Yeah. He, he, he was, uh, not just in learning, although he was very deep. My father told me once that he could spend 15 hours straight in a sugya without interruption. I can't take 15 minutes straight. He could do 15 hours.

16:45 Speaker 2 Yeah. And he-

16:45 Speaker 1 But my father was also a scientist.

16:47 Speaker 2 That's what I was gonna ask. Was he a down-to-earth person?

16:50 Speaker 1 He, he-

16:50 Speaker 2 Although he's living in, uh-

16:51 Speaker 1 No, no. He-- Well, he was both.

16:53 Speaker 2 Uh-huh.

16:53 Speaker 1 He was both. He was, he, he invented electronics.

16:58 Speaker 2 Really?

16:58 Speaker 1 Yeah. And he w- he was a photographer. He, he, uh, was-

17:02 Speaker 2 Really?

17:02 Speaker 1 He was an orator. He was a p-very powerful speaker, mesmerizing speaker in his, in his y- when he was younger. I, I used to be spellbound when, when he used to speak in Yiddish and in English. People who heard him speak in Yiddish thought he couldn't speak English. People who heard him speak in English thought he couldn't speak Yiddish.

17:19 Speaker 2 He's an American boy.

17:20 Speaker 1 American boy.

17:20 Speaker 2 I'm sure his English is good.

17:21 Speaker 1 Right, right.

17:21 Speaker 2 Yeah.

17:21 Speaker 1 And his first language is Yiddish.

17:23 Speaker 2 Right.

17:23 Speaker 1 But he picked up English right away. But my, my father was brilliant in all different ways, but he was also very, h-his Emunah Pshata, that's what I grew up on, Emu-Emunah Pshata. I grew up on a, on a love for, for, for lamdas. My father instilled that in me. But, but also the Emunah Pshata, and the Aibishter, and the Rebbe, and Mashiach, these are things that I got from my father and mother. But, but, but my father stood out as someone with such a head like him, and, and sometimes he was spaced out in his learning. I remember there were two Lubavitcher came in America, shlichas, and, uh-

18:02 Speaker 2 This is already in Paterson

18:03 Speaker 1 ... this is in Paterson. I was standing there listening

18:07 Speaker 2 And my father asked them what they're learning. I think they said

18:09 Speaker 1 So my father started talking and learning. My father forgot where they were and where he was. He went on for two hours, and they're rolling their eyes. You know, they, they lost him in-- after 10 minutes, he was, uh-

18:22 Speaker 2 He was going on a whole pilpul for two hours

18:23 Speaker 1 He's going on a pilpul from one segia to another for two hours, right? And they had no idea. And I, I remember one of the bachurim who was a shach to learn was Rabbi Levitansky, alav ha-shalom, right? So he was someone who knew how to learn, but he, he couldn't keep up. It, it was, it was way above him. But my-- So my father was both. When he, when he wanted to get into learning, he was in another world.

18:45 Speaker 2 Sitting here in front of the backdrop where we first recorded the intro to the podcast, it's hard to believe we are fast approaching the milestone of 100 episodes recorded and published for the Homesick for Lubavitch podcast. Looking back at the past three years, the journey has been far more than I imagined when I started. I've met so many interesting people. I've spent so many hours discussing their ideas and their perspectives. Their ideas have changed me, have changed how I think, have changed how I live, have changed how I feel, have changed how I interact with others. And I know that many of you that listen regularly who have reached out to me and shared how it's-- what it means to you feel the same. This podcast was started here in this studio as a small idea, has turned into something that thousands of people look forward to each week. It brings ideas to the table. It brings perspectives to the table that are then shared and multiplied in conversations between thousands of people around the world, whether it's in shul, at a Shabbos table, on a WhatsApp chat, that's opened and encouraged conversations that have been closed and shut off for too long, and has shown that those conversations can be had in a respectful and patient and productive way. As I look for what comes after the 100 episodes, my feeling is that what comes next has to be more intentional, has to be bigger, has to be bolder. There are a number of

20:14 Speaker 2 projects that we have in the works that will take the podcast to a new level. We'll open up new kinds of content that are aligned with the vision of the original podcast. In the next few weeks, we'll be launching the 100 for 100 campaign, which will raise $100,000 to make those initiatives possible. Thanks to a few generous friends of the podcast, we're already 20% of the way there. I look forward to sharing with you updates about the campaign, as well as initiatives that will follow. The impact and reach of Homesick for Lubavitch is just beginning. Mazel tov. But how was he as a, how was he as a father? It's always interesting, interesting to hear about such people. Was he-

20:53 Speaker 1 He was this-

20:53 Speaker 2 Like he, he would read you a bed-- Uh, I don't know what they did back in those days, but did he read you a bedtime story?

20:58 Speaker 1 My father was the soft-- No, he didn't do that. He, he would-- But he was the softest father you could imagine. I mean, he-- If, if you misbehaved and he said something, the-- I had a trick. I was able to get him just to, to make amends for what he did to me. When I put my head down and acted as if I had a hard time breathing. So as soon as he heard that, he ran over to me, and he started hugging me, and that was the end of the upset, being upset with me.

21:25 Speaker 2 So he's a softie.

21:26 Speaker 1 Very soft when it came to his family. But when it was at rov, he was very tough. He put, he put b-butchers out of business 'cause he caught them. One of them, I remember, got a key. Somehow he was able to... He couldn't really open the butcher without the mashgiach.

21:43 Speaker 2 Right.

21:43 Speaker 1 But he somehow on Shabbos, he got in there. My father discovered that. He was-- Within days, he was out of business. My father just took the sign away.

21:52 Speaker 2 Right. Also, uh, back in the day, butchers was like a, it's very different than it was today, right?

21:56 Speaker 1 Right. I mean, not, not-- Most of the butchers were not from.

21:59 Speaker 2 Right. Right.

22:00 Speaker 1 So it was up to the sh- the mashgiach to determine that they're-

22:03 Speaker 2 Right

22:03 Speaker 1 ...not fooling around.

22:04 Speaker 2 Right. And they weren't part of supermarkets or anything. It was much more-

22:07 Speaker 1 No

22:07 Speaker 2 ...it was a much more Wild West back then.

22:09 Speaker 1 There were probably at least 20 butcher shops-

22:11 Speaker 2 Right

22:11 Speaker 1 ...in Patterson. Patterson had, when we came there in 1953, I think, there were 38,000 Jews.

22:19 Speaker 2 Right.

22:20 Speaker 1 And it's not such a big city, so it was Jews con-concentrated, and it's a third of the popula-- fourth of the population was Jewish.

22:26 Speaker 2 Yeah, working class, working class community.

22:28 Speaker 1 It was an in-- it was a textile industry town.

22:31 Speaker 2 Right.

22:31 Speaker 1 It was like a sister city to Lodz.

22:34 Speaker 2 Uh-huh.

22:34 Speaker 1 So one of my father's seven shuls was the Lodz Shul. That was the largest shul with like Chevre Tair. It was about the same size and this exact same construction as Chevre Tair.

22:43 Speaker 2 Wait, it was a sister city to Lodz. This was before the-- This was after the war?

22:48 Speaker 1 Uh-

22:48 Speaker 2 By the time you came there

22:49 Speaker 1 ...after the war, a lot of the Holocaust survivors from Lodz settled in. Uh, it could be it was there before the war.

22:54 Speaker 2 It makes sense that they were sister city before the war.

22:56 Speaker 1 Yes.

22:56 Speaker 2 And now they're sister city to a city that doesn't exist anymore. It's a Jewish community.

22:59 Speaker 1 Well, they, they were not a-- I don't know if they were officially a sister city, but they, they had, uh, an affinity to one another.

23:05 Speaker 2 Uh-huh.

23:05 Speaker 1 And my-- And, uh, the Holocaust survivors who came from Lodz gravitated to that shul. There were a lot of Holocaust survivors. I grew up with Holocaust survivors.

23:13 Speaker 2 Right.

23:14 Speaker 1 There was one shul called the Shtiebel that was more Hasidish. Everyone there was a Holocaust survivor, about 20, 30 members.

23:22 Speaker 2 When your father would say a speech, you were saying he was a tremendous orator. How did he keep people's attention? With stories, with, with, with, with, with divrei Torah, with, with jokes? What was the-

23:33 Speaker 1 No, I don't-

23:33 Speaker 2 What was the key?

23:33 Speaker 1 I don't remember him telling too many jokes. He was a very, uh... I, I just-- Maybe because I was a child, and this is my father, but I found him mesmerizing. I, I-- It was like spellbinding to hear him speak, and he spoke in the old-fashioned way. He-- My father used to write down his speech and memorize it word for word.

23:54 Speaker 2 Mamish.

23:55 Speaker 1 I, I'm totally the opposite of my father in that regard. I don't-- I, I'm not like my father almost in anything.

24:01 Speaker 2 Your father prepared a speech word for word.

24:03 Speaker 1 He prepared it word for word.

24:04 Speaker 2 And this is someone who-

24:05 Speaker 1 Very carefully

24:06 Speaker 2 ...this is someone who has a mind that can, I'm sure, wing it no problem.

24:10 Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah, but, but that was not his style. His style was he, I, I-- He pro-- I think he did took some courses in public speaking when he was younger, and he-- But my father was had a fear of, of, uh-

24:22 Speaker 2 Public speaking

24:22 Speaker 1 ...public speaking.

24:23 Speaker 2 Uh-huh.

24:23 Speaker 1 So he came to the Friediker Rebbe with it, with his, uh... He said, "I can't speak because I, I, I'm, I'm intimidated by the people." So the Friediker Rebbe said, "Imagine all the people's heads are heads of cabbage."

24:37 Speaker 2 No kidding.

24:38 Speaker 1 Yeah. So, so that way he won't be intimidated. So I, my-- I always wondered why the Friediker Rebbe would talk about people's heads as cabbage heads.

24:46 Speaker 2 Right.

24:47 Speaker 1 Then I realized it could be, this is just bederech hepsher, that a human being has a composite of dam, sameach, chayim, medaber.

24:54 Speaker 2 Right.

24:54 Speaker 1 Sameach ha-midas. Don't look at them as intellectuals. Look at them as y- your fellow Yid, and you have this, uh, you're, you're speaking to their hearts.

25:03 Speaker 2 Interesting.

25:03 Speaker 1 You're speaking to their sameach, not to their m-- to their, uh, adam, to their meichen. So you won't be intimidated. Whatever, if that hesber is true or not, but that's what the Friediker Rebbe's advice to him.

25:13 Speaker 2 Interesting. Interesting. So y- you said your father learned by Reb Shlomo Heiman?

25:20 Speaker 1 He also learned by Reb Berel Rifkin.

25:22 Speaker 2 Who was a Lubavitcher.

25:23 Speaker 1 Was a Lubavitcher.

25:24 Speaker 2 Where was that?

25:25 Speaker 1 He was in Torah Vodaas.

25:26 Speaker 2 Remember, was it-

25:26 Speaker 1 Before he learned by Shlomo Heiman, he learned by Rabbi Berel Rifkin.

25:29 Speaker 2 So they had a Lubavitcher, uh, well, they had Rabbi Jacobson, and they had Rabbi Rifkin both teaching for them in Torah Vodaas.

25:34 Speaker 1 No, Rabbi Jacobson taught unofficially.

25:35 Speaker 2 Unofficially.

25:36 Speaker 1 But Rabbi Rifkin was part of the hanhala. He was a Rosh Yeshiva, then he became the menahil when Rabbi, uh, what's his name again? When the menahil was ill-

25:45 Speaker 2 Mendelovich. Herman Mendelovich

25:46 Speaker 1 ... Mendelovich was ill, Rabbi Rifkin took over as the menahil of Torah Vodaas.

25:50 Speaker 2 Oh, no kidding.

25:51 Speaker 1 He was the masmich. Later on, he be- he was the one who gave smicha to everyone.

25:54 Speaker 2 No kidding.

25:54 Speaker 1 He was very highly respected in Torah Vodaas.

25:58 Speaker 2 So-

25:58 Speaker 1 So when my father told me he learnt in two years by Reb Rifkin, he learnt the whole Baba Basra leHit'on.

26:04 Speaker 2 Really?

26:04 Speaker 1 In two years, yeah.

26:05 Speaker 2 Two years.

26:06 Speaker 1 Now-

26:06 Speaker 2 What happened? What ha- how, how, how have things changed so much in 80, in the, uh, what is this, 80 years?

26:11 Speaker 1 If they learn 20 blad in a year, it's a lot leHit'on.

26:14 Speaker 2 That's what I'm saying.

26:15 Speaker 1 Yeah.

26:15 Speaker 2 How have things changed? I mean-

26:16 Speaker 1 I, it's a good question

26:17 Speaker 2 ... you're saying your father was a ilu- was an ilui, fine. Y- most people aren't. But you're saying the yeshiva learned the, the Masechtel Hit'on in two years. Not everyone there was an ilui, I imagine. Right?

26:28 Speaker 1 I imagine that anyone who went to the yeshiva was steeped in learning.

26:33 Speaker 2 Mm.

26:33 Speaker 1 Took learning very seriously.

26:34 Speaker 2 Uh-huh. I think that's what it is.

26:36 Speaker 1 And some people had to... My father, with all his mental a- abilities, was a tremendous masmid. He sat and learned 15, 18 hours a day.

26:46 Speaker 2 Right.

26:47 Speaker 1 So y- you combine those two, you get a, a l- l- good, good results.

26:52 Speaker 2 Right, but what happened to yeshivas that, like, the idea of learning, you said even 20 blad Gemara Hit'on's already like a big deal. What happened? Did we change the way we learn the Hit'on? Is it that the yeshiva used to select for guys that were, like you said, more interested in learning in the first place?

27:07 Speaker 1 I don't know. I'm, I'm, I'm out of the system, so I'm not-

27:12 Speaker 2 This is, it seems like such a drastic drop-off is all I'm saying. Like-

27:15 Speaker 1 Yeah, it's like that not just in Lubavitch. It's like that all over.

27:18 Speaker 2 I know. I, I, I know. I'm not saying it's a Lubavitch thing.

27:21 Speaker 1 It, it-

27:21 Speaker 2 I, like, I, like, you read stories like... I was even interviewing, uh, I think Reb Yisroel Kanevesky, uh, a few weeks, a few months ago. He was saying like that he, he was, he was in Lud, in the Lubavitch yeshiva, and like he c-

27:32 Speaker 1 Uh-huh

27:32 Speaker 2 ... he, uh, he comes to, he comes to New York with a letter from his teacher, and this was in, he was a younger boy, that he's, he's bakant in the, in, in the, in the, all the Babas of Gemara.

27:45 Speaker 1 Yeah.

27:45 Speaker 2 It's like, and like, I learned, I, I read the memoirs of my zeyda aftrer, and the same thing. Like, people were learning Masechtas. They knew Masechtas. Like, what happened? Is it-

27:54 Speaker 1 Right. My father, Reb Shlomo Heiman, learned Yavomas. He learned about most of Yavomas leHit'on. Yavomas is, they don't even teach it anymore in Lubavitch yeshivas.

28:02 Speaker 2 Right, right.

28:02 Speaker 1 When I was there, they did teach it.

28:03 Speaker 2 Oh, they did?

28:04 Speaker 1 Yeah. I-

28:04 Speaker 2 Well, what, what happened there?

28:06 Speaker 1 I guess they felt it was too much for the Bochum. It's, it's very intricate.

28:11 Speaker 2 Right.

28:11 Speaker 1 My father, to him, Yava- he was, uh, you can wake him up in middle of the night, and you talk to him about a Rashba somewhere in, in Yavomas, he would be able to talk to you about it. And in fact, my father-

28:20 Speaker 2 Oh, he liked, he liked Yavomas?

28:22 Speaker 1 That was his favorite Masechta.

28:24 Speaker 2 Really?

28:24 Speaker 1 My father, when he was very ill, he had Parkinson's, and he wasn't, uh, you know, it, it slowed him down. If you started talking to him in Yavomas, he would talk about it like he learnt it today.

28:36 Speaker 2 That's what, that's what brought him back to life.

28:38 Speaker 1 Yeah.

28:41 Speaker 2 Huh.

28:42 Speaker 1 He had that love for Yavomas, maybe because that's where was most productive year with Reb Shlomo Heiman. My father loved Reb Shlomo Heiman.

28:49 Speaker 2 Right. How did he, how did he... I just, in a way, this is a silly question, but I wonder if the answer might be less silly than the question. How did your father reconcile being a Lub- ultimately a Lubavitcher Chassid with the fact that his teachers were, were not Lubavitchers? Was it at all a, an issue?

29:07 Speaker 1 Uh, my father was not a comp- c- complicated person. He took whatever he could take from each person. He got lamdis from Shlomo Heiman, although he learned by Reb Yehuda Leber for a few days when he went to Otwock. And I once asked him who was, who was better, who was a bigger lamden, Reb Yehuda Leber or Shlomo Heiman? And, uh, I s- he was uncomfortable with the question, I think, but he said Reb Yehuda Leber.

29:36 Speaker 2 Really?

29:37 Speaker 1 Yeah. Apparently, Reb Yehuda Leber was much deeper. Reb Shlomo Heiman was more a poshtan.

29:41 Speaker 2 Uh-huh.

29:41 Speaker 1 But if you wanted depth, Reb Yehuda Leber gave you a lot of depth.

29:45 Speaker 2 Right.

29:45 Speaker 1 Reb Yehuda Leber was able to go on for, for hours and hours in the same Sugiah.

29:50 Speaker 2 Uh-huh. Wow. Your father went to Otwock for a few days befo- obviously before the war.

29:56 Speaker 1 It was, it was right before the war.

29:58 Speaker 2 Right, and a lot of American Bochum would go to Poland to the yeshivas. How did he get out?

30:02 Speaker 1 That, that's the big miracle. Uh, w- the war broke out Erev Chayil.

30:09 Speaker 2 Right.

30:10 Speaker 1 So here they go- they went from Otwock to Warsaw, and it's Friday night, and they have to get a place to stay. The hotels wouldn't let them in unless they signed their name. It was already Shabbos, so they didn't know what to do.

30:23 Speaker 2 Right, they went from Otwock to Warsaw because, 'cause Otwock was, was-

30:27 Speaker 1 To, to get out of Poland, they had to go through Warsaw. They had to get papers.

30:30 Speaker 2 Uh-huh.

30:30 Speaker 1 They had to get documents they needed. So-

30:33 Speaker 2 But your father need-- your father's an American.

30:35 Speaker 1 Right, but they need... I, I don't know exactly what they needed.

31:00 Speaker 2 Uh-huh.

31:00 Speaker 1 Uh, but they needed things in Warsaw. So, uh, they didn't know what to do. They had Right. Menachem Zember was one of the greatest gaonim. Right. He was one of the only people who could stump the Rogatchover. So when Menachem Zember was sitting eating soda Shabbos in the hallway 'cause they couldn't keep lights on in the outer rooms, and Menachem Zember invited my father to sit down and make kiddush, and then when they asked him the shayela, he said, "First of all, the Polish, you can trust them. They're not gonna keep the time for the curfew. If the curfew was 9:00, it's not gonna be until 11:00, kazava." And then he said, "If you're forced to sign, then bo- two people should sign with their left hand at the same time, so it's, uh, signing with a shinui." But they, they got in a hotel without signing, and that saved them, because they didn't have money to get tickets to get out. You can't just... No one had money to give them, but there was a guy, a Rabbi Isbi, who was in that hotel, and he had a big problem. He had a lot of money, but they wouldn't let him take the money out. So they figured out how much money they needed, and he had exactly that amount. He bought them all tickets, and when they came to America, they reimbursed him, so he got his money out, and they got themselves out.

32:15 Speaker 2 Wow.

32:15 Speaker 1 So then if they had taken another hotel and signed, they would never have met him. Who knows if they would have f-found a way to get out.

32:21 Speaker 2 Who's, who's they? Who was his friend?

32:24 Speaker 1 He was with M-M-Mehtal Waltine. Uh, I, I don't know how many-

32:27 Speaker 2 A few American boys

32:28 Speaker 1 ... American boys.

32:29 Speaker 2 Hmm.

32:29 Speaker 1 I don't know which ones were out, uh, w-were together. I think Rabbi Bernetsky was another one, Rabbi Kolodny. I don't remember all the names. Uh, Rabbi Shlomo Zamir Hecht, who was married already. I don't know if he was in the, together with that group at that, at that time.

32:47 Speaker 2 Hmm. So, so, so, so we, we, we, we have a little bit of the background of your father. And you, you, you grew up in your father's home, and it comes time for you to go to-

32:57 Speaker 1 I really didn't grow up in my father's home.

32:58 Speaker 2 Okay, fair enough. I mean, you said you grew up a little bit going Yom Kippur with him to shul.

33:03 Speaker 1 Right. But at the age of eight, I was sent away to yeshiva in Brooklyn, to Lubavitch Yeshiva.

33:08 Speaker 2 Uh-huh. Was there a yeshiva in Patterson?

33:10 Speaker 1 It was a day school, a modern Orthodox day school. I went there to first grade and part of second grade, I think, and then my father didn't want me to get a chinuch, uh, that kind of a chinuch, so he sent me... First, he sent me to stay with my mother's parents in Borough Park.

33:25 Speaker 2 Mm-hmm.

33:25 Speaker 1 It was a yeshiva called Toras Emes.

33:27 Speaker 2 So your mother doesn't come from a Lubavitch family?

33:29 Speaker 1 No, she comes from a Litvish family. My, my maternal grandfather was a talmid of the Chofetz Chaim, Rabbi Chaim Ozer Grodzensky, but he loved Lubavitch, and, and, and he would, he would speak on his-- He was a big maggid, and he would-

33:41 Speaker 2 Your zeide.

33:42 Speaker 1 My zeide, my maternal gra-grandfather.

33:44 Speaker 2 That's why you married off his daughter to a Lubavitcher.

33:46 Speaker 1 Yeah. He-- First, in those days, it was hard to find anyone who's from-

33:49 Speaker 2 Right. That's true. That's true, yeah.

33:50 Speaker 1 And my father was twenty-seven when he got married.

33:54 Speaker 2 Right.

33:54 Speaker 1 So, uh, but he loved Lubavitch, and he sent one of his sons to Lubavitch, who was a, who learned by my father in seve- in s- uh, when he was a kid. So I went to Toras Emes. I don't know why they sent me there first. I didn't like it, and after a month, they sent me to my other grandparents in Brownsville.

34:14 Speaker 2 Right.

34:14 Speaker 1 I stayed by them from the age of eight to fourteen. Six years, I lived there. So I only saw my father every few weeks and in the summer.

34:24 Speaker 2 Was it hard for you as a kid?

34:25 Speaker 1 I don't remember it being hard. I have no, I have no negative memories.

34:30 Speaker 2 That's possible. Doesn't have to be hard.

34:32 Speaker 1 I don't know.

34:33 Speaker 2 It d- it doesn't have to be negative.

34:34 Speaker 1 Maybe I have a coping mechanism that I forget the negatives. I don't know. But, uh, I, I really didn't... Uh, that I missed, that I c- uh, that I really didn't live with, with my father, except in the summer. Although I went to Gan Yisroel the year, one of the years the rabbi came there, I was in Gan Yisroel.

34:54 Speaker 2 Oh, yeah, you were there.

34:55 Speaker 1 I was there, but I remember when they c- my father came for visiting day, I said, "Take me home." It's not that I didn't like camp, but I was homesick.

35:03 Speaker 2 Right.

35:03 Speaker 1 So that's, that's the little bit I got.

35:06 Speaker 2 So you didn't ask your father to take y-you home from yeshiva, though? From camp, yeah.

35:09 Speaker 1 No, no. Yeshiva, how could you take home? Not go to yeshiva.

35:14 Speaker 2 Uh, you're also by your grandparents, I guess. It's not like being nowhere.

35:18 Speaker 1 Yeah. Uh, it was, it was better than just being in a dormitory. But I, I lived with my grandparents, and, and, uh, my grandmother was, uh, said at least a whole Tehillim once every day, maybe more than once.

35:32 Speaker 2 Hmm. Was your father ever, uh... Did he ever remark, or did he... What, what did he think about the chinuch you were getting in Lubavitch? You weren't getting the same ki- I mean, maybe you were. I'm assuming you weren't getting the same kind of, uh, Gemara learning or just the, the kamus and echus that you, that he had gotten with, with Rabbi Hyman and, and his teachers.

35:54 Speaker 1 Well, the lower grades, we're talk- I went when I was in elementary school. But-

35:58 Speaker 2 Right. But even when he was-

35:59 Speaker 1 When we came to the zal, my father was never, uh, never complained that they, I wasn't getting enough.

36:05 Speaker 2 He didn't?

36:05 Speaker 1 No, he didn't.

36:06 Speaker 2 He thought you were getting, he thought you were getting-

36:07 Speaker 1 I c- I complained.

36:08 Speaker 2 Okay. Yeah, f- okay. So, so my question wasn't so off base.

36:13 Speaker 1 No.

36:13 Speaker 2 So you don't think it bothered him?

36:15 Speaker 1 No, he never... I, I don't remember him ever saying, "You're not getting the same standard that I got." Uh, he probably recognized that the, the Yiddish said that it is, that we're not, I'm not the same as him. And, uh, and we did get a lot. I mean, it's, it's-

36:32 Speaker 2 Who were your teachers?

36:34 Speaker 1 You talking about in mesivta?

36:35 Speaker 2 No, I mean when, when you complained, who, who were-

36:37 Speaker 1 That was when I was in the zal in Bedford.

36:41 Speaker 2 Uh-huh. It's a little bit of a balagan over there.

36:44 Speaker 1 I, I, I, I don't wanna mention any names.

36:46 Speaker 2 I understand.

36:46 Speaker 1 But, but, uh, it was one Rosh Yeshiva that I was not happy about. It was a little incident that I started writing his shiurim, and he was very happy that I was writing his shiurim. And once he said something, and I asked him, "What's the basis what you're saying?" And he couldn't give me a good answer. So I got upset, and I s- I said, "I'm not writing your shiurim anymore." So then Rabbi Tennenbaum, the menahil, who was a big lamdan, tried to explain it to me. It made a little sense, but I wasn't satisfied. So I really got upset. So then Rabbi Ye'el heard, Rabbi Ye'el was our mashpia, he heard that I was upset. He asked him, "What, you know, what's the problem?" I told him what the issue was. On the spot, he gave me the hesber.

37:30 Speaker 2 Rabbi Ye'el?

37:30 Speaker 1 Rabbi Ye'el, yeah.

37:31 Speaker 2 Since when does he, does he know Gemara?

37:34 Speaker 1 Rabbi Ye'el was a, is a, uh, ga- gaon adsum. And in a few-- And he learnt as a bachur in, in, uh, in Israel, and he remembered things, and he, and he, he just, he just answered on the spot. He, and he, what he said later on, I found it was, was, was, was true.

37:52 Speaker 2 One second. So, I mean, the fact that Rabbi Ye'el is a genius, that, that, that, that I knew, obviously. But I, I-- He-- you're saying that he, he answered a question in Gemara that the Rosh Yeshiva couldn't answer, and he answered it klal chiyad? Like, just-

38:05 Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah.

38:07 Speaker 2 Klal chiyad. Hmm.

38:10 Speaker 1 It, it, it wasn't-- it was mamash klal chiyad. You know, the, uh his style of speaking. It was no big deal. He didn't make a big deal out of it.

38:20 Speaker 2 Homesick for Lubavitch is brought to you by Yuvala Media, a boutique video production company that I have run for close to ten years. Today, Yuvala Media works with organizations all around the country, bringing their stories to life in a way that is both meaningful and memorable. Whether it's a video for a milestone dinner, an online fundraiser, or a building campaign, we begin each project with the same question: What does your audience need to know about you to feel more connected to your cause? Once we answer that question, we tailor-make a video that best addresses this need. Over the years, we have built a reputation for top-of-the-line visuals while also being responsive and reliable. As one of our clients put it, "A combination of technical excellence and real heart." If you are looking to make a video for an upcoming dinner, fundraiser, or building campaign, please reach out to us to schedule a fifteen-minute phone call to see if we can make something beautiful together. Email us at hello@yuvalamedia.com. Again, that is hello@yuvalamedia.com. A link can be found in the show notes. And now, back to the show. Yeah, so i-i-isn't that, in a way, part of the difference between whatever you're getting in Lubavitch and, and what your father was getting? That, like, in Lubavitch, the more you know, the more you're kind of encouraged to, like, take it, you know, keep it under wraps, so to speak. Uh, doesn't that change a little bit the whole-

39:39 Speaker 1 I, I, I don't agree with that. I b- I think that the Rebbe wanted desperately that Lubavitch bachurim should compete with and outshine Litvish bachurim in every aspect of learning Limud Torah.

39:54 Speaker 2 Right.

39:54 Speaker 1 I know that from-- I know that for a fact, that the Rebbe's, uh, the Rebbe said it openly. It's not just what I know. But I, I remember, this is an incident that happened, American shlichas. I went to-- And this is n- this is right after the Six-Day War, 'sixty-seven. So I went to the state of Illinois with Shmarya Schust- Shmarya Schusterman. He's the rav of Chicago, Beni Rubin, Schul's son.

40:19 Speaker 2 Right.

40:20 Speaker 1 So I knew I'm gonna speak to rosh yeshivas there. So there was a rosh yeshiva, his name was Rabchaim Shachnovitz, who was a talmid of the Rogatchover, a big gaon.

40:29 Speaker 2 In Chicago?

40:30 Speaker 1 In Chicago. And he wrote a few sefarim. So I, I f- I found one of the sefarim in the library in seven seventy, and I pr- I prepared a minyan from that sefer. And when I came to him, I told him that his chiddush, I told him, I said, "This is-- I heard you wrote this and this." He was so delighted that someone looked in his sefer and was able to repeat what is in his sefer. He fell in love. Then I see he's writing something, so I'm asking him, "What are you writing on?" He says, "Writing on, on Masechtah Menachos." I don't think it was ever printed. And Menachos is where it talks about tefillin, and I had a pilpul on, in Hilchas Tefillin. And I told him what I, my chiddush, and he said, "That's m- th-that's my chiddush."

41:14 Speaker 2 No kidding.

41:15 Speaker 1 So in other words, I was mechaven to his way of thinking.

41:18 Speaker 2 No kidding.

41:18 Speaker 1 So he told someone that he never met a L- an American bachur that can, can «Izeh farshpreht, farshteyt azoy gut lernen.» That's such a good comprehension. Why? Because I appreciated his way of learning . That was-- And he turned-- He was a very fiery misnaged. He hated Lubavitch 'cause he knew Lubavitcher in, in Samarkand, and they'd make fun of him. You know, the Chassidim made fun of, uh, of anyone who was-- stood out and had this s-sense of self-importance. And it was wrong because they were mara'ach him, and he spoke out against someone who sent his son to the, s- to the, the Lubavitch. And this turned him around.

41:59 Speaker 2 No kidding.

42:00 Speaker 1 This mamash turned him around. My Rabbi Mentlick told me they used to give a report to the Rebbe about American sh-- Bachurim went to American shlichas. The Rebbe had more nachas ruach when he heard this, these stories of talking and learning than he had from other things. Not to minimize other things, but the Rebbe wanted tremendously that Lubavitch bachurim should know how to learn. And part of it is part of havath ha-semayachus.

42:25 Speaker 2 But cu- but culturally, culturally, Lubavitch wasn't like that, right? People-

42:30 Speaker 1 Uh, depends who. There were a lot, but no one made a fuss about it. If you were, even if you knew Shas by b- by heart, no one ever knew about it. No one cared about it.

42:39 Speaker 2 Right.

42:39 Speaker 1 No, no, uh, no one promoted it.

42:42 Speaker 2 Right. Doesn't that do something to... I mean-

42:44 Speaker 1 Because of Chassidishkeit, that was the one-- the reason that, uh, the Rebbe changed that. The Rebbe wanted it. We should write pilpulim. We should be, uh, publish sefarim. That, the, you know, in the olden days, if someone would say, "I published a sefer, but I don't drink mashke," they'd say, "A misnaged."

43:01 Speaker 2 Right.

43:01 Speaker 1 Now, if a person says, "I, I take mashke, and I'm, and I, and I don't write chiddushim, and I'm s- able to do it," that's a misnaged.

43:11 Speaker 2 Right. Yeah, but- You're still on the-- You're still an exception when you say that, culturally speaking. You're not wrong, but, but-

43:20 Speaker 1 No, but, but we, we know what the Rebbe want-- The Rebbe once said he used to pass by the Kol El Gorari. That was Rabbi Hutner's Kol El on President Street. I think it's where, where, uh, Machan Eliyahu says or where, where Free-

43:33 Speaker 2 Free

43:33 Speaker 1 ... one of those places.

43:35 Speaker 2 Yeah.

43:35 Speaker 1 Used to be a Kol El. The Rebbe says, "I'm jealous of them." I'm not sure this is the exact words. The, the K- when he used to go by, he would hear the Kol Torah, and the Rebbe wanted desperately they should hear the Kol Torah from Bachrim.

43:47 Speaker 2 So did it bother you as a Bachri who is picking up on this, on this priority of the Rebbe? Does it bother you that it seems like it's not-

43:57 Speaker 1 No, there weren't plenty of Bachrim. All my classmates, most of my classmates that I remember were all steeped in learning.

44:02 Speaker 2 Uh-huh. No, 'cause you said before that you, it bothered you. Th-this is not what bothered you. You said that y-y-you, you-

44:08 Speaker 1 What, what bothered me that I didn't get a good answer from the Rosh Yeshiva.

44:11 Speaker 2 Oh, that's it.

44:12 Speaker 1 That was that was my complaint.

44:14 Speaker 2 Oh, that's it. I see. Okay.

44:14 Speaker 1 This Rosh Yeshiva happens to be a big Lamdan, and I regret the fact that I, I was upset at him because I caused him makmis nefesh. So I'm not, not, not proud of it. That's why I'm not mentioning-

44:24 Speaker 2 Uh-huh

44:24 Speaker 1 ... his name.

44:25 Speaker 2 Uh-huh.

44:25 Speaker 1 But, uh, and he ha-happens to be a gadole haLamdan.

44:29 Speaker 2 Uh-huh.

44:29 Speaker 1 But I was, I was childish, I was immature, and I, and I got upset because he couldn't explain that inyan that he said.

44:39 Speaker 2 Uh-huh. So y-y-your, your, your Bachri, your, your Bachri learning in, in, in Lubavitch, what, what, what... Y-y-on one hand, you are, you are following, it seems, your father's path of, of, of being immersed in learning Gemara and Torah in general.

45:01 Speaker 1 I, I try to do that a little. Not, nothing to compare to my father.

45:05 Speaker 2 I said following, right? Following his path.

45:08 Speaker 1 That's where my interests lie.

45:10 Speaker 2 Right. What is different about your, about your life or your chinuch to your father, being that you're the one learning in Lubavitch Yeshiva? Do you feel there's a difference?

45:20 Speaker 1 Between my father and myself?

45:21 Speaker 2 And you. Yes.

45:24 Speaker 1 No. I mean, my father, besides learning, he was a Rav, and he is very active as a Rav, and he was mecharev people to Yiddishkeit, and he, um, he, he was a big machnis Aruch, and, and my father had-

45:39 Speaker 2 No, I'm not trying to put your father down, Chas ve'Shalom. I'm, uh, let me, let me phrase the question a little bit differently. What do you-- What are you gaining or what, what's different for you being a Talmid and learning, learning in Lubavitch Yeshiva?

45:49 Speaker 1 I, I-

45:49 Speaker 2 Is there something different or something that you're gaining from, from that experience?

45:53 Speaker 1 Maybe we had more his galus of Chassidis my father wasn't, uh, exposed to when he was growing up. My father learned Chassidis. My father learned Chassidis constantly. He wasn't known as a big maskil in Chassidis. In fact, the Rebbe was once describing different Bachrim. It was, it was criticism actually. But the Rebbe described, uh, one Bachri was a big Lamdan in Nigla and, and mamutza in Chassidis. Another one was mamutza in Nigla and big in Chassidis, and the third one was simple in both, and he did a-- he accomplished the shlichus that he was, that was put on him. So, but he described my father as big in, in Nigla and average in Chassidis.

46:33 Speaker 2 Uh-huh.

46:35 Speaker 1 But my father was a, was a big Chassid. My fa-father was a tremendous haskachas to the Rebbe. And, uh, you know, where did I get my... If I, if I have any shtick or emunah in, in, in, in Mashiach and the Rebbe, and the Rebbe as Mashiach, I got it from my father and my mother.

46:54 Speaker 2 Well, when did, uh, when, when in your life do you remember Mashiach being this, this-

47:00 Speaker 1 From the time I was a child, a little child.

47:02 Speaker 2 Time you were a child.

47:03 Speaker 1 Yeah.

47:03 Speaker 2 Where do you think your father got that from? Do you think your-

47:07 Speaker 1 He, he grew up in this-

47:08 Speaker 2 You think your grandfather, you think your grandfather that kind of-

47:10 Speaker 1 I never heard this from my grand-- My grandfather was a very quiet person. I didn't hear too much from him at all, klal.

47:15 Speaker 2 Mm-hmm.

47:16 Speaker 1 But maybe he got it from his, from his parents. They were, they, they, they were, they had, they all had emunah pshuta. That was something that that generation had. It was not, it was not based on haskala. It was just m- a mamsh emunah pshuta. They, they, uh, every, every Chassid believed that the previous Rebbe was Mashiach, and when the Rebbe became Rebbe, that's where I got it from. I didn't get it from a Melamed. My Melamed were not, uh, steeped in Mashiach that I can remember.

47:40 Speaker 2 Right.

47:40 Speaker 1 All my Melamed from the beginning, from second grade on till, to the, to the Zal.

47:46 Speaker 2 Right. So 'cause you said two things. You said all the Chassidim believed that, but your Melamed didn't seem to emphasize it.

47:50 Speaker 1 They, they... First of all, Lubavitch Yeshiva in Bedford and Dean was mostly non-Lubavitcher.

47:54 Speaker 2 Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

47:55 Speaker 1 There were very few Lubavitcher over there.

47:57 Speaker 2 Right.

47:59 Speaker 1 And, um-

48:01 Speaker 2 But the Lubavitchers that you met had that same kind of, uh, priority? 'Cause there's two things here.

48:06 Speaker 1 Well, I don't know.

48:06 Speaker 2 There's, there's q- there's one question is if people believed Mashi-- Uh, uh, every Yid says that they believe Mashiach's coming. You're not talking about that. You're talking about a much more immediate emunah that he's coming today.

48:20 Speaker 1 Yeah.

48:20 Speaker 2 And then on, on top of that, who is Mashiach?

48:22 Speaker 1 But f-focusing on Mashiach, that was a major thing in my, in my upbringing from my, mostly from my parents. That I, I don't even remember did the other Bachrim talk the same way, and I, I as-assume so.

48:34 Speaker 2 Mm-hmm.

48:35 Speaker 1 I remember, this is a, an interest-- a cute story. The Rashag was raising funds. He was a fundraiser. So he came to my grandparents. My grandfather was a comfortable Yid. He is a landlord, so he, he made a g- a comfortable living. He wasn't a Gvir. So the Rashag, this is I'm probably ten years old, so this goes, this is nineteen fifty-eight, m- m- give or take a year. And, uh, the Rashag asked my grandfather, "I want a thousand dollars from you."

49:03 Speaker 2 Which is a lot of money back then.

49:05 Speaker 1 That's a lot of money then. It's like probably like fifty thousand today.

49:08 Speaker 2 Yeah.

49:08 Speaker 1 My grandfather says, "How could I give it? It's impossible. I can't give it." Within two minutes, he gave it. He got it out, and Rashag was... So my grandmother was trying to impress the Rashag about her grandchild, her einikel.

49:19 Speaker 2 You?

49:20 Speaker 1 Me. I'm standing there, and my grandmother says to Rashag, "My einikel zoka the Rebbe is Mashiach."

49:27 Speaker 2 How did the Rashag take to that?

49:28 Speaker 1 He smiled. He smiled.

49:30 Speaker 2 Uh-huh.

49:32 Speaker 1 That's our, that's one of the few memories I can remember from those back, from those days. But-

49:36 Speaker 2 Why, why, why at that point? We'll get to later on. Uh, we'll get to later on in history a bit later, but why at that point is it important to say who is or isn't Mashiach? Like, is that, in your mind, the way you see history, was that always a concern of the regular, of the regular Yid? Like, who is... Like, was that ever a, a, a constant in your-

50:00 Speaker 1 This was an emunah pshuta that I probably, if you'd have asked me that when I was that age, I couldn't have told you much. I'd say, "Obviously, the Rebbe is Mashiach. Who else, who else could be Mashiach?"

50:09 Speaker 2 Right.

50:09 Speaker 1 Years later, if you asked me, I could give you hasveirim, up in Nigla, up in Chassidis.

50:14 Speaker 2 No, but was it historically a thing that people-

50:16 Speaker 1 But Lubavitch, every, by the Friediker Rebbe, and I'm sure Chassidim believed that the Rebbe Rashab was. Maybe not all Chassidim, but maybe they didn't even focus on that.

50:24 Speaker 2 That's what I'm saying. There's no st- you don't really hear stories of Chassidim that would say X-

50:28 Speaker 1 But, but the, the urgency for Mashiach increased-

50:32 Speaker 2 Mm-hmm

50:32 Speaker 1 ... from one rebbe to another. Rebbe Rashab, Chaya lebase David, the famous that the, the, the, the, and the Friediker Rebbe intensified it even more, and the rebbe even more. So it makes sense that the person who was supposed to be Mashiach should become more and more pronounced, more and more closer to the surface.

50:52 Speaker 2 Mm-hmm.

50:52 Speaker 1 It just... And everyone assumed, uh, the, the, the, uh, even though they didn't know how to articulate it the way the rebbe articulated it, the Nasi HaDor is the Mashiach of the Dor. If you'd asked anyone why they believed the rebbe's Mashiach, I don't know if they would've said that. The rebbe say, says it, that the Nasi HaDor is the Mashiach HaDor. And my father, even after Gimmel Tammuz, was very strong.

51:21 Speaker 2 In, in, in your understanding, what's the, what's the f- what's the point of, of, point of, of knowing who it is?

51:30 Speaker 1 One, one point is it makes-

51:31 Speaker 2 Spe- specifically because of course it does start creating controversy.

51:35 Speaker 1 Okay, you wanna talk about the controversy?

51:37 Speaker 2 No, I'm not talking about the Lubavitch-

51:38 Speaker 1 I, I have, uh, my, my approach to controversy about Mashiach and identifying who's Mashiach. The rebbe said it should be Erez Yisrael v'kalem d'tiken. Erez Yisrael was not saying, "I believe in Mashiach." That's, that's obvious, which he doesn't.

51:57 Speaker 2 Right.

51:58 Speaker 1 Erez Yisrael means that we're saying something more. So identifying who is Mashiach would probably fit into Erez Yisrael.

52:06 Speaker 2 Right.

52:07 Speaker 1 But the rebbe is against Erez Yisrael in Kalem Yisrael. He wants Kalem d'tiken. The problem is personalities. There are people who are Erez Yisrael people, and they can't get themselves to be t-t-to relate, relate, to do Kalem d'tiken. They, they're not shyach to it. And the, uh, te- the Kalem d- the, the Kalem d- tiken people are, to them, Erez Yisrael is, is, is, doesn't fit well with them. So I was al- I always hoped, and I wrote about this many times, was in Beis Mashiach and I wrote that what you need is if you can't do it yourself, you can't take your Erez Yisrael and put it in Kalem d'tiken, so g- work together. Get Erez Yisrael people together with the Kalem d'tiken people and work out things so the, so the, the extremists on the side of Erez Yisrael will be m- tempered. They won't do the crazy things that some of them do. In Chafchila, when they, when they had billboards, I remember I thought it was a good thing to have billboards, but my idea was that they're gonna put in, for your, in more information to understand what this means, call this and this number, and it'd be a, a follow-up. It would be Kalem d'tiken, but there was no Kalem d'tiken. It was just Erez Yisrael. And the Kalem d-- and, and it polarized the Kalem d'tiken people.

53:32 Speaker 2 But what's the point of it? What, what, what do we gain? What, what does, what, what does one gain by knowing or saying who it is? W- 'cause to me it doesn't even sh... The, the, the teyu part of it just seems to be the controversy itself, but the fact of it, either yes or no, it's not like, "We'll find out, won't we?" Like, what, like, it is what it is. Like, I don't-

53:53 Speaker 1 Because if you know what-

53:54 Speaker 2 It doesn't feel so teyudik

53:55 Speaker 1 ... because the rebbe himself related it to it. That if, if, if the rebbe wouldn't have said the things that he said, which he ne- which he n-n-n- in Tan Nun in Nan Alef, in Nan Alef and Beis, we wouldn't have had that same tekifus, that same tenacity. It's, the rebbe is the one who, who created this understanding that it is important, even though the rebbe said that's not the mitzvah to identify who the Mashiach is. And the rebbe said there's no chiyuv to identify Mashiach, the famous response. Although you know that response, the, there, there's a mitzvah of Ahavas Yisroel, but there's no mitzvah to identify Mashiach. You know what that response was a response to?

54:35 Speaker 2 No.

54:37 Speaker 1 Rabbi, uh, not Rabbi Wolpe. Rabbi Nachsun, who was promoting the idea of the identity of Mashiach, was being harassed and being persecuted, and people said to the-- asked the rebbe if, uh, if they should continue to, uh, to put him down because what he's doing is damaging. And the rebbe responded that maybe it, to fi- to, to identify Mashiach is not a mitzvah, but Ahavas Yisroel is a mitzvah. So it was, it was fakert to what most people thought, that the rebbe was putting down the idea of identifying. The rebbe's saying it's not a chiyuv, but there's, but Ahavas Yisroel is so why do you wanna hurt this person? He's not doing anything wrong.

55:18 Speaker 2 Right.

55:19 Speaker 1 So the, and the rebbe himself promoted the signing, signing, uh, kasherut to Mashiach. The rebbe did everything and more than what the biggest Mashiachisten did. So you have to ask the rebbe why he did, why he did. He, he, he led us in this direction. But if you're looking for his behirrim-

55:41 Speaker 2 No, I'm so-- I'm, that's why I'm asking. I'm asking from before, from the earlier years. 'Cause, uh, you know, what, what the rebbe said and didn't say, n-nobody's gonna be able to tell me why. Uh, you know, and, and, and a lot of people are gonna argue about what he said.

55:53 Speaker 1 If someone... Okay, wait, ju-

55:55 Speaker 2 But why, why, why did you feel it was a point earlier?

55:58 Speaker 1 First of all, it makes it more real. If you know someone's meshach to be Mashiach, if you ask someone, a Samayid, who believes in Mashiach, he says How can Mashiach come? Someone's gonna fly down from a cloud and is gonna wave a magic wand? It's, it's, it's not logical. It's hard to, it's hard to imagine a thing like that. You believe in it, okay, uh, uh, everything can happen, but it can't happen in a, in a natural way. If the Rebbe is Mashiach, it's the most natural way of, of Mashiach coming because everyone identifies the Rebbe. Some say yes, some say no, but everyone realizes that he's the only one candidate that is shayach to, that fits into the Rambam's description. But I think that the people, uh, just like everyone when they spoke about-- I'm talking about the early days when people identified the Friediker Rebbe or the Rebbe, I, I think it was simply, uh, you believe that just like, uh, many Hasidim will say their Rebbe is the tzadik hador, right? The, the, the manig hadar, the gadol hadar. So Lubavitch would say, "Ours is even better. Ours is the Mashiach."

57:01 Speaker 2 Right. So I was learning yesterday, I was learning yesterday the, the sicha of Shavuit Nanalev. And what struck me, and I, I'm not trying to claim that I, that I'm, uh, y- that I have great ideas in, in that whole parasha. But I, I happened to learn that sicha yesterday, and, you know, famously talks about, uh, telling the world that there's a navi and so on. And what struck me was that if you, if you take the context of the sicha, the point of the sicha is, um, what, uh, "Hashem shavtayich v'Hashem yitzach v'atchila", right? The whole point is that, that people should, should feel a, a connection to Mashiach on their terms. And like you're saying, that if, if there is, if there is a nevua, if there is, if there is someone who is, who is talking about Mashiach and br- making Mashiach real in this, in this moment, it makes it more real on your terms. It's not something that's, like you said-

57:57 Speaker 1 Right

57:57 Speaker 2 ... coming up from the sky.

57:58 Speaker 1 Right.

57:58 Speaker 2 It's here.

57:59 Speaker 1 The whole, the whole idea of nevua, the Rebbe didn't say in the nevua when it's gonna happen. Usually a nevua says, "Listen this day, listen-

58:05 Speaker 2 Right

58:05 Speaker 1 ... this is going to happen."

58:06 Speaker 2 Right.

58:07 Speaker 1 What the Rebbe was saying is that it's no longer something in the he- heaven.

58:10 Speaker 2 It's real.

58:11 Speaker 1 It's down to earth. It's here. It's with us.

58:13 Speaker 2 It's real.

58:13 Speaker 1 It's here atzayich.

58:14 Speaker 2 Right.

58:14 Speaker 1 It's something, not, not, not, uh, shevtayich aluf and distant.

58:17 Speaker 2 Right. Right. And so s- like to me it was like the point of the sicha is not about who is and who isn't. That's, that, that's, that's, that's, that's part of it, but the point of the sicha is- ... that, th- that people should feel connected to it. And w- I wonder if the making, making the identity of who it is and who isn't k- uh, kind of inverts the priority, and so now everyone's worried about w- people are arguing about who it is and who it isn't, or if, if you should focus on who it is, if you shouldn't focus on who it is. But the point was never that. The point was that people should feel connected to it, right? And, and there's a larger, there's a larger point, there's a larger objective that, th- there's a larger objective that the Rebbe's trying to accomplish, and it, it seems like it, it gets overwhelmed by the argument of identity.

59:09 Speaker 1 The, the, what's, what's problematic, uh, is th- that personalities get involved.

59:16 Speaker 2 Mm-hmm.

59:17 Speaker 1 And people become enemies because of their beliefs, instead of sitting down together and discussing and agreeing to disagree. I'm not, I'm not-- I don't claim that I could convince people that I'm right, and I don't wanna hate someone because I disagree with him, 'cause that's certainly not gonna bring this galus of Mashiach. And w- w- we're, we're forgetting in our zeal to promote our own beliefs in either side, we're forgetting that the, if, th- that the last sicha of the Rebbe, Vayakhel, was about achdus.

59:57 Speaker 2 Right.

59:58 Speaker 1 Why would that be the last sicha? All the sichas before were talking about Mashiach, Mashiach. The, they were never, like, never before. The Rebbe answered every question you have about Mashiach, I think. And then all of a sudden, the last sicha, he, he, it's hardly about Mashiach, it's about achdus. So the Rebbe, I think, was giving us the eres, and then the last sicha, he gives us the keli. Without, without achdus, you don't have the keli. So all your, all our discussions are, are all, all very nice, and sometimes they're not so nice , but they're, they're, they're, they're not, they're not bringing the geulah. I mean, everyone has to do a cheshbon hanefesh. We didn't bring the geulah. The meshichistim didn't bring, and the ones who are opposed to the, the, the, the, the meshichist, so-called meshichistim. I don't-- I'm not sure I like that title one way or another, but...

1:00:50 Speaker 2 I think it's a pejorative. I, I think it's, I think it's-

1:00:53 Speaker 1 It, it is. It depends who says it.

1:00:56 Speaker 2 Right.

1:00:56 Speaker 1 But, but, uh, the problem is that it, it's, it's the opposite of the whole, the message of the Rebbe of Achdus Yisroel, Ahavas Yisroel. So we have to either agree to disagree or sit down together and try to work out ways that we could, we could inc- bring together the eres, the tahor, and kelim d'tikkun. And that was never t- I don't think it was ever tried.

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1:02:48 Speaker 1 Oh.

1:02:48 Speaker 2 And, and to bring Mashiach, it is in his mind, you have to have-- people need to feel connected to Mashiach. Mashiach has to come from a pri mistake connection. That's how you usher in Mashiach, by having people connection.

1:03:01 Speaker 1 We have to get out of the Galus Penimi.

1:03:02 Speaker 2 Right.

1:03:02 Speaker 1 That's, that's for sure.

1:03:03 Speaker 2 Right. And, and, and it just so happens that because the Rebbe who's saying this idea, he wants Mashiach to come. He also is a person who his Chassidim and others feel at the time that if there's anyone who's Mashiach, it's him. And so it gets caught up in as if all he's trying to say is, "I'm Mashiach", and what he's saying is something much larger than that.

1:03:26 Speaker 1 Uh, uh, absolutely. But the Rebbe is the one who promoted the idea in so many different ways and allowing the Rebbe saying, "Talebe Chabad Al Asar" to, to sign people up to Kabbalas Hamalchus. The Rebbe says it's Talebe Chabad Al Asar, that you can't do it at every place, but you have to decide if it's appropriate for that place. But the Rebbe didn't nix it. The Rebbe didn't say, and there was a time when the Rebbe did nix people identifying the Rebbe's Mashiach. And then the Rebbe changed. The Rebbe changed in a lot of different ways. I mean, there's, there's, there's certain things in Yiddishkeit that you can never change.

1:04:02 Speaker 2 Right.

1:04:02 Speaker 1 But there's certain things that are designed to change. You know, there was once a cartoon I once saw of someone stopping at a stop sign and someone saying, uh, "Well, why aren't, why aren't you going?" He said, "Because it, the sign didn't change. It says stop." A, a stop sign that doesn't, is not the same thing as, it's n- that, that you can't change. You know, the, the, the point of a stop is you have to pause, and then you have to go right there.

1:04:27 Speaker 2 Right.

1:04:28 Speaker 1 So the, the Rebbe-- but there is no question that the Rebbe okayed it. And if the Rebbe gave his okay, you can speculate what the reason for it is, why it's important to know, because Chassidus explains what Mashiach is. If we wanna know what a Rebbe is, we know what a Rebbe is 'cause we know what a Mashiach is. We wanna know what Mashiach is, we know-- because we know what a Rebbe is. It's a Giyus of Yechida. And the, and the Rebbe

1:05:56 Speaker 2 You think you could win over Rabbi Schachnovitz?

1:05:58 Speaker 1 I can win him over. I think that he shouldn't be so opposed to it, that he'd s- he'd be able to accept it if he felt that the person he's speaking to is basing it on Torah and is Shayaach to learning. I remember once someone came to my house from Toronto, was passing through, and was asking me about this, and I tried to give him, I remember, the most rational explanation I can give. And I saw I didn't convince him, but he had respect for it. One of the things that we f- I found, and not just about the Rebbe's Mashiach, but in a lot of things that Lubavitch does, the impression is if it comes from Amoratzim, what value could it have?

1:06:38 Speaker 2 Right.

1:06:39 Speaker 1 If it's not coming from Torah, what value could it have? And that's the biggest obstacle for Chapas HaMayones amongst Frum Yidden. People think Frum Yidden, we don't have to, uh, be Mekarev them, Chassidus.

1:06:52 Speaker 2 Right.

1:06:52 Speaker 1 And, and you can make fun of them, misnagdim, and you could, you could put them down. But that's not the Rebbe Shlichit. The Rebbe Shlichit I wa- we have-- Chassidus has to spread to every Yid. And if you, if you, if you come across as being an Amoratz, that you don't have any, uh, knowledge-

1:07:08 Speaker 2 Yeah

1:07:08 Speaker 1 ...then they don't have respect for anything that you say.

1:07:10 Speaker 2 Yeah, you have no cr- you have no credibility.

1:07:12 Speaker 1 Right. I, I, I feel that was a Shlichus. In fact, when I came back from Australia, I was a Shlich in Australia for two years, so I was a second Kvutza.

1:07:22 Speaker 2 Oh, how was that?

1:07:23 Speaker 1 That was the two best years of my life.

1:07:25 Speaker 2 No kidding. No kidding. I had, I had on the podcast a couple months ago, Rabbi Minkowitz from Montreal.

1:07:31 Speaker 1 Right.

1:07:31 Speaker 2 The first Kvutza.

1:07:32 Speaker 1 Yeah, I saw that podcast, yeah.

1:07:34 Speaker 2 Yeah. So you were the second-

1:07:34 Speaker 1 He, he has a phenomenal memory. I, I, I, I envy his memory.

1:07:37 Speaker 2 For dates, for dates, you're saying?

1:07:39 Speaker 1 Right.

1:07:40 Speaker 2 I think it's different kinds of some Zicharon's are, there's different kinds of Zicharon.

1:07:45 Speaker 1 No, he, he-- everything he said, I couldn't f- find flaw in anything that he said. Everything was accurate. But we were the second Kvutza, and when I came back, I had Yechidus, and I asked the Rebbe, "What's my Shlichus now?" And the Rebbe said, "Your Shlichus is to become a big Lamdan in Nigla and a big Lamdan in Chassidus.

1:08:05 Speaker 2 Really?

1:08:06 Speaker 1 Yeah.

1:08:06 Speaker 2 Interesting.

1:08:07 Speaker 1 I, I, I didn't fulfill that. I'm still working on it.

1:08:11 Speaker 2 On, on which part? The Lamdan in Nigla or the Lamdan in Chassidus?

1:08:14 Speaker 1 Both.

1:08:16 Speaker 2 All right. Well, let's see. That's what you got time for.

1:08:19 Speaker 1 Yeah. I, I still have many, many more years ahead to, to fulfill the shlichus.

1:08:23 Speaker 2 Im yirtzeh Hashem.

1:08:24 Speaker 1 But, uh-

1:08:25 Speaker 2 Why was Australia the two best years of your, of your life?

1:08:28 Speaker 1 Because I was picked by the Rebbe. I, I... When the Rebbe picked us, I felt a person could go through his whole life and not know what his, what a shlichus is, and here you're told exactly what your shlichus is, where it is, when it is, and how it is. I, I was, I was, I was on top of the world.

1:08:45 Speaker 2 You don't feel like you were picked to go to Buffalo?

1:08:49 Speaker 1 Uh, not, not to the same extent.

1:08:51 Speaker 2 Uh-huh.

1:08:52 Speaker 1 With the Rebbe, where you actually know the Rebbe handpicked you.

1:08:54 Speaker 2 I see.

1:08:55 Speaker 1 I saw the letter on Rabbi Chodikov's-

1:08:57 Speaker 2 Right

1:08:57 Speaker 1 ... desk.

1:08:58 Speaker 2 I see.

1:08:58 Speaker 1 Where he's, the Rebbe writes it, "You should be mediah to these," and he's, and, uh, there was a, a, a squiggle around the names that the Rebbe picked.

1:09:07 Speaker 2 What was that like when you found out that you were being... Was, was it just, was it just joy?

1:09:12 Speaker 1 Well, it was-

1:09:12 Speaker 2 Was it also like, "What does this mean?"

1:09:14 Speaker 1 It was a s- no, it was a s- a sense of fulfillment that my, I know what my shlichus or my neshama came into this world. I, I, I know exactly what it is.

1:09:23 Speaker 2 Hmm.

1:09:23 Speaker 1 I don't have to go searching for it. I don't have to guess what it is.

1:09:27 Speaker 2 Was your kvutza as... Was the Rebbe as strict with your kvutza about Sdarim and not going to give a shiur even after-

1:09:33 Speaker 1 We, we didn't h- the Rebbe didn't have to be strict 'cause we were told by the first kvutza how strict you have to be-

1:09:40 Speaker 2 Uh-huh

1:09:40 Speaker 1 ... and you can't, and we took it seriously.

1:09:43 Speaker 2 Hmm.

1:09:43 Speaker 1 In fact, I had a problem the first few weeks that I ca- I came. I was suffering from jet lag as is normal.

1:09:51 Speaker 2 Yes. I'm from Hong Kong. I'm familiar I'm familiar with this, uh-

1:09:55 Speaker 1 And I couldn't fall asleep during the day 'cause the Seder, and what are people gonna say? "The Yanks are sleeping."

1:10:03 Speaker 2 Right.

1:10:04 Speaker 1 So it took me... And then I, I had, I had some-

1:10:06 Speaker 2 At night you can't sleep either

1:10:07 Speaker 1 ... I had some mild depression.

1:10:09 Speaker 2 Because of not sleeping?

1:10:10 Speaker 1 That probably contributed to it, but also because I realized, it hit me now, yeah, you were on top of the world before, but now you're not gonna see the Rebbe for two years.

1:10:17 Speaker 2 Uh-huh.

1:10:17 Speaker 1 You're not gonna see your parents, you're not gonna see your siblings, you're not gonna see your chaverim, you're not gonna even talk to them. You're in another... It's like going to the moon. It's, it, it, if someone were to be sent to the moon, it wouldn't, wouldn't be much worse.

1:10:29 Speaker 2 Yes. That, so that hit you when, once you got there.

1:10:31 Speaker 1 Once I got there. But the fact that I couldn't even rest, I couldn't even take a nap, and I-

1:10:36 Speaker 2 Wow

1:10:36 Speaker 1 ... at night we, I was up because of the jet lag. S-so, but it took a few weeks and I, then I, then I realized this is the best. If the Rebbe would've told me stay another two years, I would've said sure.

1:10:48 Speaker 2 Did your friends feel the same way when they landed? Was it something that you shared with each other?

1:10:51 Speaker 1 I never, I never, I never, I don't remember ever speaking to them about it. I wonder what they would say.

1:10:54 Speaker 2 You kept it to yourself.

1:10:56 Speaker 1 Yeah. I, I was embarrassed.

1:10:57 Speaker 2 You're embarrassed.

1:10:58 Speaker 1 I was embarrassed.

1:11:00 Speaker 2 So the, it took you a few weeks to acclimate.

1:11:02 Speaker 1 Here you are the biggest shliach in the world, and you're so important, and you're, and you're, and you're, you're, you're depressed about it.

1:11:07 Speaker 2 Well, I, I... Look, for whatever it's worth, as, as someone who, who went through the, the, the torture of jet lag a number of times, it, it, I, I'm pretty sure that jet lag does cause a kind of depression like on its own. It's just that, that you're so disoriented. You're so... You're tired in a different way.

1:11:26 Speaker 1 And you know that everyone is looking at every movement, every gesture.

1:11:29 Speaker 2 Right.

1:11:30 Speaker 1 The Yanks-

1:11:31 Speaker 2 Right

1:11:31 Speaker 1 ... you know, they, they idolize the-

1:11:32 Speaker 2 Right

1:11:33 Speaker 1 ... the shluchim.

1:11:34 Speaker 2 No, but jet lag makes you feel dislocated in a way that's ver- Like, if I, if you fly, you could fly, let's say, from here to Argentina. It's 12 hours. It's a far flight, but it's basically the same time zone. You get there, you, you're, you're pretty much fresh.

1:11:49 Speaker 1 Right.

1:11:49 Speaker 2 When you fly to a place, like I flew to Hong Kong many times, Australia, you land there, you, you're tired and disoriented, and you're just complete... It's very, very hard to make heads and tails of where you're at. So, you know, I, I'll, I, I, I, I'm just saying, I, I think the jet lag can be explained a little bit just by that. But you're saying there was more to it as well.

1:12:10 Speaker 1 Yeah. It was, it was the fact that I was now on another planet. It was a different part of the world. And the biggest simcha I had is when you saw a Yid who came from America.

1:12:21 Speaker 2 Right.

1:12:21 Speaker 1 You didn't even have to know that Yid. The fact that you, there was some-

1:12:24 Speaker 2 You're still on the same planet.

1:12:28 Speaker 1 That was... And we also had, there was a bocher who used to call us or found ways of calling. I don't know how kosher those ways were.

1:12:36 Speaker 2 Uh-huh.

1:12:36 Speaker 1 And he would, uh, report things to what's going on in Beis Chayenu.

1:12:41 Speaker 2 So 'cause Rabbi, Rabbi Minkov was saying, very interesting, that because you had such a, uh, because you had such a strict order about Seder that they wouldn't, they, they wouldn't hear the chazzan. They, they wouldn't even have time to listen to all the farbrengen cassettes that, that they would get or, or to learn the sichas that were mailed over. They would have to find time for it. Like, those came almost, like, second in priority to the Seder itself. Was that, was that the case also for your group?

1:13:09 Speaker 1 I don't remember that we couldn't read ha'nochas that we got.

1:13:13 Speaker 2 No, you said they would squeeze it in between Seder-

1:13:15 Speaker 1 Yeah. I mean, I remember during the, the summertime when we had more shiyurim, we had shiyurim from 7:00 in the morning till 9:00, 10:00 at night with just small breaks for lunch and breakfast and supper, and we had to be up six o'clock to go to the mikvah, and I, I was falling asleep at night. So I would take a, a styrofoam bowl, fill a third of it with coffee, a third with sugar, and a third with water.

1:13:44 Speaker 2 That sounds healthy.

1:13:44 Speaker 1 And drink that.

1:13:45 Speaker 2 That sounds healthy.

1:13:45 Speaker 1 And my, my, my heart would pound- ... and I couldn't fall asleep till about 1:00 in the morning. So that, that's how crazy it was.

1:13:53 Speaker 2 Right. That sounds very healthy. Who was, who was Rosh Yeshiva back then in Australia?

1:13:57 Speaker 1 There was no real Rosh Yeshiva. Rab Chaim Gutnick, alav ha-shalom, used to come once in a while, give a shiur. I was, uh, like a, a semi, uh, uh, not, not official, but I used to give, uh, farbrengen every now and then.

1:14:09 Speaker 2 Uh-huh.

1:14:09 Speaker 1 So they, they made fun of me as the Rosh Yeshiva.

1:14:15 Speaker 2 So, so you, you said you're in Australia, you feel like the Rebbe handpicked you. You know where you belong. Did you understand what you were doing there? At any point did it make sense to you? Or was it like-

1:14:25 Speaker 1 Yeah. We know we're-

1:14:25 Speaker 2 ... a case of Maspiah that he's-

1:14:27 Speaker 1 We're-

1:14:27 Speaker 2 ... a Ba'al Ganah and he doesn't know what he's doing there?

1:14:29 Speaker 1 No, we knew that we had to learn, sitting and learning and, and being mashpia on the, on the, on the talmidim there.

1:14:35 Speaker 2 But did you see it? Did it make sense to you at some point or...?

1:14:39 Speaker 1 I, I never looked for, for it to make sense. It was so obvious that we're doing, that's the shlichus. We knew exactly we were-- Our shlichus was not to, to, uh, do mitzvos. Though we did, of course.

1:14:51 Speaker 2 Mm-hmm.

1:14:52 Speaker 1 But the shlichus was to sit, sit and learn and to teach, and we were very devoted to that. I don't think to this... It, it, it, it didn't last to the same extent and the same extreme as it was in the beginning. Things began to loosen up a little, but we still were pretty strict on, on Sdarim. Rabbi Menule Kaplan was like the, the unofficial mashgiach, and he, he was in charge of k- of keeping people keeping Starem.

1:15:20 Speaker 2 Uh, Muli Kaplan lived in Australia?

1:15:23 Speaker 1 He was one of the shluchim.

1:15:24 Speaker 2 One of the shluchim, the one that lives in Baltimore-

1:15:25 Speaker 1 My cousin. Yeah

1:15:26 Speaker 2 ... the one that lives in Baltimore now.

1:15:26 Speaker 1 The shliach in Baltimore.

1:15:28 Speaker 2 So he was a mashgiach of the Bachar, and he's also your mashgiach? He was mashgiach to you?

1:15:31 Speaker 1 No, not really. I mean, but h- he was, uh, made sure that the yeshiva ran in order.

1:15:36 Speaker 2 Uh-huh.

1:15:37 Speaker 1 And of course, Rabbi Zalman Serebransky was-

1:15:39 Speaker 2 Sure

1:15:40 Speaker 1 ... uh, around the place, and very geshmake Hasid Shaheed. One of the things in Australia that I loved was I had every generation of Has- Hasid. You had Hasidim who learned in Lubavitch.

1:15:53 Speaker 2 Like Rabbi Zalman?

1:15:54 Speaker 1 No.

1:15:55 Speaker 2 He didn't learn in Lubavitch?

1:15:56 Speaker 1 No, no. You had Mordechai Perlov and Betzalel Lushansky.

1:16:00 Speaker 2 Uh-huh.

1:16:00 Speaker 1 Then you had those who learned in, I think, Chaim and Shulk and next generation, Rabbi Zalman Serebransky and Rabbi Menachem Zalman Gorevich and-

1:16:07 Speaker 2 Right. I remember Rabbi Menachem Zalman

1:16:09 Speaker 1 ... and, and then you ha- Yeah, he was, uh, incredible.

1:16:11 Speaker 2 Yeah.

1:16:11 Speaker 1 He... Then you had Rabbi Groner, the next generation.

1:16:15 Speaker 2 Oh, he's America already.

1:16:16 Speaker 1 He was American, but the early American.

1:16:18 Speaker 2 Right.

1:16:18 Speaker 1 Then you had Rabbi Aaron Serebransky.

1:16:20 Speaker 2 Right.

1:16:21 Speaker 1 Who was a later generation. So you ha- And every siyor was different. Today, we all look the same.

1:16:28 Speaker 2 Uh-huh.

1:16:29 Speaker 1 You all find too many siyorum.

1:16:31 Speaker 2 Right.

1:16:31 Speaker 1 But, uh, uh-

1:16:32 Speaker 2 Why do you think that is?

1:16:33 Speaker 1 Why is that?

1:16:34 Speaker 2 Yeah.

1:16:36 Speaker 1 Because we're dealing with etzem now.

1:16:39 Speaker 2 Oh, is that what it is?

1:16:40 Speaker 1 It must be that. I was also in Brunoy.

1:16:43 Speaker 2 I, I don't say that cynically. I'm, I'm asking what you think.

1:16:45 Speaker 1 Yeah, that must be the hesber that we're-- The emphasis now is not on, uh, siyor. I mean, the bachur who, who grew up after Gimel Tammuz, was born after Gimel Tammuz, and is mekushar to the Rebbe. He's not mekushar because he saw the farbrengens and because he was there at dollars and he had yechidas. He's connected to the Rebbe's etzem.

1:17:07 Speaker 2 Interesting. I was just speaking earlier this morning with someone-- 'Cause I, I've heard that argument many ti- or that, that, that, that, yeah, that argument many times. I was just speaking to someone who, he, he was a bachur in Bedford-Indienne, in the youths, and was, you know, part of that was he'd come to Seven Seventy and so on. But he beca- he felt that he became a Hasid when he left, uh, Bedford-Indienne and went to Montreal. He was, uh, one of the students in Bedford-Indienne, and he could have gone back to where he came from. He was a Hasid in Montreal. So I, I, I'm beginning to wonder, not just from him, in general, how much being a Hasid ever fully depended on yechidas or, or farbrengens or dollars. I know for a lot, for, for a, a long period of time, that's how it was.

1:17:54 Speaker 1 No, a Hasid is, is goshos to the Rebbe is an etzem iz diker.

1:17:57 Speaker 2 Right.

1:17:57 Speaker 1 A goshos whenever it was. But there were so many gilyayim-

1:18:01 Speaker 2 Right

1:18:02 Speaker 1 ... that you lived the Rebbe through the gilyayim. You, you came to davening, you came to the farbrengen, you came to the dollars, you came to, to whatever it was. You were, you were connected to the hisgalus of the Rebbe, not to his etzem.

1:18:15 Speaker 2 It was like that for you as a bachur as well?

1:18:17 Speaker 1 I was not so much... I mean, I, I, I, I, I was in Bedford, but we didn't go to Seven Seventy that much.

1:18:23 Speaker 2 So it feels like that was what you're calling etzem as well.

1:18:27 Speaker 1 Um, you could call it that if you want, but I mean, I, I had some of it, but a little later on in, when I grew up, grew, uh, uh, higher, the older age. I, you know, we, we had yechidas with the Rebbe.

1:18:38 Speaker 2 Right.

1:18:41 Speaker 1 But, but, but something that I, that I benefited from in Australia is that I was able to see all these different siyorim of Hasidim. I'm not talking about siyorim of the Rebbe. I'm talking about siyorim of Hasidim, and that's something that is missing today, I think, that, uh, the bachurim don't have someone to say, "Look at this Hasid. Look how he's davening." I w- I was in Brunoy also for three quarters of a year.

1:19:02 Speaker 2 Ah.

1:19:02 Speaker 1 I had the same thing over there also. I had, uh, Rabbi Solner Balanitsky, one of the older temim of Lubavitch-

1:19:08 Speaker 2 Right

1:19:08 Speaker 1 ... of Nis- of Nisan.

1:19:09 Speaker 2 Right.

1:19:10 Speaker 1 And then you had, uh, Rabbi Gorevich and, uh, and, and, uh, uh, A-Aron Yossef Balanitsky. You had all the different levels of... It was a geshmake thing to see the difference between one Hasid and another.

1:19:23 Speaker 2 Well, look, one of the things this podcast tries to do is by talking to people, I think we find, we rediscover that people are different, are not as, are not q- quite as similar as we think they are. For whatever reason, that, that obvious shape or siyor of people that differentiated them back in the day, it does seem like that that's less than it used to be. But when I sit down and I speak to people, and now it's almost a hundred people, and I speak to them for an hour or two hours, whatever it is, you quickly find out that people do have their individual flavor and their individual-

1:19:57 Speaker 1 Uh, absolutely

1:19:57 Speaker 2 ... siyor. Like, it's not like everyone's melted into one thing. For whatever reason, the public image seems to be kind of very everything's bittul, is goshos, just follow the line, and so on. But I, I agree a hundred percent. That's why I do what I do, is that I, I think people need to have, "Oh, I see what this guy thinks. I like what he thinks. I, I... That, that, that... I connect to that." You know, I-

1:20:21 Speaker 1 Right. Uh, one of the, in the Sefer Ha-Erekim of Abas Israel, it says, "We always know Abas Israels because we all have one shareesh, Abba Chalu Kolonu, but you also have to love a Yid for his pratis diker maalos."

1:20:31 Speaker 2 Right.

1:20:32 Speaker 1 That's a chidush, 'cause by Chassidim, it's av gelait Abas Israel 'cause it's one etzem.

1:20:37 Speaker 2 Right.

1:20:37 Speaker 1 So the, the, the Chassidis is moser, but you also have to love him because he has maalos. He's a ba- bal chessed, he's a, uh, knows how to learn, and, and he's a Chassidishe Yid. They have all these different maalos. You have to relate to his maalos as well.

1:20:50 Speaker 2 Right. It's the ultimate kind of hisgalus, right?

1:20:52 Speaker 1 We shouldn't be-- Everything has to follow one path, and a- all the other aspects of it are i- irrelevant. They m- they may be secondary, but they're not irrelevant

1:21:04 Speaker 2 Right. Do you feel-- I was gonna ask you this question earlier, but now I'll, I'll bring it into this point of the conversation. Do you feel that, 'cause you mentioned earlier that there was, there was, there, there was a change in the years of No, No, Now, If, And Base. Do you feel that one of the things that happened in those years was that there became a singular focus that kind of overshadowed all these tziyurim or differences of people and just made everything very-

1:21:32 Speaker 1 I think that, that, that's probably true. That's probably true. I remember when the sifras were coming out, uh, uh, it blew my mind. I mean, I-- the Rebbe saying things that Chassidim used to say quietly, and the Rebbe saying it openly and even stronger than what we Chassidim would, would say. Y-y-you, you-- It was, it was unbelievable. You, you, you, you were expecting this galus of the Rebbe any m- any minute.

1:22:00 Speaker 2 How did you make sense of it? Like, what, what, what, what did it, what did it-

1:22:06 Speaker 1 In other words, the Rebbe's telling us it's happening now. That's how we understood it. And the, and the Rebbe's identifying himself. That's how it, but it was-- It, it, it came out clearly. And, and if, if it-- That was not the Rebbe's intention. The Rebbe is a smart enough person to realize that's not how people are going to interpret it, and he would've forewarned it and, uh, forestalled that.

1:22:26 Speaker 2 Yeah.

1:22:27 Speaker 1 The Rebbe said, "Don't think that I mean this. I don't mean this. I mean that." No, the Rebbe clearly wanted us to... And, and I think the reason for that is 'cause the Rebbe wanna tell us it's coming, it's happening now. And if we, it would've happened. We don't understand why it didn't happen, but for whatever reason, it didn't happen. But the Rebbe is looking at the Matzias. The Matzias then it was, it was happening.

1:22:51 Speaker 2 How do you make sense of the fact that like now it's thirty years now and it, and it didn't happen?

1:22:56 Speaker 1 I don't make sense of it. I, I-- If I start saying because we did this wrong or that wrong, while it might be true, that's not sense. That doesn't make any sense to me. The Rebbe, the Rebbe's approach when someone asks the Rebbe, "How come you're talking..." The, the Friediker Rebbe says, "Well, look how many years have passed." The Rebbe says, "That's a, a galus dikke question." The Rebbe wants to reorient the way we think. We shouldn't be-

1:23:23 Speaker 2 What, what's, what's Rebbe's answer though? It's a galus dikke question.

1:23:26 Speaker 1 The answer is the Rebbe didn't give an answer. He, he, he-- The Rebbe said that's a galus way of thinking. A gal-- A g- What I think the Rebbe means by that, if someone tells you that he dropped a glass a-and it didn't break, it didn't fall to the ground. He dropped it, and it didn't fall to the ground. You say, "One second, it doesn't make any sense." The Rebbe wants us to, to, to, to, to not make sense out of why we're still in galus. That it doesn't make any sense. We're so geulah dik that we can't grasp, no matter how hard we try, that there's a-- that, that, that we still are in galus.

1:24:03 Speaker 2 So you're saying the question that, the q- the question that would ask on the Friediker Rebbe means that, means that you are approaching it from a-

1:24:10 Speaker 1 From a galus perspective. You're, you're living in galus, and you're trying to find, figure things out within a galus perspective.

1:24:17 Speaker 2 Mm-hmm.

1:24:18 Speaker 1 A g- As I think Rabbi Yael was, uh, explained, if someone drops something, you expect it to fall, right? No one expects it to fly higher. You expect it to fall.

1:24:28 Speaker 2 Right.

1:24:29 Speaker 1 But sometimes things do fly higher. Some, a gust of wind can come and blow it, but is that how your mind works? Your mind works that I'm gonna throw something out of the window, and it's gonna fly up?

1:24:38 Speaker 2 Uh-huh. So you're saying that the, the hun-- the, the, the prior, meaning the, the hanaha has to be... The hana-

1:24:44 Speaker 1 The hanaha has to be that geulah is in front of us. The L'shana Haba'ah B'Yeresh, and our mamash on our table, and it's, it's happening. El Mai didn't happen for thirty years. That doesn't make sense. That's what doesn't make sense, not the, the fact that geulah is here. That makes sense. That's the way it has to be. That's the way-- that's the reality of it.

1:25:08 Speaker 2 Are you-

1:25:08 Speaker 1 It's-

1:25:09 Speaker 2 Yeah, go ahead. Sorry.

1:25:10 Speaker 1 This was not necessarily always the case, but the Rebbe introduced us to that new reality. That's the nevuah, I think. It, it's, it's a, it's a reality in this world. And though the Habesh is d-doing things that we don't understand, just like we don't understand the Holocaust, and the Rebbe doesn't want us to try to make sense of it.

1:25:29 Speaker 2 Right.

1:25:29 Speaker 1 We don't, we don't-- The Rebbe wants us to feel that way about galus in general. We can't make sense of galus. Ay, it says, "M'pechateinu gulinu m'artzenu." That doesn't make any sense anymore.

1:25:40 Speaker 2 Are, are you at all nervous that that kind of posture where basically the idea is that our situation cannot be explained, are you at all nervous that a, a child, a, a new generation growing up with that kind of posture, uh, is being asked to do too much? There's a, there's a lot of cynicism, I don't have to tell you, arou-around this very topic. A-and this is goes far beyond families that are on one side or the other of the classical divide.

1:26:15 Speaker 1 You mean about Mashiach in general? About geulah in general?

1:26:17 Speaker 2 I wouldn't say about Mashiach or geulah in general, about this posture that, like, Mashiach has to come today and, and galus doesn't make any sense. It's like, because you told me thirty years ago that Mashiach's coming, whether or not now people say that that's what the Rebbe actually said or not, but that's how it was understood. And, and now you're telling me that it, you know, this doesn't make any sense, and you just have to live life that doesn't make any sense. And it's like, I have my whole life ahead of me. I'm okay believing Ikrei Emunah and so on, but I'm not okay living a life where nothing makes sense, right? I need to pay my mortgage. It depends on what age you are or what you're thinking about. I need to get married. I need to have kids. I need to have a life. And you want me to basically have a foundation where nothing makes sense, but go ahead with your life. Are you worried, are you worried about that at all?

1:27:04 Speaker 1 But the more we think, we realize that, that geulah is, is such a compelling thing. There was a Yid in Buffalo, Mr. Friedman was his name, a Holocaust survivor And I used to take him to classes to teach-- tell people about the Holocaust, and someone asked him about how, "Do you believe in God? Do you still believe in God?" He said, "Sure." He said, so they asked him, "How could you still believe in God?" He says, "That's what-- It's the Holocaust that got me to believe in God, because you can't believe in anything else. You have to believe in, uh, in God. There's nothing else to believe in."

1:27:36 Speaker 2 Mm-hmm.

1:27:38 Speaker 1 Yid has to feel the, the... Whether I understand why Mashiach didn't come, but it's compelling that Mashiach has to come now. And you know what? Th-thirty years ago, the only one talking about Mashiach was Lubavitch. Some w- people were saying, "You're not allowed to talk about Mashiach." I remember we had a, uh, started a school, and we were looking for a teacher, and there were two candidates. And one of the candidates was the Lubavitcher, and he was the better one, clearly better as a, as a teacher. And one of the people on the board, a rebbetzin, said, "We can't take the Lubavitcher because at the end of his talk, he spoke about Mashiach." Nothing controversial about Mashiach. So someone said, "You just had a speaker a few weeks ago. It was Tisha B'Av, and he spoke about Mashiach. At Tisha B'Av, you're allowed to."

1:28:30 Speaker 2 It's true.

1:28:30 Speaker 1 No one will talk like that anymore.

1:28:32 Speaker 2 Yeah.

1:28:33 Speaker 1 Everyone is talking about Mashiach and Geulah. Everyone's making predictions that are-- They have codes-

1:28:37 Speaker 2 Right. Yeah

1:28:38 Speaker 1 ... and all these things. It's all very nice, but it's not Lubavitch anymore.

1:28:43 Speaker 2 Mm-hmm.

1:28:43 Speaker 1 In, in some ways, it's more the non-Lubavitch than there is Lubavitch talking about Mashiach and how compelling it is. So what the Rebbe tried to do then finally has taken root now more than ever before.

1:28:56 Speaker 2 Right. So-

1:28:59 Speaker 1 But there's a, there's a part of us that's pulling us into Galus because Galus is a Helen Behester, of course, and it makes our material lives-

1:29:09 Speaker 2 Yeah, but part of the reason that we're pulled, I, I can't speak for everyone, but I-- but a lot of people I know and for myself, part of the reason we're pulled is that when you insist, when you're taught that it's-- When you're taught, like, this very absolute language of certainty and you're told, "Oh, you know, ten years after Gilad Tammuz, that's impossible. Twenty years is impossible," and yet it's ten years, it's twenty years, it's thirty years.

1:29:34 Speaker 1 The same question you ask about Bitachon. We're told Bitachon works.

1:29:38 Speaker 2 Right.

1:29:39 Speaker 1 And some people have Bitachon, and things don't work out. See? So it, it challenges Bitachon. That's one of the, that's one of the challenges that we have with everything in Yiddishkeit. And the challenge of Mashiach is cr-- is, is, is enhanced, is ac-- is accelerated by virtue of the fact that it's taking so long. And Yidden were, were marching to their, the gas chambers and singing Ani Maamin. For two thousand years, Mashiach didn't come, and now they're going to the gas chamber, and they're still singing Ani Maamin.

1:30:13 Speaker 2 Yeah, but I think, I think it's different. I mean, I mean, first of all, it's amazing that-

1:30:18 Speaker 1 It's a lot different. I agree.

1:30:19 Speaker 2 That-

1:30:20 Speaker 1 You know, the Rashi in, in, uh, in Daniel, the, the words Asher Hamachakeh.

1:30:26 Speaker 2 Right.

1:30:26 Speaker 1 It says Asher Hamachakeh goes on the period of Nichser. Mashiach is Nigla. Nichser bechazet of Nigla. Why is it a Nichser? Why not before the Nigla, Asher Hamachakeh? Because after Mashiach already started the process and this Nichser, which is what happened after Gimel Tammuz, there's Nichser. The Rebbe said Mashiach is Bez Galus, and all of a sudden there's N- there's Gimel Tammuz. The, the, the, the, the, the Nisyoon I think is even greater than it was before. The Rebbe was in Ezgala, before there's a Gilul Hakadosh. The Nichser is, after Nigla is, I think, a bigger challenge. And, uh, apparently, for reasons that we can't understand, the Habesh is giving us a bigger challenge now.

1:31:14 Speaker 2 Hmm.

1:31:16 Speaker 1 The Habesh, uh, you know, doesn't, doesn't ask me how to operate his world. He does it the way and he's doing it in ways that we don't understand. And Mashiach co-comes and this brings us to Geulah. We'll, we'll say, "Hashem Kenafte bee". But everything that's happening in the world today, if you need, you need, uh, more m-m-material, the world seems to be-- The Rebbe was talking about, once he was talking about the world is teetering. The shakelsech. The, the shakeling now is more. I mean, America is fighting a war in Iran, and it seems America is losing. Uh, North Korea is, uh, threatening America. The, the, the, the whole world is, uh... It's, it's a, it's a mess what's going on. The world is very unstable. Russia and the Ukraine. The, the, we had-- The, the only solution is Mashiach. There's no other solution.

1:32:24 Speaker 2 But was it-

1:32:25 Speaker 1 That's not why we should want Mashiach.

1:32:26 Speaker 2 I was gonna say-

1:32:27 Speaker 1 That's, no that's not the reason.

1:32:28 Speaker 2 Since, since, since when is Mashiach like a Beles Beriah kind of option? I mean, the moon of Mashiach is not because Beles Beriah.

1:32:34 Speaker 1 Okay. You're, you're a hundred percent right. I'm glad you, you, uh, you mentioned that because the Rebbe was trying to get us to believe in Mashiach, not because we'll get rid of illness, we'll get rid of wars. That's all true, and it's all tremendous. But when-- because we want his Galus of the Habesh, and we want the Olam HaBa, and we want the Habesh's pu-purpose for creation to come to fulfillment. But it-- nevertheless, we're allowed to want Mashiach for ulterior motives. The Rebbe once explained, why does the Rambam say the Madanim Mitzriym Kaafar? So the Rebbe says, "Because the Rambam is trying to entice people whose only interest in Mashiach will be because they'll have Madanim."

1:33:14 Speaker 2 Right.

1:33:14 Speaker 1 But for people who are more sophisticated, Mitzriym Kaafar, it'll have no value. It'll be like dust. So it, it appeals to both crowds. There's a Midrash where an Am Ha'aretz comes to Rabbi Yeshayah, and he says, "Can I give a Drashah?" Rabbi Yeshayah says, "Yeah, you can give a Drashah." And what was his Drashah about? The-- about Mashiach coming, and the-- all the kings are gonna pay homage and give gifts to Mashiach. So Rabbi Yeshayah says, "You can say that Drashah, it's all right." So the Chasam Sofer's Eynikel, I think the Shevet Sofer explains, the Am Ha'aretz, what does he know about Mashiach? Him, Mashiach is gonna get gifts. Is it w-- Is it acceptable for me to give a Drashah that we want Mashiach to get gifts? And Rabbi Yeshayah says, "We're on-- I'm on a higher level. I'm on a level where you want Mashiach for, for, for his geulah of the kliz. But if that's your reason you want Mashiach, it's kosher, you can give that Drashah, even though you're, you're an Am Ha'aretz, you're on a lower level." So we should want Mashiach. If we can get a Yid to want Mashiach because the, uh, the Yankees will win the World Series, if that's his level of hasaga. In Buffalo, if the Buffalo Bill- Bills will win the Super Bowl-

1:34:29 Speaker 2 Mashiach will come before that happens, don't worry.

1:34:31 Speaker 1 That's what I think most people agree on. But if that's gonna get you to believe in Mashiach, it, it's good enough. It's not good enough, it's good. And if it's-- And, and from there you go to a higher conception of it.

1:34:45 Speaker 2 So I just-- I wanted to ask you, what... I wanted to ask you, has anything changed for you in the way that you understand the sichas of Nun Alef and Nun Beis, given that it's been thirty years? Has, has, has anything-- You said that you, you don't understand. Uh, I think you said that earlier.

1:35:06 Speaker 1 Don't understand why we're still in Galus.

1:35:08 Speaker 2 Correct. You don't make sense of it. But has anything changed in the way that you understand the sichas? When you look at some of them now, does it, "Now I understand it differently. Maybe I missed that thirty years ago."

1:35:18 Speaker 1 No. No. And no one has ever given me any insight that would change the meaning of what the Rebbe said then.

1:35:25 Speaker 2 No, I'm not talking about, like, if you switch sides of Lubavitch politics. That's not what I meant. I meant is there any new insight on your, on your end that, like-

1:35:33 Speaker 1 Nothing I can think of

1:35:34 Speaker 2 ... that this-- that, that the Rebbe said this, and now I underst- I understand that he meant something different than I thought back then.

1:35:41 Speaker 1 Right. Offhand, I can't think of anything. No.

1:35:43 Speaker 2 Mm-hmm. Because at that time, the sense was Mashiach's coming right now.

1:35:49 Speaker 1 Yeah.