בתי אבות סיעודיים

00:00 Okay, this is a short letter today. I guess we have people here, we should just start. This is a pretty short letter today, and, um, and I don't really have that much to say on it. I'm more-- I, I was gonna skip it entirely, um, because it's short and 'cause there isn't that much to say, but it shocked me. I was sitting on the bus and it, and it, uh, it hit me across the face. Somebody has their, um... Yeah, somebody mute yourself 'cause I'm hearing myself. I, I'm sitting on the bus reading this letter saying, uh, "This is so interesting, I have to share it with everybody," and realize that if it's so interesting I have to share it with everybody, it's probably a good letter for us to look at. So it's this little one at the top on kuf lamed gimel. You should have it in front of you. It's just two paragraphs long. And, uh, the Rebbe says, "You asked me about my, uh, about my opinion about, um, about becoming an administrator of a nursing home." And somebody's writing to the Rebbe asking about becoming a nursing home administrator. And the Rebbe is, is not happy with it at all, which is very strange to me offhand because normally when somebody asks the Rebbe about a profession, even if it's a very strange profession, I mean, we've had, we've had the stories in the, in the Gem videos of like, uh, of, of, of models, of dancers, of people who

01:01 have pretty inappropriate professions, and the Rebbe talks to them about how they can find a way to, uh, to... Oh, really? Hirsh says this was quoted to her recently. I, I didn't see it. The Rebbe talks to them about how they can, um, they can use their profession for good, how they can find ways to, to make things holy that don't seem holy on the surface. But he does not like nursing homes, uh, especially not nursing home management. So he says here, "伊克尔哈רב מזה." Where, where, where do people get their profits from? Um, and I looked this up. This, what the Rebbe says is completely true, of course, that, uh, nursing home profit margins, if you're running a fair game, they're pretty slim. You don't make a whole lot of money in the nursing home business. So the main profit doesn't come from the, uh, business itself. It comes from שגרם הפחית ממיליוני רפואה. It comes from skimping on the medical care, um, the medical care that is needed for these patients. It means מצמצם המאכל שלהם. It means limiting their food or giving them less food or less healthy food. It means limiting the חימום הבתים כיאת זה. It means limiting the heat in their houses. It's a business where you really only get ahead by cutting the, uh, by, by, by cutting what you're putting into it, which I guess is how all businesses work, right? The way that every business works is that you increase your profit

02:03 margins by, uh, by lowering your expenses. But when your expenses are a person's life, that makes a, that makes a very uncomfortable sacrifice. "ושמעתי עכשיו מקום וקום," the Rebbe says, "I've heard this from many people, that in the nursing home business, the way that you get ahead is by hurting the people in the nursing home." And the Rebbe says, "Based on that, איני я itse משושלם." I'm not advising the person to take such a job. "ליכא נס לי זה." I, I don't believe a person should enter such a profession. "כי כאן יראה ניסיון יום יומי." Because such a person, even if they're very ethical and would never cut food, never cut heat, they would never hurt their patients, this is a daily test where every single day they're looking at their balance sheet and seeing that it's not adding up, and that all they have to do is be dishonest about how they're treating the people there and unethical and harm their patients. And "גדול מזה," that's more than anybody can be expected to handle. And the Rebbe says you can make it even worse because you can add to it a "התר," that a person says to himself, "איינך לאחר דבר הבהרה." I believe that's how you read that para-- that, those parentheses. That the Rebbe's saying that a person could justify it, and that makes it even more dangerous. Regardless, what we have here is the Rebbe telling a person not to go into a profession, period, because there's too much of a

03:04 challenge to it, too much of a test. I sent a, uh, a WhatsApp message to Rabbi Seligson, who is the best person to ask these sorts of questions to, saying, "Can, can you think of any other time that the Rebbe told somebody not to go into a profession בכלל? That the, the, the field itself, the occupation was too dangerous for a, for a, an ethical person to be involved in?" And he said he couldn't think of one offhand. Um, I've never heard it. The closest thing I can think of to the Rebbe doing this is what he says about college sometimes, that the daily challenges will be too much for somebody if they go to college. But even that, uh, I've never seen this sort of language before. The Rebbe goes, "This field, it makes its money by hurting people, and I don't think you'll be able to withstand the test, so I'm advising you don't go into it." Um, I like to add background to these letters, but since we're doing it afterwards, I don't know what the word for it is. Postground. The, the postground on this, I think, is, uh, one's newsworthy, that's the one I put in the chat, and one is just Rebbe-worthy. So let's talk about the Rebbe a little bit. The Rebbe does not like nursing homes. Um, you see this in a lot of sichas. The best place to find this is every ten years of the Rebbe's birthday. So every time the Rebbe turned, when the

04:01 Rebbe turned fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, every one of the ten-year markers, the Rebbe talks about how people don't retire, how it's not appropriate to retire. Retirement is a, is an American invention that is for, uh, that is for taking. And the goal of retirement is to move, move people out of the way so the younger people can come in, the march of society, the march of progress, and, uh, and at the cost of the fact that we're taking people who have spent years and years gaining information and getting good at things and telling them that they're worthless now. So the Rebbe complains about this just about every decade, uh, like clockwork. And in each of these, almost all of them, he mentions nursing homes specifically, specifically calling them out as the place where he believes this is, th-th-this injustice happens day in and day out. So, uh, the Rebbe comes into this letter as someone who already is not fond of the phenomenon of nursing homes. He doesn't want people put in them. Um, I have some quotes here from sichas. The best place to find the information on this is there's a book called "Healthy in Mind, Body, and Spirit." It's got several volumes, and it's, uh, summaries of the Rebbe's sichas from Sichos in English. They have a whole chapter on aging, and they just go through this again and again and again. It's the same message over and over, but let me, um, let me give you some highlights of the way

05:02 the Rebbe words these sorts of things. Um, here's one over here. He talks about how people send off, uh, s-saying that people tell you to retire, and then they send you off to a nursing home, and your kids do you a favor. They take, like, thirty minutes off from golf or the beach to go visit him, then they remind him that it costs a whole much to keep you here, so you should be grateful. And they, uh, they just, they, they, they lock old people away. And, uh, you see this, this, this, uh, he always mentions for some reason that they're buying them a tie. They're, he-- The, the Rebbe paints a picture here of, of sort of neglect of elders, where we neglect them by throwing them in nursing homes, and he's not a fan. The Rebbe does say that, uh, since we have retired people who are in nursing homes anyway, we better find programs for them. We should set up centers of Torah study. We should set up Badei Midrash. So the Rebbe understands that we need to use this and, uh, and find a way that since people aren't working, to find a way to keep them productive anyway in Torah and mitzvahs, but very reluctantly. The Rebbe doesn't like nursing homes. Now, the Rebbe's hesitance about nursing homes and the ethics of nursing homes is not unjustified. I'm, I'm sure we all follow the news to at least some degree. Uh, in this year alone, the New York Attorney General

06:03 has sued, I think, r-right now, in this month, in December So within this last month, in December already, you had the attorney general filing at least three major cases against nursing homes citing neglect, citing exactly what the Rebbe says nursing home management will do, saying that people embezzled funds and understaffed facilities and culminated in death. And what are some of the words? I pulled some of the words from the attorney general reports. They all involve significant resident neglect, mistreatment, abuse, all coming down to the bottom line, to money. And this is a modern phenomenon. But really what the Rebbe was talking about, I think, is the Rebbe speaking right now in 1973, right? That's what we're up to, 1973. 1973, to write a letter like that shows that the Rebbe very much had his finger in 1973 on the pulse of what was happening in the news. There had been no major cases against nursing homes as of 1973 in America. In 1975 was the first time that the New York State created a special prosecutor for nursing home fraud. And that was in response to a big scandal that broke in 1974, one year after this letter was written, which was covered by the Times and everybody. Every publication covered this, is that there were multiple places that were all doing exactly what the Rebbe says. They were cutting heat. They were cutting food. They weren't treating the residents properly. And they came down. They arrested like everybody. Everybody went to jail. Everybody owed

07:22 ridiculous fines. It was a coup. And after that, the New York State created an actual special prosecutor's office for it. And then Congress a year later signed in some kind of an act that allowed there to be a national scan of this. What is it, Hirsch? What do you want? Hirsch is sending messages. In any event. So the Rebbe is looking at this situation and saying, I'm hearing from people on the ground that the fraud in nursing homes is rampant. And a year later, this would be demonstrated in America when nursing home fraud became a public issue. And it continues to be a problem. So that's the background. And that's the letter.