עיתונות ועיתונאים

00:01 Speaker 1 Okay, we're looking at a letter from almost exactly fifty years ago today to the day almost. We're looking at a letter from Ches ER. This is Igris Tuvshin Lamed Gimel, Ches ER, and the letter is written to one of the most important journalists, or I guess one of the most important owners of a newspaper in Israel at the time, a Noach Moses. Noach Moses. Um, I wanna give you a little bit of background on who he is and what paper he was writing for. He's, uh, he's Yediot Aharonot. That is, uh, I believe now-- What would you say, Israel? You probably know Israel better than anybody here as far as the modern things going on there. I don't know. The, the rest of us on the, on the chat right now aren't, uh, aren't necessarily holding an Israeli newspapers. Is it a prominent paper now? I know it's up there. Is it the number one paper, you think? Yeah. I think probably the top paper now. It was, uh, it started off that way, and then it wasn't, and then it sort of was again. It's, it's-

00:46 Speaker 2 Still pretty prominent.

00:47 Speaker 1 Yeah.

00:47 Speaker 2 Yediot is a pretty prominent newspaper.

00:49 Speaker 1 Okay. It's, uh, it's wi-- At least what-- from what I read online, it's widely considered the paper of record in Israel. It's sort of their New York Times. Um, except unless you hate the New York Times, in which case, I apologize. Uh, it was established in nineteen thirty-nine. It's a very old paper. It was the first evening paper in mandatory Palestine. That's the way it goes in the Wikipedia article. Nineteen thirty-nine. It was trying to be L-- the, the, uh, London Evening Standard. That was its idea at the time. There was a, um, wealthy landowner named Yehuda Moses. He thought it'd be fun to buy the paper, so he bought the paper, figured it'd be a fun investment. He didn't really take it very seriously. He handed the paper over to his children, and his son, Noach Moses, he took over the operations and became the managing editor. Uh, most of this conversation here, Noach Moses' conversation, is happening in Tuvshin Lamed Gimel. So that's nineteen seventy-three. This was the end of a rough chapter for the paper. Uh, shortly after, uh, I guess shortly after the founding of the modern state, probably around nineteen fifty, maybe the very late '40s, early 1950s, there's an enormous split at Yediot Aharonot where Maariv breaks off and forms their own paper. It's a coup, and it's one of the most famous coups in, uh, in Is-- maybe the most famous coup in Israeli journalism because it founds a paper that becomes their major competitor. Uh, Maariv becomes

01:54 Speaker 1 more important than Yed-Yed-Yediot Aharonot for a while. Um, and it, uh, I have here that it wasn't until nineteen eighty that Yediot Aharonot once again overtook Maariv. So we're coming now near the, uh-- It's nineteen seventy-three. They are fighting like cats and dogs, as they say. Uh, it was revealed in the nineteen nineties that each paper had bugged the other one's offices. They each were listening in on each other's phone calls. It was a very, a very bitter competition between them. The one who really revolved-- revived the paper is this Dov Yudkovsky, who was, uh, considered, I guess, the father of modern Israeli journalism. He was a distant cousin of Moses. He saved the paper more or less. In any case, this letter is coming during a rough time for the newspaper, and the Rebbe is talking to the managing editor of one of Israel's two most important newspapers at the time and a, a beleaguered newspaper. I wanna actually do a little bit of background before we read the letter, but let me just give you an intro to what this letter is. In this letter, the Rebbe is going to try to convince him to include a Jewish section to his paper. That he wants a section that has Torah, that has Mitzvahs, that has Shulchan Aruch, that has a little bit of Parsha. And the Rebbe is trying to convince him to, to take Yediot, this relatively secularly focused paper, and put in a section for the firm readership and also to

02:57 Speaker 1 inspire the Chiloni readership. That is the, that is the point of the letter. With that in mind, I did wanna run through. I, I ran, ran through some of the other interactions that the Rebbe had with journalists. I wanted to pick out a few and show you maybe a, a bit of a picture of the Rebbe's general interaction with journalists and what he feels their influence should be and what they should be doing. I am from Asher Penn. Asher Penn was a journalist at The Forward. He's written a lot about his interactions with the Rebbe. I believe he had more than one Yechidus. Uh, Asher Penn has written that the Rebbe told him in Yechidus, this is a quote, "Stop insisting that American Judaism is in danger, an assertion that does little but place Jewry on the defensive. We need to go on the offensive." So this is a PR tip for him that every time that the newspapers and the people who are writing report that American Judaism is set up to fail, you know, we do this all the time, and we do this, we do this for Shofi. We'll say things like, "The intermarriage rate is through the roof, so you need to make sure you marry a Jew," or that, uh, or that, uh, synagogue attendance is dropping, so we need to strengthen synagogues, and we need to strengthen Jewish organizations. The entire idea of founding Birthright, as a matter of fact, was in order to cut back on intermarriage. That

03:52 Speaker 1 was the whole-- that was the idea behind Birthright. The Rebbe is not into this as a shitah, at least not into this as a, as a public shitah. The Rebbe was telling journalists constantly that they need to stop talking about American Judaism as if it's in danger and instead go on the offensive, not be on the defensive, saying that we're dying and need to fix it, but that everything's going great. This is kind of a PR trick. This is something we've actually talked about, about our own Shacharis. This is a piece of advice that I gave Yisrael during the days when our Shacharis was a little bit weaker. I told him that if every morning you're saying we need a tenth man, no one comes to Shacharis. This is, uh, this is a PR trick that the Rebbe is very familiar with, that if people see something failing, they don't try to invest in fixing it. People sp-- People generally invest in making things that are succeeding succeed more, but they don't usually want failing process. It's very-- There's a real wisdom to that, to that, uh, to that advice that he gave the forward. There's a guy, Shlomo Shamir. He was one of the editors at Haaretz. He also wrote a column for the Algemeiner. Um, in his column, uh-- He wrote a column one time that got him in big trouble. He, uh, he wrote a column that was protesting a fast that a lot of Rabbonim said that they should hold during

04:47 Speaker 1 the Iran hostage crisis in nineteen seventy-nine. What he didn't know is that the Rebbe had spoken at a farbrengen about how even though Chabad doesn't usually like fasts, the Rebbe would support such a fast if the other Rabbonim would get behind it. So when they did, and, uh, he was the only one saying we shouldn't do the fast, it was kind of him against all the Rabbonim and the Rebbe. Um, Jacobson wrote a editorial on the opposite page, which is something that he did all the time. Uh, Gershon Jacobson would always allow people who didn't agree with him to write in the Algemeiner, but then he would write his own editorial right next to it that completely destroyed them. So he wrote a competing editorial right next to his that completely destroyed his case, and, uh, he later found out that Shamir and later found out that the Rebbe had specifically wanted this fast, and he felt bad. So he wrote an apology to the Rebbe saying that he didn't mean to discourage fasting. He didn't mean to discourage prayer. He obviously believes that prayer helps. He just had an opinion. He's very sorry. The Rebbe wrote back to him. The letter is available. I didn't bring you the letter. I'm just telling you a line from it. The Rebbe says from that somebody who Hashem gives the talent to write needs to remember that people can interpret the things that they write incorrectly if they don't write well. That you're a good writer, but

05:45 Speaker 1 if you're not careful about the things you say, people are able to misinterpret them, and a good journalist needs to constantly anticipate what the reader will infer from his words. I have one from Moshe Ishon. He was the editor-in-chief of Hatzofer. He was at one point-- There, there, there was, there was a, there was a my story with him. He's written quite a bit about his interactions with the Rebbe. One of his stories is that there was a point in his life where he was offered a position to be on the board of the Jewish Agency or to be the editor-in-chief of Hatsofer. He wrote to the Rebbe asking which one he should be. That's another Israeli paper. And the Rebbe told him definitely to go into journalism. He says that the Rebbe respected journalism and saw it as an important calling, believing that journalists have a duty to make their views heard. At the time, the Rebbe pointed to a copy of Hatsofer lying on his desk and said the following. This is a quote, "A journalist who knows his role and mission has the power to influence, change, and guide public opinion." We did mention Gershon Jacobson. I just wanted to say that, uh, the Rebbe sort of had the opposite approach when it came to him than he did to almost every other journalist. It's something that I think we should consider, especially when we look at this letter. The Rebbe, by the way, did you know the Rebbe recommended the name

06:40 Speaker 1 Algemeiner? I didn't know that. The, the Rebbe came up with that name himself. The Gershon Jacobson came to the Rebbe and said, "I need to start a Yiddish paper." He was out of work because they, they just closed the main Yiddish paper that was, uh, that was not entirely secular and anti-religious, so he needed a place to, to write and the-- and he suggested that he wanted to open his own. The Rebbe got behind it, suggested the name Algemeiner, and, uh, told Gershon Jacobson not to attach it to Chabad or any group, other voices should be on the page, and that, uh, and that he doesn't want it to be, uh, he doesn't want it to be a Chabad paper. Obviously, he can have his own opinions, write your own opinion section like Chabad should, but not Chabad paper. Uh, according to, uh, according to Jacobson's, uh, widow... I don't remember her name. What's it? Tuvia. Tuvia Jacobson, I believe is her name. His wife. Okay. She said that, uh, she said that she was told that the Rebbe told him that a newspaper is for people who read newspapers and not people who sit and learn Torah all day. So at the Algemeiner, he said it's, it's a great thing if they can read a column that contains some words of Torah, maybe among things like literature and culture and articles by very good writers. And he said that the Rebbe said, "If you don't give them these things, they won't buy the paper.

07:37 Speaker 1 And when they do, they'll get some words of Torah and news about religious institutions and events and things about Yiddishkeit along with it." So the Rebbe told him, "If you give your readers good content that's not Jewish, they'll pick up between the lines the Jewish things, but don't push the Judaism too hard in the paper." Now, this is in pretty strong contrast to what we have by Yediot Aharonot. I hope that we'll have some time in the WhatsApp group today to discuss why the Rebbe might have given such different, d- such different advice. It's a long letter, so we'll move a little bit quickly. Um, the Rebbe writes to Noah Moses, who I told you again is the publisher, is the, is the-- I guess not the publisher, that's his father. He's the managing editor of Yediot Aharonot, and this is in nineteen seventy-three, so right near the end of a difficult Tikun Olam with Maariv. Rebbe writes, It's up on the screen if you wanna follow. The Rebbe writes, "I've been wanting for a while to, uh, write back to you. We had a visit and we spoke. I've learned some things in between. I've learned about your health condition." We're gonna see near the end of the letter that he means that it's improved. Apparently, they'd had some health pr- health problems and things had gotten better. The Rebbe says, "I was waiting for an opportunity for the right reason, the right cause to actually write to you as I was looking for

08:43 Speaker 1 an excuse." "The reason that-- The reason I should write to you came just yesterday." "So now I'm rushing to write a letter to you." "Because I think this is important for everybody." What we'll find out near the bottom in this paragraph down here is that, uh... See, I told you it's a long letter. We'll find out in the paragraph down there is that, uh, is that the Rebbe has received a, uh, an insert to a magazine that has some Torah ideas in it, and he thinks that they could copy it and do a good job, too. I believe he attaches this insert and says, "Model yours after this one." "I'm referring to the thing we talked about that is very important." "The newspaper that you run which God gave you to run ." "I want you to dedicate at least a page or more every single week to things that involve Parsha, Mitzvot maybe Mitzvot that have to do with that week. maybe some Halacha before Pesach, a little bit of a Pes- pre-Pesach insert. Because of course, action is the most important thing." Not just drushas, he wants a little bit of Halacha there, too. "We spoke about at that time at length." "Since a lot of your readers are Frum," "certainly your intent as somebody publishing a paper is to make sure you take care of their needs as well." "Certainly people who are trying to figure out what happened this week are not just looking to find out about politics or about

10:12 Speaker 1 money." "They also wanna know what's going on in religion." "Certainly, you have to do this in a way that makes sense for a newspaper. You're not a posek, but, um, but I'd like you to speak to your audience." This is a very interesting, uh, very interesting direction the Rebbe is going here. He's saying, "I'm not telling you to do this because I'm asking you to turn over the world and make people Frum. I'm telling you, you have a responsibility to your readers. A good number of your readers care about Torah and Mitzvot. And if you cover sports because some of them like sports, and you cover money 'cause some of them are following money, you have to cover religion because some of them are religious." It's a very interesting attempt here. "There's no reason to repeat the things we talked about at length back then." When they had their conversation, their first conversation. "And based on what I remember, you don't necessarily, uh, you don't necessarily need any convincing from somebody else." "You come from, uh, you come from good stock," I believe is what that expression means. "You have a good family. You, you come from a, you come from a long line of people who care about this stuff. I don't have to convince you." I'm not sure what the Rebbe is talking about here because as far as I know, they don't come from a religious background. But in any event, the Rebbe says, "I also recall ." The Rebbe says that,

11:29 Speaker 1 "Although I also remember that I mentioned you at the time, I'm no expert in running newspapers or in profits." "I'm sure that when you do this, you will get more readers. Despite the fact that I don't know newspapers," the Rebbe is promising them, "If you do this, your readership will go up." That's why the context I think is important. He's talking to somebody who is very worried about readership, who is in a serious battle right now with the other major paper. "Maybe more-- maybe also more, uh, more advertisements. Maybe you'll get more ads in your paper." So for a Rebbe who says he doesn't understand what makes editors tick, let me tell you, he just said the two magic words, audience and ads. So, those are the right words to say. "Even though I, I hope that these things are not what you care about most," you know, ads and, and eyes. "I hope that what you really want is to serve the broadest audience possible." "And of course, I hope that you truly are a, a person who believes in Hashem." So the Rebbe goes, "I can give you bad reasons and good reasons. I hope you want it for the good reasons, but let me tell you all of them. If you add this, you're gonna get more financial success. I think a better reason," the Rebbe says, "is that you'll serve more people, which I assume is your higher calling as a journalist and a publisher. And above all that, I assume

12:35 Speaker 1 your very highest calling is that you care about God. You're so you should be putting Torah in your paper." The Rebbe goes, "It's become even more important now for you to do this than it was previously." "There are more, there are more young people called ." I guess it was a new word back then. "All over the world, and specifically in Eretz Israel, there are more people who are identifying as non-religious." "They don't know what true Judaism is." "They're looking for more information about the values of Judaism, about their inheritance . They weren't educated with any of these-- with any of this knowledge not at home and not at school." And the Rebbe says, it's certainly the case that I don't expect your newspaper to educate them and be their school. Says that I think that this is something that would be important for many of the people who are interested in your readers. So once again, your readers who are interested in finding out about these topics. So the Rebbe is now taking a second half to this approach. He said you have frum readers, and so you need to serve that audience by serving them Torah. You also have non-frum readers, the Rebbe says, you have chilanim who want to know about frum kites. They're also your readers. So the Rebbe is telling him, whether you're serving just the religious population or the entire population, a little Parsha corner and a Halakha corner on the paper, I guess a whole page, a page

13:57 Speaker 1 or two every single week would be beneficial to your readership. The Rebbe goes, this is the thing I told you about before. The Rebbe says, the whole reason that I'm telling you all this now is I received a really nice insert that was in a magazine that did this, and I'd like you to copy it. That's what he says more or less in this paragraph. I assume you'll be able to do it better, is what he says. Let's keep on reading, because again, long letter. The Rebbe goes, I think you also could make it a little bit better. He has some suggestions. He thinks maybe you'll have some good ideas on how you can make it better. You can find some real Halakhic and Torah authorities who can help you improve upon it. But I'm sending this over to you, and the Rebbe attaches this insert that he got in a magazine as an example of what he wants this guy to try in Yidiyot Achranot. The Rebbe now goes in a different direction, and here, this is a fabregan, this paragraph. This paragraph is a fabregan. The Rebbe says, Our Torah is called the true Torah. This certainly applies also to things that come out in Torah as Halakha Lema'aseh. So Halakha Lema'aseh is true as well. One of the themes of Halakha, something that shows up a lot in Halakha, is the problem with Devarim B'teilim, idle speech. In Mussar, you say that they're very strict about this. The Torah is very careful

15:13 Speaker 1 to tell us not to be very careful, not to be involved in Devarim B'teilim. There's also Halakha Lema'aseh regarding Devarim B'teilim. And then here, the Rebbe says something that I believe is his chidush. If it's not his chidush, then certainly the Rebbe says it in a couple of sichas, and I haven't seen it. I don't know of it anywhere else. The Rebbe says, Devarim B'teilim is not asur, the Rebbe says. It can't be Devarim Asurim. It can't be things that are asur. What's the only problem with these words of the Devarim B'teilim? Devarim B'teilim, by definition, must be things that would otherwise be okay if they weren't Devarim B'teilim. This is the Rebbe's chiluk. That Devarim B'teilim is not Lashon Har. Devarim B'teilim is not idle chatter. Devarim B'teilim is something that would be mutar were it not for the fact that it was B'teilim. And what does B'teilim mean? The Rebbe defines. See, I think that's a chidush. What the Rebbe is saying is that if we have a conversation and nothing comes of it, it is defined as Devarim B'teilim. That's what Devarim B'teilim is meikaradin. Because if something comes of our conversation, what we said wasn't libato. We talked about something, then we went and did it. But we talk about something and never do it, that is the geder of Devarim B'teilim. Because everything else is Devarim Asurim. So the Rebbe says, what's the geder of Devarim B'teilim that makes it different from Devarim Asurim? Is Devarim B'teilim is something where

16:25 Speaker 1 we had a productive conversation, but it wasn't productive because it didn't actually result in an action. And then the Rebbe puts it on him, and I think puts it on us too. When it comes to us. The Rebbe goes, my entire intent in this conversation, the prior conversation we had about your paper, was certainly not to get into things that are not my business. I was interested in helping your readers, and certainly you want to help your readers too. Says it is now entirely your responsibility to make sure that the things that I said to you don't become Devarim B'teilim. If you don't do anything, then I've been talking about nothing this whole time, and you've made me do Devarim B'teilim. And I don't think this requires a whole lot of drasha for us to get to a very practical message there. If the Rebbe says a sicha and we don't do anything about it, we are kiviyachol, maybe, I don't know if it's even kiviyachol, practically making the Rebbe's words retroactively Devarim B'teilim. If the Rebbe tells us to do something and we don't do it, we turn the Rebbe's words into Devarim B'teilim. That's what he's saying to this reader. Why not to us too? Says, There's certainly good things in all things. The Rebbe goes on to say that it's been a long time since we've spoken, but good things have happened since then. He says that I hear you're getting better. Whatever diseases that they'd had, you have in this last

17:42 Speaker 1 time. I hear you've gotten healthier. The Rebbe also gives him one line here that's interesting in the very, that's in this paragraph that I'm circling right now with my mouse. Second to last line, he says, I hope that you're going to be able to improve upon this thing that I'm sending you significantly. And that it should be justified. People write on things that are holy. Be careful about kedusha sadap. The Rebbe goes, I hope you live up to it. I hope that you're able to publish this and also live up to it so that being careful about the kedusha sadap will indeed apply to the thing that you put out. The only postscript I have to this is that as far as I know, this never happened. I don't know that Yidiyot put out a section like this. I looked up online to see what their different sections are for different days of the week. I could not find Ynet has stuff, but that's their website. I don't know if the paper, certainly not in the 80s, I don't know if they ever did this. So I don't know if it ever actually happened. What I do know is that we have a couple of things we can take home from here. One of them is that there's a strange thing here where the Rebbe is telling a newspaper writer that he wants more Judaism in the paper, which is sort of the opposite of what he told Gershon Jacobson, which I think is something

18:44 Speaker 1 that is worth discussing. Why the Rebbe was telling the Algemeiner to not put Torah in so openly, to kind of sneak it into the articles. And here he wants a full page. Also, I think definitely up for discussion is that we need to do things, we need to think about what we can do to ensure that the things that the Rebbe tells us are not made into Devarim B'teilim through our inaction. And that's what I've got. Floor is open.

19:07 Speaker 2 My only theory about the distinction Gershon Jacobson and the Mariv is if you think of the readership, I believe that the newspaper that Jacobson was coming from was called the Morgen Journal or the Tug Journal or something like that. It was like a leftist Yiddish-speaking newspaper which probably attracted a lot of people after the Holocaust who left Yiddishkeit and stuff like that. They might be a lot more antagonistic to having overt Torah in their newspaper when they're trying to be as secular as possible. So it's possible for those readers and for that readership, you need to kind of sneak it in somewhere and add that, sprinkle that flavor versus coming up with an entire article which would theoretically turn them off versus the people in Israel that he's talking about where he says, A, it's people that are chilanim that don't know anything, or it's B, it's people that are frum and they would benefit from having it. So it's kind of almost like a different readership. And therefore, for that paper, he's giving advice saying that that's more beneficial for those readers, being that the whole letter is all about the readership, right? The majority of everything that he's saying is about the readership and how this is going to do a toy for the readership. Also for this person, he's going to be able to have a better newspaper, better advertising, and a better circulation of his newspaper. But at the same time, most of it is about the readership that as a

20:16 Speaker 2 good journalist, you need to do what your audience is looking for and what your people are looking for. That's my only thought, very, you know, 30,000 feet of what may be a difference between the two newspapers.