הרבי מורה להפסיק את הוצאתו לאור של כתב עת

00:01 Speaker 1 Okay, this is Igres, and the letter that we are looking at today is from our volume once again, back to our regular schedule, uh, volume twenty-eight. We're in the year Tav Shin Lamed Gimel, exactly fifty years ago, give or take a couple of days, and we're looking at a letter from the Pshatish Tambuls, which is not terribly far off what's today. Yud Ches, Yud Ches Sivan. We're more or less in the ballpark. This is a letter that essentially ended a publication dynasty. This is the letter that ended Batei Chabad. I- Yechiel, can I just stop you for a second? Can we, can we, um- Yeah. -honor this learning for someone that needs it, a complete Refuah Shleima? Absolutely. Who's talking? Th-this is David Tilson. Oh, hi, David. Yeah. So it's David Nachman ben Yecheved Shifra. The learning should be Refuah Shleima for David Nachman ben Yecheved Shifra. Was that it? Yes.

00:49 Speaker 2 Amen.

00:50 Speaker 1 Amen. Amen. Refuah Shleima. For his nefesh and refuah haguf. Thank you very much. Thank you. This was a, uh, this was an edifice in Lubavitch. We're gonna read a letter where the Rebbe is very unhappy with something they printed, and actually this was the beginning of the end for the publication. Uh, after this letter, they tried to fix things up. The Rebbe didn't like how they fixed things up, and the Rebbe forcibly closed it. So we're going to see the, uh, the end of a publication crash and burn right in front of us in the year Tav Shin Lamed Gimel. Let me tell you a little bit about the publication, Batei Chabad. Uh, Batei Chabad was a quarterly that came out from, uh, Eretz Israel. They put it out between Tav Shin Yud Beis and Tav Shin Lamed Gimel, so that's quite a long run. What's that like? Almost twen-- a little more than twenty years, twenty-one years, this publication ran. It came out four times a year. They saw themselves as the continuation of Hatamim, and they advertised themselves that way. They were supposed to be Hatamim two point oh. For those of you who are not familiar with Hatamim, Hatamim was the , uh, was the publication, uh, supported by the Rabbeim. The, um, the Free the Rebbe invested his heart and soul into it, and the Rebbe did too. So Hatamim, uh, they, they... I, I have it like in, in a bound version in my house, but it came out, uh,

01:54 Speaker 1 the point being to, uh, to spread Chassidus in more of a, uh, spread Chassidus and Chassidic stories and Chas-- in the Rim Chassidus in a bit more of a, uh, in, of a periodical sort of format. And, um, although that did not continue, uh, the Batei Chabad was supposed to be its, uh, its successor. So the Rebbe gave them a lot of Herods throughout the years. He sent them money regularly. He participated in the, paying the publication costs. The Rebbe was passionate about this project as well . It, uh, it went on initially for seven years from Yud Beis, Tav Shin Yud Beis for seven years. Twenty-nine editions came out in the year Tav Shin Yud Tes. It paused for a little bit. It restarted four years later and had a reboot, and then it lasted another ten years until our letter where the Rebbe shuts it down. Uh, every one of these editions, I looked up what they're made up of just to give you an idea of what, of what you'd find in one. You can still get them actually. Etzel Chofma has the full collection. They're-- they've been digitized. You can read them. Uh, each edition had a sefarim from the Rebbe. It had a piece of a yoman from seven seventy, a journal entry from someone who was there. It had translations of Likutei Diburim and Sefer Hakeses from the Yiddish into Hebrew so that Israeli audiences could enjoy the, uh, the stories and the sifrei of the Free the Rebbe.

02:58 Speaker 1 It had sort of a section on Chabad house activities, not unlike a lot of what Lubav-- what Lubavitch International, I guess, does now, so a little bit of that too. Uh, a nigun with sheet music, uh, specifically for David Paltrak. I'm just kidding. It wasn't just for him. Um, a nigun with sheet music and also memories, uh, zichronos from the times of the Rebbe Rashab. They had a few older Chassidim there who were able to talk about their times with the Rebbe Rashab. So they had a section on Rebbe Rashab Zichronos . Now, the Rebbe takes this publication very seriously, as we've said, and, uh, and he's going to get so involved that eventually he tells them he'd rather they not publish it anymore. I wanna give some possible background before we read the letter that might explain why the Rebbe was so passionate about this project specifically. Dehair, uh, somewhat recently put out an article on Hatamim revealing how much the Rebbe was involved in the publication. So officially, the Rebbe was not involved in Hatamim at all, this original journal. Um, he's not mentioned by name in any of the publications, but the Free the Rebbe would always tell people that the Rebbe was running the show. The Re-- the Free the Rebbe has one letter where he says that the main editor of the journal lives overseas and doesn't say who it is, but it's understood he's referring to the Rebbe. In a letter that's been publicized a little bit that was

04:01 Speaker 1 sent to the, uh, to, to the Rebbetsin, Rebbetsin Chaya Mushka, the Free the Rebbe writes to his daughter that, uh, through the work and devotion of your husband, um, this very important journal, Hatamim, is soon gonna be published. The Free the Rebbe writes that while on paper the names of the editors are other people, the fact is that it is entirely the Rebbe's work. So he just didn't put his name on it, but it was entirely-- Hatamim was very much put out by our Rebbe. Um, we didn't really know the extent to which the Rebbe worked on this though, besides for hints until Igros Kodesh Volume fifteen came out. In Igros Kodesh Volume fifteen, they finally published a bunch of letters between the Rebbe and the Free the Rebbe, and in those letters, the Free the Rebbe is asking the Rebbe for his help with Hatamim and the things he asks, the Rebbe was very much the line editor, the editor-in-chief, the , the editor who decided what went in. The Rebbe did everything. The Free the Rebbe asks him to edit every article, asks his opinion about, uh, what should, uh, what should be put on-- what, what should be used on each subject. Like, "I wanna talk about this subject, what, what angle should we approach it from?" Uh, he asked the Rebbe to put references and footnotes in all of the articles. He asked the Rebbe to proofread everything before it got published. He asked the Rebbe to go through and find

04:59 Speaker 1 contradictions or unclear points or places where footnotes might be needed in Hatamim. So the Rebbe was used to scouring the official Chabad publication, Hatamim, for mistakes. So he doesn't-- that may be why he's so intolerant, if you'll allow me to use the world-- word, but the Rebbe has such low tolerance for errors in Batei Chabad, which is supposed to be the successor of Hatamim. Uh, they make mistakes, and the Rebbe gets quite upset about it. So we have a letter here where the Rebbe writes that, uh, after a long, after a long delay, he's finally getting, uh, he's finally getting an addition from them, and he's not happy with it. In order to understand what the Rebbe is referring to though, we have to go back just- A year before that to Tav Shin Lamed Beis. The first letter we're gonna look at today is not from our year, it's from Tav Shin Lamed Beis. It's a short letter where the Rebbe says he's very unhappy with the, with Bytown Chabad. It says, "In this ‹foreign language› this is letter Yud Tav Ayin," which is printed in volume twenty-seven. The Rebbe says, "Although I've mentioned this several times, uh, ‹foreign language›. It looks to me like the editors are not editing the material at all." The Rebbe says, "It looks to me like no one's doing anything around here. ‹Foreign language›" Because he wants some examples of major mistakes that have snuck into Bytown Chabad, he says, "There's a letter that you print about Tzedakah,

06:11 Speaker 1 ‹foreign language›." I went to look at what the Rebbe is talking about here because they printed both the letter-- They printed the letter that he's referring to in Igros Kodesh, and I also found it in the archives for Bytown Chabad. What they did was they took a small excerpt of the letter that was missing so much context that you couldn't figure out what the Rebbe was saying. So they, they just sloppily cut a piece of a letter and threw it in without the necessary context. The Rebbe was very unhappy about this. "‹Foreign language›" I'm not looking for fault, the Rebbe says. This is just a glaring error. "‹Foreign language›" The Rebbe says, "I would like until you can find somebody who's willing to take responsibility for the editing and for all of the material in this publication, please stop publishing." This is the first time the Rebbe hints, this is in Tav Shin Lamed Beis, the first time the Rebbe hints that he might shut down this publication if they can't find somebody willing to edit it properly. Says, "‹Foreign language›" In addition to the very obvious, uh, and surprising problems that I've mentioned above, like the first example with this letter regarding Tzedakah, "‹Foreign language› also on first glance, if anybody's even looking." You see the, see what he writes on the parentheses? "On first glance, if you're even glancing, ‹foreign language›" That you gave an explanation, um, you gave an explanation on a paragraph from a sicha that I gave on Shabbos. What

07:24 Speaker 1 had happened here is there's a footnote that tries to explain it, but I had to look this one up, too. It's a little bit vague, but, uh, the Rebbe gave a talk on a Friday night, and after the Friday night sicha, the Friday night sicha went long, so he said he was gonna do Kabbalah Bracha the following day. He wasn't gonna do Kabbalah Bracha at night. But the way they printed it in Bytown Chabad suggested that the Rebbe had decided that they, like, weren't gonna do Kiddush Friday night because the talk went long. And the Rebbe was very upset with the wording there because it sounds like he did something aser. So he tells them, uh, he tells them how he would like it to be published. If you look down here, I think they, uh, and he, he, he, he sent to them in the later part of the letter, the way that it should have been written is that since the farbrengen went long, we decided to do Kabbalah Bracha the following day, not that we didn't make Kiddush that night. So the Rebbe is just very unhappy with the implications, the way that they're writing, and he tells them they need to start editing. I don-- I sh- I didn't get to show you the picture I brought. Look at that. Have you seen this one before? I'd never seen this picture. This is a picture of the Frieda Rebbe smiling over a Chumash. The Rebbe cared about these publications turning out

08:16 Speaker 1 well, and when they didn't turn out well, they were quite upset. Okay. I decided to use a visual today. Those listening at home won't know the picture. Okay, looking at our letter, Tav Shin Lamed Gimel. He writes to them about their next edition. "‹Foreign language›" the published Yud Beis Tammuz. I think they hope to publish again on Yud Beis Tammuz, uh, but they published this. So I got a copy of what you just published in Bytown Chabad. "‹Foreign language›" The Rebbe says, "Before I tell you what's wrong with this," I'm paraphrasing. Rebbe says, "Before I comment on this, I wanna give you a overall view of, uh, of how I see Bytown Chabad. "‹Foreign language›" Says that this magazine needs to live up to its name, "‹Foreign language›" since it is the, uh, the Chabad publication. It should be understood that there's an incredible responsibility, "‹Foreign language›" not just a responsibility, but a great "‹Foreign language›" which should make you pay even more attention. "‹Foreign language›" Specifically, we need to be, uh, we need to be addressing people who are looking to find pretext against us, not people who are "‹Foreign language›" meaning that if somebody writes something poorly, people who want to understand them almost certainly will. You-- We, we've had this experience before. People will, uh, will, uh, people will get up in front of a crowd and they'll say something and they spoke perhaps their grammar wasn't perfect, or perhaps their, uh, or perhaps their delivery wasn't perfect. But those of us

09:42 Speaker 1 who love the person and care about the person, we want to understand them, so we read the explanation into them. That's true. "‹Foreign language›" you don't need to have it right for them. You need to have it right for the people who wanna jump down your throat. So he's saying, we're trying to respond. When you're writing, you have to respond. This is just very good writing advice. He said, "When you're writing, you need to respond to people who are looking for a pretext against you, not people who are trying to read into what you're saying." This is advice that I, that I used to give, uh, used to give students at the Kollel where I was teaching them how to write in English. You can't, uh, you can't hope your audience will like you. You have to, you have to, uh, you have to be convincing even to somebody who doesn't wanna hear you out. So just excellent writing advice. Anyway, I lost my place. Okay. "‹Foreign language›" He says, "Of course, you need to be extra careful when it comes to printing anything that has to do with our Rebbeim. "‹Foreign language›" He says, "Because this is a very simple point, I don't need to spend a lot of time discussing it with you, especially since I've already told you about this many times, and you've already promised that you're gonna do better many times." So we've already been through this. Says, "‹Foreign language›" Nonetheless, he says, "I see all over the place, uh,

10:48 Speaker 1 a steer to what I-- a steer to these rules. I see that this publication is breaking those rules constantly. "‹Foreign language›" He says, "Let me just look at the most egregious example, the most damaging thing that you put in this publication, and maybe you can, uh, and, and, uh, ‹Foreign language› maybe we can, uh, po-- I can point out some of the problems." Okay. So the Rebbe points out what he's most upset about in this most recent publication. "‹Foreign language› You printed a story about the Alter Rebbe, ‹Foreign language› and of course, you didn't put a source." I mean, because of course, no source. And he's just-- The Rebbe's clearly very frustrated with this publication. You see it from these parentheses. The Rebbe summarized it. He goes, "I don't have it in front of me, but it's more or less a story about the Alter Rebbe kashering then traping something at the request of the Shah who wasn't alive then. And then you write nothing else. You give a wild story, and you don't write anything else. You didn't explain yourself at all." He says, "This is, uh, particularly surprising. I expect you to put in some note like the even if you were rushing." Um, and, uh, and given that this has been a problem in the past, he also thinks that maybe it could be a problem of gezela 'cause the Alter Rebbe is, uh, is traping meat that should be kosher. And he says, uh, he says, "I can't imagine this is

12:08 Speaker 1 going to change in the future." That's sort of a sequum of the following paragraph. The reason why I'm rushing through this is because if you wanna see what really happened, I found the old Betam Chabad that printed this. So what we have here is the story. I'm not gonna read it, but I'll summarize and go through like this. Maybe I'll read it. Uh, it says in Betam Chabad that it's a story from the Rebbe Maharash, however, this is not sourced anywhere in the Rebbe Maharash. That once upon a time in Liadi, they shechted a certain animal on Erev Shabbos. A shailah came up, and it was a shailah that comes down to a difference between a taz and a shah. The taz would have been machshir and the shah would have been matir. So the shah says it's kosher and the taz says-- I got it backwards. The taz says that it's kosher and the shah says it's trap. The rebbe of the city decided to pasken like the shah and told everybody no meat for Shabbos. But when the shailah came to the Alter Rebbe, he said, "We should hold like the taz," and everybody in the city had meat for Shabbos. Then the Alter Rebbe is davening super long. At the end of it, at the end of a super long mincha davening, he tells everybody, "Sorry, I was wrong. Your meat's totally trap. Don't eat any of your meat this Shabbos." This surprised everybody a lot. And which is Rebbe Yosef the

13:11 Speaker 1 Maggid, uh, asked the Alter Rebbe to explain himself, and the Alter Rebbe explained himself. He said that in the middle of his mincha davening, the Shah appeared to him. The Shah was not alive anymore. And the reason why the Shah appeared to him, apparently, is because souls on Erev Shabbos, they come to get a tikkun on Erev Shabbos, and the Shah was coming to get a tikkun. Now, why would a holy tzadik like the Shah need a tikkun? Because the Alter Rebbe had not paskened like him and thereby had disenfranchised him. So his neshamah didn't have the aliyah that was necessary. The Alter Rebbe felt very bad about this and said, "Fine, I'll pasken like you to get your neshamah an aliyah." And indeed, the Mitler Rebbe later on visited the Alter Rebbe in his room and had to wait outside the door for a little while. And the reason why he had to wait outside the door was because the Shah was in there thanking the Alter Rebbe for the aliyas neshamah. Now, the Rebbe says this is ridiculous, as the story comes out of nowhere. It sounds like the Alter Rebbe's wrong. It sounds like the Alter Rebbe changed up sack to help a neshamah out. It sounds like he got something through a, through a dream or through a vision, which you're not allowed to pasken based on. It sounds like maybe by traping all the meat, there's a chashash gezela. So he writes all these in Yonim in our letter to

14:07 Speaker 1 them saying that the, the story makes no sense. "I don't know how you would publish this, and certainly how you would publish it without saying, 'Hey, I'm not so sure about this.'" They wrote a response, and, uh, the way they wrote a response is interesting. They, uh, i-in the p-- in the, in the next edition of Betam Chabad, they reframed the Rebbe's questions as a reader question, even though the reader never asked the question. So what they did was they, they, they made like a, uh, what do you call it when people write into the edit? Letters to the editor. They wrote a letter to the editor framing the Rebbe's questions over here, and then it's on your screen, and then they proceeded to give line-by-line answers to the Rebbe's questions. So they don't say they're wrong. What they do is instead of admitting they're wrong, they try to shlug up the Rebbe by turning the Rebbe into a letter to the editor that they shlug up, which is just a very interesting tactic. They say that it's, uh, it's-- they bring makaris here that it's not a problem to pasken based on a dream, and they have all sorts of sources. And then, uh, in the second paragraph, they say that it's not a gezela at all 'cause it's hefker based and hefker. They basically-- they go again-- they go after the Rebbe's questions. I, I don't know why this was their approach. Um, the-- I, I guess maybe there was kind of a

15:08 Speaker 1 mutual frustration here. It's just hard to imagine. But, uh, they did not do anything to the Rebbe's satisfaction. So in a letter that is from volume Tavshin Chaf Tes, we have it in on our page in front of us. It's letter Yud Tav Tav kuf pei zayin, um, from Tavshin Lamed Dalet. Excuse me, it's Felek Chaf Tes. Tavshin Lamed Dalet. He writes to them and says, "I'm closing this shop down forever." And he starts it by saying that, uh, that, um, The Rebbe says, "I'm really not trying to upset you. I'm also not trying to give you mussar, but, uh, this isn't being done properly." And he says, He says, He says, "Especially after the whole shturem about this Alter Rebbe story, I thought your next editions would be more careful, but I'm still finding all sorts of very serious problems, specifically in the response that you wrote." And then I'm not gonna read it 'cause it's a long letter. He goes through each of the points they wrote in their response to their fabricated letter to the editor and it-- and, and schlugs up all of their responses. So yeah, th-th-they're going back and forth over this issue, not for any purpose. I don't know why. I, I, I, I'm, I'm not very sensitive to the writers in this, uh, in, in this particular scenario. Okay. He says, "I don't suspect that anybody's trying to sabotage this publication, and I'm sure nobody forgot the whole discussion we had before." "And nonetheless, you published this."

16:43 Speaker 1 He goes, "It's clear from the fact that you're still writing this way, despite the fact that I'm sure that you're worried about the fact that I keep on telling you you're doing it wrong, is I'm sure you guys didn't forget. I'm sure you're not trying to sabotage. So if it's coming out bad, it must be that it's not within your ability to do it well." Um, and with that, it goes to, uh, let's go down here. And if you really wanna put this out, you're going to need an editor in charge of things. That's his final heirlo. "Until you find an editor who can meet my expectations, don't put out any more publications." And indeed, they did not. They, uh, they had a couple-- they, they had a, they had a possible editor, Yehuda Mon- Yehoshua Mondschein. He was going to do it. They went to him, and, and Yehoshua Mondschein said back to them that he wouldn't have seen any problem with the story so-- with the story about the Alter Rebbe, so clearly he's not the right editor. So they never found the right editor. And, uh, from that point on, from the Rebbe telling them, "Until you find somebody who can meet my expectations, don't publish," they in fact never published again. So this is the story of the rise and fall of Betam Chabad. I think it has a, a couple lessons here for us, specifically for those involved in publishing. And actually, we do have some people here, even possibly

17:50 Speaker 1 on this year, but certainly people who listen regularly, who are involved in publishing, uh, official things under the name of Chabad. The Rebbe expects them to be, uh, close to, if not at the quality of Chatamim itself. Uh, the Rebbe expects very careful line editing. He expects a polished job. And, uh, specifically when it comes to telling stories of the Rebbe, something I think we all do. We all tell stories of the Rebbe, stories of the Rabbeim. We tell them in the WhatsApp group. We tell them at farbrengens. The Rebbe wants them to and if they are stories that reflect poorly or strangely on Chabad, they need to be, uh, they need to be taken with a grain of salt. I think, um, a lot of us perhaps are a little too fast and loose with our Rebbe stories without realizing that they could be misinterpreted and that the Rebbe is telling us, especially when telling Rebbe stories or stories about Rabbeim to the general public, uh, at, uh, in, in, in forums where a lot of people can read them or a lot of people can see them, there needs to be particular care taken to make sure that very strange stories are well-sourced and that even then they're explained fully because we wouldn't want people, Chas ve'Shalom, to think that something us or inappropriate had been going on. Okay. That's it.