מתי צריך לקחת אחריות?

00:01 Speaker 1 This is Icarus. Today we're going to look at a letter from Yud Dalet Teves of our year Taf Shin Lamed Gimel, fifty years ago. And, uh, we have here a klal, and I say, I say a klal with some trepidation. I recognize that when you find a letter from the Rebbe, you cannot necessarily rely on it to tell you everything the Rebbe thinks about a topic. But I have here something like eight letters from the Rebbe that all say the same thing, so I think we might really have a klal on our hands. I didn't find really exceptions to this anywhere. And this is that people frequently have very good ideas. Sometimes those ideas will advance Torah and mitzvahs. Sometimes they will advance the cause of Lubavitch. Sometimes they will advance the cause of Hashem himself. The Rebbe, nonetheless, seems to have a condition he attaches to all good ideas, and without it, the Rebbe says it's not even worth starting. Without giving away the ending, let's look at the first letter, and you'll see it immediately. So the first letter is letter Yud Taf Reish Mem Dalet. These first two points, we don't really have to read them. The first point is that if it's still practical, you should consult with other people. This is referring to a contract deal. Somebody had sent the Rebbe a contract. He didn't know whether or not to do it. The Rebbe had delayed in responding, so the Rebbe writes back, "If that contract is still on the

01:02 Speaker 1 table, I have some advice for how to go about figuring out whether you should sign the contract." And the second point, the person, this business owner of some kind, had asked about a, uh, a partnership and whether they should change the name of the company. And the Rebbe says, "When it comes to the partnership, you should wait to change the name of the company until you're sure the contract, the contract is gonna go through." Practical business advice, which has halachas in it too somewhere, but it's not what we're focusing on today. Point three is the big one. Now, point three, if we look below the line, says that, uh, this person had said that he had a great idea. He wanted to arrange movies about Chabad and Jewish topics. At the time, I don't know, in nineteen seventy-three, there wasn't, uh, I don't think Gem was around. Uh, you certainly couldn't get, uh, couldn't get Good Night with the Rebbe on your WhatsApp. So, uh, there weren't-- there was not a lot of film on authentic Yiddishkeit and on the Rebbe and on Chabad. So this person had the idea to put out Chabad and Yiddishkeit-oriented movies. Look at the Rebbe's answer in number three. "B'eoifen tiyoreti," if it comes to theory, if we're talking theoretically, "hatachnit tov v'menchutza." This is a good idea and an urgent idea, pleasing idea, an urgent idea. This is a good thing. It's a great idea. "Aval," there's a but. But, "tzarich lihiot b'mesud v'ichtvi." It has to be

02:07 Speaker 1 in an organized fashion. It has to be in an organized way. And what does that look like? "Az kaneh chabad shebeheivah ein manam panim klal." We have nobody in Chabad right now who has time for this. The people who are busy in Chabad with these sorts of things, they have no available time. "V'chol zman shelo yin matze ish achrai v'mesugah lazer upaneve yikabel ze al atzmo ein inyan l'kanos l'chal zer." As long as you can't find a person who is going to take responsibility for this project and is talented about it and has free time for it and will take it on as his responsibility, don't do it. "Ein inyan l'kanos l'chal zer." Don't do it. Even though it is a "tachnit tov v'menchutza," even though it's a very good idea in theory, your best idea in theory does not, uh, does not get the Rebbe's stamp of approval unless you can find somebody who's willing to take charge of it. And it has to be somebody who's willing to take charge who has a couple qualities. This is an "ish achrai," a person who's willing to take charge. They have to be "mesugah lazer." They have to be good at it. They have to have "panei." They have to have free time for it. "V'ikabel ze al atzmo," and they need to accept this as their personal responsibility. And if you can't find someone who's willing to do that, don't start new initiatives. Now, that seems like a, uh, that seems like staunch language,

03:11 Speaker 1 but I think we'll find that it's something the Rebbe says in a lot of letters about a lot of initiatives, that if you can't find somebody talented who is prepared to take over the control of something, will accept the responsibility for it on himself, and who has free time, don't do it no matter how good an idea it is. And the Rebbe's gonna give some reasons why. Take a look at the letter. This letter is letter Taf Kuf Nun Heh. It's a very early letter. It's from the year Taf Shin Yud. Yud Dalet Teves of Taf Shin Yud. Is that the same? It's the same date. That's kind of weird. Look at that. Same date as our letter, except, uh, obviously many years earlier. Yud Dalet Teves of Taf Shin Yud. The Rebbe writes, "Shalom u-bracha." We're gonna just read these first three paragraphs. It says, "V'mainar al mechtavav b'ninchinuch hayeladim ha'eilim atah l'Eretz HaKodesh tibaneh misikanim." So the Friediker Rebbe had been very involved in helping organize education for children who are making Aliyah to Eretz Yisrael, uh, who are just joining Eretz Yisrael, I guess, in the year nineteen fifty. "Hinei yesh ma mudcha zu kamam kamah chadashim." We've been standing there for a while not doing anything about this. "Hayu asifos etzla kavan conditions beino tamim hashlita." There were all sorts of meetings by the Friediker Rebbe. "V'nageh lepulasa guch bezeh," trying to get people involved. "U'majen if-- u'nir lef'ideah nisdacha." The Rebbe says, "Here's my idea of what we need as

04:15 Speaker 1 an absolute minimum to start educating the children in Eretz Yisrael." A very worthy cause that you would think you would just throw yourself at. "V'chal nitzrach l'pisidai neshailah." Now, we need to answer the following questions. We need to answer the previous question. Excuse me. "Batim." I think that that might be a nirali. I'm not sure. Anyway, the questions that we need to answer are, "Batim," we need a place to put them. "Madrichim manhilim," we need people who can be kind of counselors and people who can do on halo, who can run these things. "Uv'ikar ish yi-achrai l'chol mifalzah." Specifically, we need somebody who is the responsible person over this entire initiative. "Mamad lehetsayis," and we also need money for our expenses. The Rebbe then says, "V'nikmei b'chol inyan shehakavana shebeishihi abar kayamah." Any-anything you build that you want to last, "me'anach lan as chael bezer anpin," you should start small. Anytime you want something to last, start small. "Hainu eiza shi-- eiza sirius yeladim yeladis," we should start with a couple tens of boys and girls. "Meshi chabad atzmah yireh be'eiza efen yesh l'archim l'agdil." Once you start with sort of a sample of, like, ten or ten or twenty students, you can see in what areas to expand. Now look down here. "Aval gam la'as chaza kazu druish akana." Nonetheless, even when you wanna make a small start, you just wanna start with a couple kids, and sort of it's a, it's a test run just to see what we're going to need in

05:24 Speaker 1 the future. Even then, you need to have these basic conditions we talked about above. We need to have a place to put them, people in charge of them, and money, even if you're just starting, even if you're just doing a soft launch, as they say in business nowadays. "Vashaili," the real question then is, "hayesh etzlan ish amatim gam reiz l'sisak be'achraiut b'chal anal?" Is there somebody who is fit for the job and also wants to take full responsibility for it? "Kemubin amanat l'kal pratsa derech hamitzvah." Certainly they'll get paid for it. "Hayesh etscha madrich matim." Do we have people who are fit to be madrich? "Hayesh b'Yerushalayim beis muchan eizeh k'darish rak shivah v'tikun kitanim?" And can we find a building that we only need small repairs? So the Rebbe considers this a condition of starting an initiative that is not just good, but is absolutely critical. We have children coming to Eretz Yisrael. They don't have an education yet. And the Rebbe says, "Even before you do a soft launch of this product that will be Chabad Chinuch, uh, enrolling only tens of children in your school, there absolutely must be somebody who takes responsibility for it, and otherwise it cannot last." And the only way it can be is if there is somebody, once again, that's a . It has to be somebody good at it, and also somebody who is willing to take complete , complete responsibility for it. I have a letter here from the year . The letter is .

06:32 Speaker 1 And here the Rebbe writes an explanation for why you need somebody in charge. Just one paragraph we're gonna look at here, it's on your screen. The Rebbe's writing to a woman telling her that he would like her to take responsibility for a certain Chabad project, a certain institution. And he says to her, "I don't want you to think that I'm telling you to get involved in technical matters that could be done by other people. I'm not telling you to, uh, to take care of everything yourself." But everything needs to have an . It needs to have somebody who takes responsibility for it. And that person's job is to make sure that things are done in the most efficient way, the most efficient way. Not everybody is fit for that job. There needs to be somebody over everybody else, over all of the workers, who's making sure that things are being done efficiently, who coordinates between people, and otherwise, you can't have a project get off the ground in the first place. They also need to be somebody who knows a bit about the job being done. They can't be completely aloof. They can't be completely detached, but their main job is to be a facilitator. And the Rebbe is saying that I will not start a project without a facilitator, even if it's something that is very good, like making movies or something very important, like making a . The Rebbe doesn't feel we can start new projects without a facilitator who's willing to-- who's

07:45 Speaker 1 talented and willing to take control of the situation. We have here a letter from . The letter is . And the Rebbe writes, . He says, "I've received your two letters from , and you asked me about, uh, about, um, you asked me about, uh, who should be in charge of a certain Chabad institution . I had told this person," apparently the Rebbe had sent a previous letter, "that the person in charge of a Chabad institution should have a that they should be Chabad-informed, that they should be Chabad-ish if they're gonna run a Chabad institution." And this person wrote back to the Rebbe saying, "I don't see why the person-- I don't see why the CEO of our school or the head principal of our school needs to be a Chabadnik. I feel like, you know, as long as the teachers are Lubavitchers, I'm not sure the person at the top, the the CEO, I'm not sure why they need to be Chabad." And the Rebbe here answers, "I'm shocked that you're even in doubt about this what I wrote should be understood literally." And by the way, I just-- I, I need to pause here just to-- 'cause this is a pet peeve of mine. Um, the-- people frequently write back to the Rebbe saying, "Did you really mean what you wrote?" And the Rebbe frequently writes back, "I wrote what I meant." And to this day, people have this problem that they open Igris, uh, which is fine. But they open Igris, and

08:55 Speaker 1 then they read what the Rebbe says for them to do, and then they decide that's not what the Rebbe really means. The Rebbe always means what he writes, nowadays and before . So once again, somebody writes to the Rebbe saying, "I'm not sure you really meant it." The Rebbe goes, "No, I meant it." Look at that. Even if there are many people in charge of something, there's a lot of people who are owners, a lot of people who have-- who are stakeholders. If there's not one person who is going to handle the then it doesn't have a at all. There's not one person who's going to handle the, uh, the success and failure of an institution or an initiative, then it will not last. This is against oligarchy. Sometimes it won't just not have a it won't have a at all. It won't last at all. The Rebbe says, "It pains me to, uh..." I'm sorry, it doesn't pain me. I don't want to. The Rebbe says, "I don't wanna cause pain to anybody, but in order to drive home this point, let me point you to another down the street." He doesn't say where it is, but he gives some hints. Um, there was another down the street that didn't do this. Not only did th-this-- did this never open, after a very short period of time, the entire idea of the was completely, was completely , was completely nullified. Okay. What he's saying here is that, uh, is that once again, we absolutely

10:19 Speaker 1 must have an over all things. If you wanna make that, that should-- we're adding sort of a detail here that it's not just that this person who's in charge needs to take the responsibility on themselves and be talented, they also need to reflect the values of the, of the institution. We saw that a little bit in the previous letter where the Rebbe said this person needs to know how the job is actually done or . Over here, he's saying for a Chabad institution, it needs to be a Chabad person. But here the Rebbe is issuing a threat, and it's not really a Rebbe threat, it's a threat about nature, saying that if there is not one , if there's not one person taking responsibility for an initiative, it either doesn't really get launched properly or doesn't get launched at all. And he brings an example, says, "You guys remember there was an initiative like that and never even got off the ground because although there were a lot of, there were a lot of stakeholders and a lot of people who cared about the union, because there was no one person in charge of facilitating over top of all of it, taking the responsibility, who had the talent and had the , it simply never happened." Another letter to this regard is, uh, is from a previous Igris year. You guys remember Betan Chabad, right? Betan Chabad was one of our favorite Shiurim, I think. We talk about this one all the time. This was

11:16 Speaker 1 a Chabad periodical, period- periodical. This is a Chabad periodical that was put out for a little while and that the Rebbe ultimately closed because they couldn't get a good editor. You might remember the Rebbe pre-- the Rebbe mentions this a lot in those letters. I'm just gonna highlight a couple of them, but you can listen to the prior Shiurim if you want more details on how this organization ended up getting shut down and refusing to listen to what the Rebbe said. In this letter to Betan Chabad, the Rebbe writes, The Rebbe says it's a-- this is a good publication. This was supposed to be replacing . And the Rebbe says about this publication that until you find somebody who is going to take responsibility for the editing process and be the over the editing process and all of the information that comes out, all of the material, you should stop publishing it. And the Rebbe repeats this in a letter that I wasn't able to pull up on that link because, uh, chabadlibrary.org stops giving you letters after our year. So anything that happened after, uh, after nineteen seventy-three, we have to, we have to pull up on . But here I'll just expand the screen So you can see this. This is also about Beten Chabad, and once again, the Rebbe uses the same lash and he says, "If it has to be as long as you can't find somebody who is going to take control of this entire publication, be an achrai, I

12:27 Speaker 1 don't want the publication published." He says, "You need to find somebody who is . You have to find somebody who's matim to that tafkid." So once again, we see that they need to be not just somebody who's willing to take charge, but also someone who's talented. I think that's an important, that's an important note in almost all these letters. The Rebbe says it's not just somebody saying, "I'll take responsibility." It's somebody who has the time, somebody who's good at it, somebody who knows the field, somebody who reflects the values of that organization. But there needs to be somebody there, and otherwise you can't get it off the ground in the first place. So what we have here is, uh, a whole series of letters, I think putting together a cloud by the Rebbe, that very frequently people have very good ideas on how to spread Torah and mitzvahs and how to move a Chabad maison forward or how to build a maison, but that underneath all of that is this general principle, which is that there needs to be somebody who's in charge of the entire show, and that person in charge of the entire show needs to be somebody who has the free time and somebody who has the talent and somebody who has the credibility and somebody who knows the regulas of the avoda, somebody who knows how the work normally is done, and somebody who reflects the tzurah of the way that it's supposed to be done. And otherwise, the Rebbe says

13:24 Speaker 1 it simply cannot work. You won't get a kium. These things cannot happen. I think that, uh, definitely, uh, when it comes to some of our initiatives, we sometimes have some really good ideas like fabrangens. We sometimes have some really good ideas in our community, and, uh, I think that we can tell the difference between the ones that have taken off and the ones that have not have largely been based around whether one person or a group of people have taken an achrayus on those ideas. I think some of our best ideas that haven't gotten off the ground yet are because no one person has stood up and said, "This is something that I'm taking under my purview," and our best ideas that have gotten off the ground have had that. So, uh, in addition to the letters which we could take on faith, I think we certainly have seen this and, um, therefore it's something to think about moving forward. Okay, I think it's a little bit of a shorter share than usual, but that's all I've got. We've been through a lot of letters. Let's talk.

14:06 Speaker 2 I mean, I think it's a fantastic, fantastic business lesson. I think anybody in a leadership position who manages people or manages processes or anything can learn a fantastic lesson from this concept, and you see it in business. When you have things that have multiple people in charge, multiple people to turn to, multiple levels of responsibility, usually, as the Rebbe mentions over there, it either doesn't come out kidaboi or it doesn't have a tzva chakal. Like, it either doesn't work at all or just that definitely for sure doesn't come out kidaboi, and I think it's just a fantastic lesson to keep in focus as we, you know, the, you know, the business people here that are constantly giving tasks to people to take care of things or whatever, that you put one person there in charge. And of course, obviously, the Rebbe says they have to have the capability, they have to accept it, they have to, you know, they have to have the time, they have to have the other things you have to assess, which I think most bosses have a hard time seeing whether their employees have the time or not because they always think you have the time. "What do you mean? I saw you go to the bathroom. Of course, you have time." So, you know, most, most employers feel that they have time. But the bottom line is, is that, is that you have to make that-- I think if, if in business you made this assessment before assigning projects,

15:11 Speaker 2 you would have so much more success. And the other part of it is also where the Rebbe says in the other letter, which was about starting off small, which again, a lot of large businessmen and business owners don't know how to start off small. They wanna take a bite off a big piece, get it done, get it done quickly, make a lot of money very quickly, move on to the next. Versus where the Rebbe says, "You know, listen, make sure you have the right people in place. Make sure you have the right person in charge. Make sure they have the time, make sure they accept it, and, and, and, and start small. Bite off a little piece and move ahead." I just think it's a fantastic business lesson. That's all. That's my comment.

15:42 Speaker 3 I feel like a few, uh, many years-- not many years ago, but about, uh, eight years ago, nine, maybe nine years ago, came across a letter the Rebbe was sending to American rabbi who was going to a, um, a kinus of, of rabbis. The Rebbe basically lays out for him what the job of the rabbi of a community is about bringing in people from the community and giving them tasks to do. Uh, people that are capable of do-doing those things and then also that because people, um, wanna have like individuality, and they wanna feel like a, a part of things. So that was just, uh, reminding me of