3 of Sivan - on 6.4.1829 The Tzemach Tzedek accepted the Chabad leadership - אדמו"ר הצ"צ קיבל עליו הנשיאות ג סיון תקפט

00:00 Speaker 1 We're gonna do the, um, for Gimmel Sivan, that's the third day of Sivan, in the year Tav-Kuf-Pei-Tes, that's five hundred and eighty-nine. That's June fourth, eighteen twenty-nine. That was the day that the Tzemach Tzedek openly accepted the leadership. He became the third Lubavitch Rebbe on that day, was the third day of Sivan. Because it wasn't so simple as we've read. The, uh, Tzemach Tzedek was one of the son-in-laws- Right ... and was still a son of the Alter Rebbe, and there were other grandchildren of the Alter Rebbe, and it wasn't so easy. So here we're going to hear-- I'll read a little bit about what took place. After the Mitteler Rebbe passed away in the year Tav-Kuf-Pei Ches, uh, he passed away on the ninth day of Kislev in Tav-Kuf-Pei Ches. Now, this date that we're talking about is more than a year. It's a year and, uh, and a half from Kislev till, till Sivan. It's almost a year and a half after the passing of the Mitteler Rebbe that he officially formally accepted the leadership and became the third Lubavitch Rebbe. The b-the beginning, the Tzemach Tzedek refused to accept upon himself the leadership. The previous Rebbe relates as follows, that there was a gathering of the elder Hasidim of the Mitteler Rebbe, and they had decided to crown as the next Lubavitch Rebbe, the son-in-law, the Tzemach Tzedek. And during that meeting, uh, all the very popular great Hasidim that were amongst the Hasidim, they decided, uh... So-- And in addition to

01:56 Speaker 1 that, all the, uh, Hasidim from all the various different cities and the great Hasidim, the leaders from the far and close and in all the settlements of Chabad, they all decided that the Tzemach Tzedek is it. So they made a delegation from eighteen people who were the most popular famous Hasidim. Amongst them was Reb Hillel Parich, great renowned Hasid, the great genius Reb Yitzchak Isaac of Vitebsk, also known Reb Itzık Hamler. He was another great genius rabbi. The other great genius rabbi was Reb Yitzchak Meir of Iasi, the Gaon Reb Peretz Chein, Reb Peretz Sheine Gever. There was-- These were giants, each one of them, and more. These were giant names amongst the Hasidic leadership. They were the greatest indeed. The delegation presented itself in front of the Tzemach Tzedek and gave him the decision of the Hasidim, which has already been publicized in all settlements of Chabad, that the crown of the leadership has been placed on the Tzemach Tzedek, and he becomes the, the leader of the Hasidic community for mazal tov, for long life and good years, spiritually and physically. However, to their great despair, the Tzemach Tzedek refused. He didn't wanna accept. He didn't accept the Yideses. He suggested that they choose A, Reb Chaim Avrom, who was a son of the Alter Rebbe. So that was a brother of the Mitteler Rebbe. The Mitteler Rebbe-- That was the Mitteler Rebbe's brother. Mitteler passed away, but he had a son, Reb Chaim Avrom. Or Reb Nachum, who was a son-- Because

03:50 Speaker 1 the Mitteler Rebbe, he was a son-in-law, but Reb Nachum was a son of the Mitteler Rebbe. That was his brother-in-law. So he says, "No, let the son instead of the son-in-law." Right. Or he suggested Reb Aron of Kremenchug, who was a grandson of the Alter Rebbe. I'm not sure he was-- Who his mother must have been, uh, also from an-another daughter of the Mitteler Rebbe, must have been, uh, Reb Nachum of, of, of, uh, of, um... I have to look up who's, uh, who Reb Aron is, uh, how he was, um, how he was a grandson. No, he was a, a grandson from the-- He was also similar to the Alter Rebbe. The Tzemach Tzedek was also a grandson from the Alter Rebbe, in addition to being a son-in-law of the Mitteler Rebbe, because his mother was a daughter of the Alter Rebbe as well. It's true. The, the- So he's still sta- in the same lineage.

04:48 Speaker 2 Yeah.

04:48 Speaker 1 Same lineage, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So it's the s-- So it's like the same. But he didn't want. Now- He didn't wanna take it. So he's-- he didn't wanna take it. Now, so it says like this, that before the Yom Tov of Shavuot, many Hasidim came to Lubavitch. That's where the Tzemach Tzedek lived. They continued to insist to the Tzemach Tzedek that he should accept the leadership, but he pushed everybody away. The Hasid Reb Peretz Chein relates, this was on the third day, which was the first day of Selichot Magbola. That was the first day before Shavuot. Uh, that was on a Tuesday. So he says, "Somehow I got this inspiration. I got this spiritual inspiration, and when I was standing together with Reb Hillel of Paritch and Reb Yitzchak Isaac of Vitebsk, we were begging in-- the Tzemach Tzedek on behalf of the thousands of Hasidim that he should accept upon himself the leadership as the Hasidim community desires. I told him that I have a very clear proof from the words of our sages that he, the grandson of the Alter Rebbe, he is the only one that is fitting to become the leader." So the Tzemach Tzedek says, "Okay, you know, you're not allowed to, uh, degrade it. This is a saying of our sages. Let me hear, what is there to... What kind of a statement do you find of the sages that tells you that I have to become the Rebbe?" So he says to him, I said like this, he

06:24 Speaker 1 says, in the past-- in the, in the verse it states, "" So the verse that talks about the woman giving birth, it starts to talk, it says if a, if a woman is mazria, uh, then she gives, uh, birth to a male. That seems to imply, I'm not sure exactly how medically they know this, but it says, if the woman is one that is mazria, which would mean in the, in the order of conception, uh, so at that point it would be a male. Our sages tell us that if it's the man who is mazria tchila, then they would be giving birth to a female. So he says like this, uh, if the fact that the Alter Rebbe gave birth to your mother, which is Tzemach Tzedek, that means that she's directly from the Alter Rebbe, and the woman gives ma-- to the male, that's you. So she says, "So that's why you are the direct lineage from the Alter Rebbe." The Alter Rebbe gave birth to you. In other words, your mother, your mother is more connected to the Alter Rebbe than to the mother because the... Basically what it means is that the female is connected more to the father, and the male is connected more to the mother, so that's the way it's been transmitted. So they said that you come from the father, uh, my-- your mother comes from the Alter Rebbe, and you come from your mother and therefore, uh, you, um, you were, you were born and the

08:06 Speaker 1 Rebbe is obligated to fulfill the desire of the Hasidim. The Tzemach Tzedek thought about it for a while, and he says, "Okay, accepted, but with a condition, that people should not overwhelm me and trouble me with advice in physical matters." So the says the Hasidim, they wanna hear Hasidus. So there was the, uh... news came out in the, uh, the camp of the Hasidim over there that the Tzemach Tzedek has accepted the leadership, and the people were of course rejoicing, uh, all those who were there. And it was known that in a few minutes the Rebbe will come to the, uh, synagogue to say Hasidus. So we all ran quickly to the Beis Midrash to get a place next to the Bima. After a short while, the Tzemach Tzedek came out dressed in his white garments. You see the pictures over there. He has a white garment over there, that the one the Tzemach Tzedek. And, uh, that he has received a, a gift, inheritance from the Alter Rebbe. He sat on the Bima, on the, uh, the platform, and he began to say the on the-- That's the opening of that . That was the opening of the, uh, of his leadership. And as we've mentioned many time, pointed out that unlike, uh, the fake leaders, they run for leadership. Mm. But the real leaders, they don't want the leadership, and they, uh, you know, they... Yeah. No, but, you know, and especially you can see also that he said he didn't want them

09:56 Speaker 1 to trouble him with, with physical matters. But of course, I don't think it helped him. They developed, they developed a fight together. Yes. You were saying my grandfather Maharash. The grand- Would my grandfather have been, uh, Rashab? Rashab? Rashab. Whose grandfather? The previous Rebbe's grandfather was the Rebbe Maharash because the Rebbe Rashab was his father. But anyways, we've been studying, uh, Yemei Chabad for the past, um, for the past year almost. We started, you know, the Hebrew months, there is either twelve or thirteen months, depending on the year. Like this year we have thirteen months because there are three hundred and sixty-five days that is in the cycle of the solar cycle. Three hundred and sixty-five and a half days is a solar cycle. The, uh, uh- Lunar ... moon, uh, lunar cycle is twenty-nine and a half days. A month of the Hebrew month goes by the lunar, lunar cycle. But we still have to adjust that the two cycles meet up so that we don't have Pesach come out in the middle of the winter or, uh, or Sukkot in the middle of the summer. So we, we, we have to adjust it. So, uh, twelve times, which a normal year would be, a regular year would be twelve times twenty-nine and a half, you're short eleven days. You're not gonna get to the full cycle of the solar cycle. So the lunar cycle is not gonna be equal to the solar cycle. Therefore, every three years we add an additional month, because

11:38 Speaker 1 over three years, basically you're losing almost a month. You're losing like thirty-three days. So therefore you add an additional month, and that straightens it out. So this year, for example, we had two-- an extra month. We had thirteen months. This year was a year that we made up. Um, it's called a uh, literally a, a pregnant year, meaning a year which has extra, which is more than just a year. So, uh, we have thirteen months this year. But by the Hebrew, by the Hebrew month- We, we go through, uh, you know, every day, all the dates that basically that we celebrate, commemorate, with some exceptions, are always hinged on the day of the month. And it, it's very interesting that the month is something which is now determined by the calendar, but it wasn't like that all the time. Initially, the way they decided which day was the first day of the month was by the actual vision, a sighting of the moon by the witnesses, and they would come to the court, and they would testify that they saw the moon, and then bet din, the court, would actually determine that that month is the month in which-- that's the first day of the month. And then everything else would hinge on what the first day of the month is. Because any commemorative event, like a Yahrzeit, for example. So a Yahrzeit, you commemorate the day of passing on the same Hebrew date of the passing. We don't care, uh, what the English date

13:20 Speaker 1 was, and we don't care what the day of the week was. That doesn't matter. The only thing that really matters is what is the Hebrew month and what is the date of the Hebrew month. That's why we go by. So like today, for example, the date is Yud Dalet. It's the fourteenth of the month of Sivan. Same thing is for a Bar Mitzvah. You're only gonna do the Hebrew date. Uh, birthdays, you know, you can celebrate whatever one wishes, you know, but the real birthday, what we consider a birthday, like a Bar Mitzvah birthday, is gonna go again by the Hebrew date. And, um, and therefore it's very, very important to know what the Hebrew date is because everything hinges on that. So the holidays, all the holidays are at a certain, uh, date. Now today, again, our calendar has been already set. We know before, and we can tell you until the time we're going to start, um, once again, uh, making the month based on the, uh, sighting of the witnesses, until the time we have already a calculated, uh, calendar. We know already exactly every, every month when it's gonna be, and we have it all figured out already. So that's not something that we have to guess today. But still, we commemorate all the different events, and it's, and it's very important for us. It's important to know the date. So what we've been doing over here, we have this, this book called Yemei Chabad, it's the Days of Chabad, which

14:56 Speaker 1 basically brings out in each month what the special, uh, holiday or what's the special commemorative event, especially as it pertains to the Chabad Rebbes or some major Hasidim or Rebbetzins or, uh, facts which are important. And the reason, generally, why, why do r- we remember things? Why do we go back? Because most of the time, uh, we can be inspired by the things that we remember. Um, you know, um, life runs by so quickly, and everybody is, uh, so busy that we don't stop, and we don't reflect, and we don't sort of absorb the moment. We're always, you know, we're always running, and, uh, we don't have the time. Uh, we seem to be, uh, um, so, uh, busy. But events that take place at a certain date have a special power in that day. Why is a Yahrzeit celebrated on the day of the Yahrzeit? Because somehow that day has that special energy, so to speak, that took place in that event. So it's important to know the event. So we've been going through the events, but when we've been doing it, we've been going ahead. So that means that like today, uh, we're going to do in the month of Tammuz, which is the following month. We are not yet there. We're still the month of Sivan. Today, as I said, is Yud Dalet. Anybody know what Yud Dalet equals? What is Yud? Fourteen. Fourteen. Yud is ten, and Dalet is four, so it's fourteen. Now, also, it's easy to know how many

16:46 Speaker 1 days each month is in this, this part of the, the way it's set up now. Nisan is always thirty days. The following, Iyar, is always twenty-nine day, okay? Sivan, uh, Sivan again is thirty days. Tammuz is twenty-nine days. It goes one thirty, one twenty-nine, one thirty, one twenty. It's twenty-nine and a half days. So basically, one is thirty, and the next one is twenty-nine. One is thirty, then next one is nine. So on. Later on, we get to the last, to the second half. After Tishrei, then we come to sometimes there is changes, and then you have to know exactly the way it's set up. That's also made in order to match up with all, all the other calculations. So but basically, we know that, um... So the forty today was-- So today we're going to be studying something in the month of Tammuz, of the fort-- of the Tammuz. We started about a year ago, and we started from the month of Tammuz, but we didn't start from the beginning of Tammuz. I gotta check exactly where we started, but we started somewhere there. So we're actually finished the cycle, and we will be, you know, doing something a little bit different, you know, fi- once we finish the entire cycle, um, just to, uh, keep on changing a little bit instead of doing step. But that's something, I think, important that we were able to finish the entire thing. We're almo-almost done with it. We went through... And you know, we, we, we

18:09 Speaker 1 study, most days we study a little bit, you know, uh, a few minutes. Uh, we do some Shulchan Aruch, we do some, some- ... current events, some laws, general things. Um, just, um, this, this, this talks about t- this day is gonna talk about the third day of Tamuz. That's the third day of Tamuz. This was in the year Taf Reish Yud Alef. The Hebrew date, it's 611. Uh, 611, just so put it into some context. Now we're 774. Taf Shin, it's 5,000. I'm leaving out the 5,000. Oh, oh, oh, okay. All right. We're leaving out the 5,000 because, I mean, so it's 5,000. So now we're Taf Shin Ayin Daled. So that is 700. Taf is four, Shin is three, Ayin is 70, and Daled is four. So we're now, we're basically, uh, 774. 5,774. This is 5,611, so it's 150 plus years ago. Um, now, the, what, what happened on that day, there was this, uh, huge fire in the city of Lubavitch. This was during the, the leadership of the Tzemach Tzedek, the third Lubavitch Rebbe. As I'm sure you know in history, um- He's not there ... one of the biggest... Uh, the Tzemach Tzedek is the one, the picture over there, right above your head, yes. That's Tzemach Tzedek. This one here? Yeah. Um, in the olden days, of course, their structures were all of wood, and if you had a fire, unfortunately, it can burn down a whole city. Uh, one fire, uh, can burn down a whole city.

19:58 Speaker 1 I mean, we know today too, you know, a guy is not careful, we know what happens, that these can have raging acres and acres of, of, uh, trees and, uh, homes and other things can be destroyed as we have every summer in the heat and the, in places like California and Arizona and, uh, places like that, we have wildfires going strong. But in the olden days, they didn't have none of the modern ways of battling flames, and if you had a fire... Uh, also people didn't have, uh, digital storage, uh, putting it on the cloud, and they didn't have a way to hide, to put away some of the most valuable and precious stuff. There were a lot of things that perished, unfortunately, with the fire. So, and this great fire, um, um... There were many fires during the, uh, times that the Rebbes lived in the city of Lubavitch. That was the actual city in the... It's White Russia, called the Ukraine. It's right over there in that, in that area. Um, it's kinda hard to, um, you know, it kept on switching around. But, um, there's the city of Lubavitch, and there were many times there was fires, but one of the, uh, uh, very serious one was this fire that took place on the third day of Tamuz, as we said, in 611, in which the houses of the Tzemach Tzedek and all of his sons, uh, they were all burned down. And, um, the, uh, previous Rebbe writes that the Tzemach

21:36 Speaker 1 Tzedek and all the Rebbe's household, they went to live in the home of the, uh, in homes that the, uh, one who, uh, was in charge of the city. They had, uh... Those days, the land was, like, distributed amongst various different, uh, landowners who would sort of be almost like, uh, owning those properties, divided amongst themselves, and, and they, they, they, they provided for the Rebbe in a, in a, um, in a special way. Now, of course, uh, we talk about the third day of Tamuz, and it's interesting. Yesterday, uh, we talked about, um, uh, Gimmel Tamu-- We talked about the 28th of Sivan. And the 28th day of Sivan we spoke about yesterday is the day that the Rebbe came to this country. But we also know that the third day of Tamuz is the day of passing of the Lubavitcher Rebbe. Uh, it's gonna be 20 years now since the day of the passing of the Rebbe. So first of all, uh, well, we're talking about everything else, but we know that, um, life is really measured not only by the, um, by the physical when you're here, but, uh, life is measured by the impact and by the influence and by, uh, what you mean to other, uh, people. And, um, a lot of times we find that people, even after they physically pass from the world, but they continue to have a, um, an impact, they continue to direct in, in, in a way, and sometimes even stronger than even while

23:36 Speaker 1 during their lifetime. And with the Rebbe, of course, we can say that, um, that notwithstanding the fact that while the Rebbe was here physically with us, I think there was no denying, and people got, I guess, um, directly, uh, inspired by either meeting the Rebbe, seeing the Rebbe, uh, hearing his words physically. Now, after Gimmel Tamuz, the choice is ours, which means, uh, we can either continue to, uh, live by, uh, live with, with him, or we can sort of say, "This is past history." But if you look around in Chabad today all over the world, and just look at our little shul over here, um, the Rebbe's inspiration, the Rebbe's guidance, the Rebbe's message, the Rebbe's influence continues to inspire us. It continues to motivate. You know, one of the fascinating things is that when you look around in the world, there's always, they call this the generation gap. They say the old folks and the new people, they have different ideas, and they can't somehow meet. They can't mesh. The old people, you're from the old generations, and a lot of times the young people will say, "Well, you know, you don't really understandus because you're from a different era. You are-- we are different today," and there's a whole bunch of other things. Now, it is amazing to find that the Rebbe, being a scholar from Europe, where the Rebbe was raised and grew up in Russia, and later on he got an education as well, but mainly his, um, his,

25:39 Speaker 1 his life was such that he grew up in a very, uh, rabbinic, uh, holy and great family. He wasn't really, uh, exposed in his initially to a lot of the, uh, modern world. Later on, the Rebbe did go ahead and, and study. But yet, the Rebbe was able to tap in and to motivate so many of the young people till today. And you know, like they said, the young people are like a, like a fire. We're talking about a fire over here. Uh, young people are like a fire. A fire, if it goes out of control, as you see, can burn down a house, can burn down a city, can burn down a whole, can burn down a whole country. But if you take the fire and you direct it, you put it inside the burner-

26:33 Speaker 3 Mm-hmm

26:33 Speaker 1 ... then it can give heat to the house. If you put it on the stove, a fire, it can cook. And if you, uh, put it into a lamp, you can get light from it. So fire can produce tremendous benefits to us, uh, to the people around it, but it can also cause a lot of destruction. So it depends how you handle fire. And the Rebbe said, young children, children, uh, teenagers especially, and young people especially, are like fire. Which means if you don't guide them, if you don't direct them, and you don't, uh, sort of harness them in the right direction, they can, you know, do terrible things. You know, they can get involved in terrible things. They can destroy. They can do a lot of things that are bad. But if you are able to harness them, if you're able to take that and contain it into a positive way to be able to produce heat, warmth, light, beauty, I mean, that's... You're gonna get a lot more out of a fire than you're gonna get out of something that doesn't, uh, doesn't burn as strong. So the energy of the young people and their enthusiasm, if you can cha-- direct it and channel it in the right direction, you're gonna get some real beautiful and great stuff out of them. And the Rebbe, notwithstanding that he comes, or people think he comes from a different era, he was able to take the young people today, take their energy, and sometimes take their

28:13 Speaker 1 chutzpah, their brazenness, and their desire, so to speak, to go against the grain and, uh, uh, despise some of the accepted norms. You know, they'll, uh, if you go out, you'll hear they'll play music, they'll put tattoos on, and they'll put earrings, and they'll do all kinds of meshugaas of things, right? Because they're anti-, sort of the anti-establishment. They don't wanna go by what everybody says to be correct and to do the right things. They wanna do things the way they see it. That's-- they have it. So the Rebbe used that exact force, that fire that they have. But instead of doing negative things with it, the Rebbe channeled it to do positive things. He says, "You know what? Uh, you go in middle of the street, in middle of, uh, Manhattan, there's hundreds and thousands of people walking up the street over there, and you have the chutzpah go over to someone saying, 'Are you Jewish? Would you like to put on tefillin today?'" That's a chutzpah. I mean, hey, you know what? Or the Rebbe would send out a young fellow who is just barely starting to study to go ahead and give a class to people who know less than him. As we said, that Rebbe spoke about that if you have somebody on a lesser level than you, then you have to teach him, even if you know very little. The Rebbe would say, "You are somebody that matters. You have powers, and you should utilize everything that you have, that

29:58 Speaker 1 Hashem has given you, every gift that you have. Go ahead, teach it to somebody, and get involved." So the Rebbe took all of our energies, all of our seemingly negative, what we can do bad, and he twisted it around. And he said, "You know what? Take that chutzpah that you have and do it for good." So use your chutzpah, use your anti-establishment. Go ahead, open up a, a Chabad house in some far-flung country. Maybe, you know, get on the phone, tell the person, "You know, come to Shil Te Даvid." The guy says, "Don't bother me." You know, and you say, "No, no, come to Shil Te Даvid." You say, "Come to the class." And even if they reject you, keep on pushing. It takes a little chutzpah, it takes nerve. It takes a little bit of, uh, going out of yourself. But that's-- young people have that. So the Rebbe, in a different era, in a different... Motivated and pushed and got the people to go ahead and do, and do these kind of work He was able to change the whole world, one person to change everything in the world because Judaism today would not be the way it is today if not for the Rebbe's continuous inspiration. So therefore, one has to ask himself, 20 years have passed since the Rebbe has left us physically, but yet the Rebbe's message, the Rebbe's inspiration, the Rebbe's life continues to inspire, continues to motivate, continues to revive us. It's really something phenomenal. It's something which

31:40 Speaker 1 not that many have that privilege to be able to continue to be a source of, of... that pushes you to do as we find it, you know, by the Rebbe, and that's, uh, something very, very special. Talking about that matter, I just wanted to mention, um, you know, a lot of times you feel uncomfortable in situations. You know, like, you have to nudge somebody. My wife says she considers herself now to be the, the professional nudnik. Uh, you know what a nudnik is? Troublemaker. You haven't know what a nudnik is? Pain in the neck. Like a troublemaker. Isn't a nudnik? You know, they, they once asked what's the difference between a shlomiel, and a schlemazel, and a nudnik. So he says the shlomiel is the one who accidentally pours out the soup, and the schlemazel gets it on his pants, and the nudnik wants to know what kind of soup it was.

32:46 Speaker 4 The detail.

32:48 Speaker 1 A nudnik, you know, it's kind of hard to describe what a nudnik is, but the word nudnik itself has... So she says that she became a professional nudnik. You know, you're, you're bugging people. You know, somebody who bugs them. He, you know, he gets on your nerves, you know, or she gets on your nerves and, you know, she keeps on hacking you. You know, just let me... leave me alone. Let me live my life. So Lubavitchers a lot of times cons- find themselves to being nudniks. You know, being, you know, uh, constantly, uh, bothering people. You know, come to the minyan, come to this, come to that. You know, you like. So but Rebbe once gave a parable to this, and he said, which is very, very telling. He says, you know, there is like sometimes there is a fire, talking about a fire that is burning, and that there's a person who is sleeping in the bedroom, and he is having beautiful dreams. He's in La La Land, you know, and he's just, he's just loves every second of it, but there's a fire out there that is burning. So you go into him, you say, "Listen." You start shaking him, and he says, "There's a fire out there. Please wake up. Save your... save yourself." He says, "Leave me alone. I wanna sleep. This is so enjoyable. I don't wanna be bothered. Don't wake me up. This is, this is the life." And he shakes him again and again, and finally he forces

34:22 Speaker 1 the guy to get up, and when the guy gets up, the house burns down. So what is he gonna say to you? He says, "Thank you for saving my life." Now, it took a lot of nudging. It took a lot of nudniks. It took a lot of effort on your part to shake him, and to wake him, and to keep on pushing him. But at the end of the day, you actually saved his life. And guess what? He's gonna thank you, and he's gonna owe his life to you, and he's gonna forever be grateful to you. If you look around how many hundreds of thousands of people have found their way back, have appreciated what meaning in life is, how they got... found God back into their lives. They were able to bring peace in their homes. There was harmony with families, with children. There was meaning. There was just a sense of belonging and a sense of accomplishments, a good feeling of knowing that there's meaning to life rather than just letting each day pass by you, and just going, and going, and going, and just, uh, getting older by the minute and by the hour. But just utilizing and taking the time to study, to grow, to become closer to Hashem, to become closer to your friends, to get involved, to do things that are very, very positive. At the end of the day, these people, some of them didn't realize that when they started off. But when you nudged them enough, and

35:59 Speaker 1 then eventually something clicked over there, then they're gonna be forever grateful to you, and they're gonna thank you. They said, "You know what? At the end of the day, you saved my life. Maybe not physically, but you saved my life spiritually because you have shown me, you know, what it means to live, how to live a life, a life of meaning and..." Now, it's always... it's not a thing that happens overnight. It's a process. It's a process that takes, takes time, and the, um, Rebbe continues to, to inspire us. The Rebbe continues to teach us. The Rebbe continues to... and I gotta tell you this, uh, sometimes it, it looks like for some people, the outside that, you know, what are we deitizing the Rebbe, like making him into a deity or to some sort of a... But if you have the opportunity to actually read firsthand, you know, some of the Rebbe's writings, some of the Rebbe's correspondence, some of the Rebbe's work- You actually get a real feeling, a real sense of who the person really was. You don't need anybody to tell you, you don't need anybody to convince you, you don't need anybody. You, you come to that conclusion yourself. And even somebody like myself, uh, who has been with the Rebbe all my life. I grew up over there, I've been with the Rebbe, I've been part of this all my life. And you know, you get older, you know, you, you know a lot of things that when you

37:37 Speaker 1 were younger, you know, maybe you thought that you knew everything. You're starting to realize that, you know, there's a lot of things you don't know. Sometimes you start to doubt things that you thought you knew, and you're not sure. You know, life's experience shows you different ways. But the more I learn, and the more I see, and the more I read, I never fail to get again inspired, inspired by the Rebbe's just humanity, his concern, his compassion, his brilliance, his, you know, just everything. He's just like... But you know when I find it most? It's not when I read an article about him. Okay, you know, people write beautifully, and they write about it, you know. I cry when some of the articles that I read, you know, because they're very sentimental. But I'm mostly inspired when I read the Rebbe's works himself, when I see some of the Rebbe's writing, how the Rebbe handles, how the Rebbe handles himself. And especially, we live in such a, again, generation, orphan generation today, because we don't have any really strong leaders, uh, real leaders that we can sort of really look up to, that we can say, "These people are, you know, really great people." Most of them, at least those that, you know, that I hear about, that I see about, that I read about are sometimes very disappointing, to say the least. But, you know, uh, we are such, in such shortage of real leadership, people that are just a little bit bigger than

39:12 Speaker 1 just the smallness of their own ego, and their own self, and their own agendas, and their own little petty kind of stuff, you know? Everybody's into those little things, and people get so caught up. And you know, you try, you know, uh, touching somebody's ego, you know, and the whole, whole world will come apart. And where is real leadership, people of real brilliance, real holiness, real righteousness? Very, very difficult to come by, very to find. People, you know, people know how to manipulate other people's minds. You know, we find all that kind of stuff. But real that I find, every time I open up a book from the Rebbe, not that somebody wrote about the Rebbe, but what the Rebbe himself wrote. The Rebbe's-- Especially the Rebbe's letters, because they're just... Uh, so third day of Tammuz is a day to, that's gonna come up to connect, you know, with the Rebbe and with Yiddishkeit, and to keep on doing it. We hope that, you know, Mashiach will come, take us out of exile. We'll be with the Rebbe together also physically. We hope that happens. Till that time, we'll continue to study, and we'll continue to learn, and we'll continue to wait. The Rebbe inspired us to wait for Mashiach every day, and that's what we'll continue doing. Now, there's disappointments, yes. Did we have expectation? Yes. Did it happen yet? No. That's not what was happening. Does life keep on going on? Yes, it does. But we're not gonna give up hope. We're

40:45 Speaker 1 a Jewish people. Our belief is stronger, and we've overcome a lot more difficult, m-many more difficult challenges, and we'll overcome this challenge too, and we'll eventually merit to see the blessings. Each one of us will see how they're blessed. And in the meantime, we'll hold strong, and we'll do as much as we can. Everybody will do as much as we can to be able to do what we can in the, uh, in the level of Yiddishkeit. So-