3 of Tamuz - Yom Hilulla of Rebbe, Previous Rebbe released from prison.

00:00 Speaker 1 Yes. You were saying, "My grandfather, Maharash." The grand- Would the grandfather have been, uh, Rashab? Rashab? Rashab. Whose grandfather? The previous Rebbe's grandfather was- Mm-hmm ... 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. Mm-hmm. We started... You know, the Hebrew months, there is either 12 or 13 months, depending on the year. Like this year, we have 13 months because there are 365 days that is in the cycle of the solar cycle. It's 365 and a half days is a solar cycle. The, uh, uh- Lunar ... moon, uh, lunar cycle is 29 and a half days. A month, of the Hebrew month, it goes by the lur- 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, 12 times, which a normal year would be, a regular year would be 12 times 29 and a half, you're short 11 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 over three years, basically, you're losing almost a month. You're losing like 33 days. So therefore, you add an additional month, and that straightens

01:43 Speaker 1 it out. So this year, for example, we had two... an extra month. We had 13 months. This year was a year that we made up. Um, it's called a Shonah Meuberet, uh, literally a, a pregnant year, meaning a year which has extra, which has more than just the year. So, um, we have 13 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 Yahrtzeit, for example. So a Yahrtzeit, you commemorate the day of passing on the same Hebrew date of the passing. We don't care, uh, what the English date was, and we don't care what the day of the week was. That doesn't matter. The only thing that really matters it

03:23 Speaker 1 what is the Hebrew month and what is the date of the Hebrew month. That's why we go by it. So like today, for example, the date is Yud Dalet. It's the 14th 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, uh, 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 basically brings out in each month what the special, uh, holiday or what's the special commemorative event, especially as it pertains

05:04 Speaker 1 to the Chabad Rebbes or some major Hasidim or Rebbetzins or facts which are important. And the reason, in 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, uh, 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, uh, so, uh, busy. But events that take place at a certain date have a special power in that day. Why is a Yahrtzeit celebrated on the day of the Yahrtzeit? 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 the way 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 Tamuz, which is the following month. We are not yet there. We're still in the month of Sivan. Today, as I said, is Yud Dalet. Anybody know what Yud Dalet equals? What is Yud? Fourteen. Fourteen. Seven. Yud is ten, and Dalet is four, so it's fourteen. Now, also, it's easy to know how many days each month is in this, this part of the, the way it's set up now. Nisan is

06:48 Speaker 1 always thirty days. The following, Iyar, is always twenty-nine day, okay? Sivan, uh, Sivan again is thirty days. Tamuz is twenty-nine days. It goes one thirty, one twenty-nine, one thirty, one twenty-nine. It's twenty-nine and a half days. So basically, one is thirty, and the next one is twenty-nine. One is thirty, the next one, 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 for the, all, all the other calculations. So, but basically, we know that, um... So forty, today we're, today we're going to be studying something in the month of Tamuz, of the fort- of the Tamuz. We started about a year ago, and we started from the month of Tamuz, but we didn't start from the beginning of Tamuz. 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, final, once we finish the entire cycle, um, just to, uh, keep on changing a little bit instead of doing that. 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 study, most days we study a little bit, you know, uh, a few minutes. Uh, we do some Shulchan

08:12 Speaker 1 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 Res Yud Alef. The Hebrew date, it's six hundred and eleven. Uh, six hundred and eleven, just to put it into some context. Five thousand. Now we're seven hundred and seventy-four. Taf Shin, it's five thousand. I'm leaving out the five thousand. Oh. We're leaving out the five thousand because of eight. So it's five thousand. So now we're Taf Shin Ayin Dalet. So that is seven hundred. Taf is four, Shin is three, Ayin is seventy, and Dalet is four. So we're now, we're basically, uh, seven seventy-four. Five thousand seven seventy-four. This is five thousand six hundred and eleven, so it's a hundred and fifty 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

09:54 Speaker 1 whole city. 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, uh, homes and other things can be destroyed, as we have every summer in the heat in 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 in 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's 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 six hundred and eleven, in which the houses of the Tzemach Tzedek and all of his sons, uh, they were all burned down. And, um, the, uh,

11:31 Speaker 1 previous Rebbe writes that the Tzemach 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 Tammuz. 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 Tammuz 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, while 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

13:30 Speaker 1 sometimes even stronger than even while 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, uh, physically. Now, after Gimmel Tammuz, 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 understand us because you're from a different era. You are-- We're 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

15:32 Speaker 1 well, but mainly his, uh, his, 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, 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 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

17:15 Speaker 1 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 chutzpah, their brazency, and their desire, so to speak, to go against the grain and- Accepted norms, you know, they'll, uh... If you go out, you'll hear they're playing music, they'll put tattoos on, and they'll put earrings, and they'll do all kinds of meshugas 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,

19:03 Speaker 1 "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 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 Hashem has given you. Every gift that you have, go ahead, teach it to somebody, 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, far country. Maybe, you know, get on the phone, tell the person, "You know, come to ." The guy says, "Don't bother me." You know, and you say, "No, no, come to ." You say, "Come to the class." And even if they reject you, keep on

20:41 Speaker 1 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. And 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, twenty 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 live on with us. It's really something phenomenal. It's something which 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. You know, uh you know what a nudnik is? Troublemaker. You ever know what a nudnik is? A troublemaker. Oh.

22:14 Speaker 2 Pin in the neck.

22:15 Speaker 1 Like a troublemaker. It's 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.

22:43 Speaker 3 The detail.

22:45 Speaker 1 A nudnik. You know, it's kind of hard to describe what a nudnik is, but the word nudnik itself has a... So she says that she became a professional nudnik. You know, you're, you're bugging people. You know, somebody who bugs and he, you know, he gets on your nerves 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 Lebavitches, a lot of times consi-- 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's 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 the guy

24:19 Speaker 1 to get up, and when the guy gets up, the house burns down. So what is he gonna say to you? He says, you know, "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, g- going, 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 nudge them enough, and then

25:56 Speaker 1 eventually it's 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, 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, uh... 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

27:33 Speaker 1 you 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

29:08 Speaker 1 than 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 difficult. 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 Uh, so third day of Tammuz is a day to, that's gonna come up to connect, uh, 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 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. Do we have expectation? Yes. Did it happen yet? No. That's not what happening. Does life keep on going on? Yes, it does. But we're not gonna give up hope. We're Jewish people. Our belief is

30:43 Speaker 1 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- The level of Yiddishkeit. So discuss the, uh, third day of Tammuz in the year taf reish pei zayin. We spoke about the third day of Tammuz before, but this is in the year nineteen twenty-seven, the third day of Tammuz in nineteen twenty-seven. Uh, that was the day that the previous Rebbe, uh, the Rebbe Yosef Yitzchak, he was freed from his incarceration in the, uh, prison known as the Spalernia Prison. Now, previous Rebbe, his picture you can see is up here. He's the one to the, to the left over here. That's the previous Lubavitcher Rebbe. His name was Yosef Yitzchak. And as we see, uh, today, we have unfortunately, uh, Jewish children just abducted by kidnappers, and, uh, the Jewish history unfortunately has been filled with anti-Semites, with all kinds of groups trying to harm, uh, the Jewish people in various different ways. Uh, at the time in nineteen twenty-seven, the previous Rebbe lived in Russia at the time, and, uh, this was after the, uh, revolution, the, uh, communist revolution. And one of the things that, uh, they were very, um, very strict about was

32:26 Speaker 1 religion. They did not like religion at all. To them, religion was an outdated thing. They were going to have the people become more sophisticated, become, uh, advanced, become, uh, uh, in a way that they would not, um, you know... So all the old-fashioned stuff is, is, is, is, is, is, um, is gone. That's the way-- That's what they tried to do. Now, amongst together with those Russians, there was also, uh, some, a lot of Jewish people, because there was a lot of Jewish people who were also felt, you know, enlightened. They felt that they were, uh, progressing, and they felt that the Torah, the mitzvot, everything is outdated. And they waged actually a war against the religious people. Now, the previous Rebbe, Rebbe Yosef Yitzchak, he was one of the, uh, strong leaders, or perhaps the only one that really didn't buckle and took on the entire, uh, machine, the communist Russian machine. He took them on almost single-handedly with his followers, with the Hasidim. So obviously, my father, uh, blessed, may he rest in peace, uh, he was one of those young people that, uh, were, uh, despite all the, uh, difficulties, he kept on going to yeshiva, and he went from one underground place to another underground place, and they were trying, uh, desperately to hold on to, to, to, uh, to Yiddishkeit. This was, uh, after the previous Rebbe eventually left Russia. My parents stayed behind there till after the World War II, so that was a very, very difficult time for

34:11 Speaker 1 them. But the previous Rebbe had a very challenging time in his leadership because it was very, very difficult. Uh, Judaism and Yiddishkeit, as it was practiced for so many generation, was prohibited, and it was, uh, all of his activities and work, they were on top of him sending, uh, various, uh, different, uh, ways to disrupt what he was trying to preserve of Yiddishkeit. We le- read on the fifteenth day of Sivan, uh, we read that entry before he was arrested. So, uh, it miraculously, miraculously... Of course, there was some intervention with the government officials. America, they, they, they, they worked very hard, but it was, like, unheard of to be able to save somebody from the Russian, from the prison. But miraculously, on the third day of Tammuz in nineteen twenty-seven, the previous Rebbe was, uh, was freed. He-- During his incarceration, beginning in the fifteenth of Sivan, he was investigated for many, many hours through various different, uh, investigators. And in the head leading those investigations were the Yevsekctiya. Those were the Jewish sect in the Communist Party because, of course, they knew most about Yiddishkeit more than anybody else because they come from the Jew. I mean, the Goyim didn't know what to look for. You know, they didn't under- know what to look for in the Jew, but the... And they were actually descendants from older Hasidim. The name was Nachmanson and Lulov. You know Lulov? It's like the name Lulov and Nachmanson. The name Nachmanson is a really Jewish names. And

35:59 Speaker 1 they, you know, all of the revolution, the Jews played a, a big Trotsky, and the rest, they took-- they played a big, uh- They were the revolution. They were the revolution. So they were all in it. So in the, against, uh, making the life of the religious people miserable were also Jewish people making, uh, making them miserable. So after the end of the investigation, the Lulov said to the previous Rebbe, "Within twenty-four hours, you're gonna die by shooting. They're gonna kill you," he says. That's what he told the Rebbe. That, uh, verdict m-made a very s-shaking impact on the Rebbe, but he strengthened himself, and he says, "Hashem is gonna help." Uh, the people of the Kev- GPO, which is the Ein Kavedet, the KGB of Leningrad, which was the place where the Rebbe lived in, in Leningrad. At that time, it was called Leningrad. Uh, together with the people of the Yevsekctiya, uh, they could not actually act on their, uh, verdict because General government, uh, did not allow because of the pressure that was placed from all over the world against doing that. Uh, the main efforts to save the Rebbe came from a fellow named Reb Mordechai Dubin. He was a parliament-- He was a member of the parliament in Latvia, and also Dr. Oscar Cohen, who was a, uh, a member in the Bundestag, the German Bundestag. Uh, also the, uh, Pishkuba, uh, she was the head of the Red Cross, the Russian Red Cross. Uh, uh, she put a lot

37:55 Speaker 1 of effort in saving the Rebbe. Um, these activities to save the Rebbe was in the end successful, and the punishment, the, the verdict for death has been, uh, nullified. Instead of death, they-- it was decided that the Rebbe was going to be exiled for ten years to the islands of Slovakia. However, this Pishkuba, this woman who, the Red Cross, she continued her efforts to nullify also this decree. At the end, it was decreed that the Rebbe should be sent to exile to the city of Kostroma for three years. On the first day, this is Sunday, on the third day of Tammuz, after being incarcerated for nineteen days in the prison of Shpalerki, and as we read earlier, just the name Shpalerki was like, uh, sh-put a shiver and a dread because that's how... Nobody actually came home from there. Once you entered there, that was the end, uh, of you, basically. But, uh, the Rebbe after nineteen y-days there, the Rebbe was exiled to the city of Kostroma, which was a Christian city with just very few Jews lived there. It was... And before the Rebbe was sent to exile, he was given-- he got permission to go for six hours, uh, to go home to take care of his stuff. And at eight o'clock in the evening, he had to come to the train station to go together with the train that is traveling to Kostroma. During his trip to Kostroma, his, his daughter, the Rebbetzin Chaya Mushka, who's the wife of the Rebbe,

39:55 Speaker 1 she went along. Also his son-in-law, Reb Shmaryahu Gurari, and also the Chassid, Reb Eliyahu Chaim Althuis. And the train station as Rebbe was leaving was, uh, full with a ton of Chassidim that came to say goodbye to the, to the Rebbe. Before the Rebbe entered into the w-- into the, into the wagon, into the, uh, train, he turned to the people that were gathered, and he spoke the following fiery words in which the pride, Jewish pride was full with him. He talked about working with self-sacrifice, and he says like this: "Let all nations..." This is from the words of the Rebbe. "Let all nations of the world know that it is only that our bodies have been, uh, given over into exile and to the being enslaved by the governments, but our souls have not been given over to any slavery. We have to announce openly in front of everybody." This is the Rebbe being the now right in between. You can just imagine. "That everything that is as it is pertains to our religion, which is the Torah, the Jewish Torah, our mitzvahs, our customs. There is no one who can force their opinion upon us, and there is no power to force us to enslave us. We have to declare with the full strength, with our Jewish stubbornness, and with the full strength of the power of the Jewish self-sacrifice these for thousands of years." And he quotes the verse, "Al tigu b'nishika uv'navi al tora." You do not touch the anointed ones

41:53 Speaker 1 and the prophets. Don't do bad. This is our request from God, from Hashem Yisbarach, from blessed Hashem. "Al ya'azvenu ve'al yidsheinu." He should not neg-neglect us. He should not let us, let us go, let us down, let us down. Hashem should give-- Blessed Hashem should give the proper s-strength and the proper courage not to become scared because of the physical pain. On the contrary, we should accept them with joy. And any punishment that, God forbid, will be placed upon us because that we are supporting a cheder for children to learn Torah and to do mitzvahs, that any punishment, that should add more strength in strengthening of Yiddishkeit. And when he finished these words, he entered into the wagon, and the train went on its route to Kostroma. After twenty-four hours of travel, the Rebbe came to Kostroma. Over there, the Chassid of Chabad Dvoraki was waiting for him already. He had traveled there several days before that to prepare a place for the Rebbe in a way like we find in the Torah, as Yehuda showed up before Moshe Rabbeinu. Actually, eventually, Baruch Hashem, the, uh- That penalty was also removed very quickly because on the 12th day of Tammuz, which was only nine days later, nine days later, the Rebbe was totally freed and eventually he left the country. They let the Rebbe go out. That's when the Rebbe left. That was on Yut Beis Tammuz. But this strength, this inner strength and the inner determination and the inner connection to Hashem was something

43:42 Speaker 1 which legendary about the Rebbe, his strength. And the Rebbe points out in various talks that about his father-in-law, about the previous Rebbe, that to him it was important that a Jew do even one mitzvah. Even if he doesn't understand or even if he's not connected in any other way, just to do one mitzvah, one mitzvah alone, he would have self-sacrifice just to make sure. I mean, you see a lot of times and you say, what's the value? You know, you go over to somebody, you say, are you Jewish? You want to put on the tefillin or you want to make a bracha or you want to shake the lulav? So you say, well, you know, they're just, you know, sometimes they're just doing it. They want to be polite. They don't want to insult you. So they'll say, okay, you want me to put on the tefillin? I'll put on the tefillin. You want me to light the Shabbos candles before Shabbos? I'll do you a favor. So what's the value of it? But you see, even one mitzvah has a tremendous, tremendous value. And the previous Rebbe, he had sacrificed to make sure that one Yid does one mitzvah. And then he also, the other extreme, he also made sure to give very deep and detailed teaching in the esoteric parts of Torah, which only the real students who were up to that level could comprehend and be involved in. So he basically encompassed and he wanted to make sure that cover everybody because

45:19 Speaker 1 to him, the value of every Jew, to him, the value of every mitzvah was endless. And it didn't matter what the person, what his stand was. And this has been really the underpinning of the Chabad philosophy of reaching out and trying to bring Yiddishkeit and Torah to every Jew and to no matter what, it doesn't matter. No Jew is too far away. Nobody is too lost. And everybody should be given the opportunity. Now, the reality is that it starts with one mitzvah. And once you do one mitzvah, hopefully one mitzvah drags another mitzvah. And then a second mitzvah drags another mitzvah. A lot of times, you know, you wonder, you say, look, this person, I mean, he doesn't have any connection. What is he and what is he, how is she going to fit in? But you see, the reality is that there are so many people that have found their home, found their happiness, found their meaning in life through all these activities. But it's, you know, when we try to measure it next to challenges we have today, you know, I can't get up in the morning for the minyan or I can't make it to a Torah class. I'm too busy. I mean, our preoccupations, our excuses, you know, how measure them against, you know, this Mesiras Nefesh against those not being allowed to. Or if you made a minyan, for example, as my father relates and it's known, and you got together a minyan and the government found out about it,

47:11 Speaker 1 you can lose your job if you had anything to begin with. I mean, you can go to jail and you can suffer. Your family will suffer. And yet people made sure to come to the minyan. And they made, they went through all different kinds of ways and they used to come in through different and they made sure. We hear even stories, you know, in the concentration camps, how people used to get together during the holidays. It was at, you know, at death's, you know, entrance. It was the entrance of death. They still had the courage and they had the devotion, dedication to go ahead and do their mitzvahs. So sometimes we think ourselves it's important to remember for ourselves that where are we standing relative to that? I mean, we've been given all the opportunities. Fortunately, nobody is coming to take us away. Nobody's going to do us any harm. On the contrary, if you study and you learn, you get support, you get encouragement. You know, it's great. Many years later, as we all know, we spoke about that the previous time that on the 30th of Tammuz is also the day of the passing of the Rebbe. And we talked about the fact how the Rebbe's life still continues throughout the world. First of all, there's many, anything you learn in the Wall Street Journal and the OU and there's books out about the Rebbe. There's various beautiful books out now. Rabbi Steinsaltz wrote a book. Rabbi Telushkin wrote a book. Rabbi Miller

48:55 Speaker 1 wrote a book. There's various different, three books just came out about the Rebbe's history. They're very powerful books. Many, many articles about the Rebbe and the Rebbe's impact, et cetera. So the point here is that we should take this lesson and try to apply it to ourselves somewhat and better ourselves and do what we can and really appreciate the value of doing a mitzvah, coming to shul, doing a mitzvah, putting on the tefillin, doing what we can for Yiddishkeit. And hopefully we'll be able to see. Previous Rebbe was saved in a miraculous way. It was really just about an open miracle. So we should also see a miracle with these boys. We should see an open miracle that the problem is that it's already been going on the sixth day and we still haven't heard anything. And that's gets