Letters of the Rebbe: "Encouraging Others to Write to the Rebbe" (Class 10)

okay shalom aleichem good evening welcome back to i believe class number ten can you believe it we're already in class number ten i guess we're a third of the way through our 30 letters in 30 days um i just wanted to mention some exciting stuff that's going on all around the world i think last night i mentioned that there was a group in melbourne australia that's been learning the letters and got together on shabbos so i found out now there's a group in sydney who's also getting together and they're gonna have a big gathering coming up i think this sunday so it's good to hear reports from all over the world literally from all over the world i don't know if i've mentioned this before but now is a great time to mention it there's going to be this central fabregan celebration seoum gathering on the night going into yoda of nissan oil of nissan which is i believe monday april 11th at the isle we're going to get together to read a pancalli a group letter which has the names of all the mistats from all the participants in the sheer which if you can you can submit your name even if you're not going to be able to be at the oil on your of nissan you could submit submit your name to the to the pan or the door at 30 letters 30days.com and so we'll go into the oil submit that list of names and then there's going to be a fabregan at a uh in a a venue about a block away from the isle and this is a women's gathering there are many many men's events in connection with you all of nissan but this is a special event for women and that will be the location of the 30th final sheer from the 30 letters okay before we jump into tonight's letter i want to share something very very special that i just received maybe an hour before this program i'm going to share the screen if you're live with me on zoom and youtube and we'll also make sure that it gets into the final cut of the recorded video what you are looking at is a note that was written by rabbi scholamendo simpson who was a member of the secretariat and as we mentioned in previous classes abby simpson was involved in the process of bringing the letters to publication from the archival office copies that were retained by the secretariat to the editing process that was over seen by rabbi schollenberg 11 from the library this particular note was written by rabbi simpson you see he signs the enchilada mendel this was a note that was written to go along with a stack of letters which rabbi simpson brought into the rabbit in the summer of tough shin mem zion okay remember the timeline they found out that the project even existed that they'd ever wanted to make an egress just right after purim of tough shin memzine so we're talking about the spring time of 87 they got the first volume published before that of his birthday of nissan meaning within three weeks of the project even being launched and then the debbie kept pushing that volume should be produced at a very efficient pace so this is now a few months later this is the summer of 87 and they were already working on volume four okay so this is the note that accompanied letters from the secretariat that were being then submitted to the rabbi for the rabbi's personal approval and blessing this was for volume four which then was published in tishrei of memphis okay so now you understand the timeline a little bit so at the top of the note says kve kaduchis just like in the previous times meaning this is already volume four so robert simpson is saying i'm following the same protocol as the previous volumes i am including copies these were facsimiles of the letters from the rabbi mishnas so by that point they were up to that year tough shinura of 1951. rak khalik and in a parenthesis but underlined robbie simpson writes rock hey look just apart meaning these are not all of the letters that that ever wrote in that year of tafsinyordalef pivotal year that was the first year after that i've officially accepted the macias the leadership can be it's understood that in many places meaning for privacy reasons i omitted i took out the name of the one who received the latter the gambith also inside the letter i did the same thing like if they'd ever mentioned the person's name again or any identifying references so i also removed that rabbit simpson says so now he says a prayer hashem should give should grant shia laura sing that this should be favorable meaning the project of printing igor should be favorable and that we should be able to continue this expediently efficiently in order to get this volume to print shallow mendel and then you see that ebb is savvy there was holy handwriting that ever writes russia tavis there no no that yes not only is this project being received favorably but also it is causing tremendous pleasure it's causing nachas so what an amazing thing it is to be studying something whose publication caused tremendous nachas and i'm sure that our study is causing nachas as well okay so let's uh take a look at letter number 10. this is a short letter this is on page 62 of helicode volume 10 of the egress as mentioned all of these letters are from the same year and they're all from the same a volume of igras yud the tenth volume barak hashem you'd base my heisman top shintasv brooklyn shalom by the grace of god the twelfth day of the month of marchman the year 57-15 final couple months of 1954. it's not yet 1955. brooklyn greetings and blessings okay i do not know who the rabbit was writing to specifically but from the context of the letter it's very clear what the person's position was not the person's name that is not included here okay after the break after the uh hiatus of not hearing from you no i'm leela cabo gimmel it was pleasing to me to receive your letter from the third day of heisman you know before we continue i just i want to remark we've seen this before that ebba will comment on the fact that it's been a while since he's heard from the letter writer and and that itself is something really we just have to marvel at how many people do you know public figures are interested in receiving more mail more correspondences who are complaining i don't get enough people making bids for my time i think we take it for granted because the rabbit did it and we're used to hearing about it so we just say oh yeah that's normal it's not normal i mean do you understand what the devil was involved in aside from on the organizational level building the whole uh movement of of schliches and outreach and chabad houses but just the the torah scholarship just the scholarship that the rebel was involved in learning torah day and night and and and being on the deepest levels think about it like this if i can make a very crass analogy imagine albert einstein at princeton university working on on his uh chalkboards day and night with his mind totally immersed in in in this formula of of physics and everyone understands that einstein's in his own world and he's he needs to be left alone nobody thinks that einstein wants to hear about their personal life and let alone to have to take a break from his uh deep thought and respond to your personal issues now imagine somebody delving into toyota day and night with the the level of focus that that was required and inviting more correspondence from people and actually complaining like a good jewish father hey you haven't called in a while i haven't heard from you what's going on with you so it's remarkable it's absolutely remarkable but what you're going to see from this letter is that not only is the debbie quote unquote complaining to this letter writer hey you need to write more often but as we're about to see that eva is going to ask for even more people to write and uh lest you think i know we haven't even gotten into the letter but i just want to preempt this lest you think that i was looking for fan mail god forbid um i'll just tell you one story i'll just tell you one story there was an israeli journalist who came to the rabbi in 1971 and uh he'd been prepared by friends of his in eretz israel who were khabad and they told him about the protocol for yakidasan he had a uk that's a one-on-one meeting with the rabbit so this israeli journalist comes into the rabbit and what he did is he wrote upon he wrote a letter a petition for prayer that is customary when one goes into this in the private audience with the rebbe and this journalist this israeli journalist submitted this uh this letter to the rabbit and the rabbi starts reading it and the rabbit says you've written to me before so the israeli journalist says no no i'm sorry forgive me but i i haven't written to you before so that ebb opens up his drawer of his desk and goes through some papers and pulls out a letter and hands it to this guy and says isn't this your handwriting and the guy looks at it and says yes this is my handwriting but he looks further down on the page and it has a different name in the signature and he's trying to figure out how in the world is this possible that ebba has a letter from me in my handwriting but it has somebody else's signature and all of a sudden it occurs to him he remembers this israeli guy he was in the army like most israelis when he was in the army he had a friend who got injured his friend broke his right hand and couldn't write the friend wanted to write to the rabbit so his injured friend asked him to take dictation and write a letter to the deb and then at the end of the letter the friend with the broken hand managed to push himself enough to sign his his signature albeit as well as he could maybe sloppily but he was able to sign his own signature but the body of the letter had been written by the friend who was able to write and now this journalist is sitting there and looking at this letter that he himself forgot that he ever wrote and that ever looks at it instantly and says this is your handwriting how many thousands or tens of thousands of letters said that ebba see from that time that he received that letter until the time that the latter writer or at least the one who took dictation to write the letter uh was sitting there in yehides with him so lest you think when the dub is asking for more mail the mail is just gonna sit in some pile somewhere uh no that ever wants to read everything i'll tell you even more and then i really should jump into the letter at one point the mosquitoes the rabbit secretariat wanted to buy a rubber stamp for the rabbit with the signature why should that ever have to take time to write his signature on every letter that he answers and the nubber refused it and said that that's not what people write to me for they they write for the human touch they want they want the real warmth and empathy and compassion they don't want a rubber stamp so having said that let's jump in here okay so you haven't written to me for a while boy case of afki beketsu nimrodzbayeser in your letter you write to me even though you write it way too fast i get that you hear what that ever is saying like you could have elaborated more why why did you write so sparingly it's it's just mind-boggling that ever has time for for more letters for longer letters but that's precisely what that was asking for write more often and when you write write more detail just mind boggling okay so in your letter even though you write way too briefly you write about what is happening about your activities among the military during the past few weeks this is taking place in eretz israel talking about the the idf uh certainly in the future you're going to write more in detail so i like the report about what you're doing with the the soldiers next time you got to give me more details okay now parentheses and this is just from one level to the next level [Applause] perhaps there's place to say meaning that is being gentle here with this suggestion after your lectures so apparently this person was lecturing two soldiers i don't know if it was a rabbi or not a rabbi but it seems that this person who that i was writing to would give lectures on jewish topics to the soldiers so that abba says i wonder possibly maybe i could suggest that after you deliver your lectures to the soldiers that you can mention something that whoever wants to could correspond here meaning to the rabbit you could tell the people in the audience if they want to write to me they can write to me libera aza shaila hama val bellas hulu to clarify questions that may disturb them that i was telling this lecturer when you're lecturing it may come up you might find a natural place to sort of just mention that hey if you've got more questions about yiddish kite the le mavic should have it would be interested in hearing your questions just i i don't even know what to say about this okay but it goes on it's understood when you mention this idea of writing to me it's important that you preempt that you uh make a disclaimer or you clarify that this is not a fundraising solicitation meaning you have to tell them that it's you know you're not going to get you're not going to get solicited for fundraising you're not going to be put on some uh some list nobody's asking you for money i'm not trying to extract any money from anyone that's not what's happening here i'm just telling you if you want to correspond with me if you have questions about yiddish kite about life about whatever i'm here for you but let them know that nobody no one's going to ask them for any money all right and another point moving kane she calls that sore cleo says al das it's also understood that when you do this you have to do it of your own accord meaning to say don't do this because i'm telling you to do it do this because it makes sense to you to do it the lay potatoes makhan this is not a schliches this is a never sent plenty of people on schleiches right but the rabbi is saying here this is not a schliches i'm not deputizing you to say this message go out and tell the soldiers to write to me i'm telling you that it makes sense it might be a good idea but i want you to grasp on your own that it's a good idea in other words i know you could read it superficially as like the dev is telling me to do it but don't tell them i'm telling you think about it as we've been learning the igres i mean this is letter number 10 so you see how the dev is teaching us how to think that it was showing us how he arrives at conclusions giving us the reasoning it's a mil subatima it's everything is with the logic everything's transparent so what what's the point of that like we've said many times in this year is not just telling us what to do the the deb is trying to get our buy-in so that we should see it and say yeah yeah you know what that that totally makes sense to us so this is the same thing that i've been saying here is look i know if i would just tell you to do it you would do it but that's not what i'm asking i'm asking you to think about this and to internalize it and to realize on your own in your own way that this is a good idea you know it's i i have to remark it's sort of like the rabbit once in in a very painful moment uh that ever complained that people are screaming at mossai until when when when how long will these galas go on when will mashiach come and the rabbis said but they're only screaming at mosaic because i i told them to say admo like don't do it for me don't do it because here's your script read your line i'm trying to teach you i'm not trying to tell you what to say i'm trying to teach you a world view that hopefully will become yours and then on your own if you want to say adversary great but this is not a there's not a script that you're reading lines from so similar to that the the dev is saying here i'm not giving you a schliches to do this i'm telling you it makes sense i i want to sort of interject right here for a second um there's another letter which is one of my favorite letters in the whole egress which was written to a famous mashipia great educator castleman and the letter was written actually on an interesting day rosh hashana leolanes so you're talking about almost a year almost exactly a year before histalkis before the passing of the frida kerabi so the rebels writing as a secretary of his father-in-law of his rabbit not as rabbi yet but as someone working for his father-in-law his rabbit and and that was writing to robert kesselman who was at that time in france he came out of russia and he was in a dp camp and then he was in france as many lobovitches were for for a short period of time some stayed there many moved on rabbit custerman ended up back er e ended up in arizoro but uh during that time he was in paris the rebb is writing to robert kesselman and saying you know have all these laboratories in paris now and there's hundreds of thousands of jews in paris and you want to know something funny i'm working for my father-in-law i work in the secretariat i see the mail that's coming in and i haven't noticed an influx of mail from parisian jewelry the debbie complains and says what are you guys doing over there you write to me and say you're ready to be my sanafish which is interesting because all of those sit in when they were in russia literally being hounded by by the kgb under literal life and death situations they were my surnames and that i was saying but i'm not asking you to get killed now i'm asking you to do something else which is maybe more uncomfortable when you meet a jew in the street whether they're religious or not religious why don't you mention to them that there's someone called the labacher in new york and that people can write to him and and the rabbit tells rabbit councilman that according to the level of devotion that the sydney in paris claimed to have i should be seeing tons of letters coming from all kinds of jews from all stripes all backgrounds all levels of of observance that should be writing into to the debit meaning that this is father-in-law and i'm not seeing that so what's going on over here and then the debit mentions the story he says you know there was a guy the rabbit doesn't say the name but he didn't learn in tamriel we mentioned in an earlier class that's the name of the the laboratory yeshiva that was started by the rabbit shop by the fifth rabbit in fact he didn't learn in any issue at all and he doesn't have a beard and he doesn't daven with the hasidic intentions and meditation he's just a simple jew but you know what he heard about the rabbi and he believed and when he ended up in a remote location wherever he would go in that place and he would meet other jews he would tell them to write to the church and that ever says and then because of this guy who is not such a husset but he believes in the rabbi and he tells people to write to the devil because of him some woman who's not at all religious had a question about whether or not to open a shop okay a really pedestrian mundane question and what did she do she wrote to my father-in-law to the dabber to ask his guidance and blessing so that i'd be saying to have a councilman you guys are see them why can't you do what this guy did getting that woman to write into in fact it's amazing because the rebbe says this woman who wrote to the dubba asking a question about opening a shop is not religious but the fact that she's now in contact with the rabbit will bring to all mitzvah observance and you'll see she will come to tarasameshbach and kashmir that that'll be the beginning of her growth so where are these letters and then and this is why i'm mentioning it here at this point i'm sorry i know i'm right in mid sentence um that ebba says why should i have to convince you of this you're never shabamas knows this you know if you learn tanya you know about the two souls so you have the nephesholocus the godly soul you know nephew bombings the animal soul so the abba says you're never surprised your animal soul knows this this isn't something that you know because you're davening so deeply and you're meditating so deeply the fact that writing to the debate and following what the rabbit tells you to do works out good for you is something you've seen yourself so many times so that you don't even need your godly soul to believe in it your animal soul knows it's true and if your animal soul knows it's true then why are you quiet about it the devil said if you know a good doctor you wouldn't tell somebody about a good doctor or you would wait until they ask or if you knew that they needed a good doctor you would go tell them before they even ask so why aren't you go around going around telling people to write to the rabbit so that's that's the famous uh castleman letter from uh 5709 but uh now this is six years later and now the rabbit is and that i was saying a similar thing which is i want letters from these soldiers and i'm going to read them and and and let's let's let's continue inside uh oh and that's why i mentioned it that i was saying i'm not telling you that you have to say this i'm telling you on your own you should figure out this is good similar to what that ever told rabbi kesselman that even your animal still knows that this is good come on like you know this you know this yourself okay so the rabbit then continues and says when you when you mentioned to them the idea of writing to me you could just say varaka leimer you should just mention shia dayama kamanoshim smith that you know many people who have done this although sometimes it takes a while to get an answer ava macabre eventually they do get an answer so i want you to tell them i know about a place where you can write to there's a person who wants to hear from you and sometimes it takes him a while to respond but he always responds okay let's continue if you find it favorable if you find it acceptable here's another suggestion what you can do with the soldiers you could give a tanya a copy of the book of tanja as an award to somebody who does something exceptional in the area of judaism mabain anchatzava among the soldiers this is interesting because we had a letter earlier where the rabbit was writing to robbie shusterman in chicago and encouraging the kinesthet the little competition between the kids could be a good thing so here the rabbit is saying with the soldiers that somebody one of the soldiers does something special in in judaism to reward them with a with a tanya as a prize nose [Music] and that's in addition to the fact that you should see if you can work out to put a tanya in the clubhouse like where they meet their social hall and also in the library shall if they have such institutions in an appropriate place okay another thing la pelage namasker davar al divar briaz zugose tyria it's a wonder to me like i can't understand you didn't mention a thing about your wife's health apparently this person had written to the dabba previously and mentioned that his wife had a health problem okay i just want to make sure you understand this so this is the rabbit who's saying write to me more write to me more often write to me more details it's not a joke that is remembering this guy's wife's health problem better than the guy himself is remembering remember saying i can't believe that you didn't mention that your wife's doing okay so certainly the fact you know no news is good news if you didn't mention anything so certainly everything must be good and and peaceful okay now here's one more point [Music] in the margin you're going to find notes of which issues of mahanayam were received over here what is this talking about there was a magazine that the israeli military chaplain's office put out maybe they still put it out for all i know but it was called um was something that was interested in and that i was telling this person i received certain issues and i'm not even sure if that was saying i got them from you or maybe i got them from other sources but that evidence makes a list here are the issues of the mahanayama military chaplain magazine that we have and basically saying send the rest so i can have a complete set what what is this about i don't think a lot of people realize the nature of the device library i know people have heard about the rabbi's library you heard about the library of the goddess this is the famous court case about the library this library is an extensive extensive extensive collection of all types of works and the rabbit was very particular in this it wasn't just the the this forum that the rebbe was learning from or the svarim that taraba was quoting in locations there were all types of books in the la there are all types of books in the library i spoke actually this evening i called simon jacobson and because he worked in the library and i asked him to confirm for me that there were all types of books he said yeah a lot more diverse than mahanayama he said there were all kinds of books and even things you wouldn't even expect in a jewish library but the rabbit wanted that it should be exhaustive it should have everything and uh that ever was meticulous about collecting and expanding and adding to the library all the years so here the deb is writing to this person and saying here are the issues of mahanaya magazine we have you know i would like a complete set uh because with blessings for success in all of the above there's the ps and then the ps is that listing the issues of mahanayam that the library was in possession of already and that's our letter tonight we'll see you tomorrow night