Meaningful Interviews 2 - Rabbi Laibel Wolf- Yechidus Details 1971 - Holocaust & Counter Culture

no problem so welcome to meaningful interviews with rabbit heim dolphin i'm your host and my guest today is label wolf rabbi wolf uh is an old family friend and a great scholar and has been teaching and lecturing and counseling for the last 40 years um i have a recollection label that you had a relationship uh with my wife says hey that only sarah and i wanted to hear a little bit about that and and and really what i'm getting at is the following question to you what made and makes labor wolf not just today but the past you know the label wolf of today is done tremendous things but a person is formed in their youth and i'd like to hear a little bit about that to understand you and my and my listeners and viewers they really um want to know who is this rabbi label wolf from the inside go ahead it's a very demanding um request one of the things that i certainly recognize that is that as you grow a little more mature in years you begin to understand better who you were in your youth and certainly i remember my youth very very well i was the child of holocaust survivors we came to australia when i was two years of age so i was effectively raised in australia but of course i recall my parents uh screaming in their sleep recalling the horrors of poland my father was a as a young man a yeshiva when the war broke out in the radomski yeshiva and he and the family were working also in the business which was a very successful business his parents and the older brothers and some sisters and the nazis put a commissar in there and one day the commissar got greedy and in front of my father shot his parents family executed them and my father being the youngest somehow managed to escape and but he was caught later on some weeks later on and put into a labor camp they smuggled into the labor camp some guns my father somehow had an outside contact and three of them fought their way out um later on i learned that that particular contact was a non-jewish pollock a young guy who they played soccer in the streets of krakow where my father lived and one day many many years later we're talking about in the 70s i guess maybe later my father was watching tv and he sees a face on the tv and he says that's him that's the guy who smuggled the guns in and that guy was paul john who was as a young man he was in the polish underground wow at any rate my my youthful years were spent trying to empathize with the what my parents went through um and i think i was a fairly angry young person always very very uh some ways guilt-ridden in ways that a young person cannot begin to understand the causes for anything like that i knew i had to uh make good to jewishness my parents after the war i understand for some years i was a very very young child at the time had a difficult relationship with god and although my father and mother were both raised in very from backgrounds um after the war there was a hiatus a period where perhaps they didn't practice it to the extent that they did previously but they came back to it and i was raised in a environment that was uh quite jewish in orientation although i remember not every every mitzvah was kept as meticulously as later on and therefore in this somewhat ambivalent setting i found myself also drawn to other things in life and especially when i was a young university student i certainly allowed myself to enter the arena of many different schools of thought non-jewish as well until one day my father told me that a certain elderly khasid wanted to meet with me and i remember i was in second year of law school at the time and i didn't know until much later that that elderly hassid who was a rebel zealand cerebrianski oliver shalom whom you mentioned indirectly through your wife she's the granddaughter was actually quite close to my father and was like a paternal figure to my father in those formative years the decade and a half after they emigrated to australia at any rate uh rob zulman met with me i met with him i went to his little unit a little apartment and um he challenged me to study with him and i didn't know exactly what it was that we were studying i was quite understanding of the broad spectrum of judaism i could learn ablat gamora even though i wasn't necessarily a very from person at the time and he actually introduced me to hasidus which i hadn't touched and as we studied hasidos my personal curiosity was peaked and i found it to be a very profound worldview and philosophy of life but more than that a pathway of judaism that i found attractive and i kept coming to him and i think i ended up studying with rib zellman for some 20 years plus long after i married and i could certainly say that he was the most formative jewish influence in my life he introduced me to the rabbi and then as a young man even before i married i had communication and correspondence with the river and i was very very uh touched that the river even responded back to a young wild kid at the time but of course it's lived an eternal effect on me and i guess the rest is history i became closer and closer in to the hasidic way of life and took it up with a vengeance and i ended up being the first child nick in australia a colomnic being a person who after marriage continues studying there wasn't a coll such an institute for young married men yet in australia but there was a rabbinical college a yeshiva godola which rob zellman was the principal um and founder and he allowed me whilst i was still at university finishing my law degree to spend half a day learning in the yeshiva dola at that time and uh later on afterwards uh that was further on i went and studied for the uh smith for the rabbinate which i completed in israel and received this meter from the chief rabbi and also from the safari chief rabbi who i greatly admired there at the time and history went on and i continued trying to do the best that i could to make up what uh the river often described as the what we have to do as a duty as a consequence of losing such a proportion of jews and judaism to see that i can my small way make up for it to some extent thank you so did you the the anger that you had uh and you know the guilt you know your father parents being in the holocaust and everything else did you ever have discussions before zombie about that and if you did what did he say my parents didn't speak much about it at all they never expressed themselves to me about the holocaust they tell me some basic elements of where they were and what they did but hardly anything um did i discuss it with my mentor rib zulman you know to my recollection i don't believe i did i think rob zellman took a very indirect approach to me um he felt and i think in retrospect he obviously was right that the best way that i would be able to come back to the roots was not if it was tackled directly something as sensitive and something as hurtful as i took it upon myself to feel that guilt because it wasn't a normal thing most of my my uh friends etc didn't have that same degree of concern that seemed to be plaguing me um and i think rip salmon took the vantage point that if i can strengthen my alliance with jewish knowledge in a profound way then the answers would come eventually and i guess they did and as far as that he never like you know put any pressure uh as the mice are mitzvahs you know uh you know become more fruit more hasidic and things like that was that any was there any kind of conversation about that no never now that you mentioned it um never rib salmon did two things for me he introduced me to a a world view which i've taken on with a vengeance ever since of understanding the nature of the cosmos the nature of creation how the what the abyss the expects of us and also what it means to do mitzvahs beyond the obvious external trappings of what a mitzvah is how we achieve spiritually and change the nature of the world i remember all those discussions taking place and of course they've been the same basis of my belief system ever since so um the rob zellman's approach was very hands off expecting correctly that as i moved closer to things i would deepen my practice of things at the same time i understand now you mentioned labeled uh your correspondence with that but i also believe i remember you telling me uh when um i asked you to come i think twice to to california to los angeles uh to lecture for the people that i was involved with anyway i remember you telling me that um i think you had a son i think a few times or and you were a hill directly a director i believe out in milwaukee or somewhere uh wisconsin somewhere and um you had correspondence with the rubber so what i'd like to talk about for a few minutes is the the the change going from a mentor like zalman to a rebbe like and and really how that the you know how you looked at that how does that developed you and and um you know a little bit about that i'd like to understand right so remembering that uh that my sense of who my mentor was for sulman uh being uh eons ahead of me but him speaking of the river as being eons ahead of him obviously i was uh what's the right word in awe of who the rubber was and of course curious at the same time but even before i left australia i already had some correspondence as you mentioned and i also had a sense that whilst one is in awe of someone like the rubber we were very very lucky tavareva who also was very accessible in spite of his absolute status of straddling earth in heaven at the same time which i'll come to later because it may sound strange and like an exaggeration but it's not um when i was when i finished law school and um was ready to take on my work in law rob zalman suggested to me that i write to the rubber um seeking a blessing or brother for my future and i did you married were you married i was married in my first year i married my final year of law school um and my my wife comes from a very staunchly froome family uh a lit fisher family if that's understood that the hasidic tradition certainly wasn't part of her background in at all but that being the case and her father was a talmud of note in sydney i lived in melbourne but he was a very open individual who was quite open to the idea of hasidus at the very same time quite an unusual person anyway coming back more specifically to your question um so i wrote to the river and the rebber out of the blue made a suggestion to me and put it in a very gentlemanly style he wrote would it be possible for me to take a year off from my proposed legal career and to study and to work with academic youth that was the rebber's expression academic youth now that more or less flawed me because i didn't know uh what that meant in terms of my career path nor did i understand what that ever meant by academic youth so rob zellman suggested i contact the secretariat to see if there could be a clarification and it ended up that the clarification was that i'd be intended that i should work with jewish university students well in australia there wasn't such a position a role to play but in america there was the hillel foundation which was very strong at the time and as it turned out they were looking for international staff so that they could more or less call themselves an international organization and he was this young australian who as a result of the rebels advice had written to the hilo foundation in the united states and and and very cheaply offered himself as a potential employee in their organization well they lapped it up apparently and i was given the choice of three places to go and serve as an assistant more or less a halo director in training and i sent the rebber the details and the names of these three and the rubber underlined the one which was madison wisconsin of the three suggestions now i didn't even know where wisconsin was on the map of the world and certainly not madison um and but i was at that stage totally um obedient in the sense that i believed strongly in the rebels insight and i was definitely going to follow the advice so he was a a young married couple who had been married just under a year and had a two-month-old baby going off to the wilds of wisconsin which by then i found on a map and it was going to be winter was a very cold place in winter i had never seen snow and when we landed in madison wisconsin was my first taste of snow as it turned out it was very very interesting because before i left i inquired more about who the hillel staff there were and i discovered that the director there was a conservative uh rabbi so i wrote to the river and asked how can i i had been i called myself a barber hosted already at that time how could i work with a a conservative rabbi and the rabbit never responded and of course no response from the river is a response as well as it turned out he had a heart problem soon after i arrived that hospitalized him and eventually unfortunately he was nifty he passed away so he was a young guy at the age of 22 myself in charge of a beautiful big hillel building three-story building right in the heart of one of the wildest campuses of that day we talked about the early 70s right 1771 it was and i had to use my own initiative well i actually relished such situations i always did it wasn't i wasn't at all over ored and i took it up with a vengeance and uh it was a wonderful wonderful experience for me um and i had staff and i had building and what could you ask more of course my question was what was my mission statement not from hillel's point of view because hillel's mission statement was clear that their role is to keep jewish students together a very laudable one but my mission statement is the laboratory in that context and i'll soon share with you my first yehidus with the which centered around this very question soon after arriving there i discovered that there was a minion ashabus minion at the hillel center but there was no mejitsa it was a mixed minion so i already had a dilemma as to how i should behave and act in that context and that was an immediate dilemma even before i got a chance to visit the river and ask in person and the river answered very quickly and he said a very interesting response and i want to preface it by saying that whatever that advice was which i will share with you now doesn't necessarily extend to other places and other circumstances it was to me specifically in my context there whatever said i should attend the minion but make sure that they see i'm not governing there and always give a shear in some shape or form that would they were the rebber's words at any rate suffice it to say that within a year borough and we had a proper minion with a full mifitzer and everything changed very very much for the better but uh in between that i had the occasion to visit the river with my wife and it was a very very uh wonderful uh yeshidas with the river we were scheduled shall i go on is it okay yeah go on please we were scheduled to have our appointment with the river it was set for three o'clock in the morning as you know the as we all know there ever worked in those days through the night very often a few days a week because of all the number of guests who wanted advice from the river and i remember being in line we and we had our baby in our arms and the baby was not settled and it was all a little bit uh the whole experience was unsettling waiting in line etc and there was this gentleman in front of me aha bright red hair and i tried to speak to him a few times but clearly he was not very communicative and finally after a whole row of people a line of people had finished it was just up to him and we were behind him so we figured finally go in and was get approaching three o'clock actually and that gentleman went in and he stayed for over an hour and a quarter everyone else had two three four five minutes and he was in there i later learned that his stern surname was stein zoltz and he was the famous uh rabbi aden steinseltz and was receiving advice on the gemaras that he was going to re-edit in a format that made it much easier and popular for people to study talmud and obviously the rebels giving him advice on that i imagine many other things anyway finally our turn came and i was determined to try to remember every single thing that was going to take place in their figures and the truth of the matter is it's pretty much it was a pretty much of a blur but i do remember a lot of the content of the rebber speaking and i had a series of questions um i had actually taken pen to paper and before going in a day earlier i had written a series i can't remember a dozen questions or so i've got them here it's still on file and when i walked into the room with my wife i could see that my letter was there at the top of the pile that was my turn and a number of my previous letters seem to be located beneath it the river was completely up to date whatever picked up my latest letter and almost as if he was reading it for the first time he was going through it and made little marks and that took i think a full two minutes which sound seemed like an eternity and then they never turned to me and said um firstly do you want me to speak english or english my wife's yiddish wasn't so great and uh she said she prefers english and secondly the writer said you wish me to answer these questions now or respond to you in writing and i was nonplussed i didn't know what to say so the robert just began answering the questions of course i kicked myself because i could have had all these in written answer very specific for posterity and i had to rely on my own memory uh instead a couple of the questions i'll share um one of the things that uh i found myself two questions one there were there was a community of jewish people in madison a non-campus a non-university community small one i think was about 300 people but my campus had jewish students of which there were seven thousand seven thousand jewish students on this campus out of a then population of forty nine thousand i was told uh was the campus in madison and it was a very very uh uh as i said popular campus because it was a cancer culture and it was uh known to be a seat of radicalism and the like and if a lot of new yorkers of the 7000 majority were new yorkers who came there but i felt that there was some responsibility i might have for the small jewish community now it should be understood that in those days how bad houses the fewer than that that exist then were all campus oriented there wasn't such a thing as a community for that house the early happened houses of the early 70s were all campus centers interestingly a lot of people don't realize that today anyway because i viewed myself as a lava jacquard first so i asked the rebel what's my responsibility to the community and to the students and the rebels said very very straightforwardly that his words were very strong he said the older generation have had their chance now it's the turn of the younger people very strong [Music] giving great clarity where i should direct myself to and then the rabbit continued without me uh asking anything further on this point and said like this if you see two people god forbid drowning and one of them is your family and the other one is a stranger and you only have the opportunity to save one of them and you choose to save your family member no one will criticize you that you've acted in some way immorally and then the rebels said to me your brothers and sisters are drowning your responsibility is to save them so it was very very clear that was one particular question another significant question i had was a lot of students were approaching me for conversion non-jewish students remember we're talking a period where uh young people were adventurous now prepared to explore and the idea of jewish mysticism was already at its height there and kabbalah was there together with buddhism and everything else and one big challenge pot and a lot of students were confused and some of them came to me and said they want to be jewish they happen to somehow find themselves enjoying some readings in some second and third hand jewish books on jewish mysticism so i asked the rubber how i should deal with these students the first thing that the rebber said was you should first ask them to meet with your colleague chaplains being a hill director i was also uh the jewish chaplain on a campus and there were non-jewish chaplains catholic protestants and others etc and ensure that the student has a better understanding of the tradition in which he or she may have been raised this was really eye-opening number one no i hadn't thought of that one and then the rabbit said and then there'll be some of them who will continue asking you and believe they want to learn to be jewish and you will then have to point out to them this is close to what they've ever said all the difficulties and obstacles that you face in life as a jew in terms of mitzvos how you have to keep kosher they have to keep shabbos and how restrictive all that is and to point that out obviously and then the rubber said and notwithstanding that there will be some who nevertheless say rabbi i still want to pursue it you the river said you'll then direct them to a rabbi a competent rabbi who will sit and teach them and if they should then reach a point where they face and based in and they're rather than emphasized and obviously it should be a proper orthodox base then then they will continue their journey and then the river said they will succeed now the river said something very interesting he said that um look at the grammatical root involved when you say a poor man becomes wealthy and in hebrew it's anee that's the poor man with an iron ani who becomes wealthy two very different words then thereby said look at the word of a slave who becomes free which is an avid so you have two very different words but it's in this arena we're speaking about ger mescale look the river said how the root is the same it means that there's no such thing as conversion nothing changes there's no such thing as conversion in judaism what you have is that a person who goes through a proper process of a bastion and succeeds means that their neshomer was always jewish but for reasons best known to the that yiddish in the summer was born deliberately into a non-jewish environment through a non-jewish mother because that was the test of this nishana in this lifetime to find itself and therefore this with the concluding words on this point by the river therefore you have the oral says you have to respect a girl and a guillorious more so than someone who is naturally born jewish because that is a jewish soul who's gone through a much more severe test and passed it interesting there were just uh two aspects of that year for this and i was fortunate enough to have eight more federalism yeah wow none of them as long as this one was 48 minutes uh all together uh the second one was 17 minutes and then they became very normal two three minutes etc etc i was fortunate to be able as the years went on to come with more and more members of my own family uh immediate family and that at one stage my parents decided that they too would like to go to yeshidas to the river after all my father had gravitated towards khabad uh early in his uh immigration to australia uh after some eight to ten years um because he came from a custody background was the khasilisha song in town and therefore he governed at the lubbar to shiva and was always there part of the issue and became very close to the rabbi groener and learned hasidis there as well let me ask the label um what year did you leave madison so i stayed we stayed in madison three and a half years and in 1973 my wife was very very lonely in madison while i thrived and enjoyed the wildcats of the life there on campus my wife very much missed community and uh we were the only from people in town and uh this was very difficult for her and we wrote to the river about this point and the labor said that perhaps we should see if we could find another position and i can't we spoke with uh hillel and they uh they allowed me to take up a position that was available in uh the new york area on long island and was in hofstra university on long island and i spent another four years there at hofstra university and then i was invited back to start or hillel in australia after the first attempt wasn't so successful and i took it over and spent another nine years then here working on melbourne campuses at that point renee brith who were the sponsors of hillel had gone through economic deprivation and they offloaded hillel in australia it no longer existed and therefore in a sense i was out of a job and i spoke with rabbi groener and we started a chabad campus program uh on the campuses in melbourne which i worked a good number of years at uh launching at that time let me ask you when you're when your parents went you see this did that ever talk to your your father your mother about their holocaust experience or anything like that or not if they did i'm not aware of it i know that my mother was always very uh upset that her son didn't become a lawyer and if certainly she had given up hope that i'd be a doctor because i had studied law so she and she she personified her antipathy in the river so she wasn't well disposed to the river my father of course who has raised the more hasidis environment as a child as a youth etc had profound respect for the level so when they went into your figures the the rationale primarily was that my mother was going to uh give the river a piece of her mind that was the kind of attitude um and she was told before going in that you stand you don't shake hands and etc etc um and when they entered the river asked my mother to sit down and she continued standing and the rabbit says please sit down a second time so she sat down because they never said it a second time etc and the rabbit treated my mother with kid gloves and when she said in a nice way wouldn't it have been much better for my son to have been a frugal siddish lawyer and what an example he would have been to others etc the rabbi said to my mother are you trying to bribe me at any rate the rabbis charm worked wonders whatever happened in that yeshides my mother came out being from that moment on one of the rubbish strongest supporters and she went to rebel salman cerebrianski and who was then still barak hashem running shiva gadola and she offered her services that she would take over and make sure that the students were well looked after had proper food had proper bed clothing etc and for many years she took on that role wow um did you ever go back to that dumb school wherever did you ever go back to poland and what were your feelings i did go back to poland but no it wasn't to rediscover anything about my roots whatsoever my parents in bred within me a complete hate of poland uh as they did and i had no intentions whatsoever but as part of my later career which i had been in the last 40 years of traveling and lecturing um i was invited to come to warsaw and lecture to the jewish community there um rabbi stumbler they invited me so i went and lectured i flew in that day i lectured that night and i left the next day i didn't want to spend even the minimum amount of time in poland there was a second time and the second time i stayed two days because i wanted to go to the uh uh to the base island there which is an eerie huge cemetery in a forest the biggest cemetery i think in europe it's like 25 kilometers one way and 15 kilometers the other way but all forest and who's there you see no dark and you've got these uh uh tombstones that are fallen on the ground or at an inclined angle anyway i wanted to go there because uh uh some of the radonska uh uh with the famous hasidim were buried there and i wanted very much to go to the quarry on behalf of my father so we spent that extra day in uh krakow for that reason but never i never had and still have no haitian whatsoever to have anything to do with poland so so the the the secretary went to was in krakow not in warsaw i'm sorry i said krakow that was i was born uh it was in warsaw it was quite correct i label i want to conclude with the following the the question yes 40 years of working with a youth working now also with people uh including non-jewish people um mysticism kabbalah new age and i think in la babbage for sure in chabad and and i believe even you know as far as the world you're you're one of the leaders or maybe the leader for as a year and as an above chi for sure in this field i you know i know i know many many people and everyone call my hooven call him kardashian you know what everyone's good and has their chocolate shop really really um you know done wonders in this field we today i i believe you know this but you know i see it here i've seen their disro we today are having um a counter culture revolution from within and i don't mean only i mean in orthodoxy okay you know of all kinds for the young israel to chabad to the spartan kid all groups okay my question is yes do you believe and have you seen that what you're offering to the outside people would benefit the inside people and really change their attitude and they will become happier and and and and simply enjoy being a yi of an orthodox jew a froome jew etc together with um an ability to be open-minded you know what i'm saying yes i know exactly what you're saying okay so this is what i wanted to do for a few minutes to address please it's true that the vast majority of my encounters with people have been with people who have not been raised or are familiar with yiddishkai per se even my travels to buddhist ashrams where why did i do that because half of the people there are jewish and therefore that's sweet and they're sensitive spiritual people so you have a good chance to make a connection with them through yiddish guides but your question is on what's happening from the inside and i think that one of the one of the things we're discovering that there is a greater degree of disassociation by the children of religious people to their yiddish kids then what was the case once upon a time and i see two reasons for it and then i'll tell you the solution which is very much along the lines that you've said or implied and that is this when people do religious things by rote when jewish people do things because they belong to a club when they do things because of pure loyalty and nothing else when there isn't any token real content depth when there isn't any pathway of understanding that this relates to your inner life when there isn't a profound belief in the a bistro operating in every element of your life then it's very very hard to pass anything on to the next generation they'll see the externalities that you're going through the motions and they'll see the hypocrisy involved there i don't blame people because people even religious people i've met so many religious people who i doubt believe in the avista i know it's a strange thing to say i sat on one occasion next to an individual who was garbed in a fur spotting how you translate that in english and it was a shabbos and uh and his uh uh um and everything and he and i asked him a question something to do with yiddish guys and he says to me now this is a guy i'm thinking you don't really believe in an amish do you so but what about you he says i'm only doing it because of my family meaning i belong to such a family i play ball it's so upsetting now how do you expect a younger generation to respond to that when the parents aren't believing when you believe you see it in your eyes you see it in the face you see it in the energy that you pour in and through osmosis it transfers to the younger generation but when it's lacking they see through you and that's why i see a lot of disassociation with judaism even within religious ranks which is very very sad so your the question the answer to your question is i have absolutely no doubt that what hasidus offers is that pathway back in to a strong connection to hashem to give an underpinning for the meaning of everything that you do i'm writing you write books i'm writing a book at the moment and that book at the moment is 24 hours in the life of a jew and it speaks about what does it mean to wake up in the morning what does it mean to dress in the morning what does it mean to go to the bathroom in the morning spiritually all these things what does it mean to go to the toilet in the morning and somehow that's got absolute meaning in the total spiritual sense of something divine i know it's crazy to say but when you live a life where everything is meaningful you become fulfilled and i think that's lacking at all levels both outside and even on the inside as you described and that's it thank you very much it was wonderful talking and really uh making this program meaningful interviews meaningful and uh i felt very heartfelt you know and as we say in hebrew alhamdulillah right to the point hashem should bless you and your family with all the yiddish editions and really tremendous in in the work that you took upon yourself with the rabbi's guidance uh so many years ago and um the results are uh obvious and there's so much more to do because uh we still need mushy to come and uh absolutely have the ghoulish label have a good time only good things and afraid of contouring thank you bye good to speak