"Behind The Bima:" Rabbi Efram Goldberg In Conversation with Rabbi YY Jacobson

the yeshiva.net [Music] return florida rabbis ephraim goldberg philip moskowitz and josh brody are taking you behind the bema the brs rabbi's schmooze about contemporary issues and talk to special guests who give a behind-the-scenes look at how they got to where they are and what keeps them going welcome to behind the bema good evening it's wednesday nine p.m i'm rabbi from global we're joined by my dear friend and colleague grab my philip moscowitz and we're here to take you behind the bema we are here to go behind the beam uh good tag team of me and rabbi moscow so grateful and glad to be together we have a very special guest rebecca jacobson is a special person an extraordinary speaker a passionate leader and there's so much to talk to him about i hope you drink your coffee tonight i hope you're ready to stay up late into the evening because we've got a lot on the agenda for by jacobson including his own background his life story including his relationship with the rebbe including the uh time in which he made a blessing over president trump or his welcoming of raber bashkin there's a lot to talk about but first we have to thank our generous sponsor for this evening a very big thank you to our sponsor karen and simcha hermann of north woodmere in commemoration of the first year said this is pasukus of shelima you delayed ben who touched the lies including of so many including the staff at medical huge thank you to the hermanns good friends of mine of ours for a long time brother nathalie is a active member of our community a leader in our community and sim herman in fact is the one who put us together with y thank you for making the connection thank you for sponsoring tonight thank you for spreading sharing torah and the light that you do trust me what rav is going to share tonight is gold amazing we want the world to hear it it's not about us on our banter it is about rav and his message avril freed beatty deutsch and all the other incredible guests that we have had when you review more people stumble upon it and learn from it and that is our goal thank god we make no living we don't make one penny we make no profit this is not our livelihood we are just in it to get the message and the light of our guests out there to the world so again thank you to the hermes our sponsors let me introduce you why why before we bring him on by saying although most people here know that why is one of america's premier jewish scholars and experts in mysticism kabbalah he takes these complex ideas and is able to reduce them and communicate them in an accessible accessible way he speaks all over the world six continents 40 states he's taught and mentored thousands um all over he is uh an author he has a website yeshiva yeshiva.net the yeshiva.net where he teaches thousands around the world each and every day again complex topics in the most passionate and compelling way he served as the editor-in-chief people don't realize this before he was a prominent rabbi and speaker he was a journalist he inherited this from his father who began but he was the editor-in-chief at one point of the largest yiddish english newspaper existing today the agaminer janal and he's the spiritual leader of congregation base shmuel in new york revoir in in 10 seconds or mosque what's what are you impressed by what do you love about why why are you excited to have this conversation he is an excellent excellent storyteller and his width and breadth of torah knowledge is mesmerizing he's the real deal that's the bottom line we spent some time with him it's not just a show he didn't memorize three good speeches that he gives everywhere he is the real deal and it is a privilege to have him ladies and gentlemen without any further ado rabbi yy jacobson it is a great privilege and a pleasure to welcome one of the great teachers speakers educators inspirational personalities of our time revi jacobson thank you so much for making some time to come behind the bema with us my pleasure my honor thank you for having me we hope that you're feeling better and uh feeling strong and feeling well and we want to dive right in this you are a a fountain of wisdom and knowledge and there's so many ways we can go directions things that we can talk about but let's start with this let's start with your obviously chabad background the privileged relationship you had with the rebels that's all and the role you played as being one of the uh being a hosa for the rebel the rabbi gave shiurim that were hours uh long on shabbos and a team of listened carefully and recorded and shared and that experience what it meant to be privileged to be tapped to play that role at a young age the responsibility of listening in a way that you're trying to remember i don't know if you have any memory tools for our audience about how to use memory well um and lastly as part of this question what was the reba's reaction to the way that you wrote up his his his shirum um did the rebel give constructive criticism and how because i've shared many times one of the things that touched me very deeply about the reb is that emphasis on positivity positive language and there's so much written about the rebels understanding davar dibor using only positive language so how did he give constructive criticism in a way that didn't feel critical wonderful and very loaded questions so let me try to uh put it all into one uh cohesive and delightful talent so i grew up in the crown heights section of brooklyn both of my parents my late father allah and my mother may she be well were immigrants from soviet russia they grew up in the 1930s under the tyranny of the horrific soviet regime the stalinistic purges and the incessant persecutions against jews and judaism and really all religion my grandparents were arrested my grandfather was arrested tortured sentenced to death and then commuted to 25 years in the gulag ultimately he made it out at the end of the second world war and both of the families separately with forged passports stalin allowed people who escaped from poland to russia from hitler's armies to go back to poland after the war so they forged documents as though they were polish citizens and in 1946 they left the hell of the soviet union where they suffered terribly my father was a child he would always share with me the stories of you know his father being taken away friday night after kiddish for years they didn't know if he's dead or alive in any case they left the soviet union they came to europe they ultimately made it to the united states of america they built their family in brooklyn my father was a journalist for more than 50 years he worked for newsweek for the herald tribune he was a u.n correspondent for the attack which is israel's largest daily newspaper he succeeded actually eli wiesel elie wiesel in that position and then he founded he worked for yiddish newspapers then he founded his own yiddish newspaper called the algamene journal which he ran till his death in 2005. my grandfather his name was simon yakabashvili my real name is not jacobs my name is jakob bashvili which is a georgian name he came from a long dynasty of georgian jews they have a tradition that they came there after the destruction of the first temple very very religious god-fearing jews living in georgia kutais this is not georgia atlanta this is georgia south russia and interestingly when he was 18 this is my grandfather he got a scholarship to go to italy from georgia russia to italy to study the fur business which was the family business and on the way he stopped in a city called rostov at the dan river in russia and for those last few years the fifth labacher rabbi shalom bear schneiderson known as the reber ashab who died in 1920 he escaped the germans coming into belarus during the first world war he escaped he didn't want to be under the germans and he moved to rostov and that's where my grandfather a young 18 year old spheric georgian tall strong handsome kid with no connection to really the whole ashkenazic world the hasidic world certainly he was on the way to italy but rosh hashanah he davened with the fifth lubavitcher and something touched him very deeply and he met him and he visited him and the rabbit told him then i think you should spend some time learning in yeshiva and one day he'll go to italy and he felt that that was his place and he remained there and he became a very close disciple of the fifth laboratory but in the sixth laboratory who succeeded his father in 1920 known as the rayats rabbi savitsukshin the father-in-law of the most recent laboratory and when lenin and the bolsheviks transformed russia now most jews don't understand what happened the ofsexia was the jewish section of the communist party in 10 years they managed to destroy judaism in the soviet union in a way that has not been done over 200 years of enlightenment 200 years of enlightenment managed to cut 50 percent of russian jury away from judaism but they have sex in 10 years 1919 to 1929 headed by a man who had smith from rebecca's grazinski learned in pals his name was shimon dimmonstein they became such a force of tyranny that in 10 years judaism in the soviet union was literally almost completely dead mama almost dead and it remained that way everything went underground for 70 years until communism fell stalin ultimately shot everybody he destroyed the holy of sexual because they were too jewish you know how it worked in russia but the rebbe the previous laboratory with the sixth laboratory took nine students it's a very very moving story and he said that most jews live now in the soviet union there will be no memory and trace of judaism left i want to make atheist kaff an oath with you i'll be the 10th we have a minion we're going to preserve yiddishkait in the soviet union until our last drop of blood do you agree and the nine students agreed with a handshake to the lubavitchereba they made this commitment he divided the country among them to create an underground network of flourishing yiddishkeit schools rabbanam shakhtam malamdem mayalam siddhurim mahzaryam gemara swaram the rabbit created it's unbelievable 600 underground jewish schools in the 20s and in the 30s you know how hard it is to fund one jewish day school in america today right now this is under stalin where you were shot like uh he killed 50 million of his own people 50 more than hitler my grandfather was one of those nine one of those nine and he was arrested he was tortured very badly anyway the bottom line is he died young with my grandmother they both died very young shortly after they left shortly after their exodus my father and his two brothers were young orphans but they rebuilt their lives and that's where i grew up i grew up in brooklyn in the in the community and sitting at the feet of the lobster rabbit for many many years what happened was the rebbe would speak shabbos between three and seven hours now you and i so i wanted to tell you you and i especially people who went to rabbinic schools and training and communication you learn you need jokes you need stories you take off your glasses you put on your glasses you run around and this there evan didn't do that he barely ever said a joke once in a while he barely said a story once in a while he said something but that wasn't his thing he could speak for an hour two hours contemporary events education philosophy there was a mosaic you know his his er he knew the villain you know he knew every malben bao pen every villenegon from all segments of jewish thought and there was no tape recorder it's shabbos so it all had to be memorized everything and it was history in the making because we all know that what he's revealing he's not going to repeat and this is unprecedented layers of depth in torah inspiration leadership about you know where we what our duty is today the nature of our generation he would combine it all practical and then the political the transcendent and the and the and the earthly and uh so there was a group already from day one the rebel assumed leadership in 1950 after his father-in-law's passing and there was a group headed by a man who just passed away his name was rabio khan he passed away last august vov of at the age of 90. he arrived on a boat to the previous rebbe days after his passing he didn't know that he died so he left israel to come learned by the rebel in 1950 he came to new york and he found out that the previous year passed away so he was there from day one he was a brilliant mind so he was what's called the head kaiser the main person to memorize and transcribe but he always trained with him a team of of bachrim or younger light who were skilled at this i was already from the next generation i wasn't i wasn't yet in 1950 i was still a divine thought what they call in kabbalah the adam kadman i was born only in 72 but i had an older brother who was part of that team and when i was young i guess i displayed some affinity and ability in this field so i was taken in to the to that group of the actually during the last years of the rebbe until he suffered a stroke which was in march 92 but he would bring every shabbos now you have to understand the amtif somehow stereo shabbas beresha he had a three-day holiday he would do four or five fabregas you're talking about 10-20 hours not a five-minute speech not an hour ten twenty hours of deep deep shiurim in niger a lot of times current events you know eric's israel the jewish world education care of outreach challenges crisis shalom bias whatever it was one fabregan can have just a tapestry and a mosaic of hundreds of themes and topics you know then suddenly he said well they're not going to make us see him on shots so see him on shots for an hour and a half you know that's the see you one day to see him on him i see him on tomorrow and he didn't give no notes and he didn't prepare you before there was no hazardous to appear the materials then there could be a maya mahasiddhas in the deepest esoteric ideas of the hasidic spirituality you know kabbalah no no he he did not have notes uh there were a few times that they saw by the song he had like a few words on a piece of paper also very rarely he did not speak from notes and he also would never stand up in middle you know you talk about a person 87 88 to sit for hours without a break without a break he could talk and then they sang beautiful niggin and then he would resume the talking another was just a few minutes so uh it was what should i tell you it was very very intense it was not easy shabbos was a very very difficult night uh all my friends you know good good jewish kids in brooklyn you go for pizza what's the halachim and soy shabbos pizza the mahadrin do bowling mahadamana mahadrin do even more interesting things but certainly it's you know massage shop is a certain relaxation but till today my wife knows saturday night i suffer from pss post shabbos syndrome because i knew that there's not going to be any sleep for me matsuri shabbos and probably not sunday night either it was very challenging but also unbelievably rewarding and we all felt that we're like part of the transmission of history of the messiah and if we don't memorize it and transcribe it it's going to be lost for eternity so today there's more than a hundred volumes of the laboratories talks that literally inspire and enlighten the jewish world in extraordinary ways and most of it is from those transcripts that were written the days after shabbos and what happened was matsuya shabbas rabio oliver shalom the main kaiser would gather the havre with sorry shabbos and he would go over everything he would repeat everything it took a few hours there were a lot of arguments and debates back and forth he sometimes got very upset he spoke he was a brilliant man he could not tolerate the ignorance or stupidity there were a lot of arguments that said this no he didn't mean well you know that's how it went but it was all recorded to the best of our ability and over the week it was transcribed edited sometimes the rebel would edit certain parts most of it he did not edit he relied on the writers and it was all published in volumes known as uh many many many volumes you asked about his uh his role as a critic you see i remember all your questions i've been trained yeah and so i did al-rishi risha i tried to do by beer golem so i have to say this was a very very kind man and they used to say he was a gentleman he was a very gentleman but when it came to the work on his talks he really demanded i can't say perfection but he was very very exacting he was very very critical we knew that it wasn't personal it's because he the rebbe did not tolerate he did not like mediocrity he didn't like when people felt they were mediocre he you know he didn't like when something wasn't done the way it could be because of laziness or because you don't believe in yourself or because if you're timid because you're shy and the writers and the editors it was private correspondence but if they ever found a mistake or something inconsistent or the source in the rambam or the mishnah or the rajput the ramban was wrong you know would get upset i remember he once wrote after 30 years i'm not here to teach you all of base because he saw some some gross error sometimes he would write on the top of a talk mavhill which means shocking shocking how somebody can write these words once he wrote a very sharp criticism and at the bottom and then he wrote my apologies to you but usually it wouldn't come with that but the truth is we saw it as a privilege it wasn't criticism like you know your self-esteem is being shattered it was a privilege that lubavitcher ebba one of the greatest minds in many generations should literally take this text and dissect it and erase and delete and add it was like a privilege just to see to see such genius and such holiness embodied on paper it was even criticism of such a person was was the greatest self-esteem booster you can get in your life you probably know the story with the swastemas it's an amazing story this faceemas was an orphan the hidushi harim rabichamaya the first gary rabbit lost every child besides a daughter in his lifetime he had 12 children 13 children it's unbelievable one daughter survived and one of the boys from mardukai left the svasem master behind so the raised them and there was a the condition he had to wake up early in the morning and he would learn for a few hours and daven the minigun once this facemas was learning all night so he overslept chakras so after when he woke up the kidoshirim called him called him with his havrusa and said where were you for chakras so there's an answer gives a hold russia how you don't miss stavening so the chavroos asks us he says why didn't you tell the zeta you were learning all night why didn't you tell them so he says in parishes matas you have the longest speech of moisture being on the whole tower the bene god of naruto and tell moisha we want to settle in the trans jordan right so maishirabenu gives them a muslim you are fear mongers your brothers go to war you're going to stay here and you're going to dissuade the entire nation of going into so just like the spies did 40 years ago we're gonna have another catastrophe for another forty years and he goes on and on lama to niu and how could you be so irresponsible how can you be so cruel and when he finishes with russia they tell martial no we're going to war we just want to settle so samus tells his friend right when moishe started to scream at them you can't be so determined they should have said no to motion we're going to war we're going we're not separating we're not the miraculous we're not inculcating fear we just want to settle this place afterwards wasabi says because gives moosa you don't interrupt him you listen he says my zeida is talking to me about coming to davoni coming on time he says you don't interrupt him he says these are the things you these are the things you want to hear i'll tell you why i tell you why it's fascinating to me about the reb in this way i remember the summer of the 20th year side of the rebel all these biographies came out about the rabbi and i read them all i gobbled them up because of such an inspirational person i wanted to learn more but one of the things i had a tremendous yayish it really on the other hand depressed me because i read about how the rabbit never took one day off in his life he didn't take one vacation day he didn't take one hour he didn't take one and i read about the rabbit was only positivity it wasn't negativity it wasn't disappointment wasn't frustration and so on the one hand i gained in my own reverence for the rabbit but i felt much worse about myself myself as a person myself as a as a rev it's like i i need a day off i'm human but i don't know the rabbit didn't take a day off so it was it was a very mixed summer of reacting to reading those biographies so hearing that the rabbit could read these notes and he had emotion human emotion he was frustrated he was disappointed he wanted it to be better he didn't want to tolerate the mediocrity i haven't read that or seen that and i think it's so important to communicate that about the rebel or people like the rebbe that people are complicated and even our greatest people also were human had a human component to them so that's very interesting to hear yeah absolutely and to see to see how he edited a talk there was so much to learn from it the choice of words the precision and never to express to yourself negatively he he you know he didn't like the word death he would write the antithesis of life if you wrote ra he would wrote the opposite of it was just an approach of how to look at something also the respect for every word in toyota the or the reverence the deal cut it how he would change a question you learned intellectual clarity you learned brisker precision what they call hakudora is differentiations distinctions definitions compartmentalizations categorizations syntax grammar there was there was a lot to learn from this incredible amount of learn from his editing both in terms of style and substance you learned also that you have to know that you have to know everything you have to learn everything you have to you have to as much as your best you have to really go really go through the material and and master it because it's a follow-up question i'm an interesting thing it's interesting they wouldn't know this the devil would sometimes quote a safer and quote it he would quote it and then he would say but check it up in the library because it was for memory i it i didn't have a safe and it was smart he once quoted sadiq is popular in the 1960s there were a few people who even heard of rip sadduce but in one secret that was speaking about celebrating a birthday and he quotes in the sun looking with sise laila uh her ravatsada grips other kakayama lublin and he quotes it and then he said they should check it up and it was mama's it was verbatim it was interesting you know it was a chabad but he knew every line of republic of la blind once called max vitri also who knows mama's verbatim and he said to check it up he didn't have it in his room and once there's a saver from the album called eretz most people never heard of it i think it's called eretz and then also he he was interested in the footnotes he referenced it but he said they should look it up because he didn't have it in his room and he was working on it so you also saw a different level of of terror mastery that is unparalleled because it was gemara shasir xiaomi rashf rambo but also all this form of kabbalah and philosophy very rare combination in one person let me just jump in with one more follow-up then i'll let you and i promise and and i hope you have the rest of the night for this because there's so much to talk about they did the rebels successfully transmit data to his kasi do we have a large and vibrant and strong and beautiful chabad community within our shul we have a beautiful shiva mini show this morning we have a tremendous amount of moved here and and recently we were bringing together and i brought this up with them is that the world of chabad is magnificent and the torah is so deep but there's a beautiful sea of torah out there and how come they don't expose themselves go learn whether it's other hasidis go learn some greats of contemporary makshava go learn be exposed to and we had a whole conversation about that and where someone said look if if the food that you're being served is delicious why do you need to eat it out why do you need someone else's food what we have is perfect it's most nourishing it has everything in it there's nowhere else to turn and there was a defensiveness and an argument and there was a significant personality who's published many of the rebels uh uh safaram who felt very strongly that we have and we're learning this derek and we don't want to dilute it or compromise it or have it become distorted by exposing other things to it so while the reba may have quoted from all over it doesn't seem like at least from from that conversation that was something that he encouraged for among his hasidim well listen to my share room a little more you know i do listen but i think you're the exception the torah world embracing you many non-chabad many people who are antagonistic to chabad love you and embrace you because they see you as the exception to the rule meaning you happen to be you happy you happen to be but you're also bringing from all over yeah listen i really can't speak for anybody else you know i don't feel it behooves me to do so and i really can't because i don't know what you know what's in people's minds but i know you know when what i sat by the rebbe's feet and listened to him for many many years and it taught me that the approach of expansiveness is so much more real and authentic because hashem is ain't safe you know god is infinite and how do you contain infinity in one box how do you contain infinity through tunnel vision infinity only contained through complete humility and complete openness to the endless horizons of the mysteries of creation the mysteries in every jew and of course the endless mysteries in terrorism says you know longer than any measurement and larger than the sea and his whole attitude was based on that and the truth is i think anybody who takes any published seeker of the rebel local decisis you'll see i didn't do this directly so i can't take full responsibility but i'm not sure that there's any contemporary maybe besides could quote literally between 400 and 800 sources from every conceivable type of safer i should just add for maybe intellectual clarity that there is one distinction i think it's important to make and that is the maimarim of hasidis of chabad will really quote from other sources because they have a genre and i'll give you an example if you're learning right or hide talking the brisket toyota you will never find a clay yucker quoted right you'll never find the brim didn't like the kayaker i don't know what he held about the clay yucca the clay yucca is a special commentator the answer is it's a genre right is a genre that came out in last year's it's a certain genre called the brisket derek the brisket mahalo it's a certain style and the klayoka doesn't really fit into that khabad khasiddhas is a all-encompassing holistic developed by the balatanya based on the maagan and the balsamic and the mymarium are a certain genre that represents the chabad of the yahada's perspective developed by the seven generations from the balatanya all the way to the rebel so that genre is self-contained like the redmond is my modern wouldn't just you know quote from here there because it was a certain style yeah he would quote nayama imelda he would quote us levy of course the boshemth of the mogan and some of the the greatest hasidic masters outside of the first generation but over there there was and there is a certain style that is that is um defined by the teachings and the style of the chabad rabbis so i think maybe this over there there could be some confusion okay if i could just if i could just take us back to the original conversation i'm mesmerized by the number of hours that the rebbe gave asiha and having been to one of your sherm in person and listened to many online um you're not giving shirum and tidbits and i say this right your ideas are thought out they're developed they're right they're articulate double speed was created double speed was created for me no but i think it's i'm wondering you know in society as a whole where we have reduced so much to sound bites into little memes into one-liners you specifically have chosen not to take that path you give your shoe room you develop the ideas that was clearly the mahalik of the rebbe of giving long drawn out well thought out ideas i'm wondering if you have a comment on what that's doing to our society first of all and i think even within torah learning i think we're seeing that right someone says a vort they quoted this they quoted that but they're not looking at the source inside they're not developing a mahalik they're not developing an idea i'm curious your thoughts on that yeah listen people have always told me and i'm talking about very close people they said you speak long get up five minutes six minutes ten minutes you say of art and you sit down and i understand them say nobody's gonna listen nobody's gonna internalize but i i appreciate what they're saying and that's why i cherish you know whatsapp clips and i have some of my people always doing clips because some people just want 60 seconds because until the fast vartafast myself a little music a little animation and they get their inspiration for the day so be it we like to be there for every person according to their capacity but i know for myself and for me it's actually respect i know for myself when i hear or read something that's well thought out built up i know from there ever hearing how he would build an idea he gave once a hadron on rambam he made us see him on the whole round the whole mishna toyota of the rambo the way he built it he spoke for close to two hours and then he continued the next job as the next shot of the next the way he built it the questions the myvna it was architecture literally art you build the foundations you put up another floor another floor another floor and then you hit the peak and then i we can appreciate the expansiveness of torah the broadness of yiddishkeit the godliness of a passage of a maim of a sugi of an so to say just because we live in a generation of sound bites and we live in a generation where half of us have been diagnosed as add and adhd and all of the under all of the other wonderful definitions and diagnosis which by the way have some miles i i gave a sheer last shabbos and there were a bunch of bachelor from a particular yeshiva they called themselves adhd yeshiva fine they sat and a guy came over one of the bucket came over to me and he said i'm adhd but you could have spoken another few hours i said how if you're adhd he says listen we adhds so what he told me he says we get bored fast when it's boring but when somebody touches the spot when you get into my soul and you're dealing with what i'm really dealing with we could listen for six hours because we get turned on deeply it was a very profound thing he was telling me so i have found that yes there's a lot of jokes about sound bites and it's true and abundant shoals we have here prominent robunum you know how long your sermon is allowed to be [Laughter] how short it's allowed to be but i have found i have gotten so much positive feedback of real shiurim that really present an idea in all the irish and roy kevin as much as my own capabilities allow to present it and i find that there's a significant amount of people we underestimate people's intelligence and we underestimate people's depth and i think it's very important never to underestimate it but here's the mistake that some of us teachers make and that is we want they should just love it because we're giving it it's not going to be that way you have to really speak to the people that means rich beautiful elegant structure depth and most importantly emotional relevance you got to speak to their struggles you got to speak to their heart you got to speak to their soul you got to speak to the reality they're living in not some fictional reality that you would love them to live in which everybody detaches from immediately but when we can do that i think that on the contrary there's a significant huge amount of people who really cherish true amcos true depth you just touched on it because i was i was going to follow up by asking you um you're enormously popular people are real learn live and are inspired someone i'm very close with lives in muncie who it's a little fish a person who learned the daf yomi for many many years and brisker torres and would never touch hasidis now comes to you every morning put in a garter he told me it's because he's putting on his seatbelt he's buckling up before he davens and there's a real custard of yours so you have you resonate deeply and profoundly for many and i was going to ask what is it about your message that you think is really penetrating and resonating you answered that but so i'll ask a corollary of it is how much preparation goes into your sheer and your speeches you clearly give it your all your emotionally invested um tell us about the mechanics of how to tell a good story half of the meaningful minutes are you because you have mastered the art of telling a story the same story that that many others are trying to repeat over copying rave they're saying the story it falls flat it's an air ball they can't say the story you tell that story and it's a room full of people they're a puddle of tears what are the mechanics of telling a good story how much prep goes into these shiram and was it about the style that's resonating so deeply you mean it's not because naki gordon likes my looks that too okay thank you thank you i appreciate that very much i think that you asked me how long it takes to prepare so you know it's maybe cliche but it's the truth i'm always preparing i never stop preparing meaning sometimes for a particular drusher i could prepare five minutes but i've been preparing for years sometimes i need a few hours or a few days or a few weeks to research but i'm always preparing meaning i'm always trying to learn and trying to grow and trying to stimulate my own mind i once received spectacular advice from rabbi aldin steinzaltz you remember rabbi aden stein zaltz who wrote seventy swarm the first translator of gemara before anybody else rabbi hadin evangel who passed away last year at the age of eighty-three and i once went there sister all for speaking and i went to seek his advice this is 20 years ago and he told me something very special he said he was a very sharp jew he talked about criticism you know he knew how to cut somebody down if he wanted to so i asked him advice i said you know you have been speaking for years you've been writing swarm i'm just starting this is two more than two decades ago it was shabbos afternoon in his in his cottage he had a little garden behind his home in the german colony in jerusalem the sun was setting he sat me down on the stem of a tree and he sat on some other stem of a tree it wasn't shaking so it wasn't much issue of mukta and i asked him this question just for general advice and he told me something and he said i want to share something with you you know my wife went to a few speeches of yours in jerusalem and she says you're good if you're good you're probably going to get better you'll probably get so good that at some point you won't have to prepare and people will call you and you won't even have to know the topic when you get up to the pulpit you'll see a flyer on the pope and it's going to say marriage education psychology fear happiness abuse and you'll open the filing cabinet and you'll take out the you know canned speech and you'll speak for an hour you'll get a standing ovation they'll give you a check you'll go home and everybody will be happy he says and you'll do this professionally and you will do it impeccably he's telling this to me and then he whispers and he says and then one day you're going to wake up in the morning and you're going to look in the mirror and you're going to see that there's nobody there there's just a mouthpiece there's nothing left there's no person there's only a mouse mouthpiece and at that moment you will know that you have virtually died there's no person left they're just a mouthpiece i was taken aback and he was basically saying that what happens to many is they just become copies of themselves you know everything is canned everything is prepared so i have to interrupt this with one of the this is how i speak one of the best insights of the katsuke reb the madrid says in kahelas that we have different seasons in life right when we're born we're treated like kings because then we become like pigs searching through the garbage he says then we become like goats jumping around everywhere it says at 20 we become like horses grooming ourselves looking for a beautiful woman he says then we become like excuse me like donkeys schlepping all day to make a living he says then we become like dogs we need a hootsburgh barking to be able to pay all of our bills and then when we become old we become like chimpanzees asks the cut scare there the marriage doesn't explain why harehuka kaif hiskinareo kikaife madrish kahela why when we become older you become like monkeys or chimps and most say because you know we make tricks we do imitations for the 8 o'clock to entertain the grandkids katsukereba says something so profound he says when you become older you often become like a monkey or a chimp or a gorilla imitating he says who do you imitate you imitate yourself you went into a certain mold this is who i am i'm not changing once i hit 50 60 70 80 i'm just imitating myself i dove in today because i dove in yesterday i go to show today because i went to show yesterday i learned that me today because i learned yesterday i celebrate pesos because i celebrated basic last year just like i brushed my teeth today because he says you become an imitation of yourself no creativity no newness nothing fresh so this is basically what he was telling me you're going to become a monkey you know you'll copy yourself you'll get your check it's nice but you'll know that you're a dead man walking so i asked rabbi din what do i do what do i do to avoid this it says 25 years almost 25 years ago he said what you do is you don't stop learning you don't stop challenging yourself you don't stop exploring new things that you never knew about that make you learn more about your emotions your heart your brain your mind yes so what are you learning tell us what you're learning now what are you learning now and how are you challenging yourself so this was amazing advice so really i just i just constantly constantly try to learn today excuse me just just an example i mean i'm learning my section like many other jews excuse me and i gave shiuriman the homosexual hashanah but it's still always a numer every time every time you learn it you know i have my shiurim the laboratory have instituted a shirambam that is an incredible it's one of the best kept secrets in the jewish world learning through the rambam people don't realize there's an unbelievable way of mastering yiddishka in a way that you can't get it from other safari because nobody besides the rambam categorized all of halakhah in an organized way even in the most systematic organized way there's a certain mastery of toyota that is available to everybody even people who can't become kim and shas and all the protein that's incredible those are very refreshing shirum for me they're constantly you know daily hummus we have by us it's called you know just learning the parachute with them of hardship is something that a lot of jews forgot about you know they go right away to deep stuff it's embarrassing i quote apostate in the parachute nobody could finish it nobody could finish it people stopped learning tanakh just the passion was like every jew knew it says should learn so just these types of then i have my own true mother excuse me enigla meaning and other elements of kabbalah i learned a lot of hasidic works kabbalistic works ashkaf mahshavik for merely all segments and i always try to explore and the truth is every year you learn it again and there's more and more and more the 5th once said something about the hummus and he compared the tanya to it and he said that he says the hummish is learned by the goddess of gdalum by the cotton-shaptan by the greatest of the grace greatest and by the smallest of the small and he says everybody understands something and nobody understands everything you know you read the story of light and his daughters you know you read the story of the arcade how many times can you read the story of the arcade 100 i could read it 100 million times and every time i'm like wow how did he do this what was he feeling like when he went with yitzhak and every year it's an it it's it's a new story every year it's a new story i just learned today uh a sikh of the laboratory in la cutie circus parishes explaining the of rambam that's the mitzvah to say goodbye to close the door to say borussia patron it's best to bring them in there calls it and he developed the whole to drama with all of his footnotes and it was just an eye-opening really he says that what the ram is telling you is that earthquake is not about feeding the guests that's the small part of ahnaz real st feel you're part of my home you're part of my family i appreciate you where do you see that and how you say goodbye you know when you stand up you say we just spent three hours berkship attorney you go to the door you take him outside i want to spend another few minutes with you it's hard for me to say goodbye the levia saying goodbye the ramen says call me shayna malava i didn't say goodbye i didn't escort you outside i became a murderer so the first would say because he could get killed in the street i said what about what about it in boca raton what about a muncie in a barbara park that you're not talking about the wilderness in every place the rabbit says kilo shaykh because when you make the guest feel that he was a burden it's a form of emotional murder you know this this type this this it's just my point is that arter is so infinite in every aspect of it and i think our world and the jewish world and our youth deserves to smell sniff and experience the taste of the infinite divine limitless richness of torah the and the premiers because that that mosaic that integration it changes lives it it uplifts the world do you ever learn just for yourself or it's always to give over to other people in other words is there a lemur that you say this is yeah most of my learning i learned from myself but as i'm learning from myself you know i i think i reflect i meditate and something comes i said this is the next year you know i i i opened up friday morning i'm just an example i love this facebook very much especially that i'm privileged because the swasamas is so cryptic and so concise most essays or classes or swarmless on this vasa but i don't think they really understood him because i think it's very hard to understand this facebook if you don't have a good background in siddhis and the bala tanya explained because i feel that i can understand it based on what i learned from the balatanya so i just opened this facebook you know he's so brief and so concise but he says a line hashem tells of ramavinu leave your land leave the birthplace leave your father come go to the land that i will show you. so rashid says why couldn't hashem just give him a destination you know just say where you going no ella or it's a record you know why what you don't forget maisha to put into ways or google maps where he has to go and let him go it has to be a mystery this was one line there just one line i don't know if last year i would have understood it this way or five years ago or ten years ago because you know you read things from your own vantage point right everything is also subjective we read things with our own eyes and our own mental state but he says that that hashem couldn't give him a destination because then it would be the opposite of the whole point of whatever it is not a geographical location only it's also it's an existential state can you give up living a life where you have to control and predict and expect everything and allow the infinity of life to navigate you open yourself up to the destiny that god has in store for you not to get stuck in what life has to look like i'm looking at this and i think you know how much psychological wisdom lay in these words for people today because everybody's life changed everybody rich poor influential simple everybody's life went through upheavals i'm not just talking about because of death and illness even people who thank god were safe during the corona but everything changed financially emotionally psychologically spiritually you know what happened with the youth over the last 18 20 months in terms of addiction in terms of mental challenges you know every family is now you guys you are rabbinic leader so you know what i'm saying very well and people need to be able to get comfort and strength and stability so if i get up shabbos at the drush and i start off like this you know there's a vart on the parsha i lost 90 percent of the crowd especially people who are emotionally sensitive they are what we call hsps you know highly sensitive people right but if i start off and i say you know everybody each one of us have had a dream of what our children are going to look like how much of that dream has come true in your life everybody is in because it happened in every single family everybody has that one two three four children you had a dream you know next year bhaktiveda right okay not rebecca next player yeshua at least or whatever it is the dream is not working out exactly that way to put it mildly everybody is in and the teenagers say you know what did you dream of your life how was your life working out and then i discussed this fast emas the security and confidence of never getting stuck in what life is supposed to look like but really opening yourself up to endless opportunities because that's the only way you will live the most meaningful life it's those experiences that you could not plan for you know they say a line there's two people who fail in life people who don't have a plan and people who stick to their plan you got to have a plan but the worst thing is when you stick to that plan so you got to take the plan throw it in the dustbin for that i can't be uptight for that i can't be egotistical for that i can be insecure i really have to open myself up ella audits and i just have to tell you that the emotional feedback as i'm talking from the people is just incredible always more from the women than the men as we all know because you know women just have that that touch for uh for ms and and god god graced me and i realized i have the greatest story for this last week died a man by the name of avraham jacobowitz you read about him he called himself eddie jaku he lived in sydney he was 101 years old he escaped from auschwitz was shot went back to auschwitz he escaped from a death march and hid in a ditch eating snails for six months lost his entire family he grew up in leipzig in germany he published his memoirs at the age of 100 and he titled it his book the happiest man on earth he titled himself i am the happiest man on earth and i asked him he lost his family he ends up with nothing he was in auschwitz he was beaten and tortured a real holocaust survivor he was 101 he died last tuesday volvo 101 years old he called himself the happiest man on earth the happiest man on earth and i told his story i read up on his story and i told his story and i said i don't know the secret you know we can only be in awe of such people and try to emulate him but i do know that he had to have his name was avraham and he had to have that code of avraham if he would have seen success in life as a life that's predictable and a life that you could control and you can figure out how it's going to go he would have been the most miserable miserable man on earth he had that that secret code that the first drew got the allah arizona so i'm just giving one example this was this last shabbos you know there was a huge group of people men and women and one of there was a bhaka there from waterbury waterbury wonderful waterbury yeshiva blessed yeshiva and he told me he says last time i sat at a shia for more than five minutes was many many many many years ago so i said what made you sit here and he said because it was real life it it it was authentic it was what's going on in my life and it was showing me of ramavinu comes to life you'll forgive me god comes to life you know alekim you can't live on a dead god we often live on you'll forgive me we live on a dead god we live in a dead either sky it's like just repeating we're like chimpanzees monkeys repeating a boy who left yiddish guide many years ago he's a musician very smart kid he told me he says i asked him why did you leave you have such a spiritual soul he said all we do in our system is we read recipe books i said what he says we all learn about what inspiration is supposed to look like put in a little baking powder if you don't have baking powder put in another egg if you don't have an egg put in almond milk if you don't have onion and then this rashi argues says don't use almond milk use soy milk says in a regular basis comes to marshawn says but the truth is that there's a whole different recipe he says and i always ask people can i experience any of these recipes can i actually does anybody get to eat the cheesecake or we only talk about recipes i have to say he was a teacher he taught me something don't talk about recipes give them the cheesecake give them the bapka okay i know in boca you're healthy give them the quinoa give them the celery give them the kale but give it to them everything but the kale you had me tell the kale so so that's exactly i think why you resonate so deeply is because you're speaking right to people's nashamahs and everybody knows why that you're incredibly sophisticated thinker and incredibly sophisticated speaker i want to pivot for a moment and thank you so much for all this time um to talk about as a sophisticated just leader i i just i just want to i just want to forgive my interruption there's also one more important thing and i think this is the beauty of our people and i try to humbly tune into that the jewish people are sick and tired of politics on all levels i don't just mean dirty filthy politics that too but people don't like of judaism that is claustrophobic that is allergic to certain people or certain movements that's based on indoctrination and cultish sentiments they just don't like it they don't like a judaism that feeds on hate divisiveness tribalism and petty fundamentalism that's not real it's not authentic the jewish people there most people are allergic to that so i know when i speak i teach i want to give them that flavor of a yiddish guy that is very real but also very pure and i have to say another just came to me another vote from the katsuka the gemara says in a revenge of base that when sri mahama gave us two takanas a riven khatsiris and the tilasi adayam yamaraja said when he made these two takanas a voice came out from the reborn when my son is wise hashem says i'm so happy it's the gospel episode what's the grace of aravind and the talisadaya and he said that some people this is in the safe is kaiden he says some people are very good with nutilacia their hands are always clean because they're aloof they're segregated you know they're hermits they're loners some people are arriving you know they're it's called social butterfly social animal they mix with everybody they're integrated they're people's people he says the s b a riven create an aerith be integrated love people spend time with him but natalia sadayam keep your hands pure don't allow yourself to get entangled in pettiness yiddish kite always has to be a reflection of insight of infinity the moment my tribalism my ego my nusach my halois my way my habits become the dominating factor rather than just the way i may do things people feel toxicity and they don't like it they will not they will not embrace it with real enthusiasm thank you for adding that it's a perfect it's a perfect transition actually to the follow-up question i wanted to ask so you want them well sophistication and at one point you were the editor-in-chief of the auger minor journal yourself and were exposed to journalism and understand what it means to navigate the world of politics politicians community to do it with nuance with sophistication and i want to not get lost with the examples but i want to talk about the principle because there's so much to learn from and i want to know your wisdom on this there was an event the jewish community had for then president trump and his re-election and you spoke in very glowing terms and and i'm curious that and i share with you the appreciation the recognition um for the good he did for israel for the jewish people the jewish community that was probably under expressed on the other hand there were parts of his personality as behavior as conduct which were complicated for torah jews to endorse associate with align with at best and maybe even should have condemned that worse so you know do you have regrets about the way that you spoke about him at that lunch do you wish there was more nuances there a lesson to learn and a coral area of that and i'm going really behind the bema here and i don't want to get myself in trouble or you um and i'm not comparing the two whatsoever you know but similarly when when rabashkin was released and and you embraced him so fully so also a role model for all of us of emunah he was incarcerated disproportionately clearly anti-semitism he lived through it with enormous ammuna that amuna is a model for us so much to learn but at the same time there was a reason he was incarcerated to begin with not everything was pure innocence and does the community lose that nuance if we don't ever express it that on the one hand we reject this part while we admire and embrace this part so in both of those circumstance was there a nuance that's missing is it important for us to communicate with nuance that we can simultaneously you know we live in this in this bifurcated world where you have to either it's hero or villain you know which box do you neatly fit in you're either the worst or the best and i live in a world i think you live in this world of nuance that they're parts we can admire whether other parts that we could be hyper highly critical of and and that nuance so in both of those cases would you amend do you still stand by the way that you spoke about them what can we learn from you about them right wonder wonderful and important question and challenging question so in terms of uh al-rishi russian when i introduced former president trump i don't know if you know how it came about but it may be interesting i gave a speech here in muncie it was a schwa it was a schwa shear and speech and i spoke about the importance of gratitude to every single person akara satova and i spoke about the gratitude that i failed the jewish community in israel and abroad owes to the president of the united states and one of the participants in the shir a man named laser shiner who's a well-known and great jewish philanthropist and a personal friend and the builder of our community here known as archaim in muncie heard his speech and he called he called the white house and he said he wants to make a lunch and thank president trump and show support and i didn't know about this but around two years later he calls me one day and he says you know your speech inspired me and we're having 400 people honoring trump and supporting him and i want you to introduce them since you gave that speech and you inspired me to do that so this is so i said great and i have to tell you uh the arab ephraim that i received some very harsh criticism very hard as you can imagine one person wrote me an email a jew will find you let's call him a very liberal and progressive jew he said i was your student for years i listened to you i learned from you i cannot trust you anymore you have desecrated the most basic values of judaism and ethics and humanity i can't believe that a rabbi and a person of your stature would do this you have disappointed me terribly i got such emails i did get such emails but i have to say i i wrote back respectfully and explained i explained my position i even published an article the next week and i think mish baka magazine explaining but i'll tell you what i told them i don't regret what i did for three reasons reason number one is the reborn shalom told moishe to show honor even to paris like covered malcolm even who was a heinous criminal he and his wife is evil show him honor why it's not because paris and achaev deserved honor they were brutal tyrants and sadists it's because the throne the position there's something called malchus it's respect for the country the king may be benign the king may be a heinous criminal and we pray for his for for him departure and pardoning every day but it's a respect for the for the country it's a respect for the people the king represents the people as i said kosher king we're talking about the seat of the president of the united states of america there's something called covered jamalhas that goes beyond this president or that president number one number two i said in this case i'm not glorifying somebody as a god and calling them impeccable and flawless but i am going to express my profoundest gratitude when i see somebody standing up to the bullies of the world who will delegitimize israel every single monday and thursday who warned that moving the embassy to jerusalem will become a third world war and he stood up to all of them who cancels the horrific deal that was giving the hitlers of our day 150 billion dollars to create a holocaust of six million jews not in five years in one day somebody to cancel that deal just to cancel the deal with the with the hitler's that holocaust survivors in our generation had to hear 75 years later they were going to wipe out 6 million jews in israel in one day they had to hear it auschwitz survivors just that the fact that he canceled that deal or canceled sending 300 million a year to the palestinian authority that went to the families of shaheeds of terrorists that we taxpayers money was paying people who stabbed jews dead in jerusalem we're paying the families to encourage these martyrs that there's going to be enough money to marry off their children muhammad islam this man canceled it i thought to myself as an individual jew i owe him gratitude doesn't mean i agree with his english grammar or syntax doesn't mean i believe in the way he gives over his speech as a presentation doesn't believe that doesn't mean he's not saddick doesn't mean that he doesn't struggle with his own demons and skeletons and flaws and has his challenges that i hope you know like me and everybody else he could repair one day so i thought that's extremely important point and therefore i was i was very proud of it and the third thing is i thought about one thing and one thing only that was my ultimate you know i also consulted some people before i took it but i thought about one thing and one thing only and that is as our grandmothers would say is it good for the jews is it good for israel meaning the day after the reception you know i'll do my thing there'll be pictures whatsapp clips will go around all over the place fine i'll have my moment of fame and criticism and you know life moves on afterwards right what happens the next week when the president of the united states feels such a glowing hakura satay from 400 people with yamakas so they're not bashful jews will it persuade him to create policies to cultivate policies that will help the security of our people amayoshev betsy in israel and around the world fight anti-semitism will ultimately bring goodness to the world and my conclusion was absolutely yes and i have to say for those who know that the weeks after this reception he has given speeches and allowed for policies to happen that were simply for the benefit of israel and for that i think um we we have to be you know grateful and thankful i also want to say one more thing this was just on a personal note i'm a little bit of a history buff i was standing behind stage with the president and he was flanked by two orthodox jews berkowitz a yeshiva graduate and his son-in-law one of them was a yamaka he came out to the audience and there were 400 jews everybody was wearing a yamaka and i literally shed a tear and i'll tell you why you may remo you know why when i saw the number 400 it just brought me back to october 1943 400 rabbis came to see president roosevelt including hydro maisha feinstein blazes silver avram kalmanovic great rabonum 400 to persuade him to do something to save european jury and what happened roosevelt walked out from the back door he didn't even want to meet these rabbis forget about disagreed with him he didn't even want to meet them this is a few days before jim kippur i believe october 43. and when i thought 75 years later there's a president of the united states speaking to 400 eating with yarmulkes flanked by two advisers who who celebrate and observe judaism i said to myself it wasn't just trump it was the moment of where jewish history is i was very grateful for that moment so i i understand the criticism i respond respectfully i do not i've learned in my life we don't worship people we don't worship people we worship god and god has no image we don't worship images we don't worship people but we're grateful to people and we see the good in people even if we see other sides in people you know i also learned from my rebbe one of the greatest lessons was my job is to accentuate the positive in every person so they should be encouraged to do more positive does that mean they have no negative does that mean they have no demons no i also have demons i also have skeletons and i can wake up every day and become a victim to my skeletons trust me i got a couple of skeletons in my closet you could speak to my mother-in-law and my therapist but it's a choice we all make every day and that's the choice i think we want to bring out in other people including politicians who we may have some beef with in this area or that area you know in terms of the second question lahavdil with my dear friend absalom i have to say two things first of all i think that there is an unfair statement about you know that there was a lot of unethical behavior but he didn't deserve 27 years now i think he may have made mistakes i'm not saying he didn't make mistakes i'm not saying that this business was wrong you know like boca raton synagogue is run you know maybe do with some what we call siddhis malka elements and so forth but fundamentally i would ask anybody who's really interested to study all the facts but to know the other side as well to know his side as well and really study it and we'll see that the levels even if there were mistakes and there were errors and i'm not turning saying his business was one of the most saintly perfected fashion the the sentence that was given to him was saturated with anti-semitism with bigotry and with horrible horrible true hatred and therefore i feel that even if somebody and it's important to acknowledge mistakes and not to glorify every behavior of every person but shalom he may have made some mistakes but fundamentally you're dealing with an heirloom person an honest person an heirloom i'm not just saying a hasidis a guy who likes forbranging and dancing that too but you talk about an heirloom person who may have made mistakes and i know some mistakes that he made and the the level of sentencing was a completely different level and i feel felt that the dancing of cla of so many jews when he came out of prison there's no hashaj that people are going to learn from that oh you're supposed to and break the law i did not feel that that way i feel that claudia's soul has an immune system and it's healthier than we imagine it's healthier than when i just want to tell this it's an interesting thing star monizer of art people don't know this he told me that it was the 1940s the lobster rebel was not yet rebbe yet his father-in-law was alive he came into the base madrid in 770. there was a baka learning player yeshua his name was david edelman he was then a rabbi in springfield he passed away a few years ago rabbi david adelman he told us to me he said i was learning yeshua i asked him which masek they didn't remember early 1940s and the laboratory ever walks in he sees he's learning pranayashua he starts him very very well or shining him too he starts schmoozing with him on the planet yeshua okay it was a nice sword and the rebbe says do you know that this pineal sure wrote others for him he says i didn't know he says do you know the names of the others foreign but you know nobody knows about them they were not nascar bill but footsies israel they just did not circulate he says the pineal yeshua did every yeshiva yeshua some people like pena show or more you know she was a certain type of fighter some people love it and some people find it very difficult but it's but you know pleasure was the penalty you're sure right you can't ignore the issue yeshua became entrenched by by alien he says why this safer not others rabbi edelman foreign me he said lebron should have told him he said just like individual jews have ruach some jews he says claudius she told me the words claudius we have an immune system and i feel that moment was a moment of collective ruach kurdish that they felt it was something of a miracle that happened zois hanukkah when he came out that was a display of genuine emunah and a victory against against anti-semitism i'll just mention that there were five former das and there was alan dershowitz who's not suspected in being an ultra orthodox chabad satmar or lakewood jew or even a modern orthodox yeshiva university graduate alan dershowitz with alan dershowitz right and he too felt and wrote together with five former da's that this was really a crime that was done to him so i just think if we really want to be nuanced um we should be done everybody looks close but especially in this case we should study the case much more and we'll see that uh sinister portion i want to thank you for being honest on both of those questions i know they're not easy topics and i'm sorry for whatever pain the certainly the first one the criticism that you took caused and even in the second one i don't want to harp on your your explanation and i never doubted the the um the fact that the sentencing was exaggerated because of anti-semitism or that sidcos of of rabashkin in terms of the amuna he displayed i guess my only concern or what i personally felt might be missing and there's still an opportunity for as we see a segment of the torah community who are not honest in their business practices and headlines of them getting indicted arrested going to jail who better has a platform for 99 percent of their speech to be aleph based gimmel i'm going to be talking and 1 and by the way fellow jews let me tell you it's important we're honest integrity this is who we are this is what we're made of this is what the world is watching and i didn't i didn't see it maybe i didn't read everything listen to everything i didn't see it one percent i didn't see it i didn't see a 0.01 and i think that our children are watching many are watching and they're no one who could make the the argument more compelling to say i was mistreated i'm mostly heirlock this is you know and doesn't have to address it personally but we and he could could really i think inspire people um to use that experience that that's only the reason that i that i asked that fair listen it's extremely important to teach all of our children everyone in all of our yeshivas and all of our communities about you know the utmost necessity to be able to behave in the most ethical way being adam between ourselves and between us and the wider world and as the rambam famously says in hilcha's day is it's one of the greatest forms of kids hashem when the rambam describes over there the jew who's masayo matanebe it literally creates uh you become a beacon of light and inspiration for so many non-jews it changes the world when jews become a light unto the nations being adam and adam it literally changes the world and that's our role in the world i think we have to you know there is a little challenge also we have to remember i'm saying this completely in an isolated from an isolated perspective not connected to our previous conversation that you know i asked a person once i said he was telling me uh a cute vert you know ela so you come from the russian literature dish you say did i and today grey cup is a swindler they say dre but by others or some polish and hungarians they say for everything did i so he says you know you lose all the money and i said you know listen jews have been suffering from 2 000 years of anti-semitism and in the old country they felt that you know if you're if you sometimes say things as they are you're going to go out without anything just like people felt with child molestation you're not going to go to the police because it's misery right you're being moisture the jubilee and it'll be hung on the gallows but that's not the case that's not the case the fact is we as a community could not deal with child abuse on our own we tried it didn't happen it failed miserably time and time again with the poor victims suffering in silence and anguish so jews also have to remember that we're living today in a world where even though there's a lot of anti-semitism the opportunity to become a voice in the moral conversation of mankind is a gift that god gave the jewish people in our century that is unprecedented and when instead of becoming that moral voice and moral presence and moral beacon of light instead we retreat into a cocoon and we forfeit a historic opportunity of enlightening and elevating the landscape of human civilization we are forfeiting our unique mission in history i think this is very important for for jews to understand so it's not just about a question of how i run my business how i run my business and how people see it and how i relate to people in the subway and on the bus stops and in the street and in the supermarket the way i hold the door for another person or don't it literally has an impact beyond anybody's imagination people who walk around with a consciousness that i want to be an ambassador of love light hope truth authenticity avas hashem israel morality they influence people beyond their imagination and it's a great place to leave it with that inspiration that motivation and that charge to us you've been very generous with your time and we want to thank you thank you for joining us and behind the bhima thank you for letting us be inspired and even be a little uncomfortable and to share your wisdom with us hashem should give you a strength a continued uh foreshadowing will hear that cough you should feel much better so that you can proclaim the sophisticated messages of torah loud and clear in a way that mamish penetrates right to the neshama thank you for all that you do thank you can i end off with a little story please of course for me this was very moving you know a few months ago the jewish world lost akhtatwarsky rip shia he was known about yeshua ashraf shiat or in the secular world known as dr abraham twersky who was a psychiatrist a hasidic rabbi and one of the innovators in the field of recovery of addiction created a recovery center in pittsburgh in the early 1960s so this is just it was so moving because it teaches you the zeitgeist i don't know do we still use that word the zeitgeist of our times he had a priest who was in his recovery center and he recovered but he went back to his church and easter was coming and there's a big tradition by easter you drink wine but he's an alcoholic in recovery dr twersky said no wine no wine you have a disease if you drink wine you're going to go back into addiction grape juice he said we don't drink grape juice on easter he said you drink grape juice in it well he has to bring it to the superiors dr torski described it it went to the bishops it went to the cardinals it went to the vatican they called dr torski what's the source that the prison realized he says you got the idea from us we drink four cups of wine on pesach okay those who can drink wine alcoholics or people who can't drink wine not everybody agrees but there's many rabbinic dispensations they can drink grape juice who the moisture feinstein didn't approve of grape juice he said the brisker of and the chabinharov they are mata grapes and you know what the vatican accepted it that easter he can drink grape juice and not wine based on the brisker of shibinerov and the khazanesh and i thought to myself ribonu look at this the taz rabdavid segal writing in the 17th century in the says you should use red wine for pesach based and what does the task say not in our times no red wine please nothing read the balatani 18th century in our days no red wine because the blood libels the jews remember using christian blood for pesach no red wine white wine that's the sixth seventeenth and eighteenth century the commentators of the the 20th and 21st century a hasidic psychiatrist is quoted by the bishop and the cardinal and the vatican for a hectare that a priest who's an alcoholic could use grape juice based on the khazonus the brisker of and the chibinero look where history the the arrow of history is facing so this is an opportunity for the jewish people his irish irish to become moral leaders and influences of a world waiting for gula thank you this this was only the beginning of a conversation we can't wait to continue it so thank you again so very much have a wonderful day it's been an honor rabbi moskowitz or by goldberg thank you anatsloha [Music] it did because we continued a conversation with diy and uh we'll have to share that at some other point in some other context but what about that that long conversation stimulating i don't think you even realize we realized how much time had passed because it's just so so it captures you um what stood out for you every part of it no i really mean that every part of it was uh was fantastic and something to learn from you know for me personally probably the part that resonated the most and which was um news to me really was the description of what it was like as the transmission of the rebbi sijos and for me that's so juicy on so many levels first of all just the the notion of when he described the 3d yantif how they would memorize 10 20 30 hours of shirum and then have to stay up all night afterwards and how he had what he called post shabbos stress disorder because he was so worried about communicating in and coming you know and making sure that every idea came through properly i thought the fact that they had a debate about what the rebbe actually said and what the rebbe actually meant and how they would record it for posterity i think was fascinating also because for anyone who's ever learned gemara or wondered about the transmission of torus baupe to me that was just a vivid imagery of what it must have been like when you sat in the shiram of rav and shmuel nabai in rava and how sometimes you have a mahloka's two generations later it's you know after a three day auntie they debated what the rev amend and now you got a sense for how the transmission of mesora took place so for me that was fantastic for me the overall reverence that they had an understanding of the historic nature of what they were listening to i found very inspiring and again something that i don't necessarily know that i appreciated or ever was in tune to maybe for the chabad people who are listening to us they're much more in tune for that but for someone who didn't grow up in chabad and wasn't really exposed to them growing up it was just such a fascinating conversation something i completely overlooked that you and i benefit from but that he was on the front lines for when we talked about behind the bema that was behind the bema it was going through stories that people never would have appreciated never were in tune to and we gave them a really a front row inside seat to it there's not a lot of people you could go behind the bema about the rebbe trump rabashkin who every thought is communicated through the filter of advartora where he didn't prepare he didn't know what we were going to ask and he didn't prepare the reitora it's simply how he thinks his vocabulary is the vocabulary of using torah to communicate ideas he's just super uber impressive i love what you just said i hadn't thought about it in that way the fact that tambien on mote shabas could debate what he said is such an insight into if he's still alive and in the other room and you're debating what he just said then imagine like you said generations or years later we understand why in the gemara no i remember he said it this way i remember he said it that way you see the same thing with russell avec with the rav where different taught me to remember him saying different things maybe two different tommy demi said different things where they remember it differently and it does give us that insight i was moved very much by his conversation with with steins out that's all and i love first of all we were privileged to have stein's outs in our community he's an individual we would love to have go behind the bema if we could have um but he was that sharp sharp personality who didn't hold back and i love that i love that you and i feel that sometimes also where there are certain divrei torah that we have or certain canned speeches or certain we take that vort to that story to that quote to that research you press play and you're capable even of thinking about something else while you're speaking right i press play i'm right now very with a lot of animation sharing this idea well my mind is oh what else did i have to do today and i gotta do it because that and that's an enormous risk that you become a cheap imitation of yourself that you essentially become a fraud are you really still learning are you used to growing what an incredible insight of steins else then not only did he give it to rafa why but through why he's now shared that with all of us as well you know i will say there's a flip side to that because you definitely have your taglines and i know people poke fun of you you know become the best version of yourself certain taglines that you've said over and over again but to me that's a beautiful thing in other words our community knows that goldberg's always going to hammer us over the head with become the best version of ourselves and so you find different vort luck to say it in and different ways to say it but oftentimes you'll come back to the idea and the beauty of that is though is it really drives home a point and again you find different avenues to communicate it but it makes it very clear that this is what we stand for we're always looking to be the best version of ourselves means you don't have to conform to other people it means there's no one cookie cutter option in other words there are many nuances within that statement but you'll hammer us over the head with that over and over and over again i'll tell you an interesting theme that's emerged between last week and this week professor with wise and and now revoir jacobson you asked a similar question to both which is a great question we should one day compose a list of questions like tim ferriss who asks the titans of industry all the same questions um but you ask them both about the sound bite in our generation and does that cheapen or distort or distill the message and they both unapologetically said the same thing they said when you have something to say you have something you want to develop you have a sophisticated message to share you do not have to give in to this generation's intolerance for anything more than a sound bite so yes you could also condense it and reduce it you could also publish it and share it in a sound byte size but he's unapologetic first of all if you look at what time it is and the length of this then you know that he and we are unapologetic for how long it takes to develop ideas but she also they're coming from very different places in different worlds and different arenas in which they communicate but both are unapologetic and they're not trying to conform to the collective add of our generation and they are also encouraging us to have confidence in people that even with add whether diagnosed or or not all of us to a degree have a collective version of it that's not to at all diminish a diagnosed version of it but they're not apologetic and they're not conforming and they have enough confidence and belief that if we're stimulating enough and if we evolve enough and if it resonates enough then people will listen a reminder for special raffle for incredible swag if you all you have to do is review think about it as reviewing some more people here of why why reward is amazing and i know rabbi moscow do you agree with me there were parts or all that conversation which are really really worthwhile to listen to as it is with our guests each and every week when you review it helps us get the word out more leave a review it'll enable us to spread the message you'll be entered into a raffle to win swag till next time our dear friends stay happy stay healthy this class is brought to you by the yeshiva.net please help us continue the classes make even a small contribution at www.theyoshiva.net donate