Rabbi YY Jacobson Interviewed by Rabbi Shais Taub: Reb Yoel Kahn and the World of Chabad Chassidus

the yeshiva.net the taktel family close friends also asked me if we can dedicate for the complete recovery reforest lama for their father schlemmer feigl the floor is yours okay so we'll officially uh begin uh tonight we're going to be speaking about rabio khan oliver shalom feels awkward using uh those words and uh we're going to do this in an interview format ravi jacobson has generously volunteered his time to share some of his thoughts and insights personal reflections about a a figure who has uh whose reputation has i would say it's safe to say that although maybe not many people can say not many people not as many people can say they knew rabbi on a personal level although many many did uh all over the world people know of his his reputation and i think are fascinated by his life and his accomplishments and would love to know more about rabiot so and and i just want to mention in case anybody's wondering about how we're how i'm using the the the the word or the the title or lack thereof rebel you know there's a tesef denadius there are different titles of rabbis there's rav there's rabbi there's higher than them all is just using the name that ever once explained that for a hassan it's even more so because a title could get in the way of the most important thing that the homicides the whole existence and identity of a hosted is his and if you give the hassan a title he could cause a blockage god forbid between the khasid and and the rabbit so rabio is a true hasid um and without further ado i'm going to i guess kick this off with the with a question uh and now after i said everything about god tell us a little bit about who was rabiot what was his life what was he about i think the it's obviously a very intense and serious question and how does anybody summarize anyone's life especially a person of extraordinary intellectual and spiritual caliber but just today i had a thought and that is i once heard from rabbi ale at a class that he gave he shared a story that he himself heard from the lubavitcher 1964 that she was talking this is a story that ebb said which means it wasn't part of the actual sith of the actual talk that was printed later in the success a very famous talk of the rebbe about the the theme the differences of the theme of rabbi akiva's life versus rabbi schmall's life and how it's reflected in many arguments throughout gemara between rabbi small rabbi akiva who lived at the end of the second basamikadesh but in that entire very profound and extraordinary presentation of the rebbe they'd ever throw in a story a personal experience that he had when he was in paris the rebel lived in paris from 1933 to and he shared a story and he said i once visited which by the way just for the record was extremely rare in 40 more than 40 years of the laboratory of his presentations you can count on maybe uh two hands maybe three personal stories that he shared about himself extremely rare for whatever reason but then he shared a story he said when i was living in paris i went to visit a polisher of a rabbi in paris who came from poland the rebbe said he was which means a really authentic halachic authority and he said in yiddish and it seems like he was a great scholar at goodki can't learn which did happen to give such a compliment on somebody obviously he was a great talmud hachem a great god and the rabbi describes this first-hand experience says a woman walks into this ravi he didn't say her name he would very rarely mention her name so that wasn't surprising a woman walks into this rabbi this great grove with a chicken and she wants to know if the chicken is kosher or not kosher because of a certain question about the chicken and the rebels says he watches how this rav starts examining the chicken and then starts giving the wife the word the woman a lecture there ever said he says the taz who was one of the great commentators on the shulhanoruch rabbi david segel the tourism says this about the chicken but wait the shock that the coyote who was another great commentator he argues with him so it's not so simple to say that it's coached like the taos so the woman hears this she says rabbi ich kenneth and i'm liking in temple of the nisht can i throw the chicken into the pot or not so he says wait wait there's a heroin after the shock later commentators who also argue with the taos and in this area the laws like that like the other commentators so it's not so simple what to do with this chicken the rabbit didn't say what the end of the story was but he said as follows he said this rabbi was not trying to impress this woman because she didn't know who the shah was she didn't know who the taj was so his knowledge and these books would not impress her rather he says this rav he lived in the world of torah he lived in the world of tyra so when he saw a chicken he instinctively went off on a tangent about the task because that was his life for him the chicken for the woman the chicken she came with the chicken it was a question of how she's going to feed her family that night for him the chicken was just an opportunity to explore the great world of jewish law of the shakh thousand in yeredaya and there ever used this story to explain how rebe akiva lived and this story came to me today as i was thinking about rabbi yo the favorite topic of rabio khan in years and years and years of listening to his sitting at his feet listening to his classes lectures and presentations his favorite topic was the revolution of the balshemptiv and the altareba the balatanya and one of the greatest ideas in siddhas one of the greatest ideas in judaism but in siddhis it became a central theme and that is anoid mulvada that there is absolute oneness there's absolute harmony everything is part of divine infinity and the bureau would explain it and elaborate it and prove it and explain the ramifications and ask the questions and the contradictions and discuss it and explore it and i realized today that really whenever i walked into a class of rabiola had a conversation with him it was just like that rabbi the whole chicken was just an opportunity to be able to explore taina and i think for the beauty of the whole world was just an opportunity to be able to explain hashem to be able to explain the oneness of god in the world this was a person who for 90 years 91 years really lived in a transcendent universe a universe of torah a universe of jewish spirituality to its uh in its full grandeur and harmony completely completely sublime and aloof with all of the advantages and some disadvantages to it as we may discuss but the one reality was when you walked into a class and i would sometimes come from situations and circumstances that were of a very different nature you like were introduced into the world where the balshemptiv and the altered reigned and with the idea of enord mulvader of the oneness of god was pulsating with uh ever increasing vibrancy so i'm hearing from you that a a biography in the conventional sense probably wouldn't do justice to really capture rabiot rather we should probably speak about the world that he lived in i guess the world he breathed i'll tell you a story it was so i saw this with my own eyes and it was like a surreal moment he would give us classes almost every day he would teach us for years about a bunch of boys yeshiva boys we we uh ate up his classes we we we drank them with great thirst uh it put me on my feet in many ways personally in terms of understanding so much about yiddishkai tantara and halakha and premier satyara and the world of siddhis and the world of ashkaf of the world of makshava i sat for years and heard classes from it and asked questions and got answers and sometimes got screamed at and got insulted and got complimented the whole gamut once debbie liked to give metaphors to explain things he would always say a martial a metaphor now his metaphors i have to say were abstract they were not metaphors that rabbi chase you or or yours truly or others given their lectures and classes his metaphors needed metaphors and those metaphors also needed metaphors which reminds us of course of the great teaching he would always quote from the rebel back to the ultra level back to the market that it says that shloima right communicated with 3 000 metaphors so most people think it means he had 3 000 jokes for every class and everybody knows 3 000 jokes is too much a joke two jokes three jokes not three thousand jokes and metaphors and stories so the margaret and al tureb explained that the ideas were so deep that every idea needed a metaphor which needed another metaphor all the way to three thousands erbil would like to give metaphors in his own way and style once he was giving a class and there was a boy there a bachelor a friend of mine who was a alex how do you say the letters in english in this context yeah he was like a little comedian he liked jokes now i'm sure that was your friend [Laughter] yeah he was actually a friend he moved on to life he had developed an interesting career but in any case he liked asking questions that sometimes rubio got a kick out of and sometimes he got upset about it and it was the middle of teaching and he says so sometimes there's a person who's overtaken with taiwas oil which means a person who's overwhelmed with addictions and cravings towards materialistic pursuits and objects and foods etc so this boy throws out a question he says i'm marshall can you give us a metaphor if you don't say a jew who's overwhelmed with addictions and cravings to you and me we don't need metaphors for that you don't need metaphors you need metaphors for other types of things not for that right but this boy wanted you know and neither she's called rayson he liked to make it lebadek to instigate the teacher so he says a marshall give a metaphor of a jew who's overtaken with physical cravings i kid you not rubio goes into a meditation he needs a metaphor so he puts his hand on his forehead oh sorry whoever is watching he puts his on this foot start sipping the coffee which means you need even more meditation and concentration one sip another sip another those days they would smoke okay till he quit the doctor told him he has to stop secret but there was a lot of smoking a few puffs which means this is really deep stuff and then he comes back and he says yeah i got it he got a metaphor and he says i'm going to quote him he says le marshall a hot lib chocolat somebody who loves chocolate this was the metaphor he found for somebody who's overtaken by worthiness now for us this was very funny but it was such a innocent and spiritual moment to be able to sit in the 19th and 20th century with a jew who lived in america for uh more than a half a century probably did not know the telephone number of his own home and he literally lived and breathed in the world of enoid mulvaney in the world of infinity in the world of the divine in the world of turin in the world of siddhis but with a brilliant mind and an extraordinary ability to explain and articulate to people who were serious and interested and in that sense it was really a not just a breath of fresh air but a breath and a meal of transcendent ear of transcendent truth that he spoke about like i would speak about the apples and the oranges and the ice cream on the table i would like to hear particularly because you have some personal experience and interaction with w in this uh framework people are fascinated there was a new york times obituary which came out recently and it focused on this a little bit i think people are trying to wrap their heads around it but it just it's so incomparable to anything any frame of reference that's out there anywhere else in the world can you speak about the transmission of the rather's teachings the system of hazara which ruby oil was was the leader and the at the forefront of he was the the the heiser the chief oral scribe i think a lot of people even who have heard about the system aren't really familiar with how it works and with raviol's role in that system just bring us into that world a little bit sure very very intense world very fascinating world and really a very extraordinary world just to describe to you a scene that will just give you the context and then we'll we'll discuss the history of it it's torah i think 1990 maybe 91. i was a yeshiva student and i had the privilege of being on the team of khaizrim of the oral scribes in the last years of the rebels presentations my brother my older brother absimon was there from the 70s helping rabioil and another group of people and he brought me in later in the late 80s so this is i think 90 or 91. the rebel with fabregan simcha stir at night before the dancing before hakophas nine o'clock in the evening after my roof there was a long fermenting and a very deep fabrian which means very loaded intellectually stimulating brilliant profound uh talks of the reb on the night of simchaster only one o'clock in the morning with the hakafus with the dancing start most people they do the covers from eight to nine you know ten o'clock here in bed but but one o'clock he would start the dancing the dancing but remember the the fabregan is gonna be forgotten somebody is responsible to memorize it and here you have to understand most of the rebbe's presentations like all of the khabad rabbis were on shabbos and yamtif no recording devices obviously were permitted because of shabbos so everything had to be memorized and later transcribed who would do this there ever didn't give a five-minute speech that ebber could speak for three hours four hours there were times that he went i'm not exaggerating for 12 hours i heard this from a bail himself in the earlier years even in my years there were times whenever when seven hours eight hours but three hours four hours five hours this was natural during yum tif there could be four fabrians so you have to remember 10 20 hours of talks over a few days okay so here's the scene the dancing ends it's four in the morning everybody is beyond exhausted gabriel is already an elderly man we go to somebody's house the house of repsolum charitanov on crown street because you can't do khazarian 770. there's 5 000 people dancing nobody's nobody's gonna listen to a two-hour presentation better be el ca it's four in the morning maybe six people sitting up sean cortana's house with some sponge cake and he just begins four o'clock in the morning to repeat and really capture in words everything he and we heard from the rebbe and that went till after dawn break when everybody went to sleep and then came back the next morning for darwining hakufas again and then another fabrian hysteria in the evening and if it was shabbos it was a second one and then a third one and a fourth one and really this was just the moment as a yeshiva student i was sitting there and marveling at the phenomenon you know at four o'clock in the morning he was so completely dedicated to make sure that all of the extraordinary profound ideas that there ever shared that somehow would never be forgotten and that year he went through the 17 verses of atares explaining each one very profoundly and it was all transcribed it wasn't forgotten so really this is something that occurred from day one of the altered days the balatanya whose own brother would listen to every discourse he said then it was also weekdays there was no tape recorders in the 1700s and would transcribe it from this we have the magnum opuses of the altareb and the whole set of my murray admiral zach in the discourses of rabbi is written by his brother by two of his sons by his grandson by a great hostage of pimples raises this was a team of scribes who were transcribed whatever they heard this continued throughout the generations divine providence had it that a young 20 year old yoil khan born in moscow relocated to israel at the age of three or four years old happens to in 1950 embark on a voyage from israel to new york to go learn at the feet of the previous the sixth laboratory who sadly passes away one day before rabiot got onto that boat but he didn't even know about the death of the rebel because the news didn't travel fast at the time it's 1950. he comes to new york and he finds out that the laboratory of the sixth laboratory ever passed away it's the seventh rabbit the rebel who was the son-in-law of the previous rubber who gives advice to the oil that if the rabbit told them to come he probably knew what's going to happen he certainly knew what's going to happen he should stay and he stayed and from the first day that the laboratory assumed the leadership of chabad he had there this young 20 year old who had a very key mind he was a great great what you would call a gun which means he had a a keen ability to understand and grasp and memorize and transcribe and articulate and explain and literally from day one of the laboratory ever presenting rabbi oil stood there and served as the chief oral scribe memorizer and transcriber of these talks for the next 42 years and you have to understand that the rebbe spoke not ever in the early years not every shabbos sometimes once a month twice a month three times a month all over the holidays rabi oil i think in 42 years missed two gatherings of the ever sim caster 62 and shabbos akiv this week 1977. from my surprise 1950 till 1992. it was a surprise he didn't know there was going to be a thumbs up he didn't know he asked if he can go away for shabbos he and rabbi label groener the unforgettable secretary of the rebbe who was taken last year of pesach and corrupt beginning of corona they asked arab if they can go away for shabbos tiartikala a special gathering of learning a whole shabbos in camp gangna stroll in parksville new york uh created in 1974 by rabbi avraham shemtiv zulzangazoon and astradab if he can go so the rabbis said he should go bashar tayvo muslachus go with great success shabbos did never decided to hold the fabregan that was the one of two fabregans out of all the years 1950 to 1992 that abhyol khan missed imagine every other one he was there beginning to end and dedicated to memorizing it grasping it transcribing it and sharing it okay i i want to ask you to explain a little bit more because like i said this is a very foreign concept to most of us you've conveyed the stamina like just simply the physical stamina involved the mental stamina the concentration the focus involved in memorizing pretty much verbatim hours and hours and hours of of teachings and and also the the depth required because it's not just memorizing the words it's understanding what the rabbit was saying i think there's a piece here that needs to be filled in a little bit more you know there's being a hyzer and there's being one who repeats that of his teachings and one who a transcription isn't just a tape recorder transcription talk to us a little bit about the art of creating a proper transcript a proper hanoka as it's called wow good question chase you're making me think okay so i think the first thing i would like to say is sometimes i read or hear that the oil had a photographic memory it's not true the bill did not have a photographic memory people think he was like a tape recorder he stood there you have a physical taper couldn't have a human tape recorder and the words of the rabbit just went into the tape record and then he repeated it like a type record it's completely not true it has nothing to do that's not what happened he was not he didn't have a photographic memory his colleagues his younger colleagues didn't have photographic memories at least as far as i know and in fact the photographic memory would not do the job and this is what people have to understand the rebbe's talks were extremely extremely profound and extraordinary in the in two aspects quantity and quality you see a person is giving a class in a halache in the code of jewish law in a rashi in a piece of rambam in a black gemara in a talking about a story a minig a custom and you stick to your topic the rebbe's talks were a mosaic and a tapestry of literally every type of stream of judaism kabbalah neglect philosophy theology philosophy psychology current events hasidic in hasidic psychology and and personal internalization and then he can also mix in a little science and a little math and a little physics and of course contemporary events of what's going on in the world in the world of education the world of youth and american youth in israel or wherever it is and all this could come together in an hour talk an hour and a half talk a 40-minute talk quoting from everywhere without notes can quote the vilna gone can quote uh noida bihu can quote of course aramba marashi zoya the writings of thyrizal and everything part of the jewish body of of of knowledge from moshe from sinai until the rebels own generation so first of all and and he would go from topic to topic item to item so this is simply in the quantity and the quality the depth of it and the profundity of it and the originality of it and this can happen for hours and every fabregan and and you have to understand that did not tell a story for half an hour he barely told stories or anecdotes or jokes these were ideas and very serious the ibuyl was gifted with the ability to understand the rebbe's words he had also a great knowledge of the sources so that even if he didn't know that particular source he can usually follow or at least research it later to understand most importantly there ever developed a style an approach that was extremely profound but you had to understand the sources and then see his approach the oil had that ability to what's called in yiddish he was once sharing with the scribes he once said that you know people would mix into his hazara constantly and correct them he would say good good you're meaning in the rebels talks there were two parts there was the theme of the talk the beginning the middle the end the theme what's the theme what's the point what's the key essence what am i trying to convey and the ultimate lesson and relevance but throughout that journey there ever stopped at a lot of exits here he would throw in a story here he would discuss something in contemporary life here he would give a view about something that came up as a tangent suddenly he would discuss education which had to do with one of the themes but these were all exits so to speak there ever took he would explain a gemara he would explain a miami he would give an example he would give an illustration now each one of those pieces was incredibly rich but very many people once went off on his tangent they went with him and they didn't he wouldn't say okay now let's go back he did that maybe ten times he would say atkad my mohammed this was a parenthesis let's go back but he would really not do that rabbi oil had that ability to be able to happen to understand the niku de fisa now the rebbe sometimes would ask questions for a long time the answer was very brief very concise so you also have to grasp that and understand that so that was even just the repeating it wasn't repeating like a tape recorder you had to really get the theme the build up he got the build up very very well and he let that he got the flow they never had an incredible incredible flow and he knew this is a parenthesis this is a brackets this is not a parenthesis he also once shared with his team privately he said that the rebbe's mind works so fast that sometimes what the rebbe was supposed to say in 20 minutes he said now because siddhis we have a lot about simpson the teacher has to condense the infinity into very finite terms but sometimes the teacher for whatever reason doesn't do that so sometimes derebba whose mind was working so fast says something now that really belongs at the end of the talk but he said it now so it's so easy to get confused if you all had that ability for that structure yeah okay so what you were saying is a tape recorder wouldn't have done the job in other words no if you would have just taken a transcript you wouldn't have the the like that you were referring to what's a parenthesis what's a brackets where do you break a paragraph how do you take a piece that's really from 20 minutes later and transpose it to where it belongs speak to us about that that art of being an editor structuring it and and bringing the hanok the transcript the real transcript not the tape recorder transcript but the the properly edited transcript to to its final form yeah incredibly incredibly uh powerful and difficult and of course very rewarding work because as i said the richness in terms of quantity of broadness was very very fulfilling and rewarding the depth of the rebbe's teachings revolutionary and also refreshing to the soul and they spoke to the real concerns and anxieties of of people today in the rebels times but you needed the rebel was a very systematic thinker ruby oil had a systematic mind one of the things i think that really captured for him what was very i think meaningful for him was the rebbe's systematic mind was extraordinary the people know that you know as an outreach activist and as a global leader and as a great lover of israel etc all true but remember really years before he became a leader his ability of systematic thinking of categorization of putting everything in its right category in its right context and then also seeing the universal unity of it this type of incredible system of individual and collective together of infinity and finite of heaven and earth was something that very deeply appreciated because it was like the full gamut of of the universe and of the judaism's universe that both focuses on the collective and the individual the finite and the infinite the body and the soul heaven and earth so all of this you had to understand but you also had to see the structure so taking the rebbe's words and putting it down on paper required a tremendous amount of learning focus thinking rethinking arguments disputes counter arguments sometimes screaming what did he mean no he didn't mean this going back to the sources and then presenting a final product the full picture which has questions attempts to answer the questions which are refuted a first answer which is refuted the final answer a proof to the answer an explanation to the answer the spiritual dimension of the answer and then the psychological emotional and practical relevance of the answer now i always tell people which rabio was the main editor of the coding success for many years are called locute which means the gatherings of talks but it's not the talk the way they ever said it that's why i always tell people listen to the tapes because each one has an advantage when you listen to the rebels talking in yiddish the original you'll hear humor jokes once in a while tears the rebel will start crying he'll tell stories not often but you'll hear the richness of his own soul coming out you will not get that in the written word you'll get some of it anonymous obviously he put a soul into it but you can't get it in the written word the way you got it when you heard it live or you can hear it today on mp3 or watch it on video on the other hand in the written word you'll have a very clear defined structure but it will delete most of the things that he said in parentheses in their hagaf and so people this there's a unique richness in each one and as they say i i want to interrupt you for a second because a lot of people might not realize we're speaking about this body of work sort of like almost as a monolith the transcribed talks of the laboratory but it's not so simple because first of all there are sirs and there are my modern we have to speak about those as as independent genres but also i think first what i'd like to hear about more people might not realize there are the transcripts the hanakas bilti muga which were not edited by the rabbit and then you mentioned look and there's also uh my mother molokat which the rabbit reviewed and there was a process of review where the supervised and and essentially gave um authorization to a final to a final edit so i i think that process is something fascinating that people would like to hear about so very very briefly and if you're interested in this tune in because you'll get here at least a general picture and a journey of a thousand uh miles begins with one step teachings and ideas were conveyed most of them were not conveyed i just want to tell you the rabbi by nature was extremely introverted he did not like to communicate he did not like to speak i saw this over and over again he would start a fabrian he was always uncomfortable in his chair and they never told this to people it's against his nature so most of it stayed inside it was obvious but that which was conveyed was conveyed in various mediums the first was private journals and diaries which were only discovered after his passing in 1994. they're published today as rashemas from the 1920s 1930s 1940s the next medium was letters igris kaidish the river wrote tens of thousands of letters in yiddish in english in hebrew and in russian and a few in other languages tens of thousands of letters my assumption is close to a hundred thousand letters this is before computers and certainly before internet okay and you're talking about just in english there's probably more than twenty or thirty thousand letters just in english did you know that you're saying that are out there not they're published no that are unfortunately not out there yet in english not out there yet we have out there meaning they exist in the world meaning not yet yes yes somebody told me 18 000 in english that they have and then there's probably a few thousand they don't have so then there's that whole world of letters with shimmers letters this obviously doesn't have to do with the word of ruby oil kano was durability letters he worked with the secretaries and his own private journals obviously he wrote himself that was a second medium there was a third medium and that is some of the writings and essays he published on his own not many but there are a few there was a magazine called kovitz libovich in the 1940s that ever published there are a few essays that are till today incredible just incredible pieces of work if you want to know about tris sim the resurrection of the dead and who's going to stand up and who's not the rebel's essay on it is just it's just an essay he wrote in the 1940s similar essays he wrote about different topics in halakha in kabbalah in jewish philosophy and a few things that he published the haggadah with unbelievable commentary rabbi zeven once wrote if i was not afraid of the hasidim i would say that this is a scientific scientific work of the highest level that's what is of zev who was a brilliant brilliant writer and editor wrote once in israel but in any case these words which is another work compilations of his father-in-law's teachings and sayings and writings and then talk about this and then we have the last two called sikhis and my mara sikkis and my martian sikhs are what you would say public sermons the word sermons is not really the best word public presentations or talks my maryam are hasidic discourses built on the hasidic discourses of the six predecessors of chabad beginning with the altar mittally rabbits and i'm going to say that calling a mimera discourse is tantamount to calling phil in phylacteries very calling a mishkan attack excellent thank you okay what is a minor don't tell me this course what's a mimer what's this really tell me what's a minor what's a circle okay so a mimer begins already in the time of the altareb and it's he's the one who creates the structure of the mimer a mimer is from the tr in the tradition of time when the rebbe a soul that is an interlacing link between heaven and earth will close his eyes will wrap a handkerchief on his fingers so that there is something physical and tangible to hold him down there's a preparatory melody melody which is meditative meditative allowing for mindfulness for uh inner reflection and most importantly suspending your mind from everything no distractions no intellectual ego no anxiety i know that's a tough one but openness and the rebbe himself goes into a different state you could see it's a very emotional moment the altareb and his my marum would roll on the ground roll on the ground he would bump his head into the wall he would start bleeding they put cushions on all the walls in the city liargen in belarus all the rabbits would go into a trance the rebel would say a miami can go sometimes for an hour usually 40 minutes 30 minutes 45 minutes and it was like in a different way he was like in a different world and really presenting what they called the the deepest esoteric dimensions of torah discussing themes like souls angels purpose of creation relationship of god to the human being the inner structure and the science of the soul the science of the universe the deeper meaning of a mitzvah the deeper meaning of the entire structure of evolution from spiritual to physical the manifestations of divine energy paralleling every component in human psychology and chemistry this was basically presenting the extraordinarily profound philosophical theological psychological emotional spiritual and practical teachings of chabadziddis which goes through the seven generations each one a genius each one building on his predecessor and there ever being the seventh building on all the six and then adding many of his own layers and bringing it down this was a mimer dedicated exclusively to the teachings of what you would call khabad siddhas which is basically the spiritual science of the universe of the soul and of the all of history that's a mimer but there have been addition to a mime maybe we should mention that if you hear a mimer generally speaking you can identify within a few seconds because it's there's a different cadence there's a different tune it's it's distinct it's a distinct sound very different tune his eyes were closed everybody would stand up nobody would remain sitting everybody would stand up the rebbe himself you could see that he is going through a very internal experience you could see it i mean especially for people who had more sensitive eyes rabiot told i once searched from rabiot myself that purim wants the rebel set of miami a long mimer and it was three o'clock in the morning and he said i looked at the rebbe's face and from his seriousness and intensity i knew that he's going to be saying a new mimer in 10 seconds and that's exactly what happened it was a mimer about hummon's defeat just interesting to know that stalin died that night puerto rico this is the famous yeah but he told me that he saw on the face that there's going to be a mind man it was hard for him to understand because there was a mime already in the beginning rebel wouldn't say to my mother besides a few times there was one shabbos he said three maimonides and one fab rangan that was the mithuli rebecca's yard site at mithler every abdullah by the second kabaddab in 1920 in 1960 61. so he said three my marama one shabbos but that was very weird but the oil said from the rebbe's face he knew that a mimer is coming and you could see it you could see that the rebel was is it was he was going through a very profound experience and and when the mimer began the rebels had closed eyes and they would say the expression of speaking mentioned historically that after huge fight after the sixth rabbit was nostalgic after his passing the rabbit was fabrega was saying circus for a year but it wasn't until that ever said his first mimer that the official leadership began yeah the rebbe also the first few years said my mother with open eyes just like the rebel ashab said with open eyes looking at his son that ever said with open eyes and then he closed them it's a little sad to say why but it ever said that the thoughts of the people sitting in front of him were confusing him in the middle of the mimer so he started to close his eyes and they remained closed there was a mimer that he would say sometimes on shabbos that didn't have the melody of a mimer but it had the theme of a mimer he would wrap his napkin there was no preparatory song but he would begin and you saw he had his eyes open he looked in a certain direction towards his left he would speak very monotone so to speak but it was really because it was a maya man nobody would stand up besides his brother-in-law there are chagra by shmario gurari who passed away in 1989 he always knew that there ever started a mime even though didn't have the melody and he would stand up himself and troll and this is sort of a subject this is not just a subject within him this was a subject but it was the same style of my maram but that ever chose it should be with a different tune i think part of it was he didn't want to bother everybody to stand up always it may be a reason but i'm not sure um and it was a very different style the mymorium didn't have the style of the sisters the rebbe was not animated in that sense but what what is the style of the sickness now explained what are the secrets because okay would you say after we discuss 90 of the vibraniums were sickles and also the rabbit stopped saying my murder with a song he stopped saying my amaryam in 1985 and without a song he stopped saying my mom a few months after his wife passed away the last minor he said was shabbos 1988 and since then he didn't say my martin besides two times surprises in 1989 when he said of miami i just wanted to mention that the last years for whatever reason the rebel did not say my maram ribioyo by the way was very pained by that he would he would you know it was very hard for him it represented for him something that was very painful i would say for many people okay so there's no my marion baruch hashem the best talking but for him the fact that we know my mom the last few years were very uh it was not easy for him anyway what about everything else they never had so many guys i know i know we're live so maybe i should uh censor myself but is there any truth to the fact that the oil was i didn't hear this i heard about it that the oil made a connection between the passing of the rabbits and the and the fact that there were no more my modern is that okay to speak about yes um i never heard this from him i heard i did hear it from other people i should just mention that the first stage in stopping the memorial was when the rebbe stopped saying my martian with closed eyes and with a song as i said the last one was i believe shabbos bereishis 1980s the end of 1985 and that was a middle of the court case the the very famous court case that began in 1985 when the grandson of the of the sixth rebbe took many books from the library of chabad and there was a court case which questioned the entire legitimacy of the rebel as a successor and the rebels stopped saying discourses with a song after the rebecca passed away after the episode passed away he still said for a few months in the middle of that summer he stopped i never heard this from the bl directly i did hear it from other people but if i'm not mistaking as far as my knowledge it's all speculation which means there may be a connection that ever stopped something else after her passing no more fabregans in the weekdays only shabbos the last fabregan of the weekday was the 15th of shavat 1988. a few days later she passed away in the 22nd day of schweiter was no for brengan afterwards never again only talks and only shabbas and yamtif so that's also very telling what happened that was right after she passed away even purim poor him that year every year it was that year put him there was no fabric no more till the end but every shabbos there was a fabrega and there were many talks there was one sukis that they put the rubbish tender the place of the fabring and they wanted him to sit and he said it's not a fabrian it's a talk so this was also after her passing you know a lot of these things i'm not sure every anybody really knows the reason at least i don't even though there's different ideas you can say in different speculations that have been presented by hasidim over the years i'm sure some accurate some more accurate some less accurate but i do want to describe what a sikh is a sikh is a talk it's a talk every other topic besides the direct presentation of the ideas of siddhis khabad were put into the cities which means the rabbit can talk about the portion of the week the terror portion of the week discuss its theme discuss a story discuss a mitzvah discuss a detail discuss a lesson he can talk about the holiday of the time he may talk many he may discuss a whole rashi a harassing on the parasha like he did every shabbos two talks that's in the he may discuss a section in the zohar or his father's commentary in zaire he may discuss a whole chapter or mission for an hour that's a sister he may discuss a whole shirt in rambam maybe a half an hour maybe an hour that's a sick he may discuss the situation in the land of israel eretz israel that may be an hour two hours that's a system he may discuss education he may discuss kirov he may discuss this he may discuss changing the world he may discuss the nature of morality in the united states of america he may discuss things everything under the sun connected to jewish life sometimes connected to civilization connected to any theme in yiddish or toyota timely events and all forms of scholarship and sometimes he will dedicate a seizure to explain the mimer sometimes he'll dedicate a talk to discuss an idea and see this but the sisters were much different the rebe's eyes were open he was speaking to the crowd they haven't moved his hands a lot under the table he would make with his hands a lot during a sikha that could if i could say this once in a while crack a joke in a sicker start laughing start crying tell more stories go off on different tangents discuss conversations of people discuss the mindset of people discuss world events discuss events in israel he can go there was like a freedom in sikkis and of course he can discuss a whole hour he could discuss which will be suggest it was focused to the genre of pure spirituality he said this language okay so now everybody is overwhelmed tell us now you have responsible for recording transmitting and remaining faithful to all of this yes remember remember in one in one fabregan there could be a mimer for an hour or 50 minutes which is in itself which is in itself incredibly profound because you're every middle of a minor would start going fast and i'm telling you was it difficult and remember he was revealing here you talk about the top secrets of kabbalah this is not small talk this is not small talk you know this is you you miss a word you miss a word and you miss it and then you could review 10 sickest besides the memorial there's 10 full presentations each one could be 20 minutes 40 minutes 50 minutes an hour and a half and you have to record it all and then transcribe it over the next week because by next sharpest is going to be another fabrian and if the holidays on monday night you have two days you have two days and the women who would like help from their husbands serve shabbas and sarah vyumtif i should say this whole team especially arabia's wife sacrificed a tremendous amount allowing their husbands to live on the rebbe's schedule to some extent okay talk to us about the process but if i open up a location if i open up my modern maluka i see a finished project i a finished product tell me about the blood sweat and tears especially from rebbe oil that went into presenting this finished product okay so the rebbe finishes talking let's say it's shabbos afternoon he began one o'clock earlier years he began 12 30 one my years it was 1 30. and then he would go maybe till four till five there was a time he went times he went till six there was times he went till eight but that was very very unusual but five six was not unusual later years it was much shorter three thirty four so rabiot would uh would would stand there he would concentrate as i said he did not have a photographic memory but he had an incredible mind to be able to know the sources to grasp the rebbe's presentation and to grasp the structure within the rebbe's presentation right after shabbos a few minutes after shabbas this team headed by rabio would come together in which is of course the place where the rebbe spoke and worked and he had a place on one of the tables he would sit on a table you have to understand that all his classes that i was by he wouldn't have a chair and sit at the head table there was no such a thing he loathed that he would sit on a bench between two boys you understand that's how it was he did not if you put a chair at the head table he did not like that till later years you know they forced him to start behaving more regally but in those days he would just sit with him he needed he just needed coffee somebody had to keep on bringing in the coffee and he needed for a certain amount of time cigarettes till that stopped so much sorry shabbos he would sit down yes there was a lot of coffee and a lot of cigarettes and he would begin he would begin it was very special to hear there could be anywhere between 10 people and 50 people sometimes 100 people there were people who would actually write down bakrim who would take notes as he was talking so they would have it no no no notes and he would go through the whole fabregan it could take a few hours there were arguments people interrupted him said rabio no that's not what the rabbis said sometimes they'd be able to go this was the fact that sometimes was so confident that you know there's a story rabbis everywhere somebody once quoted a rambam brisket said there's no such a rambam so they brought it around and they saw he was right so don't think i know the whole rambam but i know that such a thing the rambam could have not written it's not that i knew the rambam didn't write it i knew that the rambam could not write it sometimes he was in that mode like they never couldn't say this it was like you're saying you don't know what you're talking about he was usually much kinder but sometimes he would get you know more intense but there were arguments sometimes he would agree sometimes he would agree sometimes he said i don't remember and he would let somebody else take over you have to understand if rabiel didn't understand something he often would not repeat it because he was not a tape recorder he told me a few things that he heard from the rebbe i said what did the rebel explain he knew the questions he said i didn't understand so i said so just tell me what dude said he says i can't i didn't understand it so he was the opposite of a tape recorder if the bill didn't understand it he often would not repeat it he would start saying it and then he would say i'm sorry i don't understand you also saw his honesty like if he didn't understand he just didn't understand it and if you would explain it to him he says it doesn't make sense to me and he says i just don't get it he would sometimes write a note to the rabbit middle of the week and he would say we didn't understand this and this sometimes two notes three notes four notes and the number would often give long answers long answers a page two pages long answers to explain it in writing sometimes next shabbos or over the next few weeks he would explain things that were not explained then a little bit more about this about the back and forth about the the ha god the system of getting that edits okay so the bureau would finish um it would take sometimes shorter sometimes longer sometimes there were stronger debates sometimes we do with things that remained a little bit unclear he would say fast danish i don't understand he could get dramatic uh i'll just give you an interesting example it still bothers me till today i heard from the ones that they never told over the story you know the famous story rip chase that the alternative kalina came to the altitude and everybody put in salt into the dishes and the makalina took one spoon of soup and he put it he cast it away and alter ever finish the soup so he asked dalton how can you how can you eat the soup it's so salty because d'alto ever wanted to know why he's not eating he said how do you eat it dr episode from the day i came to ms rich i didn't i didn't i do not taste any more the taste of food okay this is a famous story there's a famous secret look at this volume you you taste kislava you look about this story debio told me that once in the 1960s so i couldn't remember it because i wasn't born then they rabbit asked the question and he said it would seem that this story would not fit with the altar ever because the alternate idea was about the transformation and sublimation of the entire world and all of the individual individual taste buds and skills of a person rather than its suppression so for the alternative it would seem that he would taste the flavor in every individual food that's a question the rebel is asking that it's not the derek of siddhas the word saddiquim who transcended the world they didn't taste you could give them flight you can give them whatever you gave them they were like divine they said but sinners was to find the divine within every flavor so he should have tasted the food i heard this i said yeah what did the demon ends he said yeah the rabbit answer i said what was the answer he said i didn't understand it so i said could you just tell me tell me what you just understand tell me that his words maybe i had a husband i said maybe i'll understand tell me to rep his words i can't he said i'm not trying like i'm not trying to be cruel and selfish i didn't understand it so he really he really had to understand and that's why there were a lot of arguments because sometimes people understood differently i have to say you know with all rabio was a genius but sometimes some of his students felt that he was wrong and and there were arguments there were intense arguments obviously was the chief editor to the chief scribe so he was the he was the what you would call by sakakharan you know he had the rights of veto he had the rights of vito then came the work of uh transcribing that happened over the next week in the early years the fifties and the sixties rabial did this himself sometimes with the help of of other students in the 1960s and the 1970s they formed groups called vadhana satmim of boys yeshiva boys who would either do it with the help of rabio or a sister boyle and that's how it remained for the later years there was a group of students who were transcribed the sisters first in yiddish for many years and then later in the early 80s 80s there were also the writers in hebrew los angeles and they would write it and they would often ask tribio for guidance and advice there was often a process where if certain ideas were not understood rabiol would write in a letter a note to the rebel and the rebel would often ignore it but very often he would give out answers sometimes the answers were very sharp sometimes the answers were very intense sometimes the rebel was upset about people not thinking about the concept he once wrote on a letter on one of these questions did you guys think about this for more than five minutes he wrote once uh i think you should with this question you should consult a five-year-old boy and he will explain to you uh the rebbe once wrote on one of these questions uh go home and try it with cardboard and you'll see that i was right he was talking about the capers the lid of gold that if it wasn't a tephach it would it would cave into the iron and that's why rashi has to ride it so the writers of the city start to ask him all these questions so he said go home and take a piece of cardboard and do an experiment and you'll see that i was right so these answers were the early years were to be oil and then it was the people working with berlin sometimes as i said over the next few weeks would clarify things you'll see in a lot of the sixes they're not from one system so this is what happened that week but none of this was edited by the river none of this none of this so this is all scissors that were written based on the grasp and the ability of the memory risers and the transcribers to understand are the things missing yes there are things missing this is not verbatim there's things missing because people didn't always remember people didn't always understand and as i told you the structure was not always so easy to grasp so sometimes the ebb would say a lot of things that were tangents and some of them may have been missed or sometimes something was unclear sometimes they'll write a parenthesis a nebaru he said something but they didn't get it and the oil didn't get it so it's all right it's unclear so none of this is edited today it's published in and fifty volumes such as kaidish in yiddish and terrorism is in hebrew it's approximately 150 volumes unedited talks of the rebel from 1950 through nineteen edited means it doesn't mean unedited in the conventional sense no edited by the writers and the transcribers who did a girlfriend job there are works of scholarship but you mean this is a great scholarship yeah i should but i should say i'm going to say this i'll always say bilty mugger which means the rabbit did not go through sometimes there were disagreements you know sometimes you know i could see one of my colleagues write something and i felt that he didn't understand it right there were disagreements sometimes sometimes the richness the richness and the intricacies of the rebbe's presentations were not conveyed so well in the written word because it is based on the well-intended but the mind and therefore the limitations of the writer and his prisms it's brilliant it's great it's scholarship you have to understand people are people and every student captures the truth the way he captures it even though he's trying his best to convey the full truth so give us a glimpse of rabbi and his involvement in her goal process and getting the rabbit to give a final approved version it's very impressive i should tell you in recent years they discovered a lot of the recordings of the old fabregans that the bill did not know existed and i sometimes compare a tape recorder where you hear the remember word for it and the b oil's transcript in the 1950s from memory and there it's remarkable to see what a good job he did you could see that he missed things you could see did that be elaborated but you could see that he captured the soul and he got so much of it not fully not but he got so much of it you appreciate it much more because you can actually compare shabbos you can't compare it to a tape recorder but some of the old fabregas came now out in recordings like purim and uh and chanukah and yotaskislav and other other fabrians so so this was all not edited by the web in the late 50s it wasn't easy but the rebbe agreed to start editing some pieces some fragments of his talks this is 1958 and then it continued through the 1960s and it continued through the 70s and the 80s and early 90s every shabbos rabioil and then there was a team called vadla fatsa would prepare from the rebels talks of previous years a theme on the parsha or the holiday so let's say it's parshas veracious they may take rabial may take arashi that rabbit discussed on parachutes five years ago or ten years ago or two years ago or last month and prepare it edited fully edited with a structure delete all of the tangents sometimes delete a lot of things that were not directly relevant prepare footnotes and references this was called lacute sichus it was given into the rabbit to edit edited it very very heavily and this became the 39 volumes of le cotes sichois which begin in 1958 continue in the mid 60s late 60s and continue for most of the 70s 80s and early 90s 39 volumes with close to 1600 full edited sixes each one is a sugiya in yiddish kite it could be in halakhah nigler siddhis pilpal rashi rambam hadronym shas poiskin niglex kabala but each one is a full-fledged shear incredible circus these were these were tribuyel and then his students took sometimes they could combine a few fabregans if they ever spoke about one theme sometimes they never spoke about something for a few shabbasan the devil would make six su throughout the year five or six on different sectors of the whole shas most of them were published in the cities he would sometimes continue the next few shabbas so these were compiled into a structured circle called lakota gives you a glimpse into much of the rabbit's genius but i always tell people ninety percent of the rabbis talks did not go into lakota or maybe 80 percent i i think for people who don't understand this world when you're talking about a system where the dev is editing the transcripts first of all the transcripts that ev is editing have already been thoroughly worked through and edited and many times the sources the footnotes have been added and and as you as you yourself mentioned sometimes that ever wanted a more thorough transcript felt that it hadn't they hadn't adequately put enough work in was very upset that ever once wrote that everyone's wrote on top and this was not a compliment listen to what he wrote he wrote this is a transcript word for word from the tape and for the rebbe this meant this was a disaster because you can't write the way you speak when you speak you repeat you go off on tangents you emphasize different points in different places you know what you're reminding me of it's almost like what the rambam said about even chima yeah yeah and and i think you could say this about i mean they have to have the knowledge in the three you mean that literal translation is not a faithful translation literal the more literal it is the worse it is and by the way if we're talking already i have to say a lot of you know this well a lot of the english translations of some of our greatest works are are really inaccurate not because the writer was inauthentic he was it's too faithful it's too faithful it's very hard to explain it's like a paradox no listen if you translate tanya if you translate sadiq righteous bane in the intermediary russia wicket technically it's accurate but i don't think it allows anybody to understand what the tanya's saying you wrote you wrote the maps of the tanya by the way you mentioned the map of time here i want to tell you something there's one the map of tanya was my first attempt at trying to be involved in the what's the samayanas so i have one involvement with ruby oil that i can share by the way many times i ask the real questions and he would tell me i don't know crazy i don't know he loved libya loved saying that i know that he loved saying it but he said he certainly said i don't know right so he also i should say he also sometimes was not in the mood i sat for years by his classes sometimes he was in the mood and when he was in the mood the class was was was a masterpiece sometimes he was not in the mood maybe he was exhausted maybe something happened and he would go through the class it was still much better than any other classes i took that he had a lot of important ideas he was sorting through my question didn't necessarily have to be number one on the agenda excuse me so what did he tell you about i'll tell you about the map of time he he blew my mind i mean it blew everyone's mind but i i attempted to give the whole cutting board and gone the whole 53 chapters of the first volume of tanya in one skeira said one pictorial representation for those who haven't seen it it's very hard to understand what i'm even describing but if you've seen it anyways there's one there's really only one major structural change from the f from the first draft to the final draft and that was rubio we presented it to him and uh from cohost was involved in i wrote it in english and then transferred translated hebrew so they showed it up yo and he says no you have to change there are champions in tiny that deal with emotional well-being a lot of people don't realize time deals with emotional well-being for an extended amount of chapters so i had originally that emotional well-being is 26 through 31. 32 of course famously pediclave the heart of tanya zavas israel loving your fellow jew and then i had meshia starting in 33 dirham a dwelling place for hashem in this world starts in 33 continuing through 37. now if you all saw this he says no 33 and 34 are also about also about joy i said no no no 32 stopped it 32 stopped that type of that that flow he said no it's it didn't stop it it paused it because it's a mayama musa you understand everyone knows that chapter 32 is is is parenthetical historically it's a fact that the altar of the insert if you know the mod you know the the original edition of time you didn't have a chapter 32 everyone historically knows that chapter 32 was placed after the fact but foreign to be able to say it as a concept it's a pause and because it's a pause right after it's finished it picks up again and 33 and 34 continue to talk about sinha so i countered i said no no but 33 and 34 are about mashiach a dwelling place for god in this world which are the subjects of 35 36 and 37. he said no 33 and 34 are about the joy over the dwelling place in the in the in the lower realm so it's a continuation of the topic of joy which was 26 through 31 and the discussion of the growing place for god in this world proper doesn't begin until 35. so that was one little comment which he didn't open a book he didn't go look up some just he looked at it yeah that like you said at the very beginning that was the world that he lived in he could tell in that world he had a chapter in tanya like you could give me directions how to get from your house to the to the airport yeah and he had i sometimes call him the the the brisker of khabar zades that you know the brisket derek is very much to compartmentalize to dissect to focus and to zoom in to zoom out structure to get down to the core broad bones of the topic of this rambam and a nicholas known as the brisket eric and rabjoyo's classes from my perspective did that in in the world of siddhas they say that the rebel ashab was the rambam of siddhis and i we've been talking over an hour now about rabbi as khaizer and maniac as repeating and retaining and and transmitting the rabbi's sidness it's we've been talking over an hour i want to change gears i want to change we did we didn't even begin here we didn't even begin i want to change gears i want to talk about now rabbi as a scholar which is different than as the transmitter and the one who retained faithfully that have his teachings i want to talk about as if i could say in crass terms but maybe in terms of the that the audience might understand or relate to a professor of siddhis as the foremost experts in these teachings as a teacher as a mashbian yeshiva uh giving public classes he's working hey ho managem talk to us about that world rabio is the teacher right okay so forgive me that i'm going to say this in the beginning i just i feel i like authenticity at least i i hope that i like authenticity so i want to say one thing about ibuyo's classes i learned a tremendous amount from ruby oil number one how to build a sheer number two how to understand many concepts number three how to present many concepts um and therefore i owe him a great debt of gratitude and i went to his funeral and uh after the burial in the montefury cemetery a few feet away from the rebbe's burial place i uh when the people dispersed there was a lot of people so when the people dispersed i went over to the fresh grave and i said a capital till him and then i just said i said to rubio thank you i just felt that i and we owe him a a great debt of gratitude because i think you know rib yale's classes were not perfect the one thing that i think they lacked was um this was not a lack for me it was a lack just for me to be able to not bring it down to uh my uh frail mortal uh insecure traumatic psychological anxious world he knew that you would yeah if y'all kept it ruby oil kept it up there brilliantly and he had certain things you know that which i felt were certain limitations and teaching nobody liked to stick to the same texts i didn't appreciate that i tried always to bring in new text sometimes i succeeded sometimes he got upset at me but uh i'm not mentioning this you know to understand that you know we're dealing with so sometimes like with certain things i just couldn't apply i didn't get it like i wished he could bring it down more i wish he could bring in more diverse diverse topics but he did not he did not like rabbi aden steins outs died last year but i didn't have any snow right a scholar of tremendous proportion you know when you listen to his lectures when i listened to his lectures there was anthropology and zoology and botany and psychology and of course a little philosophy and some good cynicism and all that ruby oil would stick completely to the to the source material and he would not be yours a purist and you could not get it i'll tell you something by the way younger man came to me and he told me that he learned tanya and he told me that one time after this year he went to the bill and he asked him the source for something that abhiel had said in the class so ravioli this is what this this this sapner cluster called many he was very taken with this he said the azerbaija what's the source he said i don't know but it's it's habat he says you're sure it's probably he says yeah because i'm an innovator i'm not an friend and then let's call it foreign tax i never looked so by deduction it must be a chabad source now if somebody doesn't know how to take that by the way they wouldn't know that raviol was a bucky bashas now maybe he was a bucky bishop through lakota but he was a bucky bishop so but a purist i mean talk a little bit about that yeah the the devotion to the the subject matter and in in a very in an unusual way because normally intellectuals if i could stereotype for a second intellectuals like exploration they like to dabble they're like you know the thrill of something innovative was very laser focused in an unusual way yeah so i'll i'll i'll bring out i think a few points which are relevant that come to mind number one um i'll share something i heard from him once purim i think this was purim 95 who was sitting in somebody's house and he shared the following story which i thought was very very powerful he was close to a man named reb aaron halevi zimmermann zimmerman who was considered one of the literature gainer of the last generation he was a nephew of the great rebore bear laibovitch the great student of rabhayan brisket rosh shiva of kamen it's the author of berkel crime zimmerman was a genius he was also very eccentric but he was a genius he wrote to say for aganasar on on astronomy on the international dateline kavataire i heard from rbl directly that requiem zimmerman who was a great literature god great gone would come visit the rabbi in the early years he told me that he once saw that he stopped the reb in the street the rebel was coming from his home and they started to engage in this conversation they walked into 770 they continued they walked to the rebbe's room he said the rebbe stood with the key in the door for a half an hour trying to was running back and forth by the elevator and that little room they call grenade running back and forth arguing with the rebel he said i heard the whole conversation they went through babli urushalami rashi's toys with he was he was on fire was on fight he was screaming he was hollering arguing with the rebbe the rebel would wait calmly respond very calmly with arashi with a tight switch with your son with about for half an hour finally he said rabiot told me finally him refuted the rabbi and the rebels said but what about this tysos and they recorded the thai swiss and was quiet the crime was quiet he said i have no refutation and he went out of the room and he then he tells me ruby told me that simon told him he says i am so upset at rabbi khandakov rabbi khadakov was the chief secretary of the rapper i am he says he allows that women and men and children going to the river to speak about foolish superficial things don't you understand that he is a chad or he's one in a generation and teaching he should be giving shirum all day i should be sitting in his room all day not children asking blessings blessings for their life mr biel says this purim he was talking to a few of us and he says i once visited a prime zimmerman it was late at night and the oil visited zimmerman is excited he says i got a letter from the laboratory a personal letter and the rebbe described in a few lines the essence of seder kachin the essence of seder kachamanshas said kachim is is the whole system of mishnah and gemara about carbonism he described the essence the the quintessence so the oil says i asked him can i see the letter that was exciting so he says do kent's cutscene do you know the whole cutscene do you know the whole question brielle says no so he says so you won't appreciate the letter i'm not showing the letter i'm not trying to rub y'all says tell me about the letter tell me about the letter sorry simon told them as follows he said what is learning what is learning you think that learning is the way that him learn no learning is the way the shine and learned he says it's a big difference he says which means later generations and contemporary commentators so they learn a piece of gemara they're learning they're learning another piece another piece then they have questions so they start answering the questions and they get into a whole analysis and a whole idea to answer the questions okay he said that's not how there is shine and learned he says there is shine him the rambam the rajba the rosh the rand they're unbanned the great was showing them the reef and of course the way they learned was very different he said they had this is what i remember from rebirth in the name of zimmerman they had four or five quint essential ideas about life that their entire philosophy revolved around these ideas were quintessential ideas about god about the world about the universe about the essence of turin about the essence of wisdom the essence of the soul the essence of morality the essence of allah the essence of shas these were like four or five central ideas that everything revolving and very deep ideas that manifest themselves in every aspect of reality beginning with halacha and that's how they learn the gemara they learn the gemara is seeing those essential innate ideas that are at the core of all universal wisdom and all spiritual wisdom and all legal wisdom and all terror wisdom now the rambam have a question so they address the question just to get rid of that question but there is an essential undefined intangible infinity of wisdom that they see immediately and every tana has his shita and his derrick and then he looks at your barrel and he says and the laboratory learns toyota like that and the lava chair learns toyota like that but i'm not showing you the letter because you won't understand it because because you don't know kachin by the way till today they haven't found the letter but then someone turns to the oil and he was a big litvisor sheet we have to understand he's not a hasidic jew and he says i look at this letter go call and he calls up probably khadakov the bill started to laugh he calls up in the middle it's one o'clock in the morning and he says go into the river and tell the laboratory that khayyim zimmerman says that he's ahad bidara he's one in a generation and tell him that hayem zimmerman doesn't throw around compliments if hayem simmons says he's one generation he's one in a generation now rabbi khadikov wouldn't do this i don't think he did it but maybe he did i don't know but certainly got the bill certainly got a kick of it then he turns to the bill and he says i have to tell you that half an hour that i stood outside over there his room arguing with him i was right he was wrong his last twice was oh that was strong that was powerful i couldn't refute it but he said but you know what i'm still right i'm still why am i saying this to you i'm saying this to you because ruby oil tried to convey this path in learning ruby oil in his own way tried to convey this path in learning and that's why he appreciated the rebels so much because he felt from the rebel ibiel was a genius on his own right ira was a genius he could have been one of the top russian shivas but rabiot saw in the rebbe's mind the ability to capture torah in an unusually profound way and also be able to unify all aspects of terror into those core ideas and for him that was not only refreshing but it wrung for him i think that it rings for many of us with with that ultimate uh imprint of truth of a lucus of divinity of infinity earlier about you described being a hazard where rabiel was repeating the rebels and somebody would interrupt and say no that ever said different and they'll be all saying another have said that i don't know deeper than just it didn't fit the context of that right right he did not like the technical sometimes people would get technical with him it was and and you know sometimes i have to say sometimes i appreciated that because i wanted to know exactly what it ever said but sometimes he didn't fall for it he's like he's like kitsonius like you're busy with the externalities there was somebody who would criticize them no the main thing is isis harav just repeat like a tapered corner and rubio appreciated that but he wanted the theme he wanted he wanted the essence and uh and he was he was extremely focused on that and he and he tried to convey that taste and he understood i wanna i wanna lead you in this direction a little bit because obviously that ever spoke so many thousands of hours that abbott was commuting up communicating a message it wasn't it wasn't for fun it was that ever had a message talk to me at least in your view and your you know without any responsibility just your own impressions what do you think what did you gather from rebelle's teachings both transmitting the rabbis plato but also as a teacher in his own right what did you gather to rabiot were like the core ideas the big ideas of the rebbe's worldview i mean i can think of some but i'm more interested to hear you okay um obviously this is a very very loaded question i should say it's a very infinite question meaning it's important to say this that we can discuss hundreds and hundreds of sisters and my mariam printed published today edited by the rebel unedited by the deb each one conveying a a splendorous idea but i would i would like to touch to touch in a few notes i do want to say i and by the way just just to insert here you say every sitra has has some type of you know bombshell i would go further than that and to say you learn will relegate to a footnote at the bottom of the page that had any rash yeshiva come up with that he wouldn't stop talking about it the rest of his life right so there there's bombshell after bombshell every square inch of the very very very rich unbelievably but but but what i wanted you to do is the opposite not the richness talk to us about the big ideas the essential ideas right of the devastator that have his world view as was able to gather it and frame it and and transmit it so i will say this that give me three times i'm gonna challenge you give me three big ideas i got it okay as a just a cut as a context on what i'm building it at on our best time with ruby oil was friday night you see the other classes were 7 30 in the morning or 8 o'clock at night which were great but they were limited because 9 o'clock was was chakras and and 9 30 was mairef but friday night was unlimited he would come after lichtsteiner to be smed russian cries the kylie or 770 and sit for hours and learn he would teach a sister one of the classic circles of the rebel courtesy circus and i sat there for quite a few years and learned a lot and i have to say i never said this publicly i'm going to confess my sin rabio after an hour and a half or two hours when you would ask him a tough question he would look at the clock and if you would see that it was getting close to 7 38 and the bahama after david mayer even go home and then eat to go to the go to the meal come on he would quit the he would say another time so uh i got frustrated with that so i we we sat in a in a room in the coil on union street and the buck didn't have watches but there was a clock on the wall so before shabbos i would come and i would still i would still i would steal the clock or i got a cue from above ramallah from dalton i turned the clock backwards so the viewer would ask what time it was either there was no clock so he would say okay let's go further or the baking would give the wrong time so we could get another hour and those shabasim really we learned hours by him hours and he explained to us so many concepts and ideas in yiddish and we would ask questions uh you know again sometimes he was in the mood sometimes he was not so much in the woods he was sharper somewhat sometimes he was more benign but i'm just mentioning this as a special memory okay the big ideas give us something molded essential ideas i see i i think i think at least some of the essential ideas were as follows number one that every single thing in nigler from the biggest to the smallest from the most grand to the most intricate meticulous and detailed nuances in halacha in gemara in mishnah bavaria xiaomi a mirror is a reflection of kabbalistic mystical spiritual hasidic philosophical theological transcendental and spiritual ideas and that there's a seamless flow between the esoteric and the revealed part of turtle between the nister and the nigola to the point that it's like a soul and a body where the soul without the body is not concrete and yet the body without the soul is missing that that full life do you remember any specific examples of this specific illustrations of this concept specifically something that abuel shared the marriage between absolutely i just remember one thing he said he told us in a shirt at the end of the shirt i remember he told this to us and uh i think he got this from non-chabad sources i think he told me afterwards he got it from her sources and if i'm not mistaken i found this in the safer base yaakov from the ishbitsa if i'm not mistaken this was many many years ago so you know i guess he did look sometimes if i'm not mistaken maybe i'm wrong this is many years ago but he once said something beautiful he spoke about the conflict between philosophy and kabbalah between rambam and arizona the rambam stream officially was rational durham was a rationalist maimonides a rationalist philosopher murray and guy to the perplex and the cabalists were mystics you know the philosophers didn't have a romantic relationship with god you don't talk about god god is abstract god is transcendent and that was amazing and you know for the kabbalists there was intimacy and there's the spheres in the world and we affect the world and there's a groom and there's a bright celebrity and he was once talking about the these two streams and the fact that the altered synthesized between the two he believed that that ultimate jewish philosophy and ultimate jewish mysticism are not in conflict with each other they they really come together and the b oil and this was very surprising for anybody who's familiar with all of the literature about the conflict between kabbalah and philosophy nabil said something he said you know take a look at marin of the guy to the perplexed chapter section three the rambam gives a reason for all the mitzvahs sometimes very rational and strange reasons that many others got very upset with for example the rambam says the reasons for sacrifices is because the jews were pagans and they like to sacrifice children so god said you know what just kill animals instead of children it was like maturing the children the ramban is very upset at the rambam taurus we burn incense because there was a horrible smell there was a deodorant for the base of mikado like these are the rambam's reasons the ramban gets very upset rabbi oil said people don't understand that altered ever showed that the reasons in marina are the earthly manifestation of divine transcendental reasons articulated in the ariza so we were looking at him and i was like like really he said yeah the rabbit said that it says in zaya that we burn tyrus to remove the ruach the spiritual impurity but for the rambam there is unison so the spiritual impurity the spiritual bad odor is reflected in the physical bad order and the bio says i want to tell you something the rambam gives a reason for every mitzvah besides one do you know which one well one of the people they knew the rambam says we don't know why we offer 12 loaves of bread on the altar and eat it every shabbos the cayenne we don't know the reason and the commentators are very perplexed the rambam found a reason for everything you don't shave your beard you know what you don't shave you but you don't cut your pears because the pagan priests used to cut their payers he found the reason he couldn't find a reason for putting bread on the mesbah libya smiled and he said and now read the arizona's song for shabbos afternoon meal please hashem reveal to us the reason of the 12 loaves of bread that reason doesn't know the reason and then rebel said these words he said let me explain it to you the reason there could be a reason and murdering the vulcan is because there's a reason in kabbalah and the rational scientific practical universe evolves from the spiritual metaphysical universe if there's no reason in that resale there will be no reason in their amba because marine of him is ultimately a reflection of the ultimate truth i'm just giving you one example i heard from him those who are into these topics appreciate here the the the focus on the unity he once told me we were standing in the hallway and i asked them about the argument between the alti rebbe and the largener about terrorism you know the argument the alternative says in tanya chapter five thoroughly shema is yeah you learn lakashem to be aligned with hashem through towards an act of intimacy with hashem that's lushma reprima the great student of the villenegon and a contemporary wrote a word called and in section four he he says no not like those who think that tyrol ishmael is about thinking about god terelishma is you learn tara because of the intellectual pleasure of it's so beautiful it's so rich i love every word i just love it that's my yes of course it's spiritual connection it's the deepest connection but he praised and extolled the virtue of learning ontario for the intellectual stimulation and brilliance so somebody asked me that week about that in a sheer i gave him borough parkside discussion of the girl on shabbos so sometimes he wasn't in the mood he wouldn't answer but then he tells me he said i'll tell you a story he says there was a jew he went to two yeshivas for shivers one was a big yeshiva he mentioned the name and then he also came to la bavista for schwes and then they asked him is there any difference he says there's no difference in that yeshiva they asked honshu as rashiva said why do we say terrorism why do we say terrorists from heaven is so brilliant who cares if it's from heaven or not it's so brilliant who cares if it's from heaven and then he explained but still the greatness of terror that is from heaven he says then he comes to the sudden starts the mimer terrorism menace but i don't understand shamayim is aisha and my name is khasid and gura which is za but toyota comes from hashem's essence so why do you say there is not from hashems there is wisdom and core in both places they both said that is is uh doesn't seem so relevant and some aesthetic explained why yeah and then the bureau told me as follows he said that he once heard from the rebel fabregan i never saw this but he said he told me he heard this from the web and the rebbe said that the reason that turina is so pleasurable and delightful for the human mind the reason tara is so geshmaq when you get it it's because toyota is taino atsumi from atsumu is the essential delight of hashem in his core which transcends everything and everybody it's pure infinity and because hashem is truth so on every level of reality you're going to perceive truth so therefore even when you come into the world of human pleasures terror is going to be the ultimate pleasure but the reason that there is going to be the ultimate pleasure is not because the ego likes terror because terror was written by brilliant people or by a brilliant god the real reason is because tara is the essence of pleasure because it comes from the source so it's manifested in human pleasure as well and he said and suddenly here you see the unity of everything a jew is learning intellectual pleasure at the core of that is is is divine infinity that type of unity in everybody and everything in every sugar and in the world is is i think one of the profoundest aspects it's not just in ideas the bureau once told us kislift 1964. the never quotes of madrid says yeah yitzhak plans grain so the matter says yitzhak planted grain heaven forbid no zarat's dhaka he planted grain in order to get stucco plant grain planting grain is a sin to feed your family to grow produce i mean all the mitzvahs trimmers maestro is pay alec it's all it's all from your plants or and not vicorium as fruits but all the other mitzvahs so the bl said that said the others were a conduit for aim for infinity for enoid movado in the world everything for them was like it says in tanya that their whole life was a merkava they were chariots for hashem so they they planted crane they planted grain they lived in the world of grain they lived in a world where everything was divine every moment was serving hashem so the member says yes what's the matter saying not that they didn't plant grain that for them the grain was a vehicle for divine revelation for divine service it was an opportunity for charity so you're bringing us back to the beginning the story of the chicken the shyal about the chicken shial about the chicken that type of unity both in thought in action in reality is something that is continuously manifested uh i remember once uh gabriel taught us famous 66. i'm sorry yeah 66 and 64 both printed in easter he tells the story akiva you know that one project akiva's body is being mutilated by the romans they are scraping his holy body with the iron combs and he's saying and the talmidam say atkan come on how do you say shma now how do you say says my whole life i was waiting to love god with all my soul and to give my soul to god masaya and now i have the opportunity and when he said echoed his soul ascended and the rebels said why did the talmud ask him at boy who learns rambam hell because he said that chapter five knows that there's certain times a jew gives up his life like the students didn't know there would be akiva could say israel when he's being killed and the rebels said the rebel derby oil explained it to us beautifully the rebbe said that uh i remember when he said it over you could see that he was reliving reliving the sikh the rebels said they did they understood there had be a key was sacrificing his life for god whether he was saying they felt that he saw in the experience the oneness of hashem they said how could you scream echoed you're dying but you're being murdered by the roman tyrants by the roman dictators by the roman cruel leaders how can you say hashem god is one when you see what is happening to you in this world of god how can you say that's a question or a question and then ebay said then and he connected it with another 10 statements of rabbi akiva in shas but the point was that arabic said the famous that he said the way he understands life is that there's no negativity in life there's no evil in life everything is an opportunity to serve god sometimes hashem wants you to serve him by engaging with the positive and sometimes he wants you to serve him by engaging with the negative but it's all part of oneness it's all part of vegas he says for me this experience is simply a mitzvah of a haftas it's an opportunity to love god with all my soul he sees oneness and opportunity for oneness and everything even in a very painful moment it's an opportunity to find the ability to transcend to grow and to become one with hashem in this moment it's one thing to learn it from the page it's another thing to live it was it yeah i love it i think that was uh that was one major major component another i would say another very powerful component okay so you're going on to another point i just wanna how it give me the give me the one sentence i hate to put you at the spot like this but you just eloquently explained a certain big idea that i was trying out that transmitted give me the one sentence version of that i could give you the one sentence of yoyos language or rabbi wise language you have to choose so you know you talked about the three thousand shalom so if everything you're saying is true then hopefully if you're a talmid so it's like this just the same point very good different levels that's it so say it in listen and say it no i see it i'm not in video try to uh take a stroll through all of them as much as you can tell me in a murals language and they tell me in your language the same same one idea yeah in ebiyo's language it would be as is what i said earlier that everything is part of divine oneness the question is how it's manifested how it's processed but there's no compartmentalization in life there's absolutely no division in life versus another view in your dish guide who does embrace diversity and compartmentalization and it's expressed throughout all of shas now you hear this it's it's it's it's overwhelming intellectually and emotionally the way i would translate it if you would ask me to give a lecture to secular jews about this it would really be the ability of how do i look at the traumas the adversities the challenges i face in life in my own system and my own mental health in my loved ones in in my environment and in the world i could live in a world of of of division of dichotomies of compartmentalization of brokenness or i could see and look at every moment of brokenness as an opportunity to simply reveal a deeper light a deeper oneness now when you say it like that i'm gonna be frank with you when you say it like that if someone were to come up to you and ask you who taught you that and you said you'll come i think for many people that would be a big jump so i i think maybe today i am criticized i'm criticized often by people who say uh where did you learn all this language and and and the truth is i would sometimes ask rabbi yo my brother told me if simon that he wants astra bl you know how do you apply tanya psychologically emotionally and at one point he told them it's not my failed i'm sorry but but when you when you heard you learned by the bl he was trying to articulate siddhis and every word of siddhis is ultimately applicable and not just applicable its main mission statement is a calling for internal and universal transformation so if we cannot bring it down to that world we missed the point rabbi yo's two favorite words were the words quoted hundreds of thousands of times in khabad and by the rabbit which is to be able to fuse the infinite and the finite to be able to fuse ultimate reality with your condition today so when when when you that sentence that you said a minute ago which doesn't didn't sound at all like the old con it but you're telling me that's what you got or one of the things you got from that's one of the things that's one of the things i got from him until today till today when i learned a secret if i learned it from him or even if i didn't learn it from him you know i think about how to learn it how to understand it how to get it and then this is exactly what i think people want to hear the words are obviously your own words tell me about the thought process tell me about the way of thinking the sometimes you might call it a derek but let me just say it in plain english and play in plain english like there's there's someone who tells you what to say you know most of our education today unfortunately is regurgitating you know memorize these facts take a short answer test and tell us the radiances and then there's a teacher who teaches you how to think tell me about the style of thinking that you believe you got from review the style of thinking what does that mean to think like review because obviously the words you're using are different words but tell me the thinking the style of thinking beautiful the first time great great question rabbi taub the we should do this more often the first time i heard the bjoy live rabio i have to say when i was a little kid already my mother god bless her would listen to you on the telephone he had themes of yiddishkeit 1983-84 a brilliant series 50 100 200 classes about central ideas of yiddish kite my mother would listen to it and then i listened to it it was once a week but the first time i heard that you alive was a birthday party i was a young boy a classmate of mine was a relative rabil he made a birthday party in the yeshiva dormitory so we got pepsi coca-cola and potato chips you know these dormitory birthday parties huh you know 10 o'clock at night right waiting and eating potato chips and then coca-cola very healthy food sitting around schmoozing who walks into this birthday party in the bjoy khan with the long impressive white beard divided into various strands and he's going to he's going to oh he came to party or wasn't a party man he sits down okay so he's gonna fabring he looks at all of us kids some of us you know add adhd really not interested it's 11 o'clock at night you know rubio starts off and he says what is and bina now we all heard man been a hundred times you grew up in a in shiva you learn as the epiphany right is the flash of inspiration and bin is taking the seminal idea and and developing it and building it into a mansion like the mother who takes the sperm and the egg and turns it into a fetus okay we all knew that and it's amazing the bjor looks at us you know sips the coffee and just the way he opened it i was i was a young kid i was a young teenager but it really opened my eyes to the richness of siddhis the bureau started this way he said in yiddish whenever there is a relationship between two people and two realities you always have to ask this question who is dominating the first party in the relationship or the other party in the relationship that's always the question do they both compromise does one overwhelm the other does the second overwhelm the first and then he says what is wisdom wisdom is opening yourself up to a new idea that's a relationship those were his words he didn't use the word relationships i just have to say this he didn't know what the word relationship means i'm using the word relation he used the word an idea is a relationship it's coming into your system and it's new you never had it before it's an epiphany he says who's going to dominate who who's going to define who are you going to define the idea where the idea is going to define you he says that's why there's you melt away in the presence of the idea it defines you in bina you define it it becomes part of you he says and this is true in every relationship now then he went on to explain till today this is a paradigm for me about how to address relationships marriages friendships parents and children of course god and the jewish people but it it it showed you the the the fullness the the richness the broadness the expansiveness you could read siddhas yes an idea ben is developing the idea it boiled it yet but then means you're opening yourself up to no thingness in other words you're transcending the ego of selfhood and you're opening yourself up to infinity and then he would explain to us how there is on infinite levels just the human brain there's animal being this is but in every place is the ability to melt away in awe and just say what and and bina is the assimilation into self integration which is critical because itself is elusive and nebulous but you will never ever grasp the truth and the clarity of which is why you need das this was he was talking on a 15 year old 16 year old in yiddish abstract transcendent but he used the word relationship and it guides me it guides me how to you know don't just say an idea get to the core of it understand it in context see it as part of the system of yiddish citizens which is the spiritual science and physics of the universe which is the spiritual physics and science of biology of the soul you know so i if if it's okay i want to just offer a possible interpretation of something you said earlier you had a complaint if you could even call it a complaint but you said you wished that perhaps could have brought the ideas down a notch or two and what it sounds like now what you're describing is he didn't need to bring it down a notch he gave you the paradigm he gave you the rules he gave you the system and you were very capable of then running with it and bringing it down to the next level and uh you know so you took he gave you all the building blocks and the rules how to put the building blocks together and you you brought it down so he didn't even need to dumb it down so to speak in fact if you would have used time dumbing it down he couldn't have given you more of these paradigms so he probably made the right decision educationally yeah listen he lived in a very uh he lived in you know in a very transcendent sacred world and he remained there you know it was there was sometimes times that were very turbulent times of politics and times of confusion and you would walk into his class and he was waxing eloquent about irene saif simpson the world of of infinite divine oneness where the baal shantiv is alive and the altareb is alive and that samadhik is alive and the rapper is alive and and you know and god's infinity fills the world and he's right there what i'm what i'm suggesting to you throwing your own words back at you is as you said in rabio's name if it's not in the arizona it's not going to be in the middle if it's in the ultimately it can be traced to the arizona right nebula was telling you exactly what you wanted to hear he was just speaking it on this level it wasn't a different world it wasn't a parallel universe it was the same exact universe you know i remember yeah i remember once i remember once he uh he came to yeshiva and he gave us a share about rosh hashanah kippur and he gave over in a beautiful way to young boys the famous sikhis of the rebbe of uh tishrei 1962 1963 the three levels of rosh hashanah they're in look at this volume 4 in volume 19 and he said the three types of relationships between the jew and hashem there's a relationship through mitzvahs and if you don't do the mitzvah you're fired you're gone there's the relationship where no i will always forgive you i will always forgive you and therefore you can always do truth i'll never throw you out that's the second relationship you can always come back and there's the third relationship where you're never disconnected you're always one you don't have to do true because you were never separated that's the secret how do i say it today rubio i remember he said he said let me give you an example right this was his example if you work for a company he didn't use the word company if you're employed by somebody and you don't fulfill the contract you're fired right but if you're a child in the company if your father is the boss he'll let you come back even if you didn't show up for three weeks right right away you have here the concept for some people judaism is a business god hires you there's a checklist nine to five there's a punching clock chakras punching clock you go to paradise you break the contract you're gone no mitzvahs you're gone you're not part of the deal that's a certain level of judaism some people live on that level and it's a true level but you're also a child you can always say tati please let me back in that's the second level and then there's the third level where you could never be fired you could never leave you could never be separated your helicopter your mom is your mum is inseparable you know so the oil would give these these metaphors that opened us up to the ability to be able to apply the rebbe's teachings the teachings of yiddish guy said this to different audiences now chase takes these three levels rishishani and kippur isn't it a most amazing lecture about three layers in a marriage three layers in a relationship with your child right you're doing all the zooms all the workshops for parenting and and and trauma healing and lectures through relationships with yourself didn't wouldn't talk to us about shalom sorry but as you say the paradigms are all there do i sometimes make mistakes i'm sure i often make mistakes you know it's part of the human nature you know i like this is fun i want to i want to do another one of these tell me this is very spontaneous we didn't have we did not prepare for this but tell me something i'm going to reverse it tell me something that sounds totally new age like this is not even a jewish idea you took this from a self-help book well you're making stuff up tell it to me in that language and then and tell me how it's really a real idea and let's see if we can recognize that okay i know i'm putting you on the spot but uh yeah no beautiful it's a beautiful stuff can you give us one yeah i'll give you okay okay once taught us the rebbe gave on this is an amazing masterpiece of the lubavitcher utes kisl of 1975. he gives us his hadron on rambam the first hadron he makes on rambam it's published today in a pink in a pink wait wait but get let let me do it i think it'll be morgeshmac tell it to us first and grab asias and then reveal the hadron wonderful when people are facing deep stress or anxiety or the key buzzword today is trauma now the word shrama you would not hear under bio's mouths because he didn't know english and he also didn't live in that dictionary right it wasn't part of his milieu and his language just like it wasn't part of my father's language even though my father allah was a seasoned journalist when you're facing trauma there are ways of dealing with your stress and anxiety through what they call today cbt cognitive behavioral therapy in which you can analyze it but this is only trauma that is verbal meaning it came into you through language and therefore it could be expelled through language therapy but there are experiences that we call today in psychology pre-verbal pre-verbal this means the space of a person that's pre-names pre-definitions pre-words there's no words for them there's no verbal words and therefore they come in as deep experiences that transcend any definition any language the worst thing to do is impose language on them what you have to be able to do is you have to be able to go back into that space where you don't define yourself or you don't define your world you have to go in to your pre-verbal self and find healing from that space this is a very very profound process it's not a simple process because in the verbal self everything is defined and therefore you can attack it through definition you can counterbalance it through definition but in the pre-verbal space there's no words for it so you have to go here into the space of infinity and within a person so to speak a phrase place that is extremely pre-verbal and it's very scary it's very vulnerable i have to be able to transcend all my definitions of self because definitions are a later stage in human development my story my narrative my narrative my story i created language for it and that's how i operate and process but can i go to the place of a free verbal self where there's no language so i'm coping through the language but i'm not ultimately healing it until i go deeper than the language much people okay you got this from a psychology book there's no way this is from siddhis all right i challenge you i challenge you how's that right now anybody who hears this this is classic pop psychology not pop this is good psychology stuff and today you know very well that all most of the trauma therapies are not any more verbal they're not interested in conversations somatic therapy cannabis therapy energy therapy energy coding muscles therapy allah right it's it's it's all pre-verbal it's pre-verbal the trauma sits in the body the body sits this keeps the score etc etc all these ideas all these teachings okay but here we come you anybody opens up lakuta toyota and the beer would teach this to us all the time in his language you open up there's hundreds of my martyrdom of the altar where he will constantly say these words constantly he'll say as follows the whole world was created from words and from letters today we call it dna everything is divine words but really but really that's all the way the divine energy is condensed and limited and everything has definitions and compartmentalizations really hashem himself completely transcends words therefore transcends stories therefore transcends every articulation so every single part of the world you can trace it back to a pre-letters pre-words pre-verbal state where it's just a manifestation of infinity and there's a paragraph here because on one hand the world is made from letters and yet if you go deeper yeah yeah so the alternative says and therefore we have to always make a choice i can either impose words on the world and it's basically change your mind change your find if i use the narrative of words and verbalization i see a world made up of words and verbs and ideas and concepts or i can every moment choose to trace the entire universe back to the divine infinity before it's condensed and manifested and and filtered and restricted through words and then you're opened up to an infinite experience this is all in language of ainsoif my mariam de burum isis yeah rabio would explain these ideas at length at length using hasidic language hasidic allegories hasidic metaphor he had his metaphors with the rocks and throwing of the rock and he would speak about gravity and he would speak about how you define reality and existence and how perspective changes existence but all in language of spiritual transcendent vocabulary of kabbalah and khabar siddhis but the moment you tune into history he was a brilliant builder of classes there were structures so i this is the two things i learned first of all how you build a class rabbi wrote to me a day or two ago that we said we need structure this class needs structure it's not just a biography of rabbi oil and i was smiling because rip shay said i love structure and i was thinking you love structure rib yoyo was allergic to something that didn't have structure if you repeated a sicker and you didn't have structure he was allergic everything had to have structure and by the way by the way it has its disadvantage too because he always kept it in structure there were sometimes guys you know cowboys bohemians who would the rebel had structure but that can also you know destroy structures there never was not struck he was structured but he could destroy structure rubio was a very very big husset and fan fan of structures i learned how to structure but you also learned the vibrancy of ideas the ability that every idea you really need to appreciate meditate on think about internalize learn how to articulate it find your audience you know he would speak to 14 year olds and he would change his language he would speak to 20 year olds he would change his language he had his language but he would change it so these are all uh these are all great things i have to say something to you i have to say something to you that uh it was it was one of those uh game changers for me one of those he was teaching us the hadron of the rambam this is before the instituted learning rambam he learned rambam on his own was a very big expert in amber everybody knew all the years and he made a habit on the schistle of 75. it was an hour and a half ahadrin on tamid and the rambam and then he continued it for a few for a month afterwards it was published 10 years later for the first cm harambam of the public shire and the rambam the rabbit then asked a question the opening of rambam is that the foundation of all foundations is that hashem is the primary existence and he creates everything and everything comes from him the second allah somebody entertains the idea that god doesn't exist nothing else can exist so the rebels said once the rambam said that everything exists only because of hashem obviously there's no god nothing exists because if everything if time is a creation then everything is nothing nothing doesn't create something so if everything comes from god obviously there's no god what does the rabbi have to give in this idea by the way if you're an atheist nothing else would exist and then the rabbi says why does rama say like if you have an aliyah in your das like if you become more mature and knowledgeable and you think that god doesn't exist really should say if you have a delusion if you have a doubt if you have a thought what's it like a compliment if you have an aliyah if you're if your mind ascends and then he said it's all in one word he should have said in hebrew if somebody thinks that god doesn't exist what does it mean if somebody thinks that he that says that god yeah that god that god doesn't exist drama emphasizes that he twice god god he doesn't exist in hebrew the who is superfluous he said he said let me show you something he said there are hundreds of my maryam of the alta rebbe that explained this concept and the rebels sought in two halakhas of the rambam the rabbit says that the rambam is addressing not atheism the rama is addressing a revolutionary idea in judaism you could define god as the engine of existence it's called matsurisha he is the soul the consciousness of creation he is the creator he is transcendent but he is the creator of the world he is the battery the engine of the universe of the cosmos that's maturity and he said this is called male calaman the engine of the universe the dna of reality says what happens if you grow up and you say we know it doesn't mean that he doesn't exist then he would say means that he is in a state of enormous meaning god god is a non-existential existence god is not the engine of the universe god should not be defined as physical or as spiritual or as transcendent or as the soul or as the creator these are all humbling denigrating terms for god even the word god is is is godless and pagan shahu einai matsui don't tell me he's he's the essence of existence he's the dna of my reality please that's the rambam calls it in the mirror in the garden of the bloods but c is built in an existence that is a non-existential state of existence so the rambam says then nothing would have a defined tangible reality the reason there is reality as we know it because god allows himself to become a defined reality so to speak a transcendent infinite defined reality that becomes the essence these two states are one of the foundational ideas of cabbage siddhas of kalama the rebbe says the reason the rambam puts these in as the opening of the mission attire is because the rama says this is the foundation of the river puts it in a footnote rabbi yo taught us how to think about this i'm going to say it to you in a minute because i want you to understand what an impact is this what an impact it had on me the rabbit says judaism is based on two truths number one the world exists and it's divine number two ultimate reality ultimate reality can't be defined even by existence because the truth the source of everything can't be defined as mathias the rabbi said the first truth is the foundation of means there's a blueprint of how to eat how to sleep how to get married how to live how to how to live as a jew that there is a divine purpose and meaning of existence that's why is the second truth the foundation of that's the question and the rebbe says as follows the first truth alone doesn't allow you to change the world because you're stuck in definition only when you go to the eno mozi only when you can appreciate the divine that is absolutely infinite you're not defined by the world and therefore you're not in a spall you're never stuck you're never you can only change a system when you're out of the system as long as we're part of definition we can't really change the world we can only do cosmetic transformation complete transformation with the world becomes completely one with infinity could only come when halacha also has the concept of enemazi now when i heard this from rabbyoil this is a personal confession i have read a little earlier rabbi soloveitchik's brilliant halachic man rabiosha bersalaveczyk his thesis is that the logic man is not the mystical man the logic man says don't speak about sillas speak about this world is about this world god wants to change this world that's what is about not transcendence not spirituality not spiritual thirst and longing he distinguishes between his father his father and the mystic the rebbe had a very different approach and mystic makes holistic as the vilnigan writes in hundred places there's no two streams of yadeshka there's one stream of yadushka in that sheer in that moment in rambam we have this fusion that is based on saiv is delusional you're living in a in in a non-concrete world it's not the world of the world of has in it blood and oxes and thieves and lawyers and thugs and and murder and violence and war and and agriculture and money and everything else that deals with that's the world of very real physical concrete reality the whole world of chabad siddhis transcendence infinity was sometimes thought as an extracurricular activity for the mystics among us but the rabbis showed in the rambam and the boyle explained it to us no it's only in the fusion of mammalian sovereign which as rabio would say he would get very upset when we would say there's different aspects of god no there's one god but in our experience of ultimate reality there is existence and there's transcendence of existence creates that balance that allows us to take existence as we know it and allow it to become a transformed reality where it becomes a conduit for infinite existence because matsuya and enematsu are really one i don't know if any of this is understandable in such a short presentation but these presentations these ideas for a young impressionable student like myself were not just exhilarating intellectually but they gave my yiddishkeit such a under the word abroadness a depth an expansiveness a freshness you can't find this stuff anywhere you know there's this great spiritual mystics but but that that fusion that fusion between the most minute detailed technical nuance that you know i sometimes watch people you'll forgive me you know ocds who use allah as a crutch for their mental challenge of being obsessed with details and missing the big picture and then there's the people who run away from the small picture and they just want the big picture and then there's the people who just get into the nuances and the details and everybody's struggling with this today rabbi yo taught us very beautifully how the rabbit personified in his mind and in his life that very profound fusion of the deepest infinite endless truths manifested in a tiny genome in one of the 70 trillion cells of the human body no rabbi did not use the word jinnam the rabbit did but but was the rebbe once said in your saliva or in your you're here you have the dna which has in it your entire your entire self and tyra is a person zai satyar adam in the smallest detail of torah you have all of it as the rebbe used to say the whole sun is reflected in one cup of water it captures when you get to that point of of atsum of dna in the smallest vart in rashi or pasik or mitzvah or thais you have the full intensity of divine infinity that fusion is is is one of the very found one one out of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of foundational ideas of the rebbe okay i i wanna ask you about okay so we spoke about this idea which maybe i'll call how the highest of the high and the most practical of the practical are all one thing and how every aspect of toyota isn't even divergent aspects they're all manifestations of a singular essence and on all reality for that matter it's all oneness it's all i mean really the term oneness can be very abstract and the way that uh you're speaking of it is you're giving a lot of you get giving a lot of articulation to that idea of oneness i want to totally change gears and ask about another big idea and and i'll say it with a little bit of a preface you know in chabad we're probably very probably most famous for ava which is interesting because because about a a school of mysticism it's about the deep teachings which rabbi was very much a part of the the chain of transmission of those deep teachings but khabar is known for obesity and about loving a jew and and every jew is is precious and a jew as a jew was a jew okay but people don't think of rabial as somebody who was part of that project but i would argue that much of the way that let's just start with and then maybe we'll expand it much of the way that understand who a jew is is because of explanations that the oil gave regarding jewishness i remember hearing him talk about it blew my mind the idea of a jew is not what happens when a person reaches perfection a jew is a different category just like a plant isn't when an inanimate object reaches perfection it doesn't graduate to become a plant it's it's a different category and every jew is essentially under that included under the under that rubric of that of that category now i'm i'm just giving this as an example you can add the depth to it but i think it's important to explain this idea of jewishness jewish identity um the preciousness of a jew something that everybody equates with chabad and i think rabbi gave it gave it isis gave it give it articulation i mean could you speak to that a little bit yeah rabbi chase you bring back a memory that i haven't remembered for many years and it literally just came up as you were talking it was once shabbos and the beer was talking to a few of the yeshiva boys he liked schmoozing with the cover some guys he like schmoozing a lot with and he was once moving with one of the few of the boys and he he just he dropped the line he said i heard this one's from the reb i never saw it i never saw it printed he said i heard it from the rabbit that ever said as follows creation of the world creation of the world is stupendous it's splendid it's it's miraculous it's supernatural how can from nothing become something right how can ayan become yehesh nihilo that's that's wondrous nothing or no thing hashem creates a yesh a physical concrete reality at least from our perspective but the rebel said but that it has at least a description ayan became yesh nothingness or no thingness became somethingness that ever said the real pellet is on the the real wonder is a soul and i have to say it in yiddish he said yes this is is divine it's no thingness it's not matter it's divine it becomes a yash it becomes a reality it becomes a soul we speak about a soul it becomes the core of your personality your engine your consciousness but it remains ayat in this is a language so you created it but before barack obama says it's tahirah it's pure it's beyond creation and it remains that way it's iron and yes simultaneously the oil said i said could you explain it to us can you explain he says i'm just telling you what the rep is said now i want i want to use that as a paradigm for the question you raise there's no question that one of the key ideas in judaism but one that became emphatically emphasized in the teachings of the bolshevik and his students throughout all of the branches of khasiddha's and even more emphatically emphasized explained elaborated developed in the teachings of the most recent laboratory is the idea of the infinite absolute non-negotiable sacredness and value of a jew that is true under all circumstances and under all conditions one of the most uh powerful articulations of this truth is as always in chabad in a minor of the alta rebbe lakuta torah rosh hashanah mimer called shirahamalas where he writes that there's a level of the jewish soul that has always won echoed it's always one with hashem it can't be separated and he says how can i say this it says vinichra sahanefesh it says the soul gets cut off the soul gets cut off how do i say that a soul can't get cut off and then the altered who's the greatest one of the greatest guy in him and how luck and nicholas says no that's the level of yakov the level of yakov which is the way the soul is manifested throughout the body that could be cut off and the person doesn't have that that spiritual consciousness but the level of israel the super conscious level of the divine soul is needs trouble or not rebbe says no rim kipper itself does the atonement and the rambam quotes rabbi but he says you have to do true so it's um so even the rambam says that the day itself atones and review once asked how can a day create atonement how does that happen you didn't apologize how does a day create atonement and he says because the day brings out that space in you where there's no separation so there's no atonement because you never sinned the reason you sinned is because you don't know yourself and this was one of the rebels great ideas sin comes from alienation of self that's why the word for repentance is true which means return to self if you know who you are if you felt yourself fully you can't sin because you are the divine ambassador in this world you are the ancient scythe in this world you are a manifestation of hashem in this world and as a result of that this is who you are could god sin you can't sin you're a helicopter but because of my traumas and because of my pain and because of my addictions and because of my stories about myself i don't know myself so if i don't know myself i need to know my pain i need to numb my emptiness so inaudible sin comes from because it comes from insanity the gemara says insight the devil would always quote this why because it represents the truth that articulates in the laws of divorce chapter 2 that sin is an aberration to your innate identity and it's not just an aberration to your innate identity there's a part of your identity that even when your sin is not involved in it because it is hashem it is hashem and you're going to go back to that space these ideas were things that the rebbe breathed he lived with he articulated he understood anti-semitism this way he understood this was one of the great reasons that the germans hated the jews so much because they felt this holiness even in the atheistic left-wing communist jew for whom karl marx was god and stalin was god and lenin and trotsky and the whole poet bureau they were the deities and they hated judaism and and the germans looked at these jews who despised the aduskiet and they saw in them jews who were as jewish as rebel khan and vasiman and rabbinacham zamba and the babavirav and the other six million because they were they the the truma thomas is allergic to kadusa and he could feel he could feel the kedusa in every jew that is infinite and absolute and and therefore he needs to exterminate that jew as a way of exterminating god the rebbe taught us he he believed that he communicated it rebuild as as as as a loyal and dutiful kaiser would explain this would articulate this would teach this and this became the paradigm the paradigm today that has ultimately been inculcated into so much of claudius this essential love and essential connection and essential unity which again it's a fundamental doctrine you'll find it in gemmarian conduction you'll find it in majors you'll find it in zarya but the baal shem tiv the al tirabha other all the hasidic masters and other great giants but especially in our generation they turned this they they this became like such a important and central and and vital point arabio used to tell us i had the privilege of being there this was a historic moment 1986. the rebbe is sitting and he's sobbing like a baby for close to a half an hour i had the privilege of being there and what is he sobbing about it's the last rashi on humish that is explaining the last rashi on humish is that the last thing that tyra says about maisha is let any call israel which rashi sees as the idea that moisha broke the luchas in front of everybody's eyes as he says in parshas akev and there ever wants to know why rashi has to choose an interpretation that causes us to see that the last words of the torah are so negative instead of the last words of the terror being positive and inspiring the end of the whole sas is changed rashi and taishwa say to finish with something positive the whole hamish ends on the lowest possible note moshe broke the look he didn't give the torah he didn't split the sea he didn't take us out of egypt he didn't give us the mana he broke the luchas say that earlier and the rapper says how can the end of terror be about the breaking of tyra all right good questions and another 10 10 questions on the rashi which is not for tonight you could learn the sizzling um volume 34. the rebbe's point was this the greatest quality of maishna bainu was that he took the luchas which were priceless which were divine and he broke them why to save the jewish people who would now not be accused of adultery because as rashi says the famous metaphor may should destroy the marriage evidence the marriage contract so they didn't commit adultery because they're not married so he saves the jewish sinners from annihilation by breaking god's most precious gift and this is the conclusion of the whole torah and the never for a half an hour crying but not just crying hard to describe this describes what a jewish leader is what a jewish shepherd is somebody who's ready to take the most precious thing in the world what something hashem gave him and without even thinking he destroys it why because of his endless and limitless love to the jewish people i remember the rebels said that russia uses the words his heart uplifted him and the rebels said this is not an intellectual idea this was not a bizarre mathematical equation this moisture's hearts moisture's heart was beating with infinite love and you would think god is upset hashem is upset you destroyed my taina so rashi finishes the last words the last words of rashi of the whole terror yahshua hashem says thank you because you just got to the essence of tyra the essence of toyota is the essence of toyota is that it allows the jew to be who he or she is always and will always be the essence of toyota is that it brings out and allows us to manifest the true essence of the jew which is one with hashem and the last word is says because in that breaking you have the greatest quality of maisha nabeno and the essence of all of terror it's a long and powerful discussion it's also a deep discussion and suggests about a nisham and about tayden a whole ton of de bellio and a much like this and two approaches it's it's a whole sugar it's not just this little void i'm telling you but these types of presentations which were not one or two or three or ten they were in the hundreds over the years i still remember we were sitting with rebje four levels of ava four levels of love adam nayak avraham and myself again he spoke about it in terms of adam he didn't say four levels of love you know with those flyers rabbi yo khan four levels of love no that did not exist but he explained to us for hours the level of love that adam understood the level of love that nayaka understood the level of love that of rama the great of rama understood but nothing had compared nothing in comparison to moisture and that ever goes through and this last conclusion is that real love is that you're not you don't have an agenda i'm not loving you in order to bring you back in order to convince you in order to persuade you the love is as infinite and non-negotiable as god's essence itself so these all of the rebels outreach all of the rebels miracles all of the rebels activism all of the rebels institutions all of the rebels public activism and leadership and guidance for a half a century which changed the jewish world it's all an outgrowth of history it's all an outgrowth of his thinking of his presentation of torah gomorrah there's not a single activity approach idea that the rabbit implemented executed inspired others to do that didn't emerge and grow out of from a ticeless arashi it was all rooted in his in history and that's what the rubber did for most of the day and and most most of his life that's my short answer to your question rabbi tom and i'm not exaggerating because this is this is one of you know what what a jew is what an ashama is how you look at a person how you look at a child how you look at any jew religious secular is one of the things that there ever did ever spent hours and hours and hours hours to uh to show to show the real hashgraph of third on a jew he would also take all the sugars and gemara some of them are very negative you know some stories are very strange and and and and it seems like you're dealing with petty people and they've ever just had a way of zooming in and and bringing out a quality like afterwards it's like oh yeah yeah it's obvious but he had that that ability just to be able to see the world and the turtle world from a prism a prism of obviously so you know rabbit tab you know well from your lectures as i do that people will often challenge different ideas of the rabbit like who says this is the right approach don't hazal say this doesn't it say this in racism or this which is very opposite and and it's true in in gemara and in madrid or you can find everything the question is who you are if your paradigm is that god loves us that god is crazy about us that each of us is an infinite manifestation of god if that's your paradigm that was the rebels paradigm everything was in that context everything and if i don't have that paradigm it can often become very confusing and i can sometimes misconstrue misconstrue the hashgaffer of toyota on how you look at another jew and i should say do historically there were also different approaches and you could say hey lou valo div really we're different approaches you're backpedaling we don't have to talk about the other approaches don't worry about it the other approaches can they can have their uh proponents let me ask you something else so we spoke about the one idea is the depth of unity between all aspects of toyota and all aspects of reality that was one idea we spoke about now we just spoke about how to understand the essence of a jew true jewish identity way beyond just something uh cultural or or even religious a metaphysical idea okay these are all very exciting ideas i want to ask you we also spoke about the matsuyame matsu and mamale the transcendent infinity and the concrete imminent manifestation of the divine as the two foundations of judaism i want to talk a little bit about spoke about that we can speak about all of this information okay so here's what i want to do i'm just inserting that there's another conversation if you want to speak about the material so then here's how we're going to do it i like before when you gave me the uh the flyer version you know the five levels of love whatever and then you backtrack languages of love language languages [Laughter] give me the uh what's called the street version the matsuri matsuri in really down the earth give it to me in the version where we're never going to believe it comes from service and then show me how this is a concept with citizen abdiel thought yeah i just have to say this i have to say this because i'm going to forget and you brought it up rabio you know rebel was he would tell stories but his classes were not stories they were they were serious classes but if he wants i think he was once for bringing with us and he told us that he once went on a flight i don't know how many times in his life he was on an airplane certainly in the earlier years it wasn't his thing much much more in the later years in the later years which is remarkable we didn't even speak about this but in his israel like 80s he's really he started traveling the world yeah it's true it's true you know you have an auschwitz survivor an auschwitz survivor dr edith agar you know from la jolla she published her first book at the age of 90. it's called the choice an amazing book doctor she's a descendant of rabia akiva eger she was in auschwitz a hungarian jewish girl lives in california she's a therapist rabiot began traveling after the rebel fell ill and after the rebbe's passage this is the mid-90s yeah he was no youngster he was no youngster and he was traveling in the 70s and mostly in his 80s as you said he would travel to israel a lot in other parts of the world and he gave over you know what he heard all the years and he inspired people and he taught people and thousands of people came to hear him but you have to understand the 50s the 60s the 70s the 80s the 90s he didn't go anywhere he was yeah you know for my youngest youngest years literally it was like he was an icon the rabbit came in and sat down and rabiot had his place he never moved he was in the same place that same long impressive beard that same hat that wasn't always you know in the best shape and his hand in the same position this was the gesture looking at the rubber and just just taking i'll never forget there was a jew he was a precious jew we loved his name israel his son ripped shalom runs had a heart of gold he was a very varied he wasn't the biggest he wasn't a scholar he was a warm jew he was once sitting he would sit on the stage with the rabbit sat and the rep is giving this deep deep hadron this deep explanation and a suggest i'm telling you it was very complicated and you saw duchamp smiling he's smiling so somebody asked him about it was it all did you understand what the rebbe was saying was why were you smiling he says i did not understand a word but i was looking at yale and i saw that yale is scavelling yoyo is melting away in ecstasy i saw that the oil was melting in eggs i knew that my rabbit is doing a superb job that's a that's enough for me i didn't have to understand i didn't have to understand you're about to tell a story about that yell at an airplane yeah so bill told us that he once in the 60s he traveled on an airplane with another person who didn't go on airplanes rabbi khadakov khadakov the personal assistant or secretary of the laboratory they're both on an airplane traveling from new york to montreal to go visit the president of israel a man by the name of schneider zalman shazaar formerly rubashov who came from dimir in lithuania and came from hasidim of the altareba his name was salman shazaar he was the third president of israel rabbi khadikov now i should say if you knew rabbi khandakov he he was the personal assistant of the rebbe he was an idealistic human being in a very very unique fashion very different than abiol they both had a common denominator and that is they did not live in the oil gaza in the physical world that we live rabbi khadakov lived on the rebel schedule he was completely dedicated to education these were not people who and rabio was was lived in exodus and entirely the bureau tells us we could not fasten the seat belt how is it ripped chase you know how the fastening a seat belt for you comes easy huh my wife does it in a split second and for me the flight attendant has to come and get upset it's not always so easy but i figure it out but ruby oil says i cannot fasten my seat belt and rabbit how the cuff can't fasten the seat belt and the plane is waiting and none of us could fasten the seat belt so i come up with an idea okay ruby oil's brilliant idea i have an idea instead of me doing it for me and you doing it for you let me do it for you and you do it for me and the bureau says it worked i i managed to fasten robert khadikov's seat belt and he managed to get my seat belt in and we were ready to go and he reviews monster haddad turns it's much easier to tie up another person in chains than to tie up yourself what we call today confirmation bias you know it's much easier to project you're the problem i i know how to control you i know what you have to do i can tie you up and put you put you in a certain box it's harder for a person to really be introspective and discipline themselves but the biological was like a split second he knew everything is a lesson in life the fact i couldn't fasten my own seat belt rib yoyo let the fasten my seatbelt is because it's very easy to tie up other people it's much harder for me to tie up myself to judge myself to be critic to be honest with myself and so forth um and rubio was telling this to us you know about about how we have to work on ourselves how we have to refine our mideast how how you have to be able to to to know when you're zealotry and your critical opinions of another person is not really about the other person it's about your unresolved tension and your unresolved insecurities he didn't use these words and your unresolved fears or what he would say you know your good old yate sahara your your your toxicity your own brokenness that that you have to work on i'm just i'm just sharing it came to mind and i thought it was a very uh it was just it was just a very good lesson in life okay give me give me the down-to-earth version first yes take me back okay so i'm giving a lecture to uh 300 secular couples who are married and they would like to hear about marriage about love about romance about relationships nothing of which i heard from ruby oil ever because he wouldn't not talk about this let me just interject nothing you heard from rebel in those words beautiful i like it i like it so i'll ask them and say this quest let me ask you a question what do you think the purpose of marriage is is the purpose of marriage self-fulfillment self-actualization that my wife or my husband should really understand me and help me achieve my goals and be the best person i could become or is the purpose of marriage self-transcendence self-negation ask not what your wife can do for you ask what you can do for your wife ask not what your husband can do for you ask what you can do for your husband what is the essence of marriage what would you tell your children dating what they are looking for in a marriage is it an opportunity to give is it an opportunity to receive is it both is it neither and so forth and this is an important question um rabbi shays there's the zoom in lakewood with our friends usha piranus and coach menachem right so one sunday night one sunday night there was a rabbi who spoke about marriage and his main theme was it's not about you it's about your spouse stop fetching that he doesn't treat me right just think about his needs ay gevald the organizers call me up the next day and they say there are hundreds of people who are angry who are hurt who are upset he's an abuser he's an alcoholic he's he's eyes i'm he's a narcissist 30 years i'm thinking about him when do i start thinking about myself could you come on next sunday and talk about self-care [Music] right i'm giving you an example who got it right who who got it wrong now now i'm going to go back to the viol okay i'm going to go back to rabbi it's really matsuy and enemotze and here's the big question is the purpose of yiddishkait to find yourself in god or is the purpose of yiddish guide to lose yourself in god which one is the purpose of yudishkai to find yourself in god which means to find how god helps me become the happiest most serene most fulfilled person and if god does not do that for me it's not the god that judaism wants you to cultivate a relationship with or no the ultimate religious jewish experience is lose yourself and god what what rib yeah would call bitter what siddhas would call bitter rabiot because speaking about bitter and he would discuss how there's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of levels in bitter bittle means self-nullification me in the real presence of reality where is the room for ego there's nothing but god lose yourself and god now i want to say something and that is matsuya ne matsuya tells us that one without the other is wrong and sometimes abusive and one without the other is missing a major component of judaism and it goes both ways so what's matsuvainematsu matsu means that there must be an element where i have to find myself in god you know why because god is not just the god of infinity god is also the god that represents the truth of my psyche every neuron every nerve cell every cell in my body is really divine energy if i just if i just escape to the infinity of god matsui i am not finding the truth of god the way he is manifested through the vehicle called josephine jacobson or shea's taub or joseph schaefer or the other wonderful people souls who are here with us every individuality is not only nice and not only tolerable but important and critical and vital because there's something about the divine energy that will only flow through your personality and your talents and your resources and your gifts and your individuality and your features and your skills every person is an indispensable note in the divine cosmic symphony the devil would always say the mishna says in sanhedrin 38 every person has to say the world was created for me it's not narcissism it's basically that there's something at stake in my existence that nobody else can fulfill in the history of civilization not in the past not in the present not in the future there's something that you and you and you and me have to contribute to all of history that nobody else could contribute because it's the light that's coming through your brain and your soul and your life story and your virtues and your challenges that's mutsy but that's only half of the picture then there's enough matsi and ane matsuy is the ability to lose myself and god not just to find myself in god it's the ability to be open to absolute transcendence it's the ability and the security and the confidence to be able to go to the pre-verbal world to the pre-verbal reality where everything is a manifestation of infinity and where i don't need to exist in order to exist because the greatest burden of existence is that i have to protect my eye that i have to exist it's the greatest burden the the most serene state of existence is when i don't carry the burden of self-consciousness of self-awareness i don't have to exist i can just be a channel for infinity now this can be abusive if you don't understand it if i tell this to the wrong person in the wrong time what i'm basically telling me oh you don't need to exist your existence doesn't mean anything so you can be a smarter you can be a doormat and let me tell you rabbi there's people who misconstrued bitter and use this as an excuse to abuse themselves and abuse others they think that bitter means you're a doormat you're a smarter you're a nothingness you get abused of course you deserve it you're nothing only god exists it's one of the worst distortions of judaism could only come as something that transcends the matsu because the mutsu is in a good and powerful place and then you invite and you open yourself up to a you that is higher than finiteness and therefore is a channel for infinity and therefore doesn't obstruct infinity it's not running away from a self that you hate and you despise and therefore you find in god's infinity an excuse to hate yourself and not deal with your own pain because then it's not even a relationship with infinity it's just avoiding and it's coming from my fear of not trusting that there is love that fills my individuality so i'm just very briefly trying to show the link between a very very powerful point that is so relevant for people today and people struggle with this in all circles and demographics with one of the great great ideas and considers that rubio would teach us in very spiritual abstract terms but as you said created the paradigms to be able to understand to be able to understand ruby oil once said it was so beautiful to hear that he heard from the rabbi the rebel said you said god wanted to uh give us merits so he gave us a lot of mitzvahs he gave us a lot of mitzvahs because he really wanted to give us merits so rebel said rabbi asked like what's this idea here that he gave us a lot of mitzvahs to give us a lot of memory really what like really he just really wanted to give us one mitzvah or really he wanted to give us zero mitzvahs he wanted to give us six mitzvahs but then he said let me give them 613 so they can get more you know more rewards let me come up with a few more let's go like what is this like like it's really god says you know what i really don't care i really don't need this but you know what i know you guys like ice cream and for every mitzvah you get ice cream so let me give you 630 mitzvahs so every week you can get 613 bars of spiritual ice cream is that it really like that's what akash is saying and and what's is this a revolutionary idea how does he know this like did god tell it to him your interest very interesting questions which ruby oil articulated that he heard from the little baby i remember before the rep rabiot said the answer that he heard from the rabbi i didn't hear this from there i heard this rabbi who said he heard it from there but it was before my days sure said said something very interesting when he said interesting it meant that it it opened up new vistas and listen listen to the explanation okay and this is rabio's words and it be oil's words and then we're going to bring it down that episode i'm using his words with with a literal translation into english everybody said as follows what is a mitzvah you could look at all the mitzvahs really as one one point what is a mitzvah a mitzvah is the inner intimate will of hashem who is hashem i don't know but i know hashem is the ultimate source of everything and this is his will and that's what a mitzvah is and i don't care if there's 600 mitzvahs 900 mitzvahs thousand mitzvahs 10 minutes all the mitzvahs are one thing every mitzvah is the same it's god's inner intimate will sometimes it's not the fat not the idiom kipper sometimes it's to wrapped filling to shake a citrus to eat matzah to blow shay for not to eat pork okay fine to leave the corner of my field in here so for poor people but the theme is not so relevant the essence of the mitzvah is hashem's will that's one perspective rabio said there's another way of looking at it and that is every mitzvah is here in order to help you develop your own mindset make you a better person the madrid says the mitzvahs are with sareefes habrius to make you a mensch davening learning you want to read in our times i'm saying this read your assumption or follow her read all these types of works they're there to make you a better person better husband the better father people will talk about shabbos right what is shabbos what is shabbos no cell phones you talk to your kids no television no malls no internet you spend time you eat your filter fish rabiel didn't give this example but he said what's a mitsuma a mitzvah is the individual contribution here every mitzvah is different every mitzvah is unique every mitzvah is distinctive which one is true that ever said like this is doesn't only mean to give merits lazakus comes from the word zach hashem wanted that people should be refined individually they shouldn't only transcend their self they should transform themselves here bellam doesn't mean in quantity he gave them more mitzvahs no herbalam means he gave us a perception of judaism that's about diversity there's not one mitzvah there's many myths it's not about serving one singular god no every mitzvah is about personal refinement there's many many diverse methods why because the ultimate purpose is not only self-transcendence but to be able to realize that it's about the fusion of the ultimate infinite transcendence with your individual identity as a person that's matsuyamatsu bittel ultimately the fusion of realizing that self that oneness with god is never about self-denigration never because that means that doesn't it's not only bad for psychology okay this is what i learned it's bad for judaism because it means that god is not mamale god is which means if i'm giving a class and the people come out of my class understanding that their lives no don't matter in the sense that they're just doormats and rags i'm not just doing a disservice to them emotionally and psychologically i'm doing a disservice to judaism because i'm completely denying the foundation of judaism that hashem in other words that hashem is the vibrancy behind every thought behind every cell behind every emotion about every experience and therefore you have to be able to cherish and appreciate what is going on in your heart and in your soul knowing thyself from a divine perspective is as important as knowing god you know when you speak about all these paradoxes you know the the seeming contradiction is it a or is it b and then it's always both or c or it's it's it's it's never a limited one perspective it's always always the bigger perspective what you're reminding me there's something that girl would often say maybe as often as<02:57:29