Meaningful Interviews 1 Dr Phil Schneider 3922

so welcome to uh meaningful interviews a new series of interviews that i'll be conducting with uh various people and today we have dr phil schneider pesach schneider right pesach [Music] 30 years ago 1992 i believe april 92 after trevor had a serious stroke and uh i thought that it would be good to hear directly from you with your background as a world-renowned speech pathologist and everything you've accomplished uh with god's help or hashem in your life to hear about some of the inner workings um what happened when you were treating the rapper but before that who was the one who invited you to come treat the rebel so it started with a mystery which is not fully solved and life is about a lot of mysteries i got a phone call at home one night asking if i was phil schneider person did not give me their name they said there's a rabbi who needs your help and i said what's the problem they said well i had a stroke i said well i don't specialize in stroke i'll give you the names of the best people in new york for stroke and they said no we want you to come and i basically said no i don't first of all i don't go to people's homes i live in the bronx he's in brooklyn and i don't know why you're calling me anyway and i don't even know who you are and they kept calling and finally my wife said you know maybe you're supposed to go just like this which was very unlike her out of character to kind of say something spiritual like that at that point in time in my life i was preparing for the bar mitzvah of our first son and in fact i did not own to fill in myself and did not know how to teach them to put them on in any case i kept getting this call so i said okay i'll go uh and they said well when do you want to see him and i said well when is he most alert they said four in the morning i said and they said we'll send the car so i said okay send the car at three a.m and i'll see him when he's most alert so then a big crisis occurred in my personal jewish life it's like do i wear a head covering i don't normally wear anything on my head i don't wear a hat or a yarmulke if i'm going to a synagogue of course i know to wear a but that would be it and i go like so i start to go through this whole thing like if i wear a yarmulke i might be pretending that that's who i am and how could i go to such an important person and by the way i didn't know who he was at that time i had to start reading when i said what's the rabbi's name they told me a name and i started reading see and it wasn't the days of the computer it took a little bit of work to get uh the information oh my gosh and it was very interesting it started me on a very soulful journey about who am i as as a jew and uh i did decide to wear a head covering but because of the right reason i felt it was respectful and i felt that i'm jewish i'm going to a holy place to meet a holy person and it would be a sign of respect so what transpired next early in the mornings i sat down at the table with a group of men i will leave the names out but these were leaders in the organization and assistants and associates of the rebbe and uh they gave me a very short but very powerful lecture about how i conduct myself and speak to the rebbe when i'm in his presence and they said you don't just ask him a question you ask him in the third party may i ask the rebbe a question i remember thinking this is very strange and totally new in my life but the message was respect the dignity of this human being and i didn't just assume it was this human being but any human being particularly when they're in a vulnerable place and they can't physically take action on their own behalf and they can't speak so they ushered me into the rabbi study and two large strong men accompanied me on either side it was very clear if i did anything inappropriate they were there to protect the rebbe's not his physical safety but his dignity and in some regards as you chuckled it was comical in another regard it was profound and uh as i walked in and i my eyes connected with this man i'll never forget that experience first of all his skin was radiant shining brilliantly clean his eyes was sparkling and they locked right in on my eyes and i locked in on his eyes and i felt like this man could see right through me it was extremely power it was a soul-searching moment for me because i realized only truth could be told in that room no matter what it was and my job that i had been charged with was to find out could in fact he comprehend people's questions and comments and could we reliably comprehend his response to those questions and comments was there a pathway to communicate to connect um [Music] and so i went in and uh i started out by asking i asked the rev a question and typically when you look at someone who's had a stroke you ask all kinds of nourish guide questions to try to see if you get some kind of a response so you might put two objects out and say could you look at this or that to see which way the eyes go very often the last piece of motor control a person will have and he had a profound bilateral stroke so he could not move any of his four limbs but he had a little bit of control of his eye movements but whatever i asked him there was no sign of a response he just continued to stay locked in on my eyes and i couldn't get any response and at some point maybe 20 minutes into this encounter he closed his eyes as if he was going to sleep and that was clearly the cue to step out these two men were very clear about that it's time to step out there was no speaking but there was physical contact and i sat down at the table with these other men who wanted to know all the answers at this point after i spent 20 minutes with this man uh i forgot to mention and it's very important to mention this besides his radiant skin and how impeccably he was groomed his beard was combed beautifully he was wearing an unusual set of clothing he was wearing a beautiful white satin shirt with snaps down the sleeves and down the side and black satin pants with snaps down both sides and it struck me when you when a person is god forbid hospitalized or put into a facility for rehabilitation or something they're usually stripped of their own clothing and put into rags that leave their private parts exposed their whatever dignity they have is removed whatever identity they have of dignity is also removed and here they did the opposite he was clothed in a way that medical people could get access to his body if they needed it to listen with a stethoscope or to an injection or an iv but with the most concern that he should be in a dignified state that was a profound experience to see that then they sat me down at the table and they wanted answers and the question they posed to me was they said you know the rabbi has a fabrian scheduled in a week or two do you think we should postpone it and i said before i answer your question you'll have to tell me what's a for bringing and they said he's going to speak for a long period of time probably hours without notes now i just met a man who appeared to be someone who could no longer speak and it did not and in my mind as i'm sitting there i was like in shock and it occurred to me that this group of men were either in shock and denial or they they really thought he had laryngitis and it would clear up in two or three days and so i realized my job was not to fix the rebbe that was not a human being's power but my job was to help this organization these men who loved him and worked for for him and with him on a holy mission uh could somehow come to grips and modify their ability to to continue to go forward with this man so i did not say you think he has laryngitis i said you know if he lives long enough anything is possible but i think you should postpone the footbringing and uh so in the next i only was there a few meetings i think it was three meetings in the next two meetings i tried to come up with some experiments to figure out whether we could in any way make a connection which we could say yes he understands and yes we can find a way to understand him so i set up the following experiment oh i asked him what does he do all day and he said well all day people call here from all over the world with questions for the rebbe and we read him the questions and he responds and we tell the people we give the answer that the rebbe wanted wow so before the questions i was asking him were things i thought he would be interested in like i brought photographs of his family members and i said can you look to this one of that one and all he did was stare at me and then i brought he was there were plans for a um a replica of 770 to build be built in israel and he was very involved with those plans so i brought the plans out to see if i could get him anything i thought he was interested in nothing and then i said you know what the next person who calls this speaks english let me take the call and i will present the questions to the rebbe and everything changed the first question was a young woman of who said to me her parents had betrothed her to a 40 year old divorcee she did not want to go against her parents will but she did not want to enter into this marriage so i came to the review and i said rebbe i need to ask you a question it's very important there is a young woman on the phone she's really in distress and here is her question for you and she wants your guidance and again i was completely foreign to this system that people would call for questions like this and all i did was stare at his eyes and he stared at mine and i said i think i hear your answer and then i said i'm going to ask you the question one more time because i want to be sure i've got it right so i reversed the order of the question meaning in one hand he would have to say yes in order to agree with himself on the other question he'd have to say no so they would agree right and i felt i got the same answer twice and i had no way to know which way he'd go because i have no inside insight into how such a decision would be made but it was clear to me and someone said to me phil what did you hear now there was no sound what did you see on his face did he nod his head no i said i just kept looking at his eyes and i felt that's what i felt but i couldn't describe a physical gesture movement or sound either either in the yes or the no correct but it was clear for me if you said me what was your gut experience there i had no ambi and no ambiguity so i said wow let me ask someone here who speaks hebrew to do the same thing and i'm not going to tell him what i heard i'd like him to present the same two questions and to reverse the the order so he'd have to get yes and he'd have to get no in order to get agreement i said and write it down don't tell me then i asked someone to do it in another language i think yiddish and each of these men came out said we've got the answer and he agreed both the yes and no were in agreement so we had three people and six questions they were all in agreement so i said you know this is pretty uh like out there for me this is like not in a textbook of any sort so i said let me get another call a man called from south africa a very wealthy businessman he had put down a large down payment something like a million dollars to build a mall in the west bank of israel and israel at that point had put us a stop on development as some kind of attempt at a peace process and so all these people had money invested uh their money was tied up and it was unclear if they would get it back the israeli this man is telling me this the israeli government set up an agency to hear the filings of complaints of business people who had money tied up he's calling the rebbe to ask should he file a complaint to get his money back or just let it go i asked in two ways both answers agreed i had two other people in different languages do the same we all wrote it on a note of paper we put the paper down whoa total agreement and again i haven't told you what he said in each case because but what was striking is that when i was asking him things that were not important about people's lives i couldn't discern any answer but when the questions dealt with real people with real life dilemmas which they needed real guidance on uh it was clear to me and these other two men that they got answers that there was no room in this man's life for a nonsense talk that whatever the communication was it was soulful and intense uh that's what i experienced and and so what i took away and what i shared when i came out to sit down with the other group men i said you know i've learned something about listening i always knew listening was very important in general we don't have classes on listening in academic settings we have classes in speech what about the other half of the speeches how do you receive it how do you hear and we look at you know the partial things that we hear we hear about a mixture of seeing and hearing together it's like listening is not necessarily about sound and audition uh i said you know i learned about the power of eyes to connect human beings and if you take the time and you don't change your focus you might be able to see into people and uh i'd like to i i thank you for that uh it was wonderful uh really wonderful information and insight um a couple of questions if i may sure uh one is so after these three times uh you never saw him again because if this was in 1992 this was almost towards the beginning of the stroke you know he had it in february march you were there in april um in 93 or 94 did you see him at all so when when i wanted to know the different doctors that he was involved with i was handed a law several sheets of paper who was his cardiologist who was his internist and i kept a loose leaf and i had lists because shabbat is all over the world and everybody knows the greatest doctor and it turns and we none of none none of the people who saw him talked about it was clearly nothing was to be discussed when i left 770. so i didn't know what else was going on in my own industry but apparently afterwards and over the years since then i met many speech pathologists who had been the rebbe speech pathologist uh it was clear that i did not offer them what they were hoping and wishing and dreaming and praying for which was the idea that uh you know we could return him to the state that he was in that i was not the shalia to say you know if i come here five times a week for the next whatever he'll be back i was someone who said we have the same person with the same soul in the same mind but he's not going to talk to us we're going to have to learn to listen in a different kind of way so that message took me a little bit in but there were other people who followed who were colleagues that i knew in new york uh so yeah and uh i was fine personally i was fine with that because i don't think that i i don't think it was a path that was to be followed are you saying that the some of the other uh speech pathologists that you do your colleagues in new york they had a different uh experience with the rebbe did they say that we never shared much more about we never shared about the details of our experience uh first of all the reality is that it's not the niche in my profession that i'm known for i spent several years in dealing with this post-stroke issues but it's not the area that people that i'm asked to lecture on and so forth and so on so it was kind of a surprise that i showed other people that were there for example i came equipped with the idea that maybe i could use a computer system which existed at that time to use the eyeballs to control a computer that would either generate sound or would print would would type out on a screen right it was clear to me that was not a path that we were going to go down this man was also pretty senior in his years somewhere around the 90 point the stroke was profound it was bilateral which is pretty significant there was no movement of anything i watched him work with physical therapists and as i said if a person lives long enough anything is possible i still will hold by that um but i felt that at that point in time it was better that he move on and do what he's doing answer meaningful questions and be told stick your tongue out say the name of this word i thought that the process of trying to push him to speak could be torturous and more hurtful and helpful because it might confront him with disability instead allowing him to go forward with his specially gifted ability so i myself and thousands of others were in 770 and we observed when they brought the rep out they made a special course you probably know and um i observed him moving his head and i saw that now is that because the stroke you didn't have control of the of you remember the time frame because i remember that also and i i um oh that was that that went on until that i think that went on when they first do you remember when they first they created a window on the level of the building where his study was which the higher end of the wall into the sanctuary right and to speak to the audience when he saw them which was amazing right so that went into 93 you know i'm wondering when they first cut the window but my question is i was involved in that discussion and i would say argument and it was very heated there were several people who felt it would be humiliating to expose the rebbe in this state of being challenged as much as he was to put him in front of a group and there were those who felt it would animate him and it did animate him in the most amazing way he not only moved but he began to produce a kind of a voice there were no words and people were in conflict as to whether he was distressed or excited what was your opinion what was your opinion i voted in favor that they do it they allow him to be part of his life and his community was his life it was his family and and to do and to not do that would be to to to isolate him and that uh we would get a sense but it did animate him that's as far as my journey went right so but but you said the beginning of the interview that you said that you know you locked eyes with the rebbe and uh that was the communication but you said there was no movement like stillness my visits were at the beginning of that the window did not exist when i came in that's something that came up later i have a recollection of it i might have made it my business were not synced it might have been three or four but i remember the window scene and i remember the conflict around it and it did animate him and he produced some sound vocally i worked with people who couldn't speak for 10 years and and in the 11th year they started to produce speech human beings and maybe that's one of the big principles to draw out like there's always room for there's always room for optimism right so so what so what you're saying is tell me if i have if i understand correctly because you're the professional of this what you're saying is that the animation that he got from seeing the hasidim coming out to the porch and seeing could actually created some sound you heard when he tried to speak to the group and so you saw that you heard that yes and he did seem more animated this was a point in time later that i don't recall the time frame for right a few years ago right but you do but had they suggested that when i saw him when he was completely motionless and soundless uh my own feeling was it would have been inappropriate because because it would take away from like taking companies and wheeling them out into the public but what but once you saw that they did it without asking you you know and it was working he had more ability and he i would say it was a good thing for him right right now just let's go back from what you said you you asked the question in two different ways you had two others do the same thing you all came and wrote down the same thing are you saying that this was kind of a spiritual feeling that you came to or are you saying that in the physical in your physical mind you really believe that's what happened so it's i can tell you very strongly he did not produce produce any sound and i can tell you very strongly there was no discernible movement but i i so if you want to call it spiritual or imagination i felt like i knew which way he was leaning even though i don't know how he would have leaned in the question of the woman in the betrothal or in the case of the man with the business and by the way i did i was there a few weeks later to get a call from the man with the business thing and he said you know i took the i calling to thank the rebbe because i did not file a claim ready said not to file all my friends filed for their money back they got 50 cents on the dollar i wrote a letter to the prime minister i got my full refund my full deposit back wow i did not hear from the young woman so what i'm saying what i'm trying to communicate is that i do not hear any sound i did not see any describable movement but i felt i i underst i felt like i knew which way he was telling me he would go it's it's not it's not the world we the world most of us occupy it's hard to express that and and legitimize that but that's what happened with a few of the physicians uh and the men who were pretty much in charge of helping with the organization right right and what type of impact did this have on on your life from that until today 30 years later in all honesty so first of all one of the doctors i'm sorry that at that time were you uh observant yet were you were you from jew at the time yet so i don't fit well in any label but i can tell you for sure i was not involved in shabbat and because i we were we were we were kosher at home and not outside of the home right i wanted it that way um i did not have to fill in i did not pray on a regular basis um but i learned to put on to fill in at 7 70. one of the doctors took me aside we became friendly and he and my son i brought my son on one of the visits and he taught him and right after that visit i not only got him to fill in for his bar mitzvah but i bought for myself as well um i think it reinforced a lot of things about spiritual lives because i experienced a passion and a faithfulness and an amuna amongst the people that were involved that was profound and and even following the rebbe's death because wondering what was going to happen with this organization and all of its good deeds and its missions and i realize you know what what's really special is when what you do in this world lives on beyond you and even grows in magnitude beyond your own physical life that's what we should all be striving for that had a big impact on me because there's survival in this world there's success in this world then there's significance that your presence here for whatever your time frame was made a difference that goes on beyond your life and i realized i'd been in the presence of a man and then i watched the organization not fall apart or fumble but magnify it's good deeds and however whatever language you put to that it's a fact right and um i did develop a very nice real friendship with the local chabad rabbi in my community which i i treasure and uh i've had many contacts with uh people i've gone to these conferences when they have the gatherings in new york uh i feel very inspired by the rebbe and what the people in the kebab movement do yeah it has an impact on my spiritual life how did you feel when you heard trevor passed away i think i felt a sense of wanting to talk about the lessons that i i took from his life and not just from what i saw when i was there but i had by that point it read many things one of the lessons that i continue to share in his name well there are two um one is never to use negative language and i think the example i think one of the biographies a bunch of biographies came out in the last few years um was the example to talk about a deadline that something died as opposed to a due date like something new is coming into this world like a new life right i i share that in all kinds of formats judaic non-judaic in my life and i i i strive for that and i realize that in and of itself as one powerful lesson so i pass it along in his memory there's one other that's right oh this other one i comes up for me almost on a weekly basis uh and i use it in judaic settings meaning where the person i'm working with is jewish and i use it in settings where the person is not it was a story a metaphor i guess you call it a muscle about everyone having fences in their lives a barrier that some place you want to go and you feel that something's stopping you and maybe you dig a hole trying to get under it maybe you go left or right hoping to get around it or you look at it and say what do i have to learn to get over it and if that's your approach the fence which looks like it's going to stop you is the thing that elevates you it gives you new skills and inner strength to go beyond even and future challenges i deal i deal a lot with people who stutter they have a fence they could run away not speak or they could say okay how am i going to develop the strength and the ability to transcend this challenge and when you take that approach makes you a human a stronger better richer deeper human being so i think of it as when his physical life ended i felt a sense of mission to share these lessons and they come up often for me and i cite them in his name it's beautiful um you are current you're still practicing you're still in practice yeah and if anybody wants to ask me anything about this or anything else the practice is called schneiderspeech.com you can find me there and yeah thank god i feel uh i feel like don't have a sign on me that says out of service and i don't know there ever said there's no retiring yeah and you know that's another thing and these are all lessons some i read some i heard from other people uh you know if you came to him and he said thank you for your blessings i've done very well x y and z said great double it that's right you always become more so rather than the american way of thinking as you get older you'll dwindle in your value and your productivity or you'll aspire to laying on a beach or hitting a little ball and walking around some grass yeah right i feel very blessed to be able to help people and what better way to live than that and so so long and as long as i can do that i thought it was over when the pandemic started because i'm very health we're very sensitive to health issues we're very my wife and i are vulnerable medically um so i i gave up my office which i've had for 35 years i thought okay i'm in my 70s it's okay um and then gradually people started saying well can we meet you on the computer so now my office used to be a 10-minute walk from where i live now it's eight seconds going to work darling i'm at work and so i'm able to [Music] to people you should know that uh this interview uh will will uh will be for eternity uh i mean to say it's very meaningful that's what's called meaningful interviews because it isn't only the content that you provided which is a substantive and very important uh historically but it's the the soul the shama that you communicated in in what i hear and see and that is something that uh is an eternal lesson that's greater than the physical reality of being alive or you know the opposite of alive you know uh not alive so so exactly what what the rebbe and you said yourself exactly what the rev taught us and teaches us today 30 years later is is what what i heard and i i think the listeners will hear uh when they pay attention closely to what you're saying um because it's uh you know for me for me i want to tell you that i've spoken to various doctors neurologists and others so my first conversation with a speech pathologist on the level like like you and um what i heard is that even in the stillness because what what we hear in chabad you know and what you see on the screen is when he's moving his head he's coming out in shape okay so you know you don't really hear about uh that those first months when you saw him when there was no uh movement and there was no sound at all and yet you felt communication and not only did you feel communication but you had three different people who said the same thing and people's lives that for the shidduch and 18 year old and the businessman and and you shared the details uh it it it was real it was real so now 30 years later for uh uh the barbecue cluster or any jew that respects the rebel and wants to have his guidance and and learn from him um it's this it's still possible even though you can't physically see him uh you can't physically see him you saw him you saw him in the room right you didn't hear him but the energy goes beyond it goes beyond the physical hearing and seeing and and this is something that uh drives chabad and it's uh you know 5000 plus uh houses worldwide and we continue to continue to to to go towards the goal and and you know based on what's the goal mashiach should come so without you know that that's the goal of every jew chabad not orthodox not orthodox every jew is is waiting uh eagerly for that day to experience the the mashiach and um this and how you feel about it but this i believe is is goes hand in hand goes hand in hand with the rebber's mission and functionality today not 30 years ago although our interview was about 30 years ago but the issue is what do we do today with the message that you shared from 30 years ago your comment oh sure i was drinking in what you were saying in your passion um thank you thank you and i was thinking about the deepest communication in all of our lives and i think and as i quick my mind just took a jump on that and i realized probably the most profound pure communication we have is when you're holding your baby a newborn [Music] and very often we just stare at their eyes and their eyes stare at us i had my first son uri strapped to my chest when i was doing research in a laboratory when he during his first year of life he was one of these snug they called it snuggly he was looking at me and i was looking and i remember all the time i spent just staring into his eyes and him looking back at me there was no question that there was a bond being formed from this visual connection for me the lessons are treat everybody like they are the world's gift like they are god's gift they're a bit salmonella keem you want to call it moshiach whatever we call it and the lesson that i came away from there was treat somebody with the greatest dignity particularly when they are vulnerable another and also the other lesson was take the time to really listen to stop your own engine listening is a gift good listening is good loving it means you stop your own life to make space to drink in this other being and some of that's through sound and some of that's through your eyes and some of that just and i know what people who don't see or don't hear sometimes they have a more powerful sense of connection with the other person there's a lot more to this world than whatever i understand intellectually um so the listening the respect and the sense that every one of us if we strive in the right way can leave something behind which makes the world a little bit better and bring about a tikkun alum it's not necessarily one particular individual that's going to do it for everybody else but each one of us and i think everyone in the chabad lives that way and it's not just gabon but it's a demonstration there it's systematized it's it's been passed down through generations and you have this wonderful incredible charismatic leader who's able to communicate and educate and inspire people to go beyond themselves in ways that don't seem to make any logical sense how it's all done so uh i wish all of us the strength and the sense of conviction and spiritual guidance to to get to places we've never believed we could get to thank you thank you if we were in one room i would give you a big hug now i feel your hug i feel your hug and i thank you for this opportunity to share with you only in our lives you should have yiddish for your children grandchildren great grandchildren and we should only meet at happy occasions thank you for your time take care bye