The Lawyer and The Rebbe's father: Reb Shlomo (Paul) Hamburger

welcome to uh meaningful interviews my guest today is mr paul hamburger or the way i call him breb schleimer hamburger have been learning together hasidis and the teachings of the rabbit laboratory of his father have played the ethics narration known as ablaevic for three four years or so and um i remember the first time we met each other was i believe at the ohio it was a shabbaton that of potomac where he lives in potomac maryland they uh came for shabbos to the ohio and they asked me to come to be the guest lecturer and scholar in residence and um this jude absoluma comes up to me and he says what do you think about the idea of anoki you know i uh been learning [Music] ten commandments that sarah said libras and he and he said can i talk to you about it i said sure i remember like yesterday i think it was i think it was in the afternoon that's my recollection shop this afternoon between the break you know we had a few hours that we were able to take a walk rest and he told me that uh he's identified i think was 144 141 141 141 the expert um the torah mentions just in the torah right the word significance in its meaning and um i remember he told me that uh when he shared this with others uh some people thought he was a little strange like they've never heard of such a thing and like why waste your time and really doesn't really mean anything and i thought it was fascinating and i and i i really did because it was the first time in my life and i've been learning toyota and teaching taylor all my life i've been around many people who were torah scholars in many different ways from the literal talmudic to the capitalistic so this was really an eye-opener and we became good friends and we'll talk uh more about it a little later in the program but uh the flavor here is a washington washington dc attorney and that too uh was very interesting you know here you know we've had in our program uh a doctor a business person is our first uh attorney and um for a uh a prestigious attorney with a prestigious law firm to to uh delve into this topic and uh to write a book flame has written several works one work one book and then other uh publications i'm talking now besides his legal profession that's uh if you care to tell us about this i will be more glad to hear but um we're really happy uh schneider that um that we're here and and that uh i can tell you personally um i've learned so much from you uh in many ways and i really mean it i'm not saying this because people have to hear that um when i learn with someone and i try to learn from them because there's so much to learn from everyone regardless they have a beard they don't have a beard they have a yamaha they don't have a yarmulke there's a message that of truth that if a person has it it's valuable and you need to take it and work so without further ado it's it's um your turn now to tell us a little bit about your background and we'll go from there great thank you uh thank you rabbi dolphin i too have enjoyed our learning together i've i i can't tell you how much i've i've gained just from our conversations which i also consider learning even if we're not learning a text so it's uh it's it's beautiful and i just love uh i love the relationship over the years and i value it very much um so i think it would be helpful to put in context maybe a little bit about my background um i grew up as a uh conservative jewish household um we went to a conservative synagogue and back in the 60s and 70s which was something of the heyday of active conservative judaism particularly in the detroit area where i grew up we would go to school there be a hundred kids if easily uh all anywhere from 13 to 16 all fighting over who's going to do the laning this week who's going to dive in this this week who's going to dive in that this week and so we really had a real love for it that was instilled primarily by my maternal grandparents and as i moved to the washington area i maintained my connection with the conservative synagogue we actually helped start a new conservative synagogue in the potomac area when we moved here in about 19 we moved in 85 we started it in about 87 88 and um one of the programs that i started doing at that synagogue was that on shabbos after kiddush we would all go into the library and i would teach about the upcoming torah portion what was going to you know what it was going to be so i would have to study the torah portion we'd go through it and i would add in my own explanations and and of what was going on based on my research and in doing the research for parshas israel i ran into a secret of lubacharabe written about persia cistro explaining the significance of anoki which you just mentioned and so the way my brain works i said well if the rabbit says that anoki is so significant is must be true so i said i wonder if it's true all the time or is it only true in those particular instances that he pointed out so i found all 141 uses of an torah and i set about analyzing each and every pasuk in the torah each sentence that used the word anoki to see if there isn't some deeper kabbalistic or other meaning behind the use without at all taking away from the literal translation uh but to see if there isn't something alluded to that's a little deeper each time it's used and sure enough there is and um and uh as you as you say i i wrote a book yeah there it is the anoki project um and it's available at safarimdeals.com by the way if anybody wants it or you can email me and i'll get you a copy um and uh and and that uh was a multi-year project to research and analyze every one of those things on and off i had no intention of writing a book it wasn't in my dreams i i was you know i'm just a jew you know who am i to write a book i didn't have at the beginning anything at all to do with chabad i didn't know from khabar at all i just started analyzing it to see what i could find and it was interesting to me and then as i would go to shul and i started going to chabad at kiddish we would talk about anoki this and like that and um so the book came about very simply i got an email i'm sorry i had made up in my mind after a while people were pushing me to write a book about it so i made up my mind okay i'm gonna write a book the very next day i got an email and the email said do you have an idea that you would like to turn into a book and if so here is i we supply editing services and pubs you with the publication and it turned out i had no idea who was behind the email i sent the email and said as a matter of fact i do here it is and it was uh shimon hellinger from mercazanas and it was his company and so i sent him the text and he said you've got a great idea here let's work on it and it there it went you mentioned um that you came across a secret talk of the laboratory was this while you were still a member and actively involved in the conservative school or this was when you started to go to khabar already this was when i was still an active member of the conservative shul so i had seen the english translations of the seche on chabad.org you know and um you know it was it was um the very beginnings i guess of you know chabad.org online but a lot of this information was was available uh now i didn't know what a secret was i barely knew who the rabbit was okay i see stories about the rebbe that's about all i knew you know it was the general stuff uh i knew who the rebbe was obviously but i didn't know much you know beyond that in terms of his learning and and his uh and my marim and everything else um and i knew chabad.org because they would always send matzah for pesach and they would be you know candles veronica so i knew you know but i didn't know anything about the philosophy i didn't know anything about hasidis and and anything so yeah that was that was all before then right so i also want to i'll come back to this in a few minutes but i i i remind myself now uh that you are a a board member of khabad international on campus or is that correct i'm on the advisory board for about on campus international yeah right so um can you talk for a moment about uh i don't know if the word transition is the right word but you know you know uh you grew up you told us in a very um educated healthy uh conservative synagogue environment and you've told me about your parents your father uh slave ripley's father was a very prominent doctor um you could say maybe a few words about that i think it's important to know what what he what you know a little more little about your background and and then what what what was it that kind of made you um join a chabad school i think people uh really are looking at you and uh hey this guy is a uh a washington dc attorney of of on a very prominent level um i think it's pension planning right uh right retirement plans and the like yeah yeah with the top uh you know firms and and uh where where the yarmulke and and and uh studies uh onoki and studies see this studies replavic and um well you know this is something you don't find you don't find this so please address this so you know when i was um i'd always had a feeling for yiddish kite i was always get and as i say mostly through my grandparents on my mother's side my paternal grandparents they came from the shtetl in belarus and my grandmother's father was a cousin and she was one of eleven children and he was ashok it was an educated man uh and my grandfather was one of five children and he was uh his mother died giving birth to the youngest child and the father died shortly thereafter so he was really tasked with raising it and anyway i would hear all their stories and i was very much drawn to it and connected to it um and i and you know even throughout my years of growing up um when i was 14 my gran i was studying with a rabbi a sort of a young israel type rabbi i would go to his house my grandfather bought me my first set of mikrotik dolot and i would sit and learn he taught me how to read rashi script and he taught me how to read you know and i could already read hebrew and i'd gone to hebrew camps and things so anyway my father on the other hand grew up totally reformed reform his reform could be um didn't know an aleph from a bet and when my brother my older brother was going to be bar mitzvahed my father decided he was going to learn how to read hebrew because he was very proud and he would not read from a transliteration so he learned hebrew in order to have an aliyah at his son's bar mitzvah so he could say it in hebrew and i remember my father learning hebrew from the old records they were called habeitushma and you know hear and listen um and you would listen to these records and he would sit there and he would sit there with that dictionary and he would look up every word and he was working very diligently that was my father's approach to things he was also a writer he wrote medical books a dozen or so medical books and so that intellectual side of it i think i really got from my father that intellectual curiosity that desire to really learn more and so as i got more into my studies my brother-in-law happened to have met the rabbi the chabad rabbi in potomac it was a new rabbi at the time it was around 1999 2000 and he said you should really meet him i think you would get along you would like him so um i i remember i went um to meet him we spoke for a long time then i came one time i remember they were laughing at me because i came one time on tish above and i came one time on purim and somebody said let me get this straight you only come to chabad on the saddest day and the happiest day in the calendar can't you come in the middle and so so anyway i would talk with the rabbi for hours um at the time and we would spend a lot of time together talking about hasidis and talking about not even per se just ideas what do you think about this what do you think about that and i now know that what we were talking about was hasidis i didn't you know we didn't frame it as hasidis at the time um and as i learned more and started studying more and i realized all of these ideas were all right out of hasidis it resonated with me completely it was everything i thought independently was found in a circle or a mimer of the rebbe or some of the videos of the rabbit and stories about it and it was like yet that is what i believe uh and so anyway i started going more frequently we moved uh in the neighborhood of uh chabad um so you know we could uh be more shomer shabbas and and and everything else and um and then you know that's that's where i started now i i dive in nusari and if i have to when i was saying kaddish for my father and i had to go to school to show you you have to grab a cottage wherever you can if i had to go to an ashkenazul and daven ashkenazak all over again it was like it was tripping up i was so natural for nusari that i couldn't uh i couldn't revert back so it was it just resonated with me that way thank you for that and and that leads me to another question and an observation i find it fascinating that you know a person who's an intellectual is in love with reblavic's writings the rabbit's father in the victorious writing has a you know it's a lot of kabbalah a lot of jewish mysticism there are a lot of things you can't explain rationally you know um so i that that's something you know that's so interesting to me that you know someone was an emotional person who who who who's involved with with judaism with torah with yiddish kite from the emotional perspective i can hear it you know where someone was you know was sitting in washington and dealing with world cases and and and then the torah world you know involved in this type of study and interest and passion fleming has passion for these things this isn't just a um [Music] it isn't just passing time you know this is this is very interesting how you balance the intellectual side the emotional side and the practice so that's uh that's a great question um for me my yiddish kite has always been part of my identity that's who i am and um you know i didn't start out wearing a yamaku all the time at work um it actually i started wearing a yarmulke all the time when i was saying cottage for my father again because you know i'd say i'm saying kaddish three times a day your whole life revolves around it so i get up in the morning i put my yama kane down chakris i take my yamaka off i go to work and i put my yamacon and go down min and i take it off and then i go to murray and i put i mean this is ridiculous and i just put it on and left it on and that was the end of it and i and and somebody told me you know if you start wearing your yarmulke at work all the time you know what's going to happen i said what he said absolutely nothing nobody cares and in truth that was the reality so i would meet with ceos of major companies i would go wherever and i would always have my yamacon it was part of who i am my clients know it every now and then i'll be talking torah with a client or i'll be you know it's part of who i am and if you want me as your lawyer you're going to know that every now and then we're going to talk about some great torah idea that i just ran into or i'm going to integrate it into the conversation so it's again part of who i am um now the rebelavic side is was interesting because when i did the anoki book a friend of mine said did you know that reblavic wrote a book about anoki and i said immediately that that is impossible because i've talked to a million chabad rabbis about anoki just like you and i you know not one person mentioned this book it doesn't exist so he says no no i saw it in the book the early years you can look in there okay i have the early years i'm flipping through the footnotes you know fine trying to find it and i found it and it was in lacute levi there was an essay a seven page essay on the topic and a letter from the rabbi's father to the rabbi heir of schwas that talked about anoki because arabs you read the ten commandments and the first word is of course and i started reading this letter at first i didn't understand a word um but i stuck with it and i started reading it i think you and i maybe started learning it too and i said i really want to understand what's going on and as i got into it i realized several things first of all this was just an amazing analysis of the whole idea which was just blew me away but then at a personal level the idea of that we all know it's very famous in fact you asked any chabad rabbi what does anoki stand for and the funny thing is they all say ana nafshi kasabi's that third word kasavis is incorrect that is not what the talmud says you can look it up shabbat 105 a it actually says kasivat not kasavis so then i quiz them and i say so why do you say subbies um and they say well that's what the rebbe said i said great why did the rabbit say it that way okay and so i managed to figure out why the rebbe says it that way because he goes by the gyrosauce the the the tradition or the the text of the enyako version and there's a reason grammatically why because that is the active tense of the verb as opposed to a passive tense of the verb but there's two other acronyms in the talmud explains revlovic and by the way two of them are forward acronyms one of them is a backward acronym and in the yalkuchimoni on the same thing two of them are forward and one of them is backward but one of them that's forward in the talmud is backward in the outcode and one of them in the yell code is brand new altogether and you know and you start analyzing what is an acronym in the first place and if an acronym is made up of the first letters of each word why the first letter if there if all of the letters are vessels for godly insights in hebrew why not the middle letter why not the end letter what is the first letter and he analyzes every angle of all of these acronyms and it's eye-opening eye-opening it's fascinating and on top of that when i realized and i started looking through the volume of all of the writings and and and primarily the letters i realized this was written heir of shavuos from the rabbi's father previously he had written one on pesach after that he wrote one on roshan after they wrote one in sukkos all during 1928 these were letters not just from a a makuba lagaon a genius father to the rabbit who was of course not then the rabbit it was a letter from a 50 year old father to a 26 year old son and it was written heir of god when you're looking around the table and you want to be with your children and your children aren't there his father was a thousand miles away he was in denepa petrovsky which is now denipro which is all in the news about the ukraine and the rabbit was with the fritikorevi in riga or berlin depending on what particular time you're looking at and how do they communicate by letters and yet he writes the letters specifically arab hog why why doesn't he write it ahead of time so that he would know that his son gets it on the hug that would be logical thing to do but no he explains in the letter arab pesach he says i'm writing this on era pesach and i know you won't get it until after pesach but we go by when the person writes it not when you receive it and in other words when a father blesses his children air of hug that message is being sent when you get the piece of paper with all the writing is not relevant i'm giving you that bracha you should know that and and okay you'll see exactly what the words are later on um and he believed that and can you imagine the chief rabbi of denepa petrovsk at the time from i think 1908 to 1939 he was the chief rabbi arab pesach he's the one who brought matzah to denepa petrosk in the first place which now by the way you buy ukrainian shimura matzah handmade matzah thank him for that possibility never it's just unbelievable that he would take the time with all the things going on to write his son a letter that was important and he had to write and and they're beautiful beautiful letters uh that have a real uh as they say i think you taught me this once about a hasidis a kiss this is a hasidisha kiss from a father to a son so hearing hearing about the letters and uh you wrote a work called unlocking the code which focuses and reminds us of the following and i'd like you to say if you you know explain a little bit about it is it really in your opinion is it really practical and i emphasize that word is it really practical for your average jewish person and i'm gonna say religious or not observant not yet observant as khabad says to study these letters naturally you know with uh in in hebrew english with a teacher you know uh and to and to benefit from them and how that's one one thing the other thing i want to ask you about is what do you see because you've now delved into it you've spent so much time i mean and frankly you brought me into this world i yeah i was like everyone else i don't go there i learn i see this i learn gamora i learn i give lectures i i give sermons i have a break but revelations you brought me there and it's interesting that my spear rabio khan a blessed memory passed away this year was still celebrating his first year of passing he started in 1970 when the rebber uh asked for the to publish the first works of one of his fathers and they published in 1970 i believe he got into it until then he also wasn't into it you know so the question is is there a practical relevance to it and number two what does it tell you about the relationship between the rebbe and his father knowing full well that they were a thousand miles away and once the rebel left to his father-in-law he never saw his father again uh and that's very painful and everything else that happened we know that uh he was taken away imprisoned in 1939 and openly passed away in 1944 lately um do you feel that the letters bound them together connected them and in a sense it was the the letters that made the relationship fresh uh wonderful and special so those are my guests okay so let me tackle the second one first and the first one this uh second okay so in terms of the relationship between the rebbe and his father through the the letters in particular but i'm sure it's also in the other writings um for for me i hear when i study these letters it's like i'm eavesdropping on a conversation even though you don't hear the rebbe's response you hear in the way that his father explains things where he'll say well don't worry about x y or z because he knows that his son would have said well what about x y or z right and where he'll say you know i wrote about this and the margins of a safer in the library on a midrash somewhere and maybe you saw it there you know and so you see and i'm not talking by the way about there are certain letters that were personal in nature much more personal those were not released for publication as far as i know and then there were some letters that were more practical oriented like right before the rub is wedding where he was they were instructional and what you have to do but i'm just talking about the other letters you i hear the conversation i i sense that conversation um so it's almost like like i said like if you could listen in on a conversation between isaac stern and yitzchak pearlman the two greatest violinists talking about violin playing you wouldn't understand a word they're talking about but it would be fascinating to listen to that and you have this opportunity to hear what the rep how the rebbe speaks to his son and you know that like in stuff that's printed for publication it goes through i mean you mean howard speaks to us i'm sorry brother levick speaks to his son correct thank you so in in items written for publication or more general it goes through editing and you have an audience of an indeterminate number of people and you got to be careful how you say it and etc etc but when you have a letter written from a father's these weren't written for publication ultimately the rebbe let them be published but they weren't written for that purpose they were written because he wanted to talk to his son and so you're seeing how he really would would express himself to his son and so you can hear the son's response even though it isn't there right so i think it did affect and where you see the response is as it plays out in the rabbis and the rabbis maimaru and particularly after he started quoting his father more frequently and you can see in various um ideas even if he doesn't cite his father if you've studied the father's explanations you see how the rebbe then took it to the next level you're referring to the purim we saw that in the purim letter there's another one with the pesach letter with the four cups of wine and the three matzahs and the rebbe gave uh series on that and you see that coming also in rebelavic's writing so even if he doesn't quote him you can just see the influence so i think that relationship you know and the fact the other point i'll make and then i'll talk to your other point the other point is that all those years so in 1928 to 1939 he's getting letters from his father and through all his travels whether it was from riga to berlin and all around where he went and ultimately to new york the rabbi kept these letters with him they were sacred they were they were a part of him and he kept an index in a you know a little list by date of each letter and i mean these were very precious letters to him so yes i think it really is reflective of the relationship the practical thing is a great question because um you know i called my series of translations unlocking the code uh because when i approached a chabad rabbi about does he ever study reblaevik he says to me nope it's written in code so i said all right i'm going to call it unlocking the code so let's unlock the code let's see what's there because if you really do you yes you find practical um things so um you know as uh as as one example um i'm gonna be using actually by pesach at the seder and and reblavik explains in detail how the organization of the seder is two cups of wine followed by matzah followed by matzah followed by two cups of wine what's going on okay and he explains the kabbalistic significance of the wine representing bena or a deeper extension of your intelligence which goes up to which is matzah and then which is matzah leads into beena and when you start thinking about it you see the practical implications of it a very simple example let's say that you want to get married you find someone you are attracted to them that's bina then you learn about them and that's your and then once you're armed with that you can take that and convert that back into a being a level of understanding that is much deeper than the bena that you started with in the first place and so that that arc of and and the the uh the kabbalistic phrase uh we know is um um uh uh uh you go from that arc is what you follow and we do this all the time in our practical lives we just don't realize that that's the process that we're going through uh another one which i studied recently with uh my my future uh son-in-law um the rebbe wrote a letter thank you uh on the tonight uh and on the ribbies tonight and there he speaks about um if you don't mind what it's not oh i'm sorry yeah the tanayam the contractual engagement uh contract if you will between the bride and the groom uh before the wedding which today we do right under the hoop all at the same time or before the chuppah with the ketubah all at the same time but years ago they would do it in advance and the rabbi in fact signed his tonight is conditioned document eight days before the wedding um and so his father wrote a letter explaining the kabbalistic significance of the tonight and you when okay there's kabbalah and there's a lot of learning there for sure the practical point what is a wedding all about a wedding first of all tanay means conditional it implies a level of doubt he says suffic doubt what kind of doubt and he says not doubt for sadhash for the third side but he doesn't explain what he means i think what he means the way i interpret what he means when you have a contract as a lawyer when you have a contract you have the party of the first part and you have the party of the second part then there's the outcome of the contract if you fulfill the conditions then this is the outcome if you don't fulfill the conditions this is the outcome that outcome is the third side okay so he says no i'm not talking about that kind of doubt that's a doubt you just don't know it's knowable based on the conditions but you just don't know it today but it's knowable i'm talking about a doubt a level of unknowability when you get married it comes from this level of complete unknowability that's what you're walking into how do you do that and he explains how the tanayim are an interconnectedness meaning and i'll cut through the cabela here to get to the gist of it which is you can have red you can have purple if you mix the two you get i'm sorry red and blue if you mix the two you get purple right is purple red or is it blue it's neither but it's both and in your lives when you get married you are going to be interconnected in that same way where you are husband and wife but you're this third interconnected um identity where you're both together and and you're you're both the husband and the wife because you are so interconnected that it's this new entity so it has a lot of deep meaning and and practical significance when you're sitting down with someone to tell them you know you're getting married let's talk about what that really means what that relationship really means and that's what he's explaining and what you're saying i i the way uh you you laid out you wrote your work is structured that way where you take the letter and you give a both uh i'm not going to say verbatim but a pretty pretty accurate and close translation of the letter the more kabbalistic ideas you put into the footnotes and then you also give us an essay a practical takeaway from the letter and that i found i think is phenomenal i really do hey because you gotta you gotta have something practical walk away with it and i think we've we've spoken about how for for many people you know first they they go right to the essay which is fine which is fine because ultimately you don't want to have a little more time a little more patience and interest they'll they'll go back to the text also your um your english writing is phenomenal i mean thank you very much i'm a writer but uh your writing is of a different quality um you know your uh background and education is comes through and it's really really i mean quality writing so that's very helpful uh so the essays i'll tell you something great about the essays what's beautiful about the essays i mean i i i wanted the essays to resonate with people i would take one point out of each letter and write something about it and say just like ripley okay but just like the letters are from a father to a son i worked on those essays with my son that's right so we worked together uh and i would bounce he's a clinical psychologist and i would i i would bounce ideas off of him i said what do you think about this can you help me explain this idea in your experience how does that work and so we worked on together so it was a great another practical outcome of uh writing yeah yeah i want to uh now also talk about what i mentioned earlier uh your work of chabad on campus and and this is very important and what do i mean today we have so many young people who um are jewish and they go out to the universities can you can you please i address this because this is this is these are future leaders you know you and i we're already you know we're over the hill i mean we're doing our best and we're contributing and then and absolutely you know the rabbit teaches us to there's no retirement and i think we we both hashem are doing that but nevertheless you know you have the young people the challenges on campuses um sometimes the anti-semitism um all kinds of issues and you've told me how and i think i remember you actually without the cornell i believe um where you you led a session of how to be a jew in a legal setting on campus and future work as a lawyer and and this is something unique that only a person like yourself uh can share and must share must share uh with young people and i remember you told me another thing i remind myself now we're an orthodox mother i think had written to you or maybe had actually met you and she was all concerned about her son's orthodoxy um so to me your work uh now and forever will be really as a go-to person as really as a go-to person who you know someone who who's learns torah who keeps tolerance interested in in in yiddish in in the growth of the jewish people and at the same time is a a prominent lawyer so talk a little bit about this because it's very very important so yeah i'm i i do um i mean one of the things that attracted me to uh about on campus just as an organization is uh because of the importance of the campus and what they do and how they uh you know how these you know the ms i'm sorry i'm sorry how the emissaries of the rabbit the on-campus rabbis and rabbitsons how they you know manage with such a an incredible positive attitude and no judgment and how they go from almost nothing to all of a sudden they have 100 people at a seder um you know or they'll have you know a uh they'll shoot for uh in fact one on campus uh rabbi that we supported was uh saying telling us how great it was that he was going to have a shabbat you know 100. i said no how about a shabbat 180. and so you know we we're constantly pushing you know to do more and and they do it and people are attracted to it i think what happens on campus is students are attracted to the authenticity and to the non-judgment of just you know i just want to be here for you as you know the home away from home um you know whatever the whatever it is and and people gravitate towards that they really do and there's no mission other than i want to teach you how to be jewish teach you things about it so so for that now the other thing is when i speak and i've spoken on many campuses and many many groups of young people um also in crown heights where we did the chabad young professionals program i speak about being jewish in a secular world is what i call it and things you can do to bring your jewish identity out and know that it's part of you things that i do okay and i said and what i teach is if you are open to it if you don't shield the outside world from your jewish identity and you open your jewish identity to the world you will see things open up is there anti-semitism yes there is and i do not mean to minimize anti-semitism at all it's a serious issue in a lot of places on campus and in some cases off campus of course as we see but um but those incidents shouldn't deviate from you and what you have to contribute to the world and what you have to contribute to yourself and your family and how you can really um connect with people at a different level i mean i had i'll just tell two quick stories of uh you know how this plays out um you know where i had um i was uh so many stories as hard to pick just one all right so um anyway i had a uh a client um that was down in south carolina business and i had to go meet with them now i hadn't been there for five or six years or whatever and i had to go meet with the board of directors to explain a certain program so i get to the building and i go up to the executive suite and the receptionist says to me oh you're mr hamburger yes we have your kosher food for you right here i never asked them i never said would you please prepare kosher food for me but someone there knew one of my contacts there knew who i was knew what it meant and on his own got me a kosher meal all wrapped everything else so that opportunity was just great another meeting i had where i um i went down for meeting number one uh this was in orlando florida i went down for meeting number one and uh there was nothing to eat okay i grabbed an apple a bag of potato chips or something you know lunch time comes nothing to eat okay there was all these non-kosher sandwiches but nothing i would okay so anyway the director there the vp of tax says to me paul eat something come on you know we got all this food i said it's okay i'm not hungry i made all this out he said and he pushed so i said listen i keep kosher and there's nothing wrong with the food it's great i'm sure it's wonderful food but it's not kosher and i keep kosher he felt terrible the next meeting he comes back and 20 people in the room not one of them is jewish other than me and he announces that last time when when paul was here i felt terrible because he couldn't eat anything so this time i made sure to get him a kosher meal now i'm already crawling under the desk so you're like what do you have to call me out right and then he says but because last time we could all eat and paul could not this time i got kosher meals for everybody we're all gonna eat kosher so all of these people were ripping open like the double plastic you know wrapped things trying to break in to find whatever food they could find in this thing the whole lunch we talked about kosher what does it mean why what is it and they're all asking me these questions and this is what we're talking about we're not talking about you know 401k plans and retirement plans we're talking about what does it mean to keep kosher and why and then one of the women picks out this document and it's all in hebrew and she says what is this i said well that has the blessings after the meal that we say all the prayers and it's in hebrew and she says because it says in english you know not to throw it out or whatever i said yeah because it it has god's name and it's a holy document and so we don't destroy it we we either bring it back to the restaurant we we deal with it appropriately she got up from the table she went into the garbage and picked out all the benchers that people had thrown away wow she could okay now that opportunity would never have happened if i wouldn't said i keep kosher and look at how i was able i mean not me i mean look at the opportunity i was given to explain to this group of people who never would have known anything about kosher and what jews do and everything else it's you know those opportunities i i have literally hours of stories of different things that happen some of them are in my enoki book and some of them i talk about but um it's it's it's amazing what you will see if you just open yourself up to the possibility and that's what i teach the kids thank you thank you that's um it's a very important thing uh to have people like yourself and uh really you know the marching troops of of of yiddish kite uh us rabbis you know uh but and the rabbit always said this the rebel always said this i remember him saying this you know how balabat and people who are not rabbis or the workforce they can accomplish something that the rabbis and yeshiva students and and and and all the scholars cannot so um the divine uh providence you know in the work field um you see much more than than we do finally uh before we finish which it's we can go on here it's really wonderful but we do have to finish yeah um what's the plan for the future with your with your replay work because i'm waiting for it uh i'm waiting for it to i have in progress um almost finished it's been taking me a long time for a lot of different reasons um but there's one very long 1934 letter that i am almost finished with that covers purim and pesach and after that my my my goal would be to sort of collect all of them and so i have right now this one short volume with just the four letters and those essays they're also available uh on my website i have a website called www.theanohiproject.com and i publish them so people want to download them you can download them there um and i um and it's you know and that's available it's free you can do that uh all you want send them around share them uh but my goal would be actually to put them all into a a book and maybe uh maybe you know one or more books we'll see um you know and uh that would be the goal to pull them all together i also want to try to find some common themes that we can maybe collect into ideas i know there's a book called the inner perspective by rabbi block and there's other books out there that sort of try to do something similar to that i would want to do something a little bit more fidelity to the text as opposed to extrapolating too far from the text in terms of translating the ideas explain the ideas as he wrote them admittedly with a translation and by the way the not only the rambam but the rebbe and they they all had very clear ideas about what a translation should be and what it should not be and a translation should not be a dictionary okay a translation is explaining in your own words with fidelity to the original text and so that's really what i'm trying to do and give people access to it so hopefully there'll be books um you know i'd like to speak a little bit more about it you know with crowds and things like that and teach it a little bit well i i know that uh you you've taught you've taught this in various venues and houses uh in l.a at the solar bachelor of designs and other places and you've told me that it's been received so well um so it's just a matter of having more opportunities and um you also work uh you study you listen to rabbit who's kind of the master of a lady in the hebrew he's published extensively and i know that you're in touch with him uh as well as tree freeman the famous khabad writer who's a phenomenal writer and teacher and you're in touch with them so um you're in good company and uh there's no question about it that uh this is just a beginning and uh hashem will god will bless you to have uh uh you the shanakas with your family and uh for your grandchild grandchildren and and and we will and we will continue uh bringing uh reblavix torah to to the jewish world uh to the elite fishing world smartish world uh the jewish world everyone everyone because it's it's it's it's phenomenal so i thank you very much for being on the program beautiful interviews today and uh we wish you a kosher happy pesach and we should be well and only have simplest and only meet each other and speak with each other with with warmth and and care and love and feeling and uh we will ultimately see a mashiach because that's what we're all waiting for but i'm convinced that when meshiach will see your work he will say that's a first hamburger flavor hamburger red flavor hamburger you did something for me that no one else did so come on come on take care no man thank you thank you zai gives my magazine