Rabbi Avraham Shmidman In Conversation With Rabbi Avraham Levene

um all these faces and all these names you can turn it off now i'm happy i really feel filled with joy i i forgot all the things i was going to say harold wrote wonderful i'm sure it will come back to you i i don't know i'm too busy uh i imagine that we're now going to go into uh somewhat of a a mute mode uh i think robert pardo was the host so uh i think rabbi pardo is gonna make rabbi levine and myself the the co-host but i think everybody apologize for muting you there's definitely some sort of uh rabbinic joke to be made right all right okay uh listen uh that's the easiest way to keep me quiet i suppose but fortunately i figured out how to unmute myself and i see the same is true of hashem for for rabbi levine so uh and uh and welcome i want to thank rabbi david pardo of the union of orthodox jewish congregations of america the ou uh for his work in general uh at the ou and working to disseminate torah through many torah programs and uh rabbi pardo is the one who initiated the ou conversations program in general a great way to spend a mate shabbos and uh i am fortunate and privileged to have been asked by him through uh his professional colleague my wife to to to do this and uh i have to say i i i cannot uh tell you how overjoyed i am to be doing this very often when uh uh when asked to do things via zoom i'm not particularly excited i'm uh as the saying goes i'm ice gazoomed but uh to to be together with rabbi levine in any fashion is really an honor and a privilege and i i think that we'll have a very exciting program i also want to give a special shout out to rabbi levine's daughter becky who was uh so kind to to take care of the technical issues on on our end as i think we all know that because of the obligations of social distancing and uh the need to wear masks we have understandably not always been able to see one another and therefore i'm going to encourage you if you can to uh if you have video capacity turn it on so that we can we can see your lovely faces that other people can see you we we miss seeing one another and uh even if we can't do it in person this is a a little bit of an opportunity so um i was uh advised that uh if i gave a proper introduction to rabbi levine it would span more than the duration of this program so i'm going to try to contain myself and and provide somewhat of a limited biography of robert levine especially for those who are not from our community and who don't have the the privilege like we do of of knowing rabbi levine to to provide a very very brief introduction uh rabbi levine was born in uh eretz's role and uh his birth and his name something we'll get to a little bit later was uh isn't itself a beautiful story and uh ultimately at a very young age i think nine months ended up going to england uh where his where his other grandparents his grandparents and their sister all well-known uh rabbi and robinson arya levine mario levine uh is uh our robert levine's grandfather and uh our rabbi levine's father was a was a great great uh town and uh there are many many schmidman-levine connections one of the many is the very very close relationship between rabbi levine's father and my uh and my grandfather uh in fact there's a there was a famous uh biographer in your shalom arya rabiner who wrote biographies of many people and he wrote a brief biography about my grandfather and the one person he quotes in the in this brief biography is rabbi levine's father and uh uh our connection to to rebecca levine is a very very strong connection my grandfather was the masonic education of her parents uh so it's like a a tremendous uh a tremendous connection that that we have but remy levine ended up going to england and his father ended up having coming to america returning to israel in those days palestine was not a possibility so his father went to to america ultimately was a was a russian shiva and a rub in seattle for three years seattle washington and then moved to jersey city uh our rabbi levine and his family came to america an hour of levine at the tender age of 11 years old entered into the tel sha shiva in cleveland was uh ultimately uh educated in uh interviews and uh basarye he has mika from travidas he has from his uh illustrious grandfather robert levine yes michael from ravenkin from rav siegel who was the honorary president of the of the ou he has a masters in religious education from yeshiva university a masters in guidance and counseling from nyu and uh rabbi levine served as the russia shiva of the rogue sin yeshiva high school and he was the rav of congregation sons of israel in jersey city and uh when he came to our shul lower marion synagogue let's just put it this way mainline philadelphia was not generally considered to be hospitable to to jury and certainly not an orthodox jury and uh rabbi and robertson levine did a an amazing job of becoming the the rabbi and rebecca of a house shul and they were able to build that household into the largest orthodox congregation in the commonwealth of pennsylvania uh a tremendous tribute and rabbi levine managed to do all this while having many many other responsibilities in the city uh dying on the bes did a rebbe for a period of time in the philadelphia yeshiva and so on and so forth so uh let me if i may rabbi levine ask you uh a question or two uh about about your relationship with uh with your amazing grandfather uh or arya levine maybe you could share with us a little bit about that relationship maybe you have a favorite memory uh of being with your zeta and how do you feel that having studied with and lived with sleeping in the same room with uh with rivaria how did that impact your rabbinate actually thank you for your wonderful introduction i guess we can discount most of the hyperbole but i thank you you're very your kindness uh over over overcomes oh oh bounds uh it's extremely difficult for me and it has been difficult over here to even speak about you know my relationship with my zeta i was uh at the time 15 years old when my parents sent me back to heritage royal i grew up in america first in england i came to america when i was four and from the age of four until 15 i lived in america in seattle in cleveland in jersey city and then i went my parents sent me there to israel which a lot of parents did not do in those days it wasn't the norm to send children territories royal the long way airplanes were not jet yet and was still in the era of propeller-driven planes and it took a long time to get there and it was all it was not the normal thing to do in those days but i went to my zeta i'll just briefly tell you this i will never forget when i first saw my zeta we walked up that little street that's now today called regular barrier uh that is right off of grizzly which is a small street but it's bigger than a and uh the streets are sort of here they go down uh in level and my zeta was coming from the other side and i was walk coming up and suddenly he saw me and he had something in his hand everybody dropped it i ran i saw this oh man there were long white beard they started running he ran over to me and he started hugging me and kissing me i i was i was really shocked by the whole display of such wondrous emotion i was trying to even meet him i had heard such wonderful things he was the most approachable person that you ever met you you were with him for a few moments and you felt that you you have your whole lifetime you could part your soul to him it's very interesting because i read in one of his books that many books that have been written about him uh [Music] said the following quote he said when he first met by zade he was a little boy he hates kaimushima and he couldn't get over it he said this gold rabbis great rabbi came over and he stood before them and he said to them my korean lee aliye they call me arya [Laughter] nobody ever talked like that before no rabbi i said they call me arya my name is arya it made a tremendous impression that's how he was and it it it's a beginning insight into the whole relationship that i really found with him in the three times that i was with him in eric chisro and i stayed with him and lived with him and learned we had a sailor together we went every night to mr meyer together where he gave a shirt in connecticut's israel to balabat him i'm a safety guitar and i got more out of that shirt that i got from some of the russian shivers were very great and and wonderful it was it was just a wondrous wondrous experience to be together with him i i once said over this i i i'm not taking much time on one question but it'll go where it goes tells us that a person should never aggrandize himself with his wisdom with his strength with his abilities of any sort because all of those come from the rabbit shallow everything comes from the angus the anxious to their butterstone for the wisdom the whole gifts of god god gives it to us he said and therefore anybody who says it's my wisdom or my sacral or my strength or my expertise is about he's arrogant and he's taking the robe of the melaka vehicle of the entire entire universe that belongs to god honor belongs to god so then why do we praise people why do we say hamel mccollud he was the wisest of all men his wisdom didn't belong to him it was god's wisdom and it's testified to that god gave him the wisdom the secret and that's a tremendous harmony in of itself the secret is that was not god gave it to you his secret was that he knew what to choose because that is the one gift that is keeping particularly our own god gave us the greatest gift and that is a gift for which we ourselves take credit only we and therefore we have to stand really in security for that if we mess it up it's our own it's on us and that's the gift of choice of hero free will the ability to choose the why was the wisest of men well not because he was wise it's because he was perceptive enough to understand that wisdom is the greatest of gifts and that's a wonderful wonderful lesson personal choice that is what we live and dialed in so i said that's one of the information make the right choices is the most important thing in life to make the right choice god gave us the ability to choose but god also caveat of his great hess and his kindness gives us a great hint at how to choose not only did he give us the wonderful secret of life eternal and joy eternal fulfillment eternal but also he gave us the ability to choose and a hint in how to do that we choose by following the bent of what is needed i learned that from zeta my father zechariah my dear beloved father a blessed memory wrote an article about isaiah after he passed away and he said what was it about your father that was so special so he said to him the following he said you know my father never liked new things he would wear new things he would have a and use it it bothered him he didn't want to learn new things he always liked old things and i once asked him why zeda why is it that you thought you make a shackle you don't know why you think everyone liked you new things you always have to worry about making them dirty about spoiling them about making them move but all things and spoil things you're always involved in making them better and finer my sadist choices were always about making things better and finer that's such an important choice my zeta would look at things and say how can i fill this need how can i make this person happier how can i fulfill this thing which is lacking it was always positive and it was always looking at what was needed to fulfill rather than fulfilling what some person feels is needed that's what most people look at and that was a wondrous thing when there were no people visiting the jails from isaiah visited jails because there was no one seeing to the prisoners and they are people too and that was another one of the basic pillars of isis belief in life you have tremendous respect for others and you don't look for covet yourself right when you look for cover yourself you get covered when you look for respect for others then you get covered that's the difference so this is what he always looked for respect for every human being every human being in the world is deserving of respect for old amish this kind of and the rambam himself says to be hagaris hey guys that he writes me beautiful letter beautiful statement the rambam makes about everybody being a child of the rabbunishalam not only hidden up to everybody every human being everything in the world product of the age there and you have to be much of it you have to treat it with respect we don't judge people that's babies this job what we do is we judge acts and approaches to life we judge institutions but we don't judge individuals that belongs to god we don't take out work lightly that's his work that belongs to him so these are the things i learned from him i learned to be a kind person i learned to take everybody as important and meaningful and someone that i could learn from allah almighty nicola i learned to not take myself so seriously but to take those around me extremely seriously i learned not to look for my needs all the time but to look for the needs of others and how to fill them these were less i don't know how well i learned them that's for you to say that's not for me to say but i did learn those lessons those were the lessons that were taught and i heard them well and that believe me i will have to own up for not fulfilling them it doesn't make it easier but it makes it a lot more fascinating and and much much more wonderful so i just will give you this little story and to illustrate the point my zeta decided one week that we would learn musa in the yeshiva they said 15 minutes 20 minutes every day we're going to learn musa he was not a specific muslim but he loved me he would learn in some of the yeshivas where that was that was uh dave at the time so he gave out moses for him to all the balkan the balkan and my alma mater base are yay wherever i learned from laser bladzinski's efforts for my uncle hey nicole of the altar for slovakia the big youngest daughter at all rabbits and ethel he gave us he had old books all they didn't have news for him in their that in the early 1950s it was they had a few old sport so of course the older bachelor who were there in the yeshiva there were many of them great i was their nepotism because i was an anecho i was the youngest one so he gave they gave out safari so of course the older ones they got the first pick and they got the swastika make him the famous flavor salava he's the famous businessman i was left with one little safer all that was left and he didn't have any covers i said but zeda i said it's goblin it doesn't have any covers you know what my zeta said mankind he said my child he said hey that's a challenge to you ma fa them tumble and make covers for them you know i have been making covers for this little book for the past 70 years and as i kept making covers i improved until finally i learned how to find books and i learned how to make really nice leather covers this is the final product but i had this book with me all the years that has words of my zetas inside he's written in it and it says lovely things about gannaden and about how to achieve yellowfeld and it was a safer that nobody else had and as a result i found that all the barker when they finished the regular sport that others had they would come up and say love is under safer but the zeta dig again let me see this little safe room i still have it until the present day here it is very special and that's a semen of the kind of thing isaiah said my david told me i i when i was 20 years old i brought my fuel back that he had bought for me as a child to be checked and he checked it checked the field it didn't have to be checked because the the person who made them the scyther promised that they would remain loyal and void it's an amazing thing there was special film isaiah made for us at the time when i was born and i the covers of the film of the bathroom were already worn out and you know how they were made in those days of cardboard so they tore off i asked him maybe i could get some new covers he brought them back to me and the film were perfect but the converts were the same covers but he had stuck them together with sticky paper and with other things and they were just what we would call the yiddish get lots of that he put little patches on them here and there so that they held and so i said but say that these are the old ones he said but they're still good mckenzie do you know that until the present day i have fixed those covers 1 000 times and each time better than the other now they're really good i've finally gotten them right over all the years i've never changed the coverage that's what i learned from isaiah to pick the right choices to honor that great gift and i i really i really thank you for those lessons thank you for that tremendous uh perspective and uh so important to learn to maybe not take ourselves so seriously but to take others seriously and uh for those who don't know reverend levine personally uh certainly one of his many many hallmarks is his enormous uh avaci seral he's he's such an oe visceral he loves people so much that sometimes it overshadows so many of his other skills and talents uh reverend levine is a guy in a london and a paisak and uh an atomic and all of those things but rabbi levine has a title that no other person in the world has and i have to say that i was proud to know that he had this title when i was asked about it on a talk about small streets on a on a small street in the old section of yerushalayim somebody i don't know i was talking to somebody and an elderly gentleman walked by and somehow something about philadelphia came out of my mouth and this elderly gentleman said uh atami philadelphia so i said ken i said yes he said takedli tell me do you know the first name uh rabbi levine has in part of the the many titles which he deserves is hashem harishon the first name what does that mean uh and remember levine correct me if i've gotten some of the details wrong but if i remember the story correctly that uh levine's mother was eight months pregnant when a bomb exploded in a square very close to their apartment and as a result of which she went into a deep state of shock and doctors were concerned about her life and certainly about the life of her unborn child and rabbi levine's father was dominant and dominating and dominating and uh he must have dozed off and in his dream he saw ravkuk uh zatzal and aarov cook was wearing the clothing that he would wear when he would visit people and levine asked him where are you going he said i'm going to be my vaca cola and levine said to him will my wife be all right and will she have the baby and he said yes and i will be at the bris and robert levine was so excited about this that he told his wife and immediately she she got up and she recovered from her illness and uh at the time of rebel levine's birth so uh robert levine was given the name for rafkook zatzal and he was the first one so uh robert levine is hashema richon so i'm wondering levine you know we today one of the things when people talk about israel uh so often it's about the the divide between the religious and secular and very often a lot of it is very very ugly there was a major article in today's new york times which had uh let's put it this way a very less than complementary description about uh one of the godila israel and i'm wondering having you know been in israel in the in the early years of hakamata medina and having had the exposure that that you had to such greats as from laser pochenski your other uncle rebel yashev or mrs alma meltzer to whom he used to bring his milk every day i'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit uh about them about uh their attitude your grandfather's attitude to the to the medina to other jewish people and maybe what we could learn in our own time as as ways of bridging the gaps if you will of fostering a greater sense of ava's israel thank you they were so much above these types of swamps that we wallow in daily and that the immediate walls and that all of us are involved with in this this world that we live in and they weren't a part of this world i remember going every day to every salmon with my sandwich and my breeze a great sonic and i'm just looking at him and when you looked at him you can see some of it in the picture of him but when you saw him in person they were beneath they were not not of this kind of a world they didn't belong in this world they were in the world of torah and we're in their own world and it was a beautiful world that was the real world oil um right you see i just saw the real world it's amazing to see the real world through the eyes of such side became that's the only way you really see it is through the eyes of people who have their eyes constantly in a different world on a different world are looking in a different way those are jewish eyes don't look at the world from politics we never looked at the world through political parties my zade used to call it apolitica [Music] that cursed politics you look at the world through each and every individual through the eyes that the abrasive has given us the eyes of kindness and goodness you don't think about where the world is going to you think about where the world is coming from and where you should bring it to it's not about running away from or fighting against so-and-so it's about elevating and where you are going to and what you are going to become totally different orientation i know from all of them i just remember you know the little memories come back my zeta called me into his room one day and he was sitting there and there was a whole bunch of letters on the table he was going through files of letters that he had with so many people it was tremendous correspondent and a beautiful handwriting and he wrote to people all over the world many letters with an ink pen that he dipped into ink and he wrote on the back of the fence so it came up very very thin tiny little letters beautiful clear letters and he showed me he started to show me letters from historical people i remember particularly he showed me all the letters that he received from achemayor who was a mayor of america's royal he was a mayor in one of the towns and he had been violently against religious people so they said and i read the letters and it was a man that was expressing love for this old rabbi filled with love filled with respect for the covenant and i said say that i said everybody knows this is man harry he he fought against from a yiddi but you know my zeta said to me this was his reply to me i don't know what i did to find such favor in his eyes he was the man that i would sit in that maybe we would talk about it and just not get the yiddish guy and here he chose his love for this old rabbi and this rabbi is saying about him i don't know what i did to courage such favor that he was so accepting of me what an amazing outlook that's totally different than people would think when isaiah stood before any human being he looked upon him as another creation of the replenishing level i remember that they even said they came and gave him regards from jacques now when he was a premier of france and i remember one of the greater generals of france came and he asked specifically to meet with isaiah and all of them went away they had a tremendous impression i remember when when ben-gurion you heard all the things isaiah did he wanted to he wanted to have a a an audience with my lady he wanted to read my zeta so he came to meet my zeta hungarian and everybody said what are you going to say to mongolians like praying for beer carries my supplies yeah yeah you know he was and he was what is my zeta gonna say to ben gurion my zeta listen carefully to what he said and then you know what he said to him he said that following him he said it's the custom but when you see another you can give him a broken he said i want to give you a broker thank you imagine what it would say in the papers the next day rabbi olivia gives brock at the beginning why can't he give him a broken so he said you are the head of the member of your he said i hope and pray he says for you that you will speedily be able to give your melooka and mouthless over to a shiatsu kingdom of your that was very fitting and out but didn't say anything negative but didn't in any way lessen his faith tremendous lesson in that and i'll tell you what that is when i came here i i i knew a lot of the conservative rabbis and the reformed rabbis of the area and i never went into the tools because i don't agree with the institutions that are outside so i would never go into those institutions but over the years i became very friendly with a lot of these people they came to my show from time to time and they would call me and we would be very friendly and i would tell them i would i won't go to you but i will be your friend as a person i like you like you're as good as if you're better i'm not better than you and maybe absolutely decides who is good who is not good this is not a contest we all should fulfill ourselves and we're all good i said what i am trying to do is though is to push what i believe is right and friendship means you respect me and i respect you i respect you as a human being that you in you make your choices you have the right to do so but i don't have to agree with those choices but i certainly will not demean or lessen my choice and what i believe in in order to buy your friendship that's buying that's and that we don't do we keep sacred what is for us and we don't judge yennem and that's an extremely important rule it helps you to get along with everybody because i'm not in the judgment seat i'm in the cat worksheet i'm the one who is doing what the ambition wants me to do and i'm trying to do it for that i will answer when i am deficient but to judge no sir so this is very very important to me i think that a lot of the service in urgent role my brother dedicated his life to do that in gesher to try and explain to people that this is an individual matter and it has to do with an individual's status in guy there or in arrogance or in kindness or in goodness but it has nothing to do with the attitude towards life and towards their abundance and towards kindness and towards others and that is something that should always be shown in full and complete and loving measure and to try and fulfill the need of anybody that you see before you not to say what they are lacking but to say what do they need how can i feel it and that's a very very important thank you so much for that uh tremendously important perspective which is seemingly too too lacking uh in our time as i mentioned before hashem today our shul certainly bc before kovid was a was a hopping place uh hashem we have hundreds and hundreds of families such a such a wide spectrum really from uh from atheists to kharidam and everything in between and uh you managed with your rabbitson to do a magisterial job of building it up in an environment which was somewhere on the spectrum of not being hospitable to being outright hostile i'm wondering if you could discuss how you managed to do it uh some of the some of the joys and the successes and also perhaps some of the challenges that came along the way well i will tell you you told me bc i'll tell you a.d all delightful everything that i experienced initially was delightful especially in retrospect we have been some other irritations along the way but i don't remember any of them for some reason they all escaped me i don't remember ever ever having a different opinion with anyone i did but i don't remember and the reason is very simply because the differences were always in matters of my job of trying to do my job as a as an honest rob and trying to deliver this work but in terms of personalities or a.d all delightful i i came to a little show with a few people and everybody said you're going to a strange school they're all scientists and professors and naina nair and it was and it was there were many less people that even they said there were there weren't any orthodox jewels in the in the area community schools there were a few robotics that had to remember very competent that had their own schools or their own minions but there wasn't a single community orthodox show in the entire area this was the first one everyone should remember this the mother of shules in western phil in the west philadelphia area marion is the lower marian synagogue and it's a wonderful synagogue because the balabatim all decided in the early 1950s that they wanted to have an orthodox show nobody heard of that at that point a community synagogue everybody thought it was ridiculous when one of my members at the time he was he was a visitor actually he came to the show and he dived with us over shabbat she said what are you trying to do here rabbi there's not very many people here what are you trying to do i said we're going to build an orthodox field here he said in a community he said rabbi levine grass will grow on your face he quoted rebbi akibo in the gemare that said before the bassamidas will be restored grass will grow on your face you'll have a beard of grass at the dedication of our shul the first building that we built this man was present i said to him did you bring your lawnmower i need a trim and we both laughed he said i didn't believe it could be done why how it was that abused this hazard somehow he helped us along it was my date and my sister try to think of what everybody needed what was lacking it was for the young people i saw for the children was lacking a rabbi to take them on his lap on shabbos to lead them to their parents when they were lost to wipe a tear away to give a lollipop to give them an impression of the sweetness and the love that there is in the world because that's very important kindness and menstrual quiet are very important especially when you teach children there was a young man that was in my shule and nebach his parents were amongst the first people to ever get a divorce the young couple was very sad and he stopped coming up to me on shabbos in one shot as i said to him why did he stop coming up to me so he said to me because he said i i am embarrassed and when and i hear this story i heard this story 25 years later when i went to meet him when i happened to meet him at an occasion he told me this he said i was embarrassed i said to come up i didn't remember but he told me he said i felt i was out of place he said and then when i went up to you you said embarrass what do you mean he said where am i supposed to sit i don't know who to sit next to i don't want to sit next to a strange man he said with other people's children he said i don't know where to sit and people laugh at me and i don't want to i don't want to come in he said what are you talking about your seat is next to me saying that but he said okay and he came up every shopping she said you brought me back into the show everybody said that's a little but it just knitted rabbi on travis he was so excited another man told me a story it was an amazing song i didn't remember them he said i joined his shoe you were a little show in an old building and i came into the building and you were giving it a rush and everybody was listening and i had my son with me with a little kid and he kept running in and out and you didn't say anything and then he ran into the show and he started jumping up and down and he said him stop it he said but daddy i have to go to the party everybody was shocked and i was furious and that's how you behave in the show and you know what happened you said i could remember this authority said you said that's a very important thing when a child says that and you went down from the big man in the middle of your dream and you took him and escorted him into the bathroom he said that's what i decided to become a member of your shoe you know you look at the moment of what people need i you know there's so many of the important things that people talk about in the club and their inherits and all of that but their hurts for the needs of a person is is i think paramount and that's what you look for there were a lot of older people the older people feel left out of things and i tried very hard to give the older people a sense of belonging with the younger people that they were part of it they were european people and there were people from other countries and they all had their own min hug i went with the point that each and every person has to follow the meaning of their ovals because they're precious to them and if they don't know they should try and learn them i encourage a smarter communion i encourage the women who really sincerely wanted to daven when we didn't have an error by making two mean young by making an earlier meaning so they could darwin and the husband to sail with the children too i tried to feel insofar as i could the needs of everyone i just want to say one thing i don't know when we run out of time but i have to say this is very important to me i'll tell you a secret i did not take plague i did not take part in any way in the selection of the new rabbi of a synagogue when he came to point to select the new rabbi of the synagogue i refused to take part and i said it was because i didn't want to spoil it was partially true i didn't want them to be tagged as my follower or a continuation of my rabbinate or any of that nonsense that people do i didn't want any part of that they should ish everybody stands on his own two feet and they should be judged according to who they are so i refuse to take part and that was the reason i came but there was another reason that i gave it was personal and i'm telling you now i'm sharing with you a secret i had a test in mind i said your buddy shalom sometimes maybe i didn't do the right thing maybe it was personal maybe i did it because i i i had medias in it i had involvements personal involvements you never know these things and we're all amenable to such faults i said i will make a test this is my test i will see i will not take part in any way in the selection of the new rabbi and i will see who they select if they select someone who messes up all the work of 40 years not really my work today was this gift i said then well i'll i'll i'll feel that i better re-examine myself and think about it in the years remaining but i feel very wonderful if they have been brought to a stage where they realize what it is that makes a sure and what makes a good rapper and the sign of this will be who they pick and one day sure enough they'll walk through the door rabbi and rebecca schmidt oh my goodness what a blessing to me that was on that wonderful day excuse me surprise it was a problem if i could have created the kind of aurora that i would wanted to be there much better than i that's what i would have picked that would have been my roof i saw the rabbits my goodness oh you owe you people oh you i hope we don't say oh you you are so lucky to have this lady it's a representative that you have you were fortunate you must have been doing the right thing to pick her as one of your stars her grandfather was my my homiletics teacher in the entire thousand and what wonderful parents what what a wonderful person she herself is in so many wonderful ways and i will say to you as we're on this subject i'll go off on a branch none of the above or anything in life could ever be done by any rov without having a rabbitson that is on board 150 percent bar hashem i was like to know this firsthand this i was blessed tavir robertson was with me at every step of the way was mercedes broken when my zeta first met my wife hannah was at the time a young girl she wasn't 20 yet and he looked at her he began to cry and my uncle rebel foil secretary said what's raised to say that why are you crying when he looked at hannah he said for the mama she reminds me of the mama she has been and she will be a musician over the years together it was because of her so i know what a robinson is believe me had firsthand training in in reversinghood i know what a robinson is and rabbi schmidman came in and i met his rebels and i said hashem my zetas lessons are very good ones i am giving the shoe over into better hands than it's been in what could i ask for more i passed the test or thank you i know we're uh probably technically over time so i i'm not gonna go on with further lines of questioning although i have deep temptation to to do so uh but uh uh ravi levine i have to thank you you're uh you went uh well above and over and beyond uh you were you were way maximum about me although not about my robinson and i will say that when i was when i was when i was interviewed for the position and they asked me what is your greatest asset i without hesitation said my rabbitson uh which was not only truthful but but so you should always say this is fancy but i i i uh just before we close i want to leave everybody with although there are many but i want to leave you with one beautiful story about about our treasured rabbi levine when i came to the shul there were people who said aren't you nervous that the rabbi emeritus who's been here for 40 years who's the annika of robaria levine uh whose father was the great republic of that he's gonna still be living here with his rabbits and that's gotta be so intimidating how is that gonna how is that gonna work so i said i'm actually excited about it it's the best riff gift that any rav could have and i'll tell you that first year before rosh hashanah so i was going to blow chauffeur so one of the roles of the rabbi is to uh be in charge of the religious services of the shul so i had to pick a macrae somebody who was who would call out taqiyya shwar and tarua so i did what i thought was the natural thing and i went over to rabbi levine and i asked him i said you know would you please do me the favor of being the macro you'll be in shul and remember levine looked at me and he said no i was a little crestfallen i was like you know why not you're going to be in trouble anyway it's you know you'll be involved in the dominating and he looked at me he said he said i could never do that because then i would have to correct my rov and i could never do that uh it bespeaks the enormous humility and sensitivity and obvious israel that is the hallmark of rabbi and rabbits levine and helps to explain how they built up our tremendous community i want to thank all of you for for joining us this evening thank you i want to thank rabbi david pardo and the ou for the opportunity and uh i look forward to gathering with all of you in person to schmooze for a very long time without all the limitations of zoom thank you i want to thank you both this has been exceptional and is uh going to be incredibly hard to top or match ever um but for those of you who are uh new here first time please join us next week same great time saying great place ou.org conversations 8 15 p.m uh next week we're going to the frozen chosen the great white north rabbi rafi lipner our first international speaker in from toronto from charitsvilla it's going to be a great time um my deep thanks to uh both of the lds's lsds sorry ravagement thank you everybody enjoy to see all your wonderful faces best television i ever watched [Music] thank you so much all of you