On Tuesday, Sept 13th 2022 - 18th of Elul 5782, a delegation of 50 Student Presidents and Vice Presidents of Israeli Universities and Colleges visited the Anderson Mansion at Yale to celebrate Jewish leadership, US/Israel Relations and the birth of Chasidism, with student leaders at Yale.
Scott Shay, Harry Ballan and Tal Keinan addressed the community. Alex Belluck opened the event and Shabtai Director Toby Hecht gave closing remarks.
This historic Dinner was coordinated by Rabbi Moshe Shilat, Director of Chabad activities in Israel on College Campuses, IDF bases and Teen communities. His efforts were joined by Elchanan Felheimer, President and Chairman of the National Israeli Student Union, which represents over 400,000 students across Israel. Both were in attendance leading the group.
The lectures and celebration culminated in unprecedented dancing and singing, arm in arm, American and Israeli students, all of whom will lead the Jewish People in the 21st century with pride, keen insight, and Joy.
Tonight is the Night | Alex Belluck
Adam One, Adam Two | Harry Ballan
My Father, The Survivor | Scott Shay
Should There Be Jews? | Tal Keinan
Look in the Mirror | Elchanan Felheimer
Love Every Person | Toby Hecht
Celebrate Your Judaism!
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Alex Belluck: So some of you may or may not know this, but tonight is actually a very, very special night. Tonight is the birthday of Baal Shem Tov, born in 1698. Founder of the Chassisdic movement and also Alter Rebbe was born in 1745. And he's the founder of the ChaBaD movement. So you could say that tonight, nightfall, which is now the 18th day of Elul, the sun has now gone down. It's essentially the birthday of chassidism. So it's a very, very fortuitous night to all be gathered here and celebrating such incredible Jewish student leadership and the meaningful leaders that we have here, speaking to you as well. So let's make a toast to that and say l'chaim. L'chaim.
Harry Ballan: Welcome To our friends from Israel. And good evening to everyone. It's always an honor for me to participate in events of Shabtai, as I have been for 20 years. It's an honor for me also to stand here next to my very dear friend Scott Shay, and to my new friend Tal Keinan, and to a person whom I have revered for for decades, Professor Steven Smith. I thought it might be useful as a way of getting into the subject matter of the evening, and I'm going to let you guys know what the subject matter of the evening is, in case no one's told you: Jews, Judaism, our individual stories in relation to Jews, Judaism and Israel and ways in which our stories might be relevant to you and the world that you've been born into as Jews, as Americans, as Israelis. We were born in different places and are of approximately the same generation. I hazard to say that the world that we were born into as Jews and Americans is different in some ways from the world that younger people in this room, from America and from Israel were born into. And I want to just begin by saying a few words about that world and this world, and then a few observations about my own Jewish journey. And I hope it's helpful to you. I grew up in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, which was, during my childhood, overwhelmingly Jewish. I think that every adult male that I knew was either a veteran of World War II or a concentration camp survivor.
Harry Ballan: I think already you can see that that's not the world that you were born into or grew up in. I will confess to something. I knew so many survivors growing up, and I saw so many broken people that I never felt any enthusiasm for the Museum of the Holocaust on the Mall, which I've never visited. I never watched the movie Schindler's List. These things were too real and too close to home, and I didn't want to revisit them. Although I've read a lot about them, the reality in the human misery and the human triumph over that misery was enough for me. My father, who's Eisenhower jacket. You guys don't know what that is. It was a jacket that soldiers wore in World War II. I still have I- it fits me. And actually, I've taught wearing my father's Eisenhower jacket that he wore island hopping in the Pacific, preparing for an invasion of Japan. Of course, that invasion never happened. He ended up in Okinawa, which had been stripped of all of its vegetation and was nothing but mud because of genuine tsunamis, not figurative ones. They would go to sleep at night, and in the morning the mud was everywhere. There would be people who were gone because their sleeping bags together with they would have just sunk into the mud. I think the experiences of war and of the concentration camps were brutal, and the sense of triumph that so many felt at the establishment of the State of Israel and the early history of the state was so alive and so much a part of what it meant to be a young Jew in the 1960s.
Harry Ballan: Tremendous, tremendous love of Israel and identification with the Jewish people. This isn't something that can be translated. I can't transmit it to my own four wonderful children because they didn't experience it. And you can't transmit experience, or at least I can't. I felt a very strong attachment, and I still do. And it's primitive and I don't feel the need to defend it, and I don't apologize for it. I feel a very strong attachment to Jewish history, to the Jewish people, to the Jewish state, to Jewish tradition and Jewish texts. What happened to me when I arrived on this campus in 1977 is that I experienced something that I'm ashamed to admit to. So maybe we can forgive the 17 year old that I was at the time for feeling this. I attended my first class at LC. And the class was Chaucer. Spenser, Milton, Donne. Pope. Wordsworth, Yeats. It was English 125. I don't know if it still has that number in the coursebook and I, together with Yalies of my generation and of earlier generations, had as our first assignment to memorize the prologue to The Canterbury Tales in Middle English. Juan de Toro, with his Sieur de Sota. The roofs of marsh hath passed to the orator and divines, which liquor of which vertu. Before I meet yalies of every generation. And they all know that.
Harry Ballan: And I won't go any further than that, because probably most of the yalies in this room know that, or many. But what I experienced when I thought about the Shakespeare that I learned as a freshman, and the history that I learned as a freshman, and the Chaucer that I learned and the way that it was presented, and the greatness of the teachers and the overwhelming beauty, truth, and goodness of the tradition was a bit of a sense of shame. I didn't think that there was anything in the Jewish tradition that I grew up in that could match the power and the eloquence of what I was learning, and the texts and the people from whom I was learning those texts. And I struggled with that. And because I only have a few minutes, I will tell you what was a genuine turning point for me. I want to share it with you, because I think it can be a turning point for you. Or it can maybe stand for some other turning point that is available to you in an age when everything is published and it can be on your doorstep the same, or the next day. There was a monograph written by a very prominent rabbi and published in the Magazine Tradition in 1965 that was not available as a book until 1992. I was already in law school when this book came out. The title of the book is The Lonely Man of Faith, and the author is Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik.
Harry Ballan: The book is less than 100 pages. I just reread it. The book changed my life. And I thought what I would do, rather than in the few minutes remaining to me, is tell you something about that book. What Rabbi Soloveitchik says in that book, and how that book connected me at the root with the beauty and the power and the eloquence of the Jewish tradition. The book is an extended midrash or meditation on two chapters of the Bible, the first and second chapters of Genesis. In those two chapters, creation unfolds once in the first chapter and a second time in the second chapter. And what Rabbi Soloveitchik does in this book is first, create a typology based on the Adam who is created in the first chapter, whom he calls Adam one, and the Adam who is created in the second chapter, whom he calls Adam two. And out of this typology, he constructs a view of human nature that is based upon Jewish tradition, and in my searching and reading I have found nowhere else, and it seems to me deeper and truer to life than anything else that I have read. You can now acquire and have it delivered the next day. Rabbi Joseph. 20 books by Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik in English. You can buy his commentary on the Chumash, the first five books of the Torah, and you can find much wisdom there. And while I don't think there is genuinely a rivalry, I nevertheless will say, I think the wisdom you'll find there rivals anything that you'll find in any tradition anywhere.
Harry Ballan: So this is what Rabbi Soloveitchik does. He points out the following differences between the accounts of creation in the first and second chapters of Genesis. Adam one is made in the image of God. Nothing is said about how Adam two is made. Other than that Adam, Adam, is made out of the earth, Adama. One is in the image of God. The other is made out of the earth. The second difference is that Adam the first is told to subdue the earth. To conquer the earth. Adam, the first, Rabbi Soloveitchik says, is majestic man, and Adam the first is created together with Eve. And there you have the primary sociality, the first instance of the social, which is the creation of two human beings, the simultaneous creation of two human beings who exist in a relationship and who are told to subdue the earth. They name the animals. They take part in creation by mastering creation, that mastery, that Baconian desire to seek the betterment of man's estate through the conquest of nature that's there in the first chapter of Genesis, in the person of Adam the first. And it's a part of your nature. Adam the second isn't told to subdue anything. He's told to cultivate the garden. And keep it. And the last distinction between Adam one and Adam two that I want to speak about is the fact that unlike Adam one, Adam two is created without an ezer kenegdo, without a helpmate, without Eve. Adam two is not only alone, he is lonely.
Harry Ballan: You can be in this room. Let's be clear about those two words. You can be with people. And you can look at where you are outwardly and say Tal is not alone. Scott's not alone. Harry's not alone. Steven's not alone. Clearly we're not alone. We're together with all of you. Nevertheless, even as we're with you, we can be lonely. Because lonely is an inward state. You don't know whether I'm lonely. But you can tell whether I'm alone. What Rabbi Soloveitchik says is that the man of faith may never be alone. But to be a person of faith is to be lonely. Further, to be a human being is to be lonely. Just a moment more. What is introduced into Adam the second's world as a consequence of that loneliness? First of all, God understands that Adam the second needs companionship. None of the animals is an adequate companion, and Adam the second doesn't subdue anything. God subdues Adam the second, and as he sleeps, he draws from Adam's side, Eve, and in the first words spoken by a human being, Adam names Eve the mother of all. Isn't that interesting? As soon as she's created, she's named as the mother of all living human beings before she is a mother, in fact. So together with the sociality that comes into existence when Eve becomes a companion for Adam in that second story is this lingering sense of loneliness. It's a loneliness that Adam the first never feels. So if you ask yourself what picture of man emerges from these two chapters, and I want to say to you that it's a deeper picture that I think you will find anywhere else, and you will also see points of contact with Hegel, the notion of recognition, because there's a way in which Adam and Eve recognize each other in pursuit of conquering the earth and subduing it.
Harry Ballan: And you will recognize in Adam the second a kind of heideggerian sense, a sense that Heidegger had of being in the world in relation to other people, and being aware of your mortality and of the birth of another human being, the creation of another human being, and the possible death of that human being, and a sense of time. Because now there's a time before Eve, and there's a time before Adam. You you acquire a time awareness. All of this is in Rav Soloveitchik, and he talks about Kierkegaard, and he talks about Heidegger, and he talks about Hegel, and he talks about Nietzsche. But I want to say this to you as you move through life and as you find that sometimes you exist in a mode as chairman of a bank, as founder of a bank, as a member of an investment firm, as a law firm partner. Sometimes you exist in a mode in which your job is to be in the world and to work in the world and to accomplish things in the world, and to be a part of a work community. And sometimes you exist in the world to be part of a covenant, to be together with other people who are lonely, to be together with other people with whom you can pray, to engage in activities that are affected by prophecy.
Harry Ballan: Adam the first is visualized in that cell and that image of God. Adam the second hears a calling. Adam the second hears. Adam the second is open to prophecy and prayer and a prayer community and a covenant community. And each of you, whether you know it or not, each of you, is partly majestic. And partly lonely. And that, as briefly as I can put it, is what I learned from that first taste of great rabbinic teaching and learning, and it's informed my quest. I was 32. That's 30 years ago. It's informed my quest since then to understand more deeply the Jewish tradition that connects every person in this room to every other person in this room, to all of the Jews who have lived before us, to all of the Jews who will come after us, to all of the Jews in America, to all of the Jews in Israel and all over the world. And it's why I say to our Israeli friends, really and truly, Shalom Aleichem. Barachim Habahim, Brochah V'hatzlocha- you should have every blessing, and you should enjoy every success, and you should be proud to be a member of an ancient people whose ancient wisdom can help you move productively and charitably with accomplishments and success and with love through the world that God created for Adam.
Scott Shay: So Harry talked about knowing survivors. Here's one thing that you need to know about me, because it explains a lot. And it's led me to two of the central questions that I focused on in my life, which is that my father was a survivor. He was less than 70lb when he was liberated from Dachau by the American forces, and he was in an American field hospital for a year, being nursed back to health. Only a generous country would do something like that. And at a certain point I thought, and he thought that his ordeal started in June of 1941, when the Nazis came in and when he and every other member of the Jewish community of Sveksna was handed over. And he grappled with that, and I talked to him about it over time. It's a central question: How did this happen? In 1940, the president of Lithuania said there is no anti-Semitism here in Lithuania like in other countries. And he said this country is based on social justice. Now, by the way, when I read that and I'm thinking about what social justice and how social justice can be interpreted, well, he thought he thought Lithuanian. He came and visited Sveksna. How did this happen? That was one central question. I'm going to just tell you the other question, too, and we're not going to have time to get into it, although it may dovetail at a certain point.
Scott Shay: But the other question that my father grappled with was his father was murdered essentially in front of him. His brothers were murdered. His mother had died in childbirth, giving with his younger brother. She was already dead. But his aunts, his uncles, his cousins, everybody he knew, there were maybe ten people who survived from Sveksna. 15 people at most, Lithuanian, Lithuania's Jews, 99% were murdered. Sveksna was not unusual. And his question, by the way, was he knew. You know, some people grapple with faith. My father didn't grapple with faith. He knew. He knew that it was miracles that got him to the other side of being liberated at £65 from Dachau, he knew that if he were sitting where Tal was sitting, instead of where I'm standing or sitting over there, he knew if he were one step forward, one step back, he knew if someone else was one step forward, one step back, he would have been dead. I mean, that's how little the margin of error was. So we knew that God brought him to his liberation, and to be in Chicago and to have a son. He knew that was for some reason. But I will also say he was also and I would say this, and it's not necessarily always an easy thing to remember and always not necessarily easy to remember how it was manifested.
Scott Shay: But he was also angry at God very profoundly so, because God, who had saved him unquestionably had let his father, his brothers, his aunts, his uncles, his cousins not survive. And that's very difficult. And that's a large conversation. May come back to that a little tiny bit at the end. But he knew he had a purpose in life. He knew he had something that he had to accomplish. He knew the Jewish people. He knew there was a reason for this, for his existence. And that always left a more than a foundation and an imprint on me. An imprint. And trying to figure out how June of 1941 came to be became one of the things that was a leitmotif in my life of thinking about that, because it didn't just happen. The Jews of Sveksna didn't just turn over. I'm sorry. The Lithuanians didn't just turn over all the Jews. The Nazis didn't just come in. What happened was sadly, wrenchingly sadly, is that the population of Europe, the population of Lithuania, the population of Sveksna, had been prepared with lies, with conspiracy theories, with slanders about Jews. When my father was growing up, there was before my father was born, I found this from archives, there was a blood libel about Jews in Sveksna that caused a lot of Jews to be cause the pogrom, Jews to be harmed, killed.
Scott Shay: And then there was a second blood libel when my father was a young man. And luckily, in this case, the supposed victim turned up in health, so it ended. But from then on, Jews were treated in a very different way. Jewish shopkeepers, they had a little a head on their sign, whatever their sign was. Someone would put a little black smear of tar to say, these are Jews, don't go near this. Don't buy from this store. Boycott the Jews. I don't know where I heard that before. And don't interact with the Jews. Don't do a lot of things with the Jews. And they were prepared with conspiracy theories where Jews and Sveksna were at one hand somehow supporting the fascists in Germany, and on the other hand, the communists and the Soviet Union. None of it made any sense. But June of 1941 would not have happened, and could not have happened unless the local Sveksna neighbors, who knew the Jews had lived with the Jews for generations, were convinced that these lies about Jews were true, that there was a conspiracy, that they were part of some evil cabal of Jews that were somehow manipulating the world. I went to a university, Northwestern, that as part of its motto, truth and searching out truth and making sure that one gets a truth.
Scott Shay: And I'm not going to read it to you, but I'm going to say Yale happens to be a university that goes by the motto of light and truth, although the Hebrew isn't exactly that. It's called light and truth. And yet I'm really worried, more so than I have been at any time in my life, that we're losing a sense of truth. And if we do so, horrors will happen because they have happened when we lose sense of truth. We want to embrace truths that we like that are warm baths that make us feel good. This is a rarefied group. But if I were to take the country as a whole and say two things. Donald Trump lost the election of 2020 and there was no Russian collusion. If I were to say now, that would make 35% of the people wouldn't believe one of the statements, 35% of the people wouldn't believe the other statement, even though of course, both are true. We are deeply, deeply losing sense of what is true for what we'd like to be true for what our fantasy or our conspiracy theory for being for what we think is truth. In my book, and this is what really became, to a degree, my mission, Harry knows this, is to scrutinize and to encourage other people to scrutinize what's being said and passed is truth that are just lies.
Scott Shay: And what I did in the book is show. I don't want to go through this all now, but show how conspiracy theories about Jews have become like common knowledge and common belief. There's a professor at Northwestern who writes who wrote a book, The Hoax of the 20th century, which is particularly maddening to me, who wrote a 450 page book or so, and with heavy with footnotes, tenured professor at northwestern, explaining how the Holocaust was made up. These tens of thousands of documents that depict the the Holocaust, the minutes of the Wannsee Conference. All forgeries. The testimony of folks, of Nazis and others, who confessed to murders. Confessed to being perpetrators. Said they were witnesses. Said they were bystanders. Confessed to and were to sorts of things. They were poor, innocent Nazis who were bamboozled by Jews, these crafty Jews, to say things that they would never have imagined doing. And by the way, on the left, it's just as bad. I show professors at northwestern who are talking about all sorts of things. You have a professor who's written, a professor at Rutgers, who's written a book that says that, you know, the start up nation. Well, actually, Israel is using its technology, its biotechnology, to hack the DNA of Palestinians, to systemically starve them.
Scott Shay: It's engaged in rampant organ harvesting. Whenever a Palestinian is actually thinks they're going to the hospital in a ambulance, they are being diverted to have organs harvested. This is written by a professor, full professor with tenure passed peer review published by Duke University Press, won best book award from the Women's Studies Association. That's what it says. I can't make it up. Israel is using biotechnology somehow in the air with Wi-Fi and other things. I mean, it's voodoo, it's voodoo. It is. It got someone tenure. And by the way, I talked about a professor on the right who talked who's a Nazi, who's a Holocaust denier. Professor Salaita writes that the Nazi Holocaust was a precursor and part of a long term plan by Jews to rid Palestine of its indigenous people. He writes that flat out. It's published by Duke, not Duke, Temple University Press. Also passed peer review. These are lies. I don't need to tell anybody here. These are lies. But they're preposterous lies. They're no less preposterous than the lies that were told in Sveksna, Lithuania about Jews. And the smearing and the boycotts are no less than the smear on the shopkeepers, the Jewish shopkeepers signs. So what I want to charge you with, I think, is we're all here for a purpose. My father thought he was here for a purpose.
Scott Shay: He was here for a purpose. And zechrono le'evracah- may his memory be for a blessing, he accomplished a lot. You're sitting here in Yale, whether you're from Rehoboth or New York City or LA. Somehow we're all gathered in this place. We're sitting in a place in a university that should be dedicated, and I believe is, to truth and light. And I think it's our mission right now, with so much falsehood, to have the courage to believe in truths and to find truths that aren't necessarily what we want to hear. You have to hear the bad news first. And I'm going to say one last thing, because I was saying this to Rabbi Hecht before, is that we also live in this strange age where sometimes the best liars stick only to the truth. And this is what you have to watch out for. You can use statistics, you can use facts and you can narrate them. That's a new thing. And what I was saying to Rabbi Hecht was, if you read the third chapter since Harry talked about the first and second chapters of the Bible, I have to talk about, the third will be here as we work our way through the rest of Genesis. I don't know what you've got cooking, Tal, but in the third chapter, that's the story of the snake, and Adam and Eve. Read that story carefully. The snake never lies. It doesn't say one falsehood. Manipulates the truth in a very interesting and devious way.
Scott Shay: And you have to look out for that, too, because the snake is the first narrative writer. The snake says, Did God say not to eat? Did God say that you can't touch the apple or the fruit? It's actually not an apple pear. But I'm going to super simplify for now. Did you say you can't touch that fruit? Did God say that? Well, no. God said, I'm sorry. God sort of gaslights this into Eve's mind. Well, if you can touch the fruit, you can eat the fruit. Meanwhile, God had said in the previous few verses, just don't eat the fruit. But by confusing it, the snake successfully creates a theory that sort of overtakes the truth and turns it into something else. I mentioned to Rabbi Hecht the article in the New York Times about the Hasidic schools. You can take a lot of facts and you can create a narration. And I'm going to leave you with this, because what I'm saying about being ruthless and having courage for truth will help you not only in your moral life, but in your business life. In the 2008, 2009, 2010, there was a big financial crisis in the United States and across the world. It started with mortgages. It started with these things called CDOs. It's called MBA, mortgage backed securities and hybrid securities and subprime securities and CDOs and all this other stuff.
Scott Shay: And the fact of the matter is, it was all built on untruths. And anybody who could figure out the truth could figure out that there was a massive fraud going on here. And the few people who did came out okay. Indeed, some made money because they were willing to look at truths, and because everybody in the rating agencies, everybody in the investment banks all became attached to these falsehoods about these mortgages. And it blew up. And sooner or later lies blow up. The nice thing about finance is sooner or later there's a reckoning of dollars and numbers. The bad thing about the rest of the world is sometimes there's reckonings in human bodies and all sorts of horrors, as I talked about before. So my charge to you, Harry, left you with a charge. My charge to you is we live. We're here for a reason. We're all here for a reason. We've all taken a journey up to today for a reason. Find your purpose. Focus on the truth. Even when it hurts. Even when you don't want to admit it. Even when it will make money. Even when it will cause people to be annoyed with you. And I'll leave you with the words of my friend Barney Frank. The best test of your authenticity is whether you're willing to piss off your friends.
Tal Keinan: Thank you, Shmully, Toby, Alex, for inviting me. Thank you Harry and Scott, for welcoming me to appear with you. Great to be with you all tonight. Please indulge me for I'm going to speak in Hebrew for 30s. Every time I need to. A I'll consider it a success, from my perspective, if I leave about half of you thinking after this evening about the following question: Should there be Jews? Should there be Jews? Whether you're Jewish or not. Should there be Jews? Is it a good thing that there are Jews in the world? And there's a reason that I think we have to ask that question today, because I think for the first time in 2000 years, that's not an inevitability. In fact, I would say it's likely that we don't have Jews, certainly not in the way we were constituted today, three or four generations from now. I'm going to tell you the way I answer that question for myself originally in order to just get you thinking about this, at least the way I did. And my answer was wrong. And I think this is the wrong way to think about it, but it led me down, I think, a good path of questioning. So I grew up in what I would consider a typical American Jewish home. Typical in that my three older brothers all married non-Jewish women. And that's the numbers, right? It's about 75% of us do that. And I didn't consider that any kind of a tragedy or bad news or anything like that. I love my sisters in law. I love my nieces and nephews. They're fantastic.
Tal Keinan: They're wonderful. They're not Jewish. That's okay. I don't see that as any sort of a tragedy on an individual level. And I know some people might feel differently about that. I don't, but I do see the numbers. The numbers are very clear. If we continue on this path, it's over. It's over. Right. My grandchildren's generation, at least in this country, we can talk about Israel in this country will be about 5% the size of my generation in this country, which is way below critical mass for self-sustenance. We won't. Jews won't be meeting Jews at a rate that we'll be able to sustain us. And I grew up with zero Jewish exposure. Zero. I fasted on Yom Kippur. That was the only thing I did. That was my entire Jewish life was fasting. Why? I don't know why. That's what we did. I grew up in boarding school in New Hampshire. Without many Jews around me. I never really considered myself any different. I look a little bit different from most of the kids that that I grew up with, but that was about it. I never felt different. I've never encountered anti-Semitism in my life. That just was not a factor. I was American and I started getting into Judaism in high school, and it was a Calvinist minister, actually, who kind of got me into it as a curiosity, not really as a kind of a profound search for my identity.
Tal Keinan: But I very quickly got sucked in, and there's a moment that I write about and speak about where I was shown for the first time, the picture of the boy in the Warsaw ghetto who's being arrested with his hands up. Many of you will recognize it. If you don't, I urge you to just google boy in the Warsaw Ghetto. It's the first image that will come up in Google. Google Images, which is a photograph that that struck me and immediately I realized I was seeing it the wrong way in that the way that photograph is framed, you see the boy in the left side of the of the picture. He must be 6 or 7 years old, the picture of innocence with his hands up, and the Nazi troops on the right side of the picture with his their guns, with their guns pointing at him. And that juxtaposition of kind of raw brutality with pure innocence is what that picture begs. I didn't see it. I knew I was supposed to see it, but I didn't at all. I couldn't muster hatred or even anger for the Nazis on the right. I didn't know Jewish history well, but I knew enough to understand that they were just playing a role that somebody played in most generations in the last 2000 years. Somebody has worn the uniform changes, but it's the same role that's being played.
Tal Keinan: In fact, I saw them primarily as victims, not victimizers. What did strike me in the picture - and again, I encourage you, even if you've seen it, Google it and look at it again - is standing behind the boy is his family and probably his neighbors. This is the 1943. It's the final liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto. These are the adults, and they're also their faces and their body language project shock and resignation. And I was angry at them. And that was what that picture provoked me. I was furious. How could you not have had a contingency plan. Right. And it could be in Lithuania. This happened to be in Poland. It's the same story everywhere. You're not Poles, you're Jews. This is your story. This is what happens. How could you not have had a plan B? Because this child, who is your charge. This is your primary responsibility. You're his parents, is to protect him physically. You've abrogated that. And as far as I know, everybody in that picture was dead in two or three weeks. That's probably exactly what happened to the people in that picture. It didn't take me long to think about, well, wait a second, what's my contingency plan? I've never thought of myself as anything but American. As far as I know, the people in that picture never thought of themselves as anything but Poles. I don't know. I'm closer in age at this point.
Tal Keinan: I'm 16 or 17. I'm closer in age to the adults in the picture than I am to the boy. So who am I to be looking at this from the boy's perspective and be angry? What is my contingency plan? Which begs the next question, is America an aberration in Jewish history? Is this the end of Jewish history, or is this just what it felt like at the ascendant phase of the Jewish cycle? And if you spoke to my grandfather, he would describe 1920s Germany, more or less the way I felt in 1970s and 80s America. Totally welcome. Totally part of the franchise until we weren't. Now, I don't know the answer to that question in America. And if you put a gun to my head today, I'd say America is a special animal in Jewish history. I do think it takes a special society to welcome those people, to nurse your father back to health. I do think that that's the case, but I don't know. I don't think any of us knows for sure what's happening here. But that started a search for me where I had to. I had to understand who I am. I don't know exactly what Judaism means, what my role in it is, but I do know that there's a 3500 year chain that my three older brothers broke. And if I'm going to break it, I don't want to do it accidentally.
Tal Keinan: I want to do it as an informed decision. Okay. I don't need to carry this torch anymore. That search took me to Israel. I did a summer program in Israel. Kind of like what birthright is today. Sort of like a teen tour of Israel. And I saw people who were not afraid to ask the question I had asked, because when I asked my friends at Exeter, my Jewish friends, is America a special moment in Jewish history? Is this the exception? People looked at me like I was crazy. Why? Why are you even getting into that? That's just not. Not something we think about. I couldn't speak to my parents about that. Nobody really wanted to entertain that question. And in Israel, I saw people who not only had the courage to ask that question, they had the courage to answer it with their feet. Not in a dorm room in Exeter, New Hampshire, but on the ground in Israel, and had the dignity to fight and pay, pay a very steep price for their freedom and their dignity. And that that was the moment that summer where I realized what that picture meant to me. It was shame. It was shame in the indignity of our accepting our fate for 2000 years. And Israel, to me, was the romantic dignity. I fell in love Israel. That was my experience with Israel. And very quickly I started learning Hebrew. I started learning Arabic.
Tal Keinan: I started getting into the Middle East and understanding what this was all about. I took a junior year abroad in Israel and had the opportunity to actually live there and start feeling a little bit more confident in my Israeliness. At some point, I had a kind of a moment of lucidity, of clarity and understood that if I went back to school, I would probably end up in law school or on Wall Street, or doing something fine, something great. Fantastic. But I have a dream. And if I don't seize it right now, it's not coming back. This this is my moment. And occasionally life I think grants us these moments of lucidity. And it's a gift if you can recognize them. I probably have had many that I didn't recognize, this one I happen to recognize. And I grabbed it and I became a citizen. I made Aliya. I finished my university a few months later in Israel and got my draft papers and ended up through a comedy of mistakes, very strangely in the Air Force at the Academy in Israel, expecting to be invited to leave any day. The days went by. I was still around, a year went by. I was still around. Two years went by. Four years later, I was leading people into combat, you know, flying F-16s in Israel. That was a very intense experience. And my Jewish exploration ironically ended the day I made Aliyah to Israel because I didn't have time.
Tal Keinan: I didn't have time. This was the most intense experience of my life still to this day was was going through flight school in Israel and serving afterwards in the Air Force. No time for reading, thinking, Jewish thought, Jewish exploration. And I was a Jewish neophyte, and it was only about ten years into that experience that I looked around and I realized, I don't know anything about Israel. Nothing. I don't know anything about Israel. Everybody I know is a kibbutznik from Kosice, from flight school. That's it. It's a tiny, tiny cut of Israeli society. I don't know what it looks like to cross the street in Israel. I've never interacted with anybody from from from the haredi community in Israel. I don't know anybody from the haredi community. I don't know anyone from most communities in Israel, and I don't know anything about Judaism. And yet, this was not the Peace Corps. This was not teach for America. I had been in combat over 100 times. I had done things that I'm never going to be able to take back. Never. Some of them I regret. This is not something I could say. Oh, you know what? That was a wrong turn. I'm going to go back to law school now. My hands were dirty already. I was in the kind of the old joke about ham and eggs where the chicken is involved.
Tal Keinan: But the pig is committed. I was committed and I had to. And this was a crisis, really a crisis for me in my life. I had to figure out what this was about. I had made very, very consequential, personal and consequential decisions in the name of Judaism, a concept that I knew still almost nothing about and in a very kind of backward way, started retracing my steps to that moment. Looking at the boy in the picture in the Warsaw ghetto. And this this book is really about that is what does this mean? And what I want to leave you with. And I'm going to end in a minute. My parents generation didn't have to ask this question. They didn't have to ask this question. In the United States, where they were completely accepted and fine and had had a wonderful, wonderful life here. They were Jewish. And if you are not Jewish, you looked at them as Jewish. One of the things that's kind of most interesting to me today is that the Jews have become white. When I was growing up, Jews were not white. We were ethnic. We were an ethnic group, right? That's that perception seems to have changed. Meaning we've become embraced by, by, by wider society. And if you look at it, you know, I think it might not have escaped many of your attention. The concept of diaspora is over.
Tal Keinan: It's over as a useful model for describing the physical architecture of Judaism in the world. It's not diaspora anymore. 90% of us are here. And in Israel, that's where the Jews are. The two most philo-semitic. Right. The most Jew loving jurisdictions in certainly hundreds of years. Probably 2000 years. Right. You can be completely American if you choose to be as a Jew in this country. And obviously you can do the same thing in Israel. So for the first time, The vast, vast majority of world Judaism can treat Judaism as an option for the first time in 2000 years. And what I say is, and that's obviously much more pronounced in the United States, but I would posit that the reason Israelis marry other Jews is because they don't know anyone who's not Jewish. That's why they're marrying other Jews. It's not because Judaism means something special to them. Not not for everybody. But, but but I think for the majority of us in Israel, by the way, and that's pretty, pretty well borne out, because if you look at the statistics for intermarriage among Israelis in the United States, there are about 90% much higher than they are for for for for born American Jews. And again, I'm going to come back on an individual level. I don't judge it. I think it's fine. Frankly, in my experience, love is pretty hard. If you find love, grab it.
Tal Keinan: Don't look at don't look at it too closely because it's very difficult to to to to manage that. So on an individual level, I don't fault anybody for the choices they make in love, but the numbers are leading us to extinction. And if it's important, it might not be. But if it's important to us that there be Jews in the world, there's there's a few decisions that we all have to make as individuals and as a and as a community. I'll leave you with the good news, which is I don't think we've had more agency as Jews. Not in 2000 years. In 4000 years. This is Peak Jew right now. We have never had more power and more agency and more ability to steer our fate. Part of that has to do with the fact that we are now concentrated again in two jurisdictions. There's almost no Jew in the world who lives where he or she does not want to live today. That almost doesn't exist today. Think of that. That's an aberration from from from from the last 2000 years. You can go wherever you want. You have total freedom. We have unprecedented prosperity, unprecedented political leverage in the world. If there's a time to make a move and really take our destiny into our hands. It's right now. But no one's going to impose that decision on us. That's something we're going to have to embrace ourselves. Thank you.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank. You.
Tal Keinan: Alex. Come on. We have another speaker.
Speaker1: Elchanan Felheimer is going to speak to us.
Elchanan Felheimer: Oh, I'm. Sorry. For me? May I say to you, sir? I am so. Sorry. Good evening everyone. First, I apologize for my English. I still need to practice. Now that we are here and we are being in the Rabi house, I have a good reason to go back and study in Israel. That I will have a better English. All the leadership of the students in the State of Israel are here with us. Every academic college has a student union, and we represent a total of almost 400,000 students in the State of Israel. They are here right now. And. Whenever we. Rebbe Moshe and Chilik and I thought about doing this journey we had many debates, but after several days here in the United States I can say with a full mouth that it was worth the hard work, the thoughts and the money. We came here to learn about leadership, Zionism, Yahadut and Chabad. Every day we start really early and ended in the wee hours of the nights. During the journey, we also got to know the dear Rabbi Shmully who is hosting us tonight. Round of applause! And this is an excellent opportunity to thank him for his investment, help and many hours he devoted to us. This morning we were at the Lubavitcher Rebbe's house and it was one of the empowering moments we experienced. The Rebbe said that in order to lead, you didn't have to wait to become a CEO of a company, member of Knesset or any other point in influence. We just have to look at ourselves and say, here and now that we are. We were also told about the rich guy who came to the Rebbe and the last sentences the rabbi said to him was, if you go home, look in the mirror, and nothing has changed, then it wasn't worth it that you came.
Elchanan Felheimer: I am sure that anyone who comes home after, after our journey and look in the mirror We'll see a different person. In Chasidus it says that in order for person to work on his inner self, he must first work his outer appearance. I want to tell you that five years ago I decided to go through significant change for me. I bought tailored trousers, elegant shirts and suits, of course, I am still at the beginning of the road, where I can testify that it's hell it is (inaudible) This journey is the just the beginning of all of us. From here we will grow and rise as high as possible with the help of Hakadosh Baruch hu. I will finish in a moment. I will finish,,, with God. Yes. Okay, okay. I will finish in one moment. But for those who don't know, today is the birthday of Baal Hatanya. He would always talk about the fact that every person should always look inward and not outwardly. In today's generation, with TikTok and everything, it's very difficult. And that's exactly what Chabad Campus is doing, helping us to look at our inner selves and the good in every person. A huge thanks to Rabbi Moshe Shilat who built the elites chabad on campus in the State of Israel, empowers thousands of students every day in the work, in leadership and doing good to to each other. To Rabbi Chilik who worked on this journey day and night and all of this would not have happened if not for this adherence to his goal. A final thanks to dear Rabbi Shmully for an exciting evening, good food, and the never ending jokes.
Toby Hecht: That's good. It's good to see you. I know. It's late.
Toby Hecht: I'm just going to speak for a few minutes. No, no, no. Come on. Good evening. I have to have notes. Unlike my. Out. Okay. Good evening. Erev Tov Likulam. My name is Toby Hecht and I am one of the directors of Shabtai. I first want to thank God, the master of all ceremonies for bringing us together here tonight. It is an honor to be here with you all. I want to start off by thanking Alex for hosting tonight's event. I would like to thank Harry, Scott, and Tal for taking the time out of their busy schedules to share their wisdom with us. It was incredible. I want to thank Rabbi Moshe Shilat, head of Chabad in Israel, for bringing us this incredible group tonight And of course, I want to thank my dear friends Moshe Rubin and Mendel Motchkin for helping to make arrangements behind the scenes. Tonight is really a celebration of unity and reflection. I'm going to echo some of the things our wonderful speakers have spoken about. It is by no coincidence that tonight also celebrates, as mentioned, the birthday of two prominent figures in Jewish history, because in truth, they are the very reason we are here, sitting in this room together among friends, both old and new. In the years 1648/1649, infamously known as the Tach V'tat on the Jewish calendar, the Khmelnytsky massacres, the pogroms in Ukraine viciously wiped out over hundreds of thousands of Jews. In the wake of such devastation and abuse
Toby Hecht: The Jewish community were battered, bruised and depleted Jewish communities. The aftershocks still rumbled across Eastern Europe some 50 years later in 1698 on the 18th day of the Hebrew month of Elul, which started this evening, as Alex mentioned, a man called the Baal Shem Tov, founder of the Hasidic movement, was born. His parents, Eliezer and Sarah, were God fearing people, holy and righteous, living quietly on the edge of town in Akup. Rabbi Eliezer was one of the 36 hidden Tzadikim hidden righteous men that live in each generation. He and Sarah named their son and only child, Israel. When Yisroel was five years old, both Eliezer and Sarah passed away. On his deathbed, Eliezer told his son two things that would shape his life entirely and changed the trajectory of Judaism forever. He said, quote, fear no one but God, and love every Jew with all your heart and soul, no matter who he or she is. Israel took the words of his father to heart and lived by their dictum every day of his life. He didn't have an easy life. By our standards. But perhaps this only implies that we need to revisit the basis of our modern standards of a good life. He spent his life devoted to uplifting the tattered spirits of the Jewish people, as he traversed the Jewish landscape of hamlets and villages both far and near, with an entourage of committed disciples
Toby Hecht: he reminded the people and reinforced the notion that God loves every single man, woman and child unconditionally and indiscriminately. Through this unfailing belief, support and love of another, he fundamentally bridged the gap between the simple man and the esteemed scholar revolutionizing the status quo. Every person, no matter who they were, whether well-versed in Talmud or agriculture, could connect to God any time, anywhere. Always, The focus was on purity of faith and the sincerity of heart. And by revitalizing this foundational belief in Judaism, he stemmed the tide of loneliness and fear, rejuvenating a nation on the verge of despair. Before he passed away in Medzhybizh, Ukraine, Rabbi Yisroel the Holy Baal Shemtov left a legacy that had already begun to transform the world. 47 years to the day after the Baal Shemtov came into this world. Another great man was born. On the 18th day of Elul in 1745, Rabbi Schneur Zalman, known as the Alter Rebbe, the son of Baruch and Rivka, was born in Liozna, a town in Poland. Baruch was a follower of the Baal Shem Tov, albeit more of a clandestine group called the Nistarim the Hidden. After a year without children, the pair visited the Baal Shemtov for a blessing. He blessed them and said they would have a child within the year. That high holiday season, the Baal Shem Tov, known as the Besht was recorded to have been radiating with an unusual joy even for him.
Toby Hecht: Baruch and Rivka spent the holidays there in Medzhbizh, receiving another blessing before departing at the end of the season. Rivka promised she would devote her child to spreading the word of Torah and Chassidus, the esoteric teachings of the Torah. Rivka, who made time to study Torah, to study Torah daily and privacy went to a family member to learn what to pray and what to learn in preparation. Sure enough, as the Besht said they would within the year. Rivka gave birth to a boy on Chai Elul. Baruch and Rivka named their son Schneur Zalman, and they would raise him in his formative years under the direction of the Baal Shem Tov. Already as a young man, Schneur Zalman was proving to be a brilliant Talmudic scholar. Nicknamed Litvak, i.e. a student of the Lithuanian yeshivas, he was a young married man when he had two options for furthering and continuing his studies, one Harvard and one Yale. As if -in reality it was better, it was Mezritch or Vilna. He was told that in Vilna you'll learn how to study, and in Mezritch you'll learn how to pray. And he chose Mezritch. There he became the student of the Crown, disciple and successor of the Baal Shem Tov, Rabbi Dovber, known as the Maggid of Mezritch. Under the tutelage and guidance of his teacher, Shneur Zalman began to work on developing the teachings of the Baal Shem Tov, which included working and teaching Jews of ordinary circumstances.
Toby Hecht: Between his deep intellectual mind and his commitment to the path of his holy Teachers, word spread about his greatness. You see, the Baal Shem Tov reintroduced the mystical in small doses through powerful stories and lessons from the Torah. His student, the Maggid, began to disseminate larger swaths of the esoteric to small nucleus of carefully selected students. Slowly, the concepts within Chassidus, which had now until now been reserved for the academic elite, began to flow more broadly. Rabbi Shneur Zalman's focus was with a distinct emphasis on the intellectual dissemination of Jewish mysticism, the esoteric aspects of the Torah, the blueprint for Jewish life. His. His philosophy became known as ChaBaD, the acronym for Chochma wisdom, Binah, Understanding and Daas Knowledge. ChaBaD endeavors to understand the intent of creation and especially our individual and communal purpose in the world. It relies on a meditative study of the metaphysical, spiritual, and mundane function bridged by the fundamental recognition of G-dliness in everyone and everything. Less about disciples riding on the coattails of great rabbis. It was more about investing in the individual by inspiring faith and ability in one's self, in search and service of God. By addressing this critical belief in the power of the individual, his philosophy zeroes in on the capacity for a transformative self. The multi-layered concept is illuminated in his magnum opus, The Tanya, which followed his Code of Jewish Law. This novel approach sparked great debate among Torah scholars across countries and centuries.
Toby Hecht: The institutions, of which the Alter Rebbe had been a star pupil, could not reconcile the wisdom of the great mystic he was destined to become the flexible integration of simplicity and scholarship in service of God through a mystical passage was unconventional and Chabad's innovative synthesis of the law and the soul made available to every Jew, was threatening to the more rigid and reactionary style of service. Yet, in spite of aggressive countermeasures, the life and teachings of Rabbi Shneur Zalman, the Alter Rabbi, persisted, bringing us to this house here tonight 324 years later, I'd like to end off by saying to all of you young, beautiful men and women with your whole life ahead of you, take heed of the profound messages of these two incredible legacies that intertwined not only because of their brilliant minds and life lessons, but through their humility and their love of humanity. Fear no one but God and love every person, no matter who they are. Believe in yourself and know your potential. Spend your life living out that purpose that only you can do. Chassidus teaches that everything has a reason for being. From the thinking man to the leaf that rolls in the wind. The reason you were born into this world is because God decided the world needed you. Each one of you in it. I'd like to end with a L'chaim to you all. Lchaim. May you find your purpose in life with joy. And live out your potential all the days of your life. Amen.