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[JOSEPH TELUSHKIN] I remember it was on the 12th anniversary of the Rebbe's death, and what I noticed, when I wrote the article, was that the Rebbe, at that point, had been dead for 12 years, and Chabad's number of shluchim, emissaries, had doubled, and since has tripled. And I realized I was dealing with a very rare form of leader.

Because most charismatic leaders, when they die, at best their movement will stay where it is, and more commonly, it will start to decline. But here was a charismatic leader who, subsequent to his death, his movement was expanding exponentially. And that's what made me think in terms of a book, because such leaders are rare.

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[ALAN KADISH] Welcome to Touro Talks. I'm Dr. Alan Kadish, President of Touro University. And it's a pleasure today to have Rabbi Joseph Telushkin here with us. Rabbi Telushkin is a rabbi, lecturer, and best-selling author. He's written more than 15 books, including several volumes about Jewish ethics and Jewish literacy.

He was raised in Brooklyn, where he attended the Yeshiva of Flatbush and then later Columbia University. While at Columbia, he was active and a leader in the student struggle for Soviet Jewry and included in his activities a trip to the Soviet Union in which he met with Andrei Sakharov, which resulted in him being declared persona non grata by the Soviet Union, probably a badge of honor for him. They thought he was an anti-Russian agent.

In 2014, one of his many books was Rebbe, The Life and Teachings of Menachem Schneerson, which appeared on major bestseller lists, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Publisher's Weekly. Rabbi Telushkin and I also both served on the board of the Jewish Book Council, which is where I first met him. And it's an absolute pleasure to see you again and have you here, Rabbi Telushkin.

[JOSEPH TELUSHKIN] I'm very, very happy to be here. And I'm happy to be doing something with Touro, which I have warm feelings towards but which I've not had too many opportunities to interact. So I'm very much looking forward to that as well.

[ALAN KADISH] Well, welcome. So the book we're going to mostly speak about today, among the other things you've written, is your book about the Rebbe.

[JOSEPH TELUSHKIN] Mm-hmm.

[ALAN KADISH] So what was the origin of your relationship with the Rebbe and Chabad, and how did you come to write the book?

[JOSEPH TELUSHKIN] The relationship actually goes back a long time. My father, Shlomo Telushkin Alav HaShalom, was the accountant for Chabad even before the Rebbe, because the Rebbe's father-in-law had come to the United States in 1940, and my father became their accountant.

My grandfather, Nissim Telushkin, Rav Nissim Telushkin, had a very real relationship. He was a Chabad rabbi, but he was unusual in that, in those years, he was very, very active in Mizrachi and in Zionism. And Chabad, up until '48, like most of the I'd say-- well, I don't like using the word ultra. Most of the Haredi world was a bit-- it was hostile often to Zionism. But he really bridged both worlds.

But I grew up in a modern Orthodox home. My parents sent me to the Yeshiva of Flatbush, which was not where Chabad was normally sending people. But I always grew up with very warm feelings towards Chabad. My father is the Rebbe's accountant, always had at least one yechidus, one private meeting each year with the Rebbe he was guaranteed on April 15, when he would bring the Rebbe his tax return.

But how did I come about to write the book? I was very friendly with Zalman Shmotkin, Rabbi Zalman Shmotkin, who's the head of chabad.org. And he would ask me every year, around the time of the Rebbe's yahrzeit, to write an article about the Rebbe.

And I did. I remember it was on the 12th anniversary of the Rebbe's death. And what I noticed when I wrote the article, was that the Rebbe at that point had been dead for 12 years, and Chabad's number of shluchim, emissaries, had doubled, and since has tripled.

And I realized I was dealing with a very rare form of leader. Because most charismatic leaders, when they die, at best their movement will stay where it is, and more commonly it will start to decline. But here was a charismatic leader who, subsequent to his death, his movement was expanding exponentially. And that's what made me think in terms of a book because such leaders are rare.

[ALAN KADISH] So before we spend some more time talking about the book, tell me a little bit more about your background. I mentioned in the introduction that you attended Columbia. Tell me about what you majored in, what your time at Columbia was about, and what the atmosphere was like when you were at Columbia.

[JOSEPH TELUSHKIN] Well, I'll tell you one thing, the atmosphere was not like what it is now. I was at Columbia. I had gotten semicha at YU in '73 and then went to Columbia. And the atmosphere, there was some on the left wing, some antagonism towards Israel, but nothing like what's been going on in recent years at Columbia.

I intended to get a PhD in modern Jewish history. I passed my orals and then by that time I had started doing popular writing. I had written with my friend Dennis Prager a book called Eight Questions People Ask About Judaism. We had self published it and sold over 30,000 copies, which is unusual for a self-published book.

And then a friend introduced us to an editor at Simon and Schuster, and they said, OK, do a re-edit, because we had been 26 when we wrote the book, and add on a question. And in 1981, Simon and Schuster brought it out. And the ninth question that we added on was, is there a difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism? So it shows how long that very problematic issue has been with us.

And then from there, I went on to do other writing. And the problem is, I wish I had gotten my PhD because I would have liked to have had an academic position. But I find that once you start writing in a more popular genre, it's often hard to go back.

I still have a dissertation topic, which I'd love to offer to anybody to do, which was I wanted to see if the responsa literature, sheilot ve'tshuvot, how it was affected in the 19th century by two things, by Jews increasingly becoming citizens, and then with the rise of Zionism and the possibility that there was going to be a Jewish state.

Because one thing I'd become aware of, I'd written one other book with my friend Dennis Prager, Why the Jews, The Reason for Anti-Semitism. And while researching it, I became aware of something any learned Jew is aware of, that there is quite a bit of antagonism towards non-Jews in Jewish literature, not exclusively. You have some very remarkable characters, like the Meiri.

But I was aware of that tradition. And I wanted to see how it could be confronted with. Because while it's true that there's still a lot of anti-Semitism in the world, there are a lot of pro-Semites. One of the books I'm hoping to write, before I die, is a history of philo-Semitism, of non-Jews, and very significant figures in the non-Jewish world, who had positive feelings towards the Jews.

I mean, one very remarkable one is the writer George Eliot, who wrote the novel Daniel Deronda, which Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the founder in many ways, of modern Hebrew, claimed actually turned him toward Zionism and towards the recreation of Hebrew. That's the directions in which my life went.

I have a two-volume set that I published called The Code of Jewish Ethics. What I wanted really to do there was to in a sense, write a shulchan aruch of Jewish ethics. And I wrote a book called The Book of Jewish Values. And I geared it towards Jews who did not necessarily come from an observant background.

Because very often when I hear of Jews who are non-observant, who became observant, when they describe how their life changed, they tend to focus almost exclusively on issues that in Hebrew would be called bein adam leMakom, between people and God, ritual issues.

And when Jewish ethics were talked about, there were two terms. Tzedakah-- wait, what are the two terms I'm thinking of? Now, I just forgot what the second term-- and lashon hara, unfair speech. And I tried to come up with an ethical activity for every day of the year drawn from Jewish sources.

[ALAN KADISH] Let's go back to talking about your book, about the Rebbe.

[JOSEPH TELUSHKIN] Yes.

[ALAN KADISH] How would you describe the mission of the Rebbe, and is that mission continuing today? You mentioned the number of shluchim has increased. Are they still on mission? Are they still doing what the Rebbe would have wanted, and tell us a little bit about what you think about that mission and what he would have wanted for the future?

[JOSEPH TELUSHKIN] I think the Rebbe, first of all, he had a goal. He really wanted to reach every Jew in the world. He certainly wanted to reach every Jewish community in the world. When my book came out, Chabad, I think, was already in 48 states. The last two were Mississippi.

And in a game of Jewish trivia, what was the 50th state? And it was South Dakota. South Dakota has about 400 Jews. Mendel Alperovich, the young man who is my research assistant in writing the book, ended up becoming the shliach to South Dakota. And it's amazing, his enthusiasm. I spoke with him. I told him-- I don't always say this to people. If you want to bring me out as a speaker, just pay my expenses, and I'll come. And we had 65 people in South Dakota.

So the Rebbe really wanted to reach Jews with a message of love and that his love really was unconditional. And that's an aspect of Chabad that I think now is more commonly acknowledged but wasn't,

I remember there was a very prominent figure in the conservative movement, a man who I very loved deeply, but since I'm going to be saying something a trifle critical, I'm not going to mention his name in this context, he was a little cynical about Chabad, who thought the Rebbe just wanted to get followers. So his love wasn't quite that unconditional.

But his was, and his wife's was, Chaya Mushka. There was an organization, I'm forgetting its name, that after World War II, was helping Jews escape, basically from Communist countries. And overwhelmingly, they were not observant Jews.

And the rebbetzin came up with an interesting term for them. She called them tzadikim without tefillin. Tzadikim you know, who don't put on tefillin every day. And that emanated out of a real sense of love of Jews and of love of the Jewish heart, of people, the Rebbe's particular support for the Israeli army. So that really was the Rebbe's mission.

I think it was influenced by coming into office, only six years after the Holocaust. It occurred to me, it might have been Jonathan Sacks, alav hashalom, who said something like this. I know I wrote something like this in my book. "If the Nazis hunted down every Jew in hate, the Rebbe wanted to search out every Jew in love." And he really did it to an amazing extent.

[ALAN KADISH] So you mentioned the Rebbe's support for the Israeli army.

[JOSEPH TELUSHKIN] Yes.

[ALAN KADISH] But you also previously had talked about perhaps an ambivalent attitude towards Zionism by some Haredim and Hasidim. So where did the Rebbe come out on Zionism and on Israel, and how did that manifest in what he talked about?

[JOSEPH TELUSHKIN] Yes, he came out as as fervent a supporter of Israel, as you can imagine. The problem for the Rebbe in becoming a Zionist, was that it was a religious state would have to have the Torah either as its Constitution, which I recognize is not something that can feasibly be done, but it would have had to have been-- more of religion would have had to be part of it for them to be a Zionist state.

The thought that the ideal Jewish state could be a secular state is not something he could easily accept, and this was a very significant point. But he so appreciated the role Israel played in protecting Jews. And look, in my lifetime, I was born in '48. Actually, my Hebrew name is Yisrael Yosef because I was born the year the state was created.

But the Rebbe so appreciated what Israel was doing to protect Jews, that's why I say, in theory, he couldn't come out-- I would say his contribution was he led Chabad from being anti-Zionist to being non-Zionist but very, very pro-Israel.

And even in that case, his father-in-law, the Frierdiker rebbe, the previous rebbe, by the end also had become a non-Zionist. Zalman Shazar, who was a president of Israel, came from a Chabad background. And the fifth rebbe, the Rebbe Rashab, was virulently anti-Zionist.

And yet when Zalman Shazar, who became President of Israel and was very active politically, was brought over to the United States in '48 to put in-- yeah, it started in '47 and in '48 to push for the creation and the passage of the partition vote at the UN, he did call up the Rebbe and the Frierdiker, the sixth rebbe.

And the Rebbe said to him-- because Shazar was nervous. It wasn't clear. We had to get 2/3 of the votes, and there was some strong opposition. And he said, don't worry, the votes going to pass and then come visit me.

And so the vote passed in late November of '48. Shazar hung around for a bit of time. And he came over on a big holiday in Chabad, Yud Tes Kislev, when the first rebbe, the Alter Rebbe, was freed from prison in Russia, and the sixth rebbe had a request to make of Shazar that he wanted to build a city in Israel, which became known as Kfar Chabad.

And Shazar spoke with him about near Meron, near one of the centers of Kabbalah, which it's not at all in the center of the country. And the Frierdiker Rebbe said to him, no, no, I want something in the center of the country. And it was very central. Kfar Chabad is very near Ben-Gurion airport.

[ALAN KADISH] What can you tell us about the Rebbe's relationship with leading rabbis of other streams, such as Rav Soloveitchik, Rav Moshe Feinstein, and perhaps some others that you know about, that you wrote about in your book?

[JOSEPH TELUSHKIN] Right, well, I wrote pretty extensively about his connection with Rav Soloveitchik. Normally, when you'd hear that two rabbis of such stature had become friends, you would probably assume, yeah, they probably had learned at the same yeshiva, but they didn't because neither of them ever really learned at a yeshiva. They met at a University, the University of Berlin.

And the Rav was there first. And the Rebbe sought him out when he came to the University of Berlin, and a friendship developed between them. When some students were putting together a journal, and they were writing an article about this friendship, and they wrote to the Rebbe for a letter. And the rabbi said that indeed they were chaverim, "harbei yoter me-ma she-yodua", much more than is actually known.

And of course, it was a famous incident on the 30th anniversary of the Rebbe's becoming the Rebbe, where Rav Soloveitchik came to the celebration at 770, not the sort of things he would normally do. And when he entered the hall, which, as you can imagine, for the celebration of the 30th anniversary, it was crowded beyond belief, the Rebbe did something that people don't recall him ever doing, actually stopping in the middle of a talk that he was giving and standing up to greet the Rav. So it was a very interesting friendship. The Rebbe also had a warm relationship with Rav Moshe Feinstein.

I didn't really write so much about other relationships. There were other rabbanim who would come to visit him. But there were some tensions. I think some people felt that he was going too overboard in reaching out. I mean, I'll give you an example of what I mean when I say that.

There are things today, that we know about. The Rebbe had established 10 mivtzaim, 10 campaigns. And I think it might have been the first was the tefillin campaign, where men would be stopped in the street, it certainly started in New York, where Jews then were a more significant percentage of the population than we are now, and they would be asked, are you Jewish? Did you put on tefillin? And very often, the answer was they were Jewish. And very often, the answer was they hadn't put on tefillin.

So Chabadniks young Chabad men would put tefillin on. The Satmar Rebbe, I think, was very critical of that campaign. He said, what's the point? So they put on tefillin, and then they go eat in a traif restaurant. They could have ham and eggs or something.

And the Rebbe's response was, he focused on the mitzvah. From that one mitzvah, you don't know what else might happen and how people can grow. If you ridicule the effort because you associate it with an aveirah, a sin that later occurred, what do you gain? You gain nothing.

But if you see it as a starting point, then it becomes very important. As was the case with the campaign to get women to light Shabbos candles, which he included in it, not only Jewish women who were above the age of bat mitzvah, but even three-year-old girls.

[ALAN KADISH] Tremendous mission.

[JOSEPH TELUSHKIN] Yes.

[ALAN KADISH] It's well known that many Israeli leaders, as well as American political figures sought advice from the Rebbe. Can you give us one or two stories about that and what you think the implications were?

[JOSEPH TELUSHKIN] Well, the most noted example was Menachem Begin. Begin had maintained a relationship with the Rebbe during the many years when he was not yet the Prime Minister of Israel. Because we know Begin only got elected to that position, I think, in his eighth run. And he would really go to the Rebbe. And he wanted to know the Rebbe's advice.

When Begin came to the United States, he went to the Rebbe. And it's interesting, Zalman Shazar, who regarded himself as a Chabadnik, though that was obviously not his only identity, he was in the Labor Party in Israel, would go to the Rebbe. And Golda was very unhappy. She said it's not appropriate. You're the president of Israel. The Rebbe should come to visit you. And Zalman explained to her that she didn't really understand Chassidus. A Hasid goes to his Rebbe.

And in the case of Begin, he also went to the Rebbe. And it was a very moving meeting, and he stayed in touch with the Rebbe though he then differed from the Rebbe on the political position he took. When Begin reached a peace agreement with Egypt, the Rebbe thought he was erring in agreeing to give back, all the land that Israel had won from Egypt, which was by far, much larger than Israel itself.

And it's funny. When I was writing the book, I was told by one of my friends in Chabad who had been instrumental in working with me to make sure I got access to everybody, he said, if you have disagreements with the Rebbe, put them in.

And there were two areas where I had disagreements with the Rebbe. I thought that the peace agreement with Egypt saved thousands of lives because remember, Israel had had wars with Egypt in '48 and '56 and '67. And then I was learning at a yeshiva in Israel, '68, '69, when the War of Attrition. And subsequent to that agreement, almost no Israeli soldiers died, so it seemed to me it was worthwhile.

And the other area where I had a disagreement, but I learned more about it, I'd been very active in the Soviet Jewry movement. And I think it did do a lot of good. The Rebbe was concerned that it could hurt Soviet Jews in many ways, but the Rebbe was doing extraordinary things behind the scenes.

[ALAN KADISH] You raise a very interesting issue. You talk about two cases where the Rebbe expressed political positions. And in retrospect, I would agree with you that it seems like those positions could be questioned.

How in general, not just for the Rebbe, but in general for Hasidic rabbis or famous rabbis, is it appropriate to express political positions, and does that expose them to potential criticism for getting involved in things that aren't core mission? After all, if the Rebbe's mission was to love every Jew, why get involved in peace treaties with Egypt, where you could potentially be criticized?

[JOSEPH TELUSHKIN] Because he thought it was an issue of pikuach nefesh, of endangerment of life. So he thought Israel would ultimately come to regret it. What you're raising is an interesting question because I'm working on a book now on what I call moral imagination. And do people ever acknowledge errors that they made?

What I came to feel was that it's almost like a good cop, bad cop. The Rebbe was advocating a different sort of position. I was advocating a more militant position, though very, very far removed from the JDL, which I had very tremendous differences with. But the Rebbe didn't too often go out in political positions. I think he did it when he really felt there could be pikuach nefesh. And I think maybe it's good that-- if different rabbis do it, I think it can be good.

I'll tell you an interesting story. I suspect you probably know Saul Berman. So Saul told me that when he was at school while they were forming the student struggle for Soviet Jewry. And as appropriate, he went to the Rav, and he asked Rabbi Soloveitchik, what do you think? Is this something good?

And a few days later, the Rav came and told them, you are free not to listen to me. But my concern is that it's going to end up being endangerous for Israel by so linking this issue against Russia. And Russia could do a lot of harm to Israel.

Then a few years later, there was a conference in Belgium on Soviet Jewry. And Saul again, raised the issue with the Rav, and he said, you should go. And he said, I am very furious. The man who told me that this could be bad for Israel was an Israeli diplomat.

I asked him, is this good for the Jews of Russia, and he told me no. But it turns out he was only really thinking about Israel. And that was inappropriate because what might not be good for Israel, maybe was good for the Jews of Russia. So you have to just be very honest, also, with explaining how you're taking these positions.

[ALAN KADISH] So you mentioned earlier that when you were at Columbia, which is actually the same time I was there, that things were very different than they are now. How do you explain the dramatic change in the atmosphere on college campuses? What do you attribute it to?

[JOSEPH TELUSHKIN] Well, as regards Columbia, I'm very good friends with a professor there, a woman named Esther Fuchs. And she said that when they built up the Middle East department, They allowed it to be taken over by a number of pro-Arab professors so that basically everybody who became a professor there pretty much had the same sort of attitudes.

And she explained the difference between forming a department and-- I forget how she explained it. But there were people there who she felt very strongly, really shouldn't be there. And I think very often universities, in the more distant past, had sometimes people with conservative values. But I think they claim it was 50 or 60 years ago, probably, 60% let's say, of university professors identified as liberals and maybe a third as conservatives.

But now there are almost no political conservatives on the university campus. And unfortunately for us, the issue of Israel has become one of the defining issues. Is that anti-Semitic? I definitely believe it is. Why do people consider that much more important? Why is there much more negative feeling towards Israel on campuses than there is towards North Korea, which when you read about it, it's frightening what goes on there?

And I think Jews are right in insisting that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic because it basically says there's one group in the world that doesn't have the right to have a state. Look, it's the hardest part of Judaism to explain to non-Jews that we are both a religion and a nationality. And that thought is expressed in the Bible, in the book of Ruth, in four words, in only four words in Hebrew.

When Ruth assumes a Jewish identity, she says, amech ami, says to her mother-in-law, Naomi, your people shall be my people, Elokiech Eloki, and your God shall be my God. So it's your people shall be my people. Your God shall be my God. Those are the two aspects of it. You can't really separate the two.

There's no way somebody can become a Jew without it being through some form of religious conversion, and so they're very much fused together. And the anti-Zionists want to deny that to the Jews. And I'm not particularly happy with the results of the mayoralty election in New York because the world is increasingly moving towards that position.

Who would ever have thought that there would be such a rise-- and I'm not blaming this all on Mamdani, but who would have ever thought, after the Holocaust, that there would be a rise of such intense anti-Semitism in so many parts of the world?

[ALAN KADISH] I think that you're absolutely right. It was surprising to many. I think that to suggest that it happened suddenly, though, doesn't reflect what your friend Professor Fuchs noted, and what I've seen, which is that this has been going on for decades, but it's been impolite. So people have been reluctant to express it.

But now, through a combination of group interaction, social media, and very well-funded campaigns against Jews in Israel, it's no longer impolite. So the anti-Semitism that was lurking all along has now become much more overt in a very dangerous way.

And anti-Semitic incidents are way up, particularly in New York, where more than 50% of the hate crimes last year were anti-Semitic. And we are dealing with a difficult time where anti-Semitism is something we need to continue to fight against and work against. And we've got to do that both internally and externally. And showing love for all Jews is one way that we can help at least get Jews to be part of the solution, rather than part of the problem.

[JOSEPH TELUSHKIN] OK, yeah, that's very well put. And no, I think if my friend Esther was here, she would actually agree with you. She felt that it was a decades-long campaign of infiltrating the universities and not putting on sympathetic Jews in prominent positions if it had to do with Middle East Studies.

[ALAN KADISH] No interview about the Rebbe would be complete without discussing the difficult issue that's arisen. Within Chabad, perhaps there are two different camps, but there certainly a significant group of people who think that the Rebbe was, is, Moshiach, that the rabbi is still alive, or will be reincarnated, or some version of that idea. Obviously, I think it started with the incredible nature of the Rebbe, and the incredible things he had done.

But 30 years later, it's taken on a life of its own, with many mystical components, and many components that other Jews, who may admire the work that Chabad does, feel very uncomfortable with. So what's your take of the whole messianism aspect of Chabad today? What do you feel about it? What would the Rebbe feel about it? And what's your belief about its origin and why it's taken such hold?

[JOSEPH TELUSHKIN] Well, I'll start first with the first part of what you were asking. It so happens that the people who I was interacting with, who are very significant figures within Chabad and who made sure I got access to everybody, were part of what were thought of as the anti-messianist camp. And they had good reason to claim that the Rebbe certainly did not think he himself was the Messiah.

I think what was feeding it was the feeling that he was the seventh rebbe, and he had no successor because Menachem Mendel, the seventh rebbe, he and his wife did not have children. The previous rebbe had had three daughters, not had three daughters. I just got mixed up with what I was saying. The previous rebbe had only one son, and he had three daughters.

So Chaya Mushka, the rebbetzin did not have children. His youngest daughter, Shaindel, was murdered with her husband at Treblinka. But it's unlikely they would have had children because at the time they were deported, they had already been married seven years.

And his oldest daughter had a son. But very unfortunately, there was ill will between that son and the Rebbe. And he took books out of the library and sold them for a great deal of money. So believe me, there was no way he was going to become a rebbe. So I think that a lot of the fear was what was going to happen when the Rebbe was nifter. I think that fed the feeling, OK, he's such a great figure, it's time, really for the Mashiah to come.

But the Rebbe really tried to discourage it. I know that the proponent that the Rebbe really intended to spread that he was the Messiah, was a man who I regard as a friend, David Berger, a very eminent professor of Jewish history, who was my camp counselor at Camp Massad, who was one of my favorite teachers in college.

But I think he went overboard on this issue. And I don't think a false messianic movement really has arisen. And I definitely feel that the percentage of people in Chabad who think the Rebbe is the moshiach has declined, I think, greatly since the Rebbe's death.

I remember around the time the Rebbe died, the moment his name came up, people were always speaking about the Messiah issue. I think it probably remains, for whatever the reason, stronger in Israel than it does here. But when the Rebbe heard that there was a man, for example, who was a very loyal chasid, who was dropping papers out of his plane saying the Mashiach is alive, and he is living today at 770 Eastern Parkway. And the Rebbe ordered him to gather up every one of those sheets and destroy them.

When a Chabad publication in Israel was about to come out with a magazine saying that the Rebbe was the Mashiach, he said, insofar as I can, I forbid you to publish it. And if you insist on publishing it, I want you to close down your publication forever. So I think the Rebbe really didn't think he was the Mashiach. And it certainly did not feel it had been revealed to him.

And he also felt that if he started denying it, which he did on a number of occasions, the big messianists said that was all part of God's plan that he has to deny it. So I feel it's a very overrated issue. Maybe some of these people talk about it amongst themselves, but I don't think Chabadniks go around trying to convince people that the Rebbe was the Mashiach.

Sometimes, I'll see, young, it's usually young bachurim, young, unmarried men who'll sometimes stand around-- I live on the Upper West Side, so sometimes, if I get off at 96th Street, on the one train, there'll be young men there, handing out pamphlets still trying to do it. But I think the issue has more or less been buried. And I certainly don't think it's been responsible for Chabad's amazing growth. The fact that they now have 6,000 shluchim.

By the way, one of the great advantages Chabad has over the rest of American Jewish rabbis, is in all the denominations, certainly in Reform, certainly in Conservative, and actually pretty much certainly in Orthodox it's now understood that when you hire a rabbi, you're hiring the rabbi.

It would be considered offensive in many, certainly non-Orthodox and to some extent in Orthodox also, but certainly in non-Orthodox, if when they hired a rabbi, whether it be a man or a woman, they made it known that their spouse had to be also very involved in the rabbinical position.

But in Chabad, all shluchim are married. And both shluchim, the husband and the wife, are actively, very actively involved. And that, I think, is a big part. I think the sending out of shluchim, who are now in 120 countries, the sending out of shluchim, I think, was the Rebbe's most brilliant idea because there was such a connection made.

And part of the reason for the connection was when shluchim were sent to a community, they basically had to stay there for the rest of their lives. So the community knew they would be there. Sometimes young couples would even buy burial cemetery plots in the place.

And I think that was, again, one of the Rebbe's original ideas because you know and I know in the American rabbinate, a rabbi, it's considered a profession, obviously a holy profession. But generally, a newly ordained rabbi will assume, OK, I'll get a pulpit in a smaller community, and then my second pulpit will be in a larger community, and my third could be in a very large community.

And there's nothing-- my friend, who's in South Dakota, is not anticipating that he's going to suddenly get a much larger community or be tempted to go to another state. So I think that that's been a very big part of the reason for Chabad's success. And I don't think the messianic part-- I think, first of all, it ended up in the final analysis, turning off a lot of people, too.

And that's why some of the leadership of Chabad got very nervous about it, because it can turn off people. Then they start thinking it's fake or it's going to have a negative impact. Because the things we associated with the Rebbe did not result in the transformations that we believe will happen in the world in the messianic age.

So I think the Rebbe would be happy where the movement is died down. He didn't want people to stop believing that there could be a Mashiach. There's one famous incident where, I think it was the rabbi from Alaska, brought a note to the Rebbe as the Mashiach. And it might not have been that rabbi, so I don't want him to start getting calls about it. Brought a note to the Rebbe as the Mashiach. And the Rebbe said to him, tell him I'm holding the note, and I'll give it to the Mashiah when he comes.

[ALAN KADISH] So that's a very interesting and sobering perspective. I think that I certainly have seen more than young people on street corners, there are lots of signs in different places, with the Rebbe's picture, identifying him as Mashiach. But I think it's refreshing to hear your approach to it, and particularly what you've learned from talking to the leadership of Chabad that this isn't being embraced. Because I agree with you. It's a complicated issue and one that could potentially turn some people off.

But I think your comments about the Rebbe were amazing--

[JOSEPH TELUSHKIN] Oh, thank you.

[ALAN KADISH] --in terms of trying to capture the amazing work that he did, the amazing influence he had, the amazing humanity that he had. And he was just a remarkable leader in a way that almost no one else has been in the Jewish community and so that, at least, in recent years. And I think your book did a great job of capturing it. And I think your remarks today did a great job of capturing it. So thanks for joining us at Touro Talks.

[JOSEPH TELUSHKIN] I am very, very happy.

[ALAN KADISH] Touro Talks is sponsored by Robert and Arlene Rosenberg. And Rabbi Telushkin, it's a pleasure to speak to you. And I hope we get a chance to speak again. Have a great day, take care.

[JOSEPH TELUSHKIN] Thank you so much.

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