ChabadTalk Podcast

ChabadTalk Podcast is Chassidic teaching from Chabad.org, and it rarely offers an answer before the question has been properly felt. Tzvi Freeman introduces himself as speaking for the site. Mostly the show is one voice teaching: measured, grave by default, capable of warmth and of dry, plainspoken asides. A familiar move is to name a contradiction in ordinary language and then work at it from several sides, through the Zohar, Chassidic masters, history and homely analogy. Hebrew and Yiddish terms often go untranslated. Sources come with their citations attached. Sukkot gets a set of seven teachings from seven tzaddikim, one for each night, arranged around the Ushpizin, the seven guests the Zohar says visit the sukkah, a different one leading each night. In that set, a saying of Hillel is explained through a flawless jewel from the royal crown that makes nickels, dimes and $100 bills all look the same, and the Alter Rebbe's teaching turns on the water poured on the Temple altar at Sukkot, when the rest of the year's offerings came with wine. History gets the same close reading. One episode sets out from William Tucker's argument, in 'The Science and Politics of Racial Research', that the Holocaust was less the overthrow of reason than its triumph. It follows the idea that intelligence and moral character are fixed at birth by race through a scientific and intellectual world that hardly protested, with G.K. Chesterton standing out as a lone dissenter against his friend George Bernard Shaw. Its answer is a moral law given as divine edict that also speaks to an innate human moral sense. The interview with Rabbi Gershon Schersterman, author of 'Why God Why?', brings the question closer to home. Its introduction recalls the school and community he built up in Long Beach, California, and the death of his wife when he was 38. The talk then presses on a fine line: calling pain good is one claim, and calling it purposeful is another, while the word beneficial gets pointedly avoided. A follow-up letter from the Rebbe and a politician's objection to picturing the Holocaust as surgery both enter the argument. And then there is fiction. 'The Tzaddik and the Dragon of Darkness I' is a Kabbalistic sci-fi fantasy based on the Book of Tanya, read aloud and told in the second person to a soul in its pre-earthly existence. Figures named Mike, Gabe and Raph, along with a clerk checking the data, weigh how much light this soul can carry into space-time, and the part closes with its promise not to be a Rasha and to work at transforming the world's darkness from within. Holiday teaching, history, interview and story all come back to one concern: what pain and darkness are for, and what a person is meant to do with them.