Reb Mendel Posner grew up in Nashville, Tenessee as the oldest son of the famous chossid and shliach Rabbi Zalman Posner. His coming back to Lubavitch as a young boy for schooling was rocky and Mendel quickly found himself as a boy with more questions than answers. This led to a journey of decades in and out of observance. Through it all Mendel held on to a deep connection of love with his parents - as well as his Rebbe. ____Support this podcast at: https://www.hflpodcast.com/donate ____This wee...
Jun 29, 2025•2 hr 8 min•Season 1Ep. 65
Rabbi Tzvi Freeman lives in Sandy Springs, Georgia where he is an author and editor of chabad.orgIn this conversation, we discuss what it means to learn and process the ideas of Chassidus. Tzvi reflects on his own extensive writings in light of developments in AI, and how AI forces us to find out what human thinking - the kind machines can't do - really looks like.We discuss what it means for a chossid to think Chassidus for himself, as well as the limits of this idea, and the risks one must tak...
Jun 22, 2025•1 hr 33 min•Season 1Ep. 63
Rabbi Choni Friedman grew up in Kansas City and lives today in Pittsburgh where he is the Rov of Bnai Emunoh Chabad, a growing shul and community in the Greenfield neighborhood of Pittsburgh. He is also the dean of a new Bais Medrash Zal, which opened this year with 30 bochurim and growing In this episode, we discuss what it means to be a chossid today, if that meaning has changed over the years and if that meaning changes between each individual. ____ Support this podcast at: https://www.hflpod...
May 25, 2025•2 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 62
Rabbi Shlomo Elkan grew up in Marietta, a suburb of Atlanta, in a reform and then conservative Jewish home, and is today the shliach at Oberlin College, a liberal arts school an hour outside of Cleveland.In this episode, we discuss his winding journey to becoming a Lubavitcher and then opening a Chabad House on campus with his wife who comes from a Dati Leumi family in Israel, and how he balances the multitudes of identities they collected from their upbringings as well as the the upbringings of...
May 18, 2025•1 hr 43 min•Season 1Ep. 62
Rabbi Velvel Lipskier grew up in Crown Heights and lives in North Miami Beach where he works in plumbing and construction. In this episode, we discuss how the "voice" of Chassidus can be translated in different cultures and how it can change depending on what we pay attention to. We also discuss some of Velvel's memories from the famous Tishrei of 1992. ____ Support this podcast at: https://www.hflpodcast.com/donate ____ This week's episode is brought to you by "This World Is A Garden," a new fi...
May 11, 2025•2 hr 19 min•Season 1Ep. 61
Rabbi Chaim Shaul Bruk is the shliach in Bozeman, Montana where he and his wife Chavie are now marking 18 years.In this episode, he recalls his growing up in Crown Heights, both the wonderful childhood memories and the tense years of the early nineties.He also shares how a devastating infertility diagnosis in their first years of shlichus changed how he looked at the world, at G-d and at other chassidim he doesn't agree with.____Support this podcast at: https://www.hflpodcast.com/donate____This ...
May 04, 2025•2 hr 8 min•Season 1Ep. 60
Mayer Prager grew up in the Crown Heights of the 1960's, surrounded by the exodus of the non-Lubavitch Jewish community, the energy of the Lubavitch community that stayed, and of course, the Rebbe.In this episode, we discuss what it was like to grow up in that milieu, his special relationship with R' Yoel Kahan, and his perspective on the direction of the Lubavitch community as someone who sees things from both the inside and the outside.____Support this podcast at: https://www.hflpodcast.com/do...
Apr 27, 2025•1 hr 35 min•Season 1Ep. 59
Mr. David Shabat lives today in Boynton Beach, Florida, but as a young boy from Washington, DC he was sent to study in the Lubavitch school of Bedford and Dean in Crown Heights, where he would go on to spend close to ten years in and about the Lubavitch community and the court of the Lubavitcher Rebbe.One of the listeners to the podcast is David's grandson and suggested I meet up with him.In this episode, David shares his memories for the first time from his years spent in that school, what it w...
Apr 21, 2025•1 hr 35 min•Season 1Ep. 58
Rabbi Rafi Tennenhaus is a shliach in Hallandale Beach, Florida for more than four decades, where today he directs the activities of many Chabad Houses and an exploding local Lubavitch community.In this episode, we discuss his upbringing in Montreal and before that in a small Canadian town of Bathurst, New Brunswick, where his father, R' Dovid Tennenhaus, had moved years earlier to make a living.We hear about his father's story of individual religiosity in a far off town, his special relationshi...
Apr 06, 2025•1 hr 37 min•Season 1Ep. 57
Rabbi Yossi Rosenblum is an educator at Yeshiva Schools in Pittsburgh for several decades, where he began as a teacher and now serves as Head of School. In this conversation, we discuss how his priorities as a teacher has changed over time, how both the world around the school but also the world within the school makes new demands of teachers but also offers new opportunities.We discuss how he navigates the changing relationship between the school and the parents and his advice for parents think...
Mar 30, 2025•1 hr 30 min•Season 1Ep. 56
Rabbi Dr. Eli Leib Rubin, Phd is a scholar and author who grew up in Edgeware, a suburb of London, and lives today in Pittsburgh.In this conversation, we discuss his recently published book, "Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity: An Existential History of Chabad Hassidism," a magisterial effort of research and writing tracing the idea of Tzimtzum as it developed between one generation of Lubavitch to the next.We discuss the dynamism of ideas throughout the course of Lubavitch history, the optim...
Mar 23, 2025•2 hr 15 min•Season 1Ep. 55
Support this podcast at: https://www.hflpodcast.com/donate ____ Rabbi Shmuly Metzger is a shliach in Manhattan, where he runs Chabad Sutton in the Midtown district. A couple miles away is the famous Lubavitch neighborhood of Crown Heights, where Shmuly grew up in both its mythological and concrete past. In this episode, we discuss his childhood in the presence of the Rebbe but also the tensions on the Crown Heights streets, how the street level and heavenly narratives diverged but also someone w...
Jan 19, 2025•1 hr 53 min•Season 1Ep. 54
Support this podcast at: https://www.hflpodcast.com/donate____Yehoshua November is a poet who lives in Teaneck, New Jersey. His poetry grapples with ideas of Chassidus and their application in real "messy life," including some very personal reflections. Three collections of his poetry have been published, and his work has found appeal with audiences far outside of Lubavitch but also within Lubavitch itself. In this episode, we discuss the space that writing poetry fills in the life of a chossid,...
Jan 12, 2025•1 hr 48 min•Season 1Ep. 53
Support this podcast at: https://www.hflpodcast.com/donate ____ Rabbi Dovid Bashevkin PhD lives in Teaneck where he is an author, columnist and host of the 18Forty podcast. In this episode, we discuss the condition of homesickness across different parts of the religious Jewish community in the United States, the inherent problems but also the possible blessings to be found in it. We also discuss how different one’s view of some of Lubavitch’s most interesting questions seem depending on where on...
Dec 29, 2024•1 hr 44 min
Rabbi Elisha Pearl grew up in Flatbush and has spent the last few years studying in the Judean hills, which is where he wrote his groundbreaking book, "Make Peace," which explores the Rebbe's strategic vision for lasting peace in Israel. We were going to discuss the book, but ended up talking about how he found himself it writing it in the first place, how as a young Lubavitch boy his parents moved away from Crown Heights to Flatbush and enrolled him in Yeshivas Chaim Berlin, setting him on a tr...
Dec 22, 2024•2 hr 6 min•Season 1Ep. 51
Rabbi Mordechai Avtzon is my father and the first shliach in the Far East, which is where he and my mother founded Chabad of Hong Kong and China forty years ago. In this conversation, we discuss his upbringing in Detroit as a child of one of the only Lubavitch families in the city, and the different outlooks his immigrant parents had on their place in their new country. We also discuss how growing up surrounded by different kinds of religious Jews and spending several years learning in Telshe Ch...
Dec 08, 2024•2 hr 22 min•Season 1Ep. 50
Fifteen year ago, Nissen Goldman was a teenage son of a rabbi in Johannesburg, South Africa finding his own way. After leaving high school, Nissen ended up spending time in Cape Town where his sister and brother in law where on shlichus and ended up in a relationship with the daughter of their shul’s president. Fast forward fifteen years, and Nissen is on his shlichus at University of Cape Town with his then girlfriend and now wife, and has come to the kinnus for the first time as a shliach, tog...
Dec 01, 2024•1 hr 48 min•Season 1Ep. 49
Rabbi Nissan Mangel was ten years old when he came face to face with Dr. Joseph Mengele at the gates of Auschwitz and was miraculously spared the fate of too many others. In this episode, Rabbi Mangel shares his journey from his small childhood town in Slovakia to Auschwitz and then England and Canada where he eventually met a number of fellow Lubavitch survivors of the war who invited him into Lubavitch. As he became a chossid of the Rebbe, Rabbi Mangel would go on to work for the Rebbe in a nu...
Nov 24, 2024•1 hr 37 min•Season 1Ep. 48
Rabbi Yaakov Winner grew up in Brooklyn and has been the mashpia in Yeshiva Gedolah of Melbourne, Australia for thirty five years. In this conversation we discuss the mashpiim that most impacted Rabbi Winner as he was growing up, and how the role of a mashpia has developed over the years. We also discuss how the idea of hiskashrus and Lubavitch identity has shifted over the years, the importance of definitions and speaking with intention, and most importantly the importance of listening to and l...
Nov 17, 2024•1 hr 49 min•Season 1Ep. 47
Rabbi Dov Yona Korn grew up in Morris Plains, NJ in a “very Reform” Jewish family and is today the shliach in NYU and several other schools in the Bowery district of NYC. In this episode, we discuss his discovering Chabad in the months after the Rebbe’s passing and the difference this timing made in his own understanding of the Rebbe and Lubavitch. We also discuss how the Rebbe’s ideas are filtered through layers of communal understanding, and how this communal understanding is sometimes in tens...
Oct 13, 2024•1 hr 59 min•Season 1Ep. 46
Mendel Treitel grew up on shlichus in Montreal and is today a modern art painter living in Sydney. In this episode, Mendel shares his journey through yeshiva and how a number of special teachers helped him reconcile his artistic disposition with the norms of the Yeshiva. We discuss the challenges in being both a chossid and an artist, the question of individuality and how the art a chossid paints today should be different and unique from the art a chossid painted generations ago. Mendel's work c...
Oct 06, 2024•2 hr 7 min•Season 1Ep. 45
Rabbi Yosef Katzman grew up and lives in Crown Heights, where for many years he hosted the "Cable to Jewish Life" television show. In this episode, Rabbi Katzman reflects on different pivot points through the years and how these relate to the community's changing attitude towards asking questions. He also reflects on Rosh Hashana "back in the day" and where this leaves us going into this new year. ____ Homesick for Lubavitch began a year ago as a small passion project and has grown into an impor...
Sep 29, 2024•2 hr 46 min•Season 1Ep. 44
Rabbi Naftali Silberberg grew up on shlichus in Detroit and today lives in Crown Heights where he is the co-director of curriculum for JLI and host of the Let's Talk Tanya podcast. In this episode, we trace Naftali's years in yeshiva that took him to Oholei Torah in the late 80s and then to Kfar Chabad, where he discovers a life long love - almost despite the yeshiva - for the study of Tanya. We discuss what makes the narrative of Tanya so unusual and how a thoughtful study of the Torah Shebichs...
Sep 22, 2024•1 hr 35 min•Season 1Ep. 43
Rabbi Michoel Seligson is a teacher and author who lives in Crown Heights. He is also the son of Dr. Avrohom Abba Seligson, a"h, who was known as the Rebbe's doctor. In this episode, Rabbi Seligson shares his father's amazing story of becoming a doctor as a frum Jew in pre-war Europe, his escape to Shanghai and the role he played in saving the Jewish refugees over the course of the war, and his eventual arrival to Brooklyn where he developed a close, private and miraculous bond with the Lubavitc...
Sep 15, 2024•2 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 42
Rabbi Levi Avtzon grew up in Crown Heights and lives today in Johannesburg, South Africa where he is a rabbi at the Linksfield Synagogue. In this episode we continue the conversation in recent episodes about the tension between the soft and demanding voices in our community. We discuss the changing narratives in the Lubavitch community and how past demand for conformity has now given way to a therapeutic mindset, and we debate whether or not this change is in fact a true change at all. ____ This...
Sep 08, 2024•2 hr 7 min•Season 1Ep. 41
Mrs. Tzivia Jacobson grew up in in the 1930s in a Lubavitch family in Kutaisi, Georgia under Soviet rule. Nobody in her family had ever seen a picture of the Rebbe at that point, let alone met him, but every night her mother would put her to bed with a blessing that one day they would see the Rebbe. Her family would eventually escape the USSR and make their way to Brooklyn where Mrs. Jacobson would be one of a handful to see the beginnings of the Lubavitch story in Crown Heights and up to this v...
Sep 01, 2024•2 hr
Reb Yossel Mochkin grew up in Crown Heights in the 1960s and 1970s, living in the cloistered world of his immigrant parents and their friends but surrounded by a fast changing and exciting world around him. Never finding it easy to fit in to the milieu around him, Yossel had to ask on his own questions about the direction his life was to take. These questions were never fully resolved, but a yechidus with the Rebbe gave Yossel a blueprint his is still continuing to implement. In this conversatio...
Aug 25, 2024•1 hr 50 min•Season 1Ep. 39
Rabbi Berry Farkash is a Shliach in Issaquah, Washington and director of Chabad of the Central Cascades. Several years ago, a local crisis led Berry into the world of psychotherapy where he became a certified clinical psychotherapist and practices Hypnotherapy and other Transpersonal modalities. Today all of his clients are fellow Lubavitchers, many of them shluchim. In this conversation, we discuss his own journey toward finding the Rebbe’s softer voice and the need for forgiveness and compassi...
Aug 18, 2024•2 hr 6 min•Season 1Ep. 38
Mrs Toby Hecht is the director of Shabtai, a global Jewish leadership society at Yale University in New Haven. Toby grew up on shlichus in Seattle and was finishing up her senior year in Beth Rivka High School in Crown Heights when she and her friends were swept up in the collective grief of Gimmel Tammuz. In this conversation, Toby reflects on the feelings of that time, the emergent awareness of needing to move forward and the responsibility we have today to take decisive ownership of the futur...
Aug 11, 2024•1 hr 49 min•Season 1Ep. 37
Rabbi Dr. Shmary Brownstein is a shliach in Davis, California where he also wrote his doctoral dissertation on the famous series of maamorim, Bosi Lgani. In this episode, we discuss Shmary's growing up in Crown Heights in the early 90s and his decision to leave for Brunoy. We discuss how the conception of past changed over those years and how some of the ideas of Bosi Lgani might inform how we ought to approach staying connected to the past without becoming lost in it.
Jul 14, 2024•2 hr 49 min•Season 1Ep. 36
