Rabbi Yitz Husbands-Hankin

Posner: This is Sharon Posner, and this is Thursday, April the 11th, 2019. I’m talking with Rabbi Husbands-Hankin about his life. So would you start with your name and your place of birth?
RABBI YITZ: I was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1947. January 27.

Posner: What was it like, would you tell us about growing up in Pittsburgh? What it was like and about your family there?
RABBI YITZ: I was very fortunate. I was born into a family with my grandparents. Three of my grandparents were alive, my father’s parents and my mother’s mother. And they were very significant influences on my life, and my parents, and older brother, and eventually my younger sister. We grew up in Squirrel Hill, which is a predominantly Jewish neighborhood.

Now it still has a significant Jewish population, but it’s much more of a mixed community than it was when I was a child. When I was a child, there were storefronts that had Hebrew lettering and everybody had a pushkee, a little tsedakah box in the stores. It was a bit of a village. My family, my grandparents were religious, my father’s parents particularly. They came from Russia as my father did. My father came when he was 12, so I’m a first generation American and I usually liked it here until recent politics.

So my Bubby and Zadie particularly were having a strong religious impact on my life in a very formative way. Every time my Zadie would come over to visit, which was quite often, he would sit me down at the dining room table with the Hebrew book [and have me read the letters] “ba, bah, beh, ga, gah, geh,” and just work with me on Hebrew, as a very little child. And my Bubby sang like an angel. And when she would take care of us, she had these wonderful green song sheets and I’d sit on her lap and she would be singing these beautiful songs. Some of them were Israeli songs and some probably Yiddish, although I remember some of the Hebrew ones more clearly, but she was a great influence on me.

My mother’s mother, she was more American even though she was from Poland. She came over when she was about 13 years old with an older cousin. They traveled and she had a job rolling cigars in a sweatshop as a young teenager. Her influence wasn’t so much with Jewish content. She came to the same synagogue that I grew up in, but I don’t know that she could read even English, I’m not sure. I don’t know what her education was, but she was an incredibly loving person with a terrific high-pitched laugh that would just bubble up through her. And the grandparents were really loved and an important part of my family life. My mom was one of six kids. Her father passed on. She was the next to the youngest and her father died when she was two. So her mom was raising six children as a single mother and during very hard economic times in this country. And, I think the Jewish community helped them get by. My uncles all somehow made it through and became very comfortable in America having their professions and all of them going off to the war. My aunt Clara also was very close with my mom, zichrona livracha.

They had a very comfortable life. We didn’t have such a comfortable life, actually. My father, alav hashalom, was mentally ill. He was schizophrenic. So he spent time in and out of the state hospital, which was very difficult. As a young man, he was succeeding in business. He had a fish market and he lost the lease to that, and had a real decline over the years in his capacity to be working. So he had more and more minimalist, get-by jobs that really you couldn’t get by on. But he really suffered greatly, because state hospitals then were not places to be. So I have a lot of early memories of going to visit him and seeing what the situation was and that became a very central driving force in my life, the sense of wanting to change the world, to change things that I saw were outrageously wrong.

My brother and I, and I think my younger sister, but I’m not sure she came because she was three years younger than me, we would get on the city bus and drive out to the end of the line where the hospital was. And we’d go past these manicured lawns, and everything was good, in order and get to the hospital. And it was an entering the gates of hell. Yeah, it really was. So, that became a very profoundly formative influence in my life.

And also in terms of the religious experience and my spiritual life, I was very interested in Judaism since I was a little kid. My grandparents really influenced me. I wanted to go to Yeshiva. My parents wanted me to go to public school. If we had the money for a private religious education, I would have been able probably to go to the Yeshiva, but it was too expensive. So I went to public school, but I was wearing tsitsit. I was the only kid in the school that wore those. And I went to the synagogue every Shabbat and led the junior congregation amongst some of the other kids that were older. And that was a home away from home for me. The synagogue was directly across the street from my house, I mean directly. Our front door and the front door of the synagogue were directly [across] the street. So that was a very important part of my life. And I think coping with the illness of my dad and the chaos because of that, I found some stability and a place for myself in the world that felt supportive and comforting, even though nobody talked about my dad’s illness or anything. Back then, mental illness was a total secret. It was terrible. Even within the family, it was completely not to be spoken of. I didn’t even know when I was a little kid where my dad would go when he’d go to the hospital. Nobody would tell. It was very tough in the fifties. I was born in ’47.

So [the synagogue] provided a kind of stability for me. And that sense of prayer, communing with the transcendent, was very helpful because the ever-present manifest world was a tough place. So that really formed the basis of my spiritual life, both in terms of really yearning to commune with the transcendent, trusting in that, and also in a powerful sense of needing to work to change the world. Those became foundational pillars for me throughout my spiritual life to this day.

Posner: That’s exceptional kind of background, so that your Jewish education was tacked on after school. It was part of your whole life.
RABBI YITZ: It was an important part of my life. My schooling, the public school, was quite miserable for me.

I was a kid with ADHD and back then nobody knew about ADHD. I was a kid that was in the clouds, right? I was looking out the window. I couldn’t remember if I had homework, but sure, I was kind of a special student. They saw that I had some inclinations that were worth nurturing even though in the classroom I was probably bouncing off the wall. I spent a lot of time in the principal’s office, but the principal loved me and had a special chair for me. And I had [Chabad] Hasidic teachers. They were very affectionate, loving people. I could feel a beautiful relationship with them, a connection with them, and really appreciated their love of the tradition. And I had this one teacher, her name was Keni Daren of blessed memory, and she was the Rebbi’s daughter in Pittsburgh. Rabbi Posner was his name.

And, so she used to tell stories from the Torah and when she would talk about the burning bush, you could see the fire in her eyes, she was so passionate about it and so loving. So that small setting with that education was really, really wonderful. Even though I’m sure I didn’t always want to go, I don’t really remember resisting that so much. My brother didn’t really want to go. But the deep spiritual sense I had of the tradition was really inculcated in that setting.

The cantor, Cantor Lefkowitz, really nurtured me. I was told by his son that he would actually write solos for me for the high holidays. And I was in the all men’s choir when I was a little boy soprano. Then I would sing the solos and he taught me other things, other parts of the service, parts that I [later] taught to students here [at TBI]. So that was really special for me.

My grandfather, my father’s father [Shmuel Hankin], passed away two weeks before my Bar Mitzvah. So that was hard in another way. I remember the rabbi praising my grandfather because they studied Torah together and my grandfather was quite learned. So there was something of a great honor that I felt about my grandfather, but I can only imagine what was like for my bubby, the bitter-sweetness.

But after that my voice started to change. When I was a little kid, I thought I’d be a hazzan, it seemed like that’s what I loved. But when my voice changed, a music teacher told my mother to get me a cello because I could sing that way while my voice changed. Because I shouldn’t sing so much while it’s changing. I didn’t really know what a cello was at that point. We didn’t listen to classical music.

I did have a paper route and I had money from my paper route. We went downtown to this to Kshir Brothers music store run by two elderly guys, and they sold me a cello for $125 with a case and the bow and the rosin and the whole works. I still have that cello…that’s a very old friend.

I started to study with a wonderful teacher from the Pittsburgh Symphony, who was not a religious Jew. He was very Jewishly identified and from New York. He was very ethical and I was so moved by that world, by a world where he would exchange the number of hours that I would babysit for them or paint the house or mow their lawn for lessons. He would give me the same amount of time, each cello lesson. I mean, that is very righteous. He knew that my family was poor and so he really took me in in a very beautiful way and that was a great influence in my life.

I was just seeing there were other ways of having a Jewish identity that weren’t so caught up in what I saw as a very narrow world. The Orthodox synagogue that I was growing up in, it was “Yiddisha cup, goyisha cup,” you know, the Jews against the goys here and the goys are all out to get you; that kind of mindset. That [attitude] was very painful. That came from Europe. There were a lot of European refugees there [in Squirrel Hill]. My teachers, many of them were from Europe. So, that worldview didn’t really mix well with the emerging sixties. The 1960s was a time for looking at the whole world and seeing that we needed to be…We didn’t use to talk in terms of global citizenship. No. But there was an understanding that there was another way that needed to happen. So, I kept studying the cello and was playing in a lot of youth orchestras, and then, some professional, having a nice scholarship to Duquesne University where my teacher was teaching and I started teaching cello also, in the Jewish Community Center of all places.

So at that juncture there, when I was probably about 17 or 18, I lived in New York for a little while with a fellow cellist student, and then came back to Pittsburgh and lived in a large house in an urban commune. There were 13 of us in this huge house, which is Wilkins and Denniston, which is less than a block away from Tree of Life Synagogue where the shooting was [in 2018]. So we lived in that house and people from every neighborhood were in that house. There was a Native American man, an African American, a gay guy, a Lebanese person, a Jewish person, a Catholic, Latino. There was an amazing group. I was in and out of college. So this was when I was working in what was then called—it’s an embarrassing name to say—the Home for Crippled Children. Now it’s the Rehabilitation Institute of Pittsburgh.

I worked there for a couple of years because during the Vietnam War I had a 4F for health. I was seeing a counselor. The counselor was clear that that would not be good. I had just learned that schizophrenia could have been genetic. So I was very racked with anxiety about what was gonna happen. Was I a time bomb? I mean, this is kind of really deeply personal stuff. I don’t know… Well, it’s my story and part of my life that makes it really important. So, a friend of mine was a Conscientious Objector and he was working at this home, this institute; he was doing his alternative service as a Conscientious Objector. So I decided that I would try to get a job there to see if I can do my own kind of alternative service.

That was a time of incredible turmoil. I thought maybe I’d be going to jail because I was not going to go to the Vietnam War. I was very active against it. I was very involved in civil rights and anti-war movements back then. I was really thankful that I could work in this institute. Although I have to say when I first went there, it was so difficult to see the children. I worked with little infants. They were developmentally infants and they could be 12 years old, some of them. But it was really shocking to me to be in a room with children that were that different and apparently struggling with many things that most people don’t struggle with. But I was hired and I was very happy about that. And for me, that gave me an opportunity to really do some of the work directly of Tikkun, of repair, for my dad’s life in an institution. Although he wasn’t always in an institution—he was out a lot—and then he’d get sick and have to go back.

But it was an opportunity to work with an institution to see how humane we could make that place. And it was a very good institute, one of the best in the country; a great staff, beautiful. They had children with autism, spina bifida, cerebral palsy, all kinds of spinal cord injuries, a thalidomide baby in the unit. He was like starving to death when he came in. So these children influenced me so deeply. I mean, I really loved them and saw their holiness.

That was a really significant time of my life. I worked there for a couple of years and lived in that house. That institute is directly across the street from the Tree of Life Synagogue. So this little intersection, it’s unbelievable the events in my journey that are associated with Shady and Wilkins [avenues]. I do want to make note of my friend who was a conscientious objector, worked there and he was living in the house also. And this is my friend Daniel Leger who, worked there for probably 25 years. He studied nursing, became a nurse and then became a chaplain, and he was shot [and severely wounded] in the synagogue across the street [in 2018]. He was preparing to lead a service that Shabbat morning. So that’s Daniel, who was a longtime connection. Yeah. I talked with him today.

So it came to a point when I was very deeply in love with somebody and we were talking about getting married and I was realizing that I wanted to experience myself outside of the context of this community, that it was a cocoon for me, that I wanted to see what and who I’d be outside of that context. So I came to Oregon for no particular reason. It was either Oregon or Israel. If it was Israel, it would have ended the relationship because I knew that she wouldn’t go to Israel. So I came to Oregon and Eugene of all places. This is where you get into the transcendent part. I looked at a map and pointed, and Eugene was the closest place. So now I came to Eugene. I didn’t know people here.

And it was hard. I rented what was then a garage back then out on Willakenzie Road. I was 24 when I came out in 1971.

I drove out [from Pittsburgh] with a couple of friends, one of them being Daniel, who went as far as Boulder. And then he returned, went back to his marriage in Pittsburgh, and a guy, Bartley Ragusso, a great guy who is not Jewish, and he repaired our VW van several times on the way across the country. There were at least two or three engines that Bartley repaired and became so good at it. Then he opened a garage when he went back East.

When I came to Oregon, I had brought my cello with me and I felt that I really needed to be playing the cello. I had put it aside for a few years. And now it was the way I could communicate in a way much more true to my authentic self than with words. At that point was very hard for me to engage verbally so the cello became very important to me. I contacted the professor at the U of O, Robert Hladky. Robert is a fantastic cellist and professor who was a wonderful teacher.

So I studied with him for two or three years and I studied at the university for a couple of years. But mostly it was always one-on-one. That was my best way of studying. I studied with him and he taught me a lot. And, the dean of the music school was Robert Trotter, of blessed memory, and what a guy; the best of the best. I used to call him my Abraham, because he had such a deep spirituality and it was so universal, and we would have meetings in his office. He would just pull down the curtain, no calls, and we would sit there and he would talk about life in such an amazing way, and give me ideas about so many deep spiritual understandings. And he encouraged me strongly to get back in touch with my Jewish roots.

He saw that being a cellist in a symphony or doing something like that really wasn’t my deepest place, but to be chanting Jewish music was much more where my heart and soul were.

And so I took some classes with Bob Hurwitz. I worked on chanting the Torah with him, the musical systems of chanting Torah. And it was great to do some independent study in that way and to be exploring my Jewish core. The [romantic] relationship didn’t work out, so I was out in Oregon and I won’t go into all the details but I stayed here and really I started to play in the symphony for a while, and then I came to a place where I was really craving my spiritual path again, having not been observant for years. I shouldn’t say not observant. I was observant, I was just a Jewish guy singing Bob Dylan songs. I decided to start coming to the synagogue to just check it out to see what was going on there.

I remember coming and meeting with Rabbi Neimand, of blessed memory, and I was a long hair, with yoga pants and you name it. A rare bird for strolling into the synagogue and for Rabbi Neimand to deal with. So you get the picture, so there we are in the parking lot of the synagogue and I’m telling him I’m interested in reconnecting with my Jewish spiritual roots. And that I had a lot of background as a kid, so I knew how to do certain things on my own. I was already practicing on my own, a lot of the traditions but didn’t have a community at all. I remember him saying to me: “This isn’t going to be fast.” But that’s perfect. It’s great. Right? It’s the irony. Years later, being in the office of the Neimand House, as the rabbi there, is pretty poetic. [Intention: Years later, I ended up in that office named after Rabbi Neimand.] And I really loved him. He was a beautiful teacher and I’d come on Shabbat and we would stay after and we’d have some good talks. And he taught some Torah classes on Shabbat and also we had Talmud class at night. Rabbi Jacob Beck would teach Talmud also. It was great to have these resources in little old Eugene, to have some really good folks to be learning with.

Well, I became a regular in shul, even though there were very few people that came. I mean, Saturday morning could have four people. I remember one time Rabbi Neimand and I were the only two people there.

But it was a community. I remember the first service I went to was a Friday night and that’s when more people came, on a Friday night. And I remember Mona Sherman, of blessed memory. She was sweet as can be. She was so warm and welcoming that I felt so comfortable coming into that scene and really being warmly welcomed which is beautiful.

I just became a pretty regular participant and then over time, Rabbi Neimand saw that I knew some things that I could offer to the community with the chanting that I had learned. And so I started doing parts of the service here and there and then teaching in the school. I remember the students, Billy Maddex and Paul Zadoff and Eddie Fine, it was a whole group of young families that we were here to be connecting with. And those families as they were back then, it was an extended family, it really was. You know, if there was a simcha, everybody was there. It wasn’t the way it is, when it grew past that point where people really knew each other. And a couple of real turning points for me were, on Simchas Torah one year—I actually have the year written down somewhere—1973. I met Judith Hankin on Simchas Torah at the shul. She was kind of looking at the rabbi and he went over to her and [when she told him her name] said, “Nu, you’re Judith Hankin. Oh, do you know the Hankins over there?” My dad was here visiting then. So we met and became good friends.

We started a household that had Shabbat observance and a kosher Jewish home. And a year later on Shabbat bereshit, the first Sabbath of the reading of the Torah—it’s the “In the beginning”—so that Shabbat, Aryeh Hirschfield showed up in shul. So Rabbi Neimand asked him, “Who are you?” And Aryeh introduced himself as a musician. The rabbi said, “Oh, you’re a musician. Go meet Hankin.” Those were very important relationships. Aryeh, that day I remember we went over to the park, like 24th and University, and we were so happy; he had been observing Shabbat on his own. He was kind of a rough, rugged guy back then. He was in the middle of the ending of a marriage and he had two children and the marriage was down in the Bay Area.

So he was up here on his own and really in a tough time of transition in life. And I was doing Shabbat on my own without really any community at all. It was very lonely time. So here on Shabbat bereshit, the beginning, it felt so heaven sent. And we went over to that park and we were playing on the monkey bars when I was probably 25 years old, 26, and he was a few years older than me, I think four years older, and we were singing the trope: “How do you sing in the Torah section like that, and how do I do it? And do you know that blessing, this blessing?” and it was great. It was really water on some parched plants there. So that really began a whole new segment of life for me where I stopped playing in the symphony. I was teaching at our house, I had cello students and Bar Mitzvah students. We were at 24th and University, close to that park.

(Pause)

So, this is kind of a good transition. So before I really get into talking about the relationship with Aryeh a lot and kind of the fullness of where that went, I want to digress a bit to what I was doing.

In those years while I was getting involved in the synagogue, I was working with disabled people. I was doing in-home care. And I then worked as the director of Independent Living Programs. We had an office downtown. We functioned with grants, and it was an advocacy organization for disabled people run by disabled people primarily. And so my work became to help people move out of institutions into independent living in the community, which was very important to me in terms of my deep roots. I actually started a program that was funded by a corporation at first and then later by the state called Community Bound. And I worked with the young disabled people, who were [placed] in geriatric nursing homes and languishing.

So we had programs in the nursing home, in one nursing home that’s up on McLean Boulevard, and would work to get them set up in apartments with in-home care and hooked up with community resources that could give them a much more rich life. So I did that for a couple of years. I worked on the coast in a rehab center with people that were coming out of Fairview Hospital.

That was very important work for me. I was working with people that were coming out of Fairview, and people didn’t have any idea of what their capabilities were because they were basically warehoused in the state hospital. And here they were showing how much they knew. They were finally having communication boards to say what was on their mind instead of just being passive recipients of the world. They were able to interact. And it was quite remarkable to see how their lives changed then and some of them were moved out into communities.

Posner: And your working in Pittsburgh had really been a precursor to that.
RABBI YITZ: When I first came to Eugene, actually the first place I looked for employment was Pearl Buck Center. And who knows what would’ve happened if I had gone that route. So that was an important piece of my life journey. I met Shonna in that period, in 1975, I think. So Judith in 1973–74, Aryeh, and then Shonna in ‘75.

Posner: And, would you like to talk about the circumstances that brought you together with her?
RABBI YITZ: We met through friends at a party, at her house. Her housemate had a party. It was dramatic and I was scared stiff of a relationship back then. So, we took some time and thank G-d, we got married in ’77. And we were married by Reb Shlomo Carlebach (z’l), who came out to do the wedding, and he was an important teacher for me. And in that time, in those early years our other primary teacher was Reb Zalman Schachter Shalomi (z’l), who was the founder of the Jewish Renewal Movement.

I do want to speak of them because they were involved in my home life with Shonna too. They were great influences on both of us. So Reb Shlomo and Reb Zalman were both teachers for Shonna and for myself.

And I had a particular connection with Shlomo through the music because, I don’t know if you know his music, but he contributed more to Jewish music than probably anybody in this contemporary time. He’s influenced a whole generation of composers that came afterward and certainly influenced me in that way. I know he’s had other tsorris with some of his boundary difficulties and it’s a really sad part of what his legacy is. But there’s other parts. So Reb Shlomo.

I want to also speak about Moshav Shivtei Shalom, which happened in those years. So Shonna and I founded this community [in 1983], Moshav Shivtei Shalom, along with other families, but Shonna was really the primary organizer. And Shevach Lambert was there and Susan Sygall and Jesse Rappaport and Rabbi Hanan Sills [and others]. It was quite a crew of folks that lived on a community out near Dorena Lake. Oh, well, we had great luck with our Hanukkah Fairs—and that’s where the Hanukkah Fair started actually, and then was transplanted to TBI. But that sense of having a community was a dream of both Shonna’s and mine. That was something that was really important for us in the earliest part of our relationship. Our first conversations were about forming community. We did a lot of research on kibbutz and on all these other places around the country that were exploring co-housing and that form.

So we worked together on creating that community. I was schlepping on up I-5. Nobody could sustain themselves with the work in the community. Dolfy [Freinquel] was there, who is now Avraham. And I started working with the synagogue in Salem, as did Aryeh. He would come down from Portland and I would come up from Eugene, and we would do services and education programs there. Aryeh was never interested in communal life. I remember we had discussions in our kitchen at 24th and University where I would be saying, “We have to do things that are in the center of the community. If we want to have an impact on Judaism, then we have to bring Jewish Renewal into the center, not do it off on its own.”

Aryeh was more interested in forming a chavurah and doing something separate from the mainstream synagogue. And I was much more interested in wanting to see how we can have an influence on mainstream. And, so Aryeh moved to Ashland for a while and to Portland and started chavurot and became a very significant leader for many people and did some wonderful teaching and forming these communities. And we spent time on the moshav and also just at TBI doing whatever we could to have an influence on the community.

So now I’ll jump a little bit to rebbis, Reb Zalman. I met Reb Zalman down in California at the House of Love and Prayer, which was a place that sounds really different if you say it in English, Beit Ahava u’T’fillah. It sounds like a real shul, right?

The House of Love and Prayer sounds like the 60s, and it was the 60s. And Reb Shlomo was finding people who were Jewish. They were gravitating to him. He was singing [his own Hebrew songs] at the Berkeley Folk Festival, [appearing along with] Pete Seeger, [Bob Dylan,] those folk singers. So then he’d invite people for Shabbat to the House of Love and Prayer and be turning people onto Judaism again. Many people at that point were alienated from organized religion, didn’t want to have anything to do with it, and particularly they didn’t see anything spiritual in Judaism. They saw that it was painful to be a Jew in the 60s. There wasn’t any joy in it back then. Teachers were all traumatized from the Shoah. Our students were seeing Buddhists and Hindus and everybody else is having something spiritual and meaningful, yoga. And so Jews were in all the ashrams and the Jews were everywhere. Spiritual but not Jewish. So Rabbi Shlomo, his work was really to show people the joyful way of living Judaism and he and Reb Zalman, they were dear friends. They both were Chabad-ordained rabbis and they were the outreach program until Chabad said they’re too far out.

[This marks the end of Part 1 of Rabbi Yitz’s oral history interview.]
[Part 2 of Rabbi Yitzhak Husbands-Hankin’s oral history interview begins here.]

Posner: I’m meeting with Rabbi Yitz. It’s Thursday, July 11th. And this is part two of our conversation. Thank you for having us back again. I think our first time we talked about your growing up in Pittsburgh and your schooling And whether it was fate or whatever brought you to Oregon, let’s talk about what happened and how you happened to come to Oregon and we’ll go from there.
RABBI YITZ: Well, I think I mentioned last time we spoke, I was 24 years old and it was time for me to go and see who I was outside of the context I grew up in. I wanted to experience that. And I just decided to come out to explore the West. I drove out with a couple of friends and was very fortunate when we got here. I loved this place right away. It just was amazing. After Pittsburgh, an industrial city, to come out and see the beauty of Oregon. What more can I say? It was exquisite here as it is today. And I started studying cello at the U of O with Professor Hladky.

And that was a real key part of me getting anchored here. I was also working as a disability rights advocate. We did in-home care for people and then I became the program coordinator for independent living programs. And in Eugene while I was studying, I came to the synagogue, Rabbi Neimand was there and his wife Florence Neimand. I remember coming to my first Shabbat service there. I came to a Friday night service and Mona Sherman, of blessed memory, greeted me with such warmth that I felt really welcomed. And, I didn’t know people at the synagogue at all, but her warmth really made me feel very welcome. And I started coming to shul, and it was at a time in my life where I was really hungering for reconnecting with my Jewish spiritual life, which was so rich in my earlier years.

But I had laid this religion aside as I maintained my Jewish identity, and was much more interested in political activism, social activism in the ’60s. So, I started coming to the synagogue and studying with Rabbi Neimand and remembering some of the things, some of the melodies that I learned as a child. And, more and more started leading parts of the services, Shabbat services. There were a handful of people that would come back then. And then I started teaching the b’nai mitzvah students. So the Maddexes, the Zadoffs, the Fines, Aaron Posner, and I had some very nice couple of years, where I was starting to teach kids. And then a real significant change happened when Aryeh Hirschfield came to town and we connected. Aryeh didn’t live here when I came here. He was down in the Bay Area and he just came up and we met and became instant best of friends. We had such common interests and backgrounds and both being musicians. It felt like a match made in heaven really. So we started doing music outside of the synagogue. I don’t know if you remember Mama’s Home Fried Truckstop and places like that and different restaurants around town. I remember we played for a Hadassah gathering at the synagogue, but at that point, instruments weren’t a part of the services at all. It was really very much within the framework of Conservative Judaism, the services. So instruments were definitely not a part of the program.

And that was a really important thing for me actually, over the many years of advocating for that and really pushing for that and trying to persuade people that this would be a good, good thing. That it’s really okay, that there are actually reasons why it makes a lot of sense for contemporary Judaism to be joyful and to be expressive with instruments as well as voice.

So when Rabbi Neimand passed away [on Tisha B’Av] in 1976, the congregation asked Aryeh and me to fill in while there was a search to find the permanent rabbi. They succeeded in hiring Rabbi Myron Kinberg of blessed memory. And he came in 1977, I believe, according to my little outline. And Myron was a fantastic community organizer. He took the community from being, it was very hamish back in the years of Rabbi Neimand’s leadership, and Myron came with a whole set of skills. I think that community organizing was probably part of the Reform movement training and he would just meet folks and say, “Okay, what do you want? You’ll be on this committee or you’ll be on that.” And he built the congregation in a phenomenal way. He had a membership team, I think with the Barkins, and I forget who else was on the membership team committee, but they just did a great job of bringing people in and really organizing the committees and in such an effective way. And Myron of course was a great leader beyond the congregation. He was a real spokesperson for human rights and peace, advocating for a recognition of the Palestinian people long before other folks were ready to even consider that. And it was very controversial. It actually in many ways led eventually to a split in the community because for some people it was just too much.

Posner: But was it hard when you and Aryeh had been kind of taking care of things and then he came? How was the transition from the two of you to his arrival?
RABBI YITZ: Well, I stayed on and became the hazzan. Aryeh left because it didn’t suit his personality, his needs, or his vision for himself. So he went on and he developed a chavurah in other cities. I think he went first to Ashland, started a community down there, then Portland. And I was very happy to work as a hazzan with Myron. I felt that we had complementary energies, and a spiritual relationship as well.

It was a different kind of relationship. It wasn’t the same as the relationship I had with Aryeh because Aryeh and I lived together in a household with other people and we were having Shabbat at our household and it was very, very much a total spiritual experience of sharing. Myron was married with a family, and we weren’t intimate close buddies in the same way. But we had a very positive work relationship. And also Myron had a lot of experience in Israel. He had just come from Israel when he came to TBI. He had spent a good bit of time in Israel, married Alyce, who we incidentally just saw in Boise. It was wonderful at Myron’s grandson’s bar mitzvah. Very sweet. A major change for the community came when it was clear the trajectory of Myron’s rabbinate was such that it really didn’t fit into the Conservative movement. You know, it was pretty stifling, I think, for him to operate just within that framework.

And it was for me as well. One of the big issues was the participation of women in the congregation. As a matter of fact, when Aryeh and I were doing the services for that one year, we used to ask Jill Katz, who was a close friend back in those years, to come up, be on the bima with us and to call pages. She didn’t know the prayers to lead the services, but she could be a [female] presence on the bima, which was pretty significant from back at that point. There was a wonderful process by which the women could declare themselves wanting to be counted in the minyan by if a woman covered her head with a kippa or a head covering, then she would be counted in a minyan. Some of the women didn’t want that. And so they chose not to. We could have 15 people there, but if six of the women didn’t cover their head, we didn’t have a minyan. So I thought it was a very wise way of empowering everybody to choose their own point on that continuum of participation. And that really changed the community tremendously.

I felt that a lot of our work liturgically was dealing with the gender neutral language for the Divine to not be king, to really start working with that. And that became a very important piece of work because so many women were turned off by coming into shul, and to have it all be gendered in a male gender, there was no way to identify. And I remember receiving a lot of good input, useful input from friends about that and how important it was to really work on the liturgical.

Posner: So some of the external things happening in the ’70s had a big impact.
RABBI YITZ: Feminism had a huge impact on Judaism.

Posner: And I remember there being a controversy over the wording of the Aleynu. I was pretty naive, so I was surprised by it. But talk about it having an effect on the whole—it was symptomatic, wasn’t it, of some of the problems, right?
RABBI YITZ: It was the tension between the Conservative approach or a progressive approach. The text of the Aleynu—we were using a prayer book that was published I think in 1945. So you can imagine the perspective of Jewish people on the nations of the world at that time. It may have been published a year or two after the war—I think it was 1945, maybe 1948. The Silverman prayer book. And the [translation of the] language in the Hebrew is: “He [G-d] hath not made us like unto the heathens of the earth, nor fashioned us like the godless of the land; that He hath not made our destiny as theirs, nor cast our lot with their multitude.”

Well, that was a very offensive kind of language for people that had come through the ’60s. People who had been out in the world, not in a Jewish ghetto, people that were looking for the universalist aspect of Jewish expression. So to say that we’re not like the other nations, that our lot is not with others, is antithetical to global citizenship. It really doesn’t work. So the different movements proposed other language, including just eliminating that sentence and putting in some other very universal statement in there. And really de-emphasizing the particularist perspective and much more the universalist—and because it’s sacred text, because people saw it as you cannot touch the prayers of the prayer book, that was a hot button for many people.

And there was deep attachment to the language that people maybe had grown up with or just felt you couldn’t tamper with the text. And for others it was essential. How can you pray things that you thought are so against your personal values and your views? That was to me, a real challenge to lead a congregation. It was that that precipitated the change to [the more progressive] Reconstructionist [movement].

That was one of many things there. I think more than that probably, was the issue of intermarriage of Jews. Such a high percentage of Jews are marrying non-Jewish people. So, that was very difficult for Myron, who would actually back then turn people away, and that wasn’t his nature, but it was the policy, and I don’t know if he would have operated differently.

We had been [operating] within the framework of Reform or Reconstructionist [Judaism], but he told people that he couldn’t do their wedding [because TBI was still affiliated with the Conservative movement of Judaism]. That was very hurtful to people and it was very difficult for him. So he came up with a wonderful formulation called the ger toshav. Ger toshav is a Biblical term and it’s a resident, somebody who lives within the community but doesn’t take on the personal covenant of Judaism, but they live within the community and respect the community, work for its well-being. And Myron formulated a wonderful document of this brit ger toshav of a covenant for the resident. It’s someone who’s inside the community but not fully a covenanted member of the community. So, Myron had requirements, such as a person would agree to learn about Judaism, would be committed to raising the children, educating the children of their marriage as Jews, and several specific requirements that a person would have to commit to, and then he would do the wedding.

This was wonderful. I mean, this was really a breakthrough. And I was more than comfortable. I thought it was brilliant. I really thought it was a really a great way of solving a seemingly intractable problem. So, I think that that was one of the real key features because in the Conservative movement, there’s no way you could do that. And we were starting to operate so far out of the bounds of Conservative Judaism that it just was completely lacking in integrity to be members of that movement and be operating the way we were in the direction that we were moving here.

Posner: So you were comfortable then with the change?
RABBI YITZ: Oh, I was thrilled with the change, actually. I was very supportive of it. Personally, I’m not interested in denominations at all. I think that they have their usefulness in terms of infrastructure, in terms of some way of having a system of training rabbis and having curriculum materials and things like that. There’s a usefulness to it. But as an issue of identity, to me it doesn’t make any sense. It’s like I’m a Jew, that’s all. And so, denominationalism is really something that I don’t ascribe to. And neither did Mordecai Kaplan, who was the founder of Reconstructionism. He didn’t want it to be a denomination, he fought against that. He wanted it to be trans-denominational and unifying of the Jewish people. And that’s why I’m involved in Jewish Renewal, which is trans-denominational. It’s not a denomination. But it was important for our congregation to have an affiliation with a national movement. I think for our identity being out here in Eugene, Oregon, it was psychologically important for us to feel anchored with something bigger.

Posner: Did that change happen while Myron was still rabbi or after you had become a rabbi?
RABBI YITZ: I think that Myron had become a Reconstructionist, an affiliate of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical organization, part of the Reconstructionist movement as an individual, but the congregation was still Conservative or unaffiliated. At that point we dropped our affiliation or I think they actually dropped our affiliation because we stopped paying dues or something like that. It wasn’t real clear, the process of leaving the Conservative movement, but I was the interim rabbi when we went through the process, I’m pretty sure.

Posner: Do you want to talk about that, that process of becoming interim and then becoming the rabbi? Was that a challenging time for you or was it positive?
RABBI YITZ: It was positive. You know, for me on a personal level, the music has always been my main spiritual channel. That’s the way I connect to the mystery of life. But because I also have a deep caring about social action and having a voice for social change for certain values, I found it important to become a rabbi. Not that I ever sought that as much as I found myself being in that position where that was an open door. And I was a disability rights advocate really working actively. While I was working at TBI, I was also running this organization for disability rights. And so I saw it as a strengthening of my ability to express values. Yes.

Posner: What about all the administrative aspects?
RABBI YITZ: I don’t know. Well, we always had administrators at the synagogue. Over the years our board became much more sophisticated and much more well-functioning. In the olden days it was pretty rough stuff. As more of university people got involved, I think there was another level of awareness of how to run a board. I came into this sphere and it just really became a much more comfortable organization to work in over the decades.

In the earliest days it was really a lot of independent thinking business people who owned their own businesses and ran them and didn’t have to work in coordination with other people and didn’t have that kind of training and background, I think. So, if there was a shift, more people from nonprofits got involved.

Posner: Yes. Positive for the congregation.
RABBI YITZ: Yes, I think so. Very much so. Even the process of affiliating with the Reconstructionists, that was facilitated by people from the university. I think Lizzie Reis was the chair of that process and it was well done.

Posner: I also wanted to ask you about the role in Israel, as it affected the congregation and Jewish life, and then personally for you as well. How do you reconcile and work all these issues and ideas together?
RABBI YITZ: I’m certainly open to talk about it. It’s just gonna be a little difficult to talk about it in terms of back then because it’s a continuum of change, to make it relevant to now. So, certainly coming out of the 1960s as a peace activist, I had hopes and the belief that Israel was going to evolve into a real beacon in the world of peacemaking. And right now it’s a very difficult time because of the right wing governments and their policies are what I’m really struggling with. I have such a deep spiritual relationship with Israel beyond the political level. And so my basic relationship is formed on the foundation of biblical writings, the sense of aspiration, the historical aspiration of the Jewish people to be free and independent. It just seemed absolutely right that Israel must exist and it’s a very particular place for us as our spiritual homeland. It’s unquestionable to me on that level.

There’s a certain purity about that relationship, and then politics enters, right? And it gets complicated when we start talking about policies and the relationship with the Palestinian people and the broader context of whether the Arab countries are going to accept Israel’s existence. So I never felt that it was appropriate to just look at Israel and Palestine because there’s this whole region that has to be included in that discussion, to contextualize what’s going on between Israel and the Palestinians without acknowledging the dissonance between Israel and the neighbors or the neighbors generating that dissonance. Sure, it’s a narrow view of a conflict that can’t be solved on that microcosm, that level. So Myron was a great influence, just in it for the community in terms of him really speaking out about Palestinian rights.

Generally I agreed with Myron’s positions, although I have to say that there were times when I felt that I wished he wouldn’t push it so hard because I saw it felt like it was just being too difficult for the community to contain, to manage. This is getting away from Israel a little bit, but my hope was always that we would have a community that would have multiple minyanim, different strands, everything from Orthodox to Renewal in the same building with different rooms being used, something of a statement of unity doing this together. And so I didn’t like to push where it felt like it would break. And my calculation on that was different. And of course Myron was the rabbi, and so he had every right to lead with his sense of what was right. I respected that and didn’t always feel comfortable with it.

Posner: And there was a little breakage, wasn’t there?
RABBI YITZ: There was; it was about the Aleynu, it was about Israel and about Conservative or progressive [religious practice]. The more Conservative people broke off and formed what was called the Halachic Minyan, which I won’t go too much into that, but that was really painful for me. It was really somewhat of a heartbreak because it was such a loss of a vision that I was working toward. I really wanted everybody to be able to do this together. So that was hard. That was really hard.

Posner: But my perception is you were able to bring that together. And I was wondering, did the move to the new building help solve some of that or had things come together even before the move?
RABBI YITZ: I don’t know that they came together. They resolved peacefully there. Other contexts for people, you know, the Ahavas Torah became its own Orthodox congregation that evolved from the Halachic Minyan. So there was peace between the communities, but not necessarily a lot of being in it together. Maybe now there’s more of that. I haven’t been tracking that, but it was a complicated time.

Posner: What about the kind of the external community influence? ’Cause I think that’s an area I perceived that you were very involved with. Do you want to talk a little bit about working with other clergy in the community and on for peace?
RABBI YITZ: Sure. Actually, I have to give credit again to Myron because he really established a lot of positive relationships. He showed up for other communities when they were having their troubles and I did as well, but as he was the rabbi, that was really important for him to be doing that. And there was quite a track record for TBI to be out here in the community as a voice of moral leadership. And so I picked up that role and spoke out when I could and participated in inter-religious work and interfaith organizing.

It was an important part of the work. I’m not sure what to say about it other than it’s such a natural part of what a progressive rabbi does, who’s really not looking for Judaism to be the right religion or the other religions to be wrong, but rather how do we complement each other. How do we work together on shared values? And there are so many shared values, and there’s plenty of work to do. So it always strengthened us to be in coalitions of being able to have press conferences together with other clergy around racism or homelessness, whatever you name the social issue.

That was an important part of the work. It’s so interesting when you ask that question, that sense of inside the community and outside, and I always felt that our community wanted that voice. And so the doing that on the outside was very much for the inside as well. It was representing a voice the people in our congregation wanted expressed. That’s what was attractive to so many people about TBI, was that it was a voice for certain values that weren’t self-serving, values about how to become good members of a broader society, how to really engage with other communities around shared values. And I think that’s a deep value that we all hold. And not all, but most.

Posner: Are you working with any of those groups? Are you continuing some of that work now?
RABBI YITZ: I am. I’ll try to think what specifically I’m doing…. This Friday night there will be a rally in front of the Federal Courthouse; there will be rallies around the country actually, about the immigrants and asylum seekers. And so I’ll be offering a blessing and a little teaching about Shabbat that is part of that. So yes.

Posner: The issues change but they always keep coming.
RABBI YITZ: They keep coming and the work is endless. And right now, particularly, just our societies…. [sigh]

Posner: I was going to ask you, how are you feeling about what’s happening in our society and how do we keep the faith?
RABBI YITZ: And that’s what I’m talking about Friday night, is that our tradition says that we’re going to get there, that we’re going to get to this positive outcome. Will humanity evolve and become humane, become human, and while we’re not there yet, we can’t abandon the vision or the work. So, that’s what in a nutshell what I would be saying on Friday night…that how can we have the peace of Sabbath when we know that these families are torn apart right now on the southern border? How can we indulge in that sense of peace? And yet if we don’t hold to that vision that the Sabbath is an opportunity to strengthen our commitment, strengthen our vision and recommit ourselves to the work.

So, thank God Judaism is as Rabbi Yitz Greenberg describes that. He says, Judaism is a story with a happy ending. It’s a very long old story, but we do get there in the end. And so I find that to be a useful way of seeing life. If I didn’t think that, it would be very depressing; it could feel overwhelming. If I didn’t really nurture that sense that we are going to get there where we’re capable of something better. And then that’s balanced with this quote from Rabbi Tarfon that many people know, that it’s not ours to complete the work. Neither are we free from our responsibility to do the work. So that sense of balance between believing that we’re getting there and also knowing that we won’t see the end of this story, but we’ll take our turn in the generations and keep working. I think it’s helpful. It’s very helpful because it can be a very discouraging time. Absolutely. But falling into despair is counterproductive.

Posner: Do you want to talk a little bit about your family and the role that they played, in your being a rabbi?
RABBI YITZ: First of all, I want to acknowledge, Shonna is really my partner in this. In the work of community, she was the quiet behind-the-scenes person; she has many skills that I don’t have in terms of being an organizer. And she was enormously helpful to me over and over again, constantly, advising me and just really helping me function in that domain, which is not my natural area of strength at all.

I’m much more kind of the spiritual, the music. And really over the decades, Shonna was a tremendous partner in helping me function to the fullness of what the congregation needed. So if anything, I kind of feel badly that she wasn’t more publicly seen for all that she was doing over the years. So that’s a little bit of an ache, and Shonna’s been a real leader on a national level for Jewish women. She was one of the earliest, if not the first women to make tallit for women…there was one other person actually passed away, quite young, who was also making tallit for women. Shonna was hand painting silk tallitot that many, many women rabbis wear. She was doing egalitarian ketubot before they were the rage. Now they’re standard, but she was a real pioneer. And these were very important steps for empowerment of women.

Actually, this morning in our own home we had a little circle with two Israeli couples who are here and we had a little ceremony for one of the women, as what’s called an eshet chazon, woman of vision. And it was lovely. It was absolutely beautiful. So Shonna has been really involved on the national network in Jewish Renewal for empowering women and also bringing the arts into the aesthetic uplift Judaism.

Of course, for the two of us, from our first week, from our first conversation when we met, we were both really interested in a community, in forming a community which we did. Shiftei Shalom was our community. But that was really an important part of our shared vision about life, that we felt that collective living, communal living, sharing of resources was an important thing for us to explore. We explored it, we backed off of it, we burnt out, we’re still interested. It doesn’t end. [laugh] That’s one of those things that there’s always that question of, should we live in a community, a spiritual community? Would that be more fulfilling? Yes, it was great to raise our children in a community where we shared the Jewish rhythms, the Jewish values, and that was great for us. When the kids were young, of course I was schlepping up and down I-5, working between Eugene and Salem at the congregation there. So it wasn’t ideal, the economics of this region. It was pretty tough for us to keep that going, but we’re glad we did it. And so our kids have good, strong Jewish identities.

Growing up at TBI, they got a certain flavor of Judaism, which was really rich with a sense of pursuit of justice and they demand that and I’m proud of them. Talya works as an advocate for unsheltered people. That’s what she’s doing down in the Bay Area. And Shira is a speech language pathologist, so she works in intensive care units in trauma centers in the Bay Area. And I know that they largely do this with a sense of the mitzvot involved. They are grounded in, and when you’re Jewish….

Posner: You grow up in that, it’d be hard to, it would take a willful act not to, right?
RABBI YITZ: So they are somewhat involved in the Jewish community. Talya, [again] this year, led a Seder for the LGBTQ community. 120 people came to the scene. And they’re well involved.

Posner: You mentioned the Renewal Movement. Did you want to say a little bit about that? ’Cause I know that’s an important part of what you say of what you’re doing now, what your thinking is now?
RABBI YITZ: Well yes, I was involved in Renewal before it was called Renewal [starting in the ’70s]. It was 20 years later that this network of people eventually named it [Jewish] Renewal. But it was a synthesis of spiritual and social action that some main teachers, I don’t know if you know of Rabbi Arthur Waskow, but Arthur wrote “The Freedom Seder” that would be used in gatherings with African American and Jewish people, the Passover Seder with liturgy. That resonated for both; liberation. So Arthur was an important influence. Reb Zalman Schachter Shalomi and Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach both are very important influences. Shlomo Carlebach wasn’t so much within the Jewish Renewal movement. He was much more for everybody. There’s not a shul in the world that’s not doing his music. And Reb Zalman was a great intellect with a view and understanding of the interfacing of different spiritual religions. He taught comparative religions back at Temple University for years, and then he was the Naropa Institute, the World Wisdom Chair for many years. He taught a view of Judaism that worked for me in terms of seeing us as having something very vital to contribute to the global consciousness, non-triumphalist view of Judaism, but with a really deep respect for other traditions; deep ecumenism, and as he was forming a movement. Both Aryeh and I became important early members of that movement in terms of being musical resources for the conferences.

I don’t feel that I’m doing justice to what Jewish Renewal really is. It’s like the growing edge of Jewish as [Rabbi Mordecai] Kaplan [of the Reconstructionist movement] would say it, and talk about the evolving Jewish civilization, right? So that’s Kaplan’s language.

[In contrast,] Reb Zalman’s language: Is that a tree? [He used the analogy of a tree.] The outside, the new growth is on the outside of the tree. And that’s where the vitality is. It’s not the hardwood on the inside, but it’s the new ring that’s growing and that renewal is a bit of a laboratory for where Judaism can go to explore possibilities. It’s alive; it is a lab. He would talk about it that way as being open to experimenting, exploring. He would say that he liked to be the antenna on the Jewish bug, feeling which way we were going. So it meant he was very grounded. He is a Lubavitch rabbi and a Ph.D. from Hebrew Union College. So he was very well rounded in terms of his Jewish knowledge and he helped weave a lot of us together.

This network of friends that are here now, it’s through him and Shlomo that we know each other, through conferences over the decades. It’s very old relationships, old friendships that developed through these conferences.

Posner: And this strikes me totally as a kind of a metaphor in a way for where you are now. Because I wanted to ask you, so what are you going to do now? And I’m wondering, it seems to me that you’re in a lovely position and I wondered about if it strikes you as a lovely position or is it challenging or positive, I mean, I like this stage of life.
RABBI YITZ: I really like this stage really. Thank God, health is good enough. And it’s good for me to not work in an organization right now to see where my thinking goes outside of the framework of an organization. It’s an exciting time. I’m doing a lot of music, a lot of cello. Shonna and I are getting to spend great time together. It’s wonderful. Traveling and you know, I was in Eastern Europe last year, and in Israel twice, reconnecting with old friends that I never really took the time to do because there didn’t seem to be the time available. So I’m having a rich time of reconnecting with friends. And Pittsburgh had a tremendous impact on me. Shonna and I spoke at a Chevra Kaddisha conference in Colorado last month. They had a day about [the Tree of Life shooting in] Pittsburgh, Chevra Kaddisha societies from all over America and Canada. So they had their conference in Colorado and invited us to come and talk about Pittsburgh. I’m spending a lot of time in communication with my friend Daniel. We talk regularly. He was the man who was wounded in Pittsburgh in that shooting, so we talk regularly at length.

I like that. I was invited to come and talk Friday night at this rally and it’s good. I want to be able to express Jewish values.

I love doing weddings. I just did a wedding that was really sweet as can be. And some funerals I’ve done lately, so I’m doing the intimate sharing with people, the life cycle journeys and I don’t have lots of meetings with committees and the board and things like that. But, I was tired. So to not have meetings every night and stuff is really great. Great. It is such a good change for me, for my own health and well-being. It’s in tune with my age.

The last couple of years I was on the program committee [of Ohalah, the network for Jewish Renewal clergy], for shaping the [annual conference] program, and that was great. I feel that I got to nudge things in a certain direction that was satisfying and hopefully good for the network. And now I’m on their ethics committee, which I’m not so excited about. I don’t really want to deal with tsurris.

So I feel there’s kind of a freedom, a sense of expansiveness now, and I know time is limited, but it’s expansive now that there is a sense of clearer choice and not so much driven, with lists of got-to-dos, but much more discovering what I really want to do with this precious time. So, sometimes it’s challenging, I think, what am I doing, like wasting my time or am I doing something? And that’s a bit of a challenge that I’m trying not to be too hard on myself.

Posner: I think that’s a nice kind of summary. Is there anything that I haven’t asked that you would want to share?
RABBI YITZ: Oh, well, a little bit about Kitov. Do you remember Kitov [the music ensemble]? That was important, that was really a precious, we had a good time together. And I think that we really contributed to the congregation a lot. It was good.

Posner: So, have you ever thought to come back together?
RABBI YITZ: I don’t think everybody’s not still alive actually. But that was wonderful to take the voice out into the public also as well as in the congregation, to do something at the whole center. And it was really fun. It was good. And for me, that music is such a synthesis of the classical training for cello and the Hasidic flavor, that I know that that’s the flavor that I have naturally in my voice. And so I think that’s important.

Posner: Do you have any feelings about the temple? I do.
RABBI YITZ: I’m glad you’re asking because I feel good about the temple. I’m enjoying Rabbi Ruhi very much as a leader. I really appreciate what she’s doing and the community just seems to be thriving. It’s fulfilling to go to services or whatever, to come to activities there. And I don’t go that often, but often enough to appreciate what’s happening. Shonna and I are out of town a lot on the weekends, precious weekends up the coast. We go to the McKenzie River. But I think the congregation is doing really well. It seems to me that there’s a good balance now with programming and educational programs for the community. We have the Rabbi’s two new little babies in the community now that are so sweet and her husband, Rabbi Jacob, is wonderful.

I was one of the workers, starting with Rabbi Simmons and Rabbi Neimand and Rabbi Myron. I feel really appreciative and honored that I had a turn to have my impact with my work. And I’m thrilled to see it going forward to younger leadership that’s got good ideas and good energy. So that’s a good feeling. Well, it’s wonderful.

Posner: The honor was ours. Thank you.
RABBI YITZ: Thank you.