Celebrating the power of possibility.
I'm Rabbi Yassi and I believe anything is possible.
Welcome to another episode of Anything is Possible.
I'm Halloran Hilton Hill.
These are great stories about great people whose lives prove that anything is possible.
And it is my delight to have in studio with me today Rabbi Yassi.
I've called you Yossi, I've called you Yassi.
Rabbi, thank you for being with me today.
Thank you so much for having me and I'm humbled with that intro of great people.
I do believe that.
So first, teach me the correct pronunciation of your name.
So the full name is actually Yosef, which is Jacob's 11th son.
And this is the nickname.
So Yassi is the way it is.
If you're in Hebrew, it would be Yossi.
So they're all really correct.
And as a child, I've responded to what my parents called me Yassi.
And that's what most people call me, but Yassi, Yossi, Yossi.
I've always been fascinated, I'm a preacher's kid, and I've always been fascinated
by people who dedicate their lives to their faith, right?
And a Rabbi or a teacher, it's one of the highest levels of spiritual dedication is to accept that.
And I don't know in your tradition if you call it a calling,
but let me start at that point at which you decide that you want to be a Rabbi.
And let me be more specific with my question, because more than anything, I want to learn, right?
So in your tradition, do you decide you want to be a Rabbi?
Or is it like the story of Samuel, speak, Lord, for thy servant here, and you are called to it?
So a calling is definitely part of it.
I grew up in Brooklyn, an Orthodox community, Cron Heights, and the Rebbe, which is our spiritual leader,
Rabbi Menachem Mendelschnersen, who passed away in 94, he took over the Chabad community in 1950.
What is Chabad?
Chabad is actually an abbreviation of three Hebrew words.
Chahma bina daat, knowledge, wisdom, and understanding.
It's the idea of it's not enough to just do, but you have to connect both with your mind and with your heart.
And this was back 300, something years ago.
It was founded in White Russia and moved in Ukraine.
In that region, it was a different country, depending on what was going on politically.
But he took over in the United States in 1950.
It was shortly after the Holocaust, and the Jewish people were devastated.
And his calling was that there are Jews everywhere.
Our job is to reach out to them and tell them how important they are.
It's not about what they do, not about what they study.
It's not about if they pray.
It's about who they are and let them know that they are important.
And the example that was given in a Torah scroll, there are thousands of letters.
It's basically the five books of Moses written out on one scroll.
If one letter, the smallest letter is missing, the entire scroll is no good.
And he used that to say the Jewish people are one people.
If one Jew feels that he or she doesn't belong, there's something wrong with all of us.
And he started that in 1950.
And by the time I was a child in the 70s, I would look up to those who would come in once a year
or several times a year from wherever their post was throughout the world.
And that was something I looked up to.
And growing up in Brooklyn, hearing his teachings almost sometimes on a weekly basis,
it's like, when am I going to be there?
When am I going to be part of that?
And it was a decision, you know, when I was a young teenager, I made that decision.
So, you know, taking...
What was it like growing up in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, as an Orthodox?
Well, look, that was our community.
So, yeah, that's all I knew.
Over here, I walk into a store, I have to look for the item that's kosher over there.
It's like, you're not going to find the non-kosher item.
There's restaurants, everyone is...
You walk up the street on Sabbath on the Shabbat, and everyone is saying Shabbat shalom to each other.
And I remember we took a group of teens a few years ago to a weekend in Brooklyn,
and we stayed in Crown Heights.
And there were thousands of teens that came from all over, a part of a CTEEN program.
And later we were talking about what was your greatest moment during this weekend.
And it was amazing to hear from the kids walking in the street, and everyone tells you Shabbat shalom.
Having a sense of place.
Right.
So, you know, I grew up there, that's where I studied.
Most of my studies were in Brooklyn.
And for one year, I was in Jerusalem.
And by the time I reached, you know, rabbinical seminary, and I was...
It was locked, and I'm going somewhere.
Where am I going?
I don't know.
But once you are in that path, then you're going somewhere.
Correct.
Possibility powered by Pilot Flying J, Covenant Health, Home Federal, and the Knoxville News Sentinel.
Here's something I don't know.
How do you make a living when you've decided you're on a rabbinical path?
How do you have money to go to school and to buy clothes and rent an apartment?
So, in the Orthodox circles, most of the time, it's...
And, you know, thank God for my parents.
They, you know, threw up to my wedding, and even above, you know, beyond that.
But I was on their dime.
Correct.
Here and there, you know, you do some work, and...
But, you know, tuition and all that is on their dime.
It's nothing compared to tuition in college.
I will say that there's a lot of...
It's nonprofit.
The schools are nonprofit, so they fundraise so that they can subsidize this study,
because that's where, even if you're not going on the path of moving out somewhere
and starting your own, you know, synagogue, school, whatever it is,
most Chabach children go through the entire system.
So, ultimately, almost every home, whether they're in business, an attorney, a doctor,
ultimately what they do, there's a rabbi there in the house, too, that knows a thing or two.
The quality of that education, particularly,
what did you learn in that educational track that you might not have learned somewhere else?
It was... We were devoted to several years of studying Torah,
I would say 90%, 95% of the time.
No secular studies, no general studies.
At that point, you're focused strictly on the Talmud, the Mishnah, the law, Kabbalah, and so on.
And that is something that... It's also the fact that I was not worried about,
okay, how am I paying tuition, what am I doing?
You know, I grew up in Brooklyn, so I never stayed in the dorm unless I was in Jerusalem.
I mean, I was in Jerusalem, but there were guys who did stay, but still, all of that,
you had zero worries.
No worries, just started studying the Torah.
Did you love the study of the Torah?
Till today.
What do you love about it, and were there any parts of the Torah that especially excited you?
So I grew up, my parents are both Israeli, so we heard Hebrew at home.
So I had the advantage over some of my friends that I can read ahead and understand the text.
So I was, as a child, I remember always reading ahead when we were studying, whether it was Genesis or Exodus,
or any of the stories or then the prophets.
It was amazing for me, and you couldn't get enough.
Till today, if I pick up a Torah book and read something, oh wow, I never realized that.
There's always like the aha moment that keeps coming back.
It's another commentary or someone's life story.
What is one of your greatest spiritual aha's?
How little we are, and yet how big we can become, how much we can achieve.
That's something that's always like, wow.
What is the sound of man that you would consider him, right?
So when I met you, I had been invited to come over to the school.
And when I stepped into this space, you and your wife founded a school here in Knoxville,
I was blown away.
To me, it was like this factory of human possibility.
And I'm looking at these precocious young people that are engaged in learning,
and I mean, they're going, it seemed like at light speed.
And there was a real community aspect to it where the students that were running on ahead
had to make a commitment to help the kids that might be a little further behind.
And so there was this collaborative thing, and then there was the freedom to learn and to grow.
And it seemed like a place of great possibility.
I was blown away.
Why did you found the school and tell me about this journey?
So we moved here in 2001.
My wife's from Chicago.
I'm from Brooklyn.
Both grew up in Orthodox communities, landed in Knoxville.
And I couldn't be happier, by the way.
I always say I'm a Southern Urbite choice, and this is my home right now.
And from the beginning, we realized that the Jewish children, they have a challenge.
And what's interesting is just to digress for a moment, friends ask me about anti-Semitism here in Knoxville.
I said, believe it or not, but I've never had an anti-Semitic incident here in Knoxville personally.
And I walk around with my Yamaka Keepa, with my tzatzit.
And I look as Jewish as can be.
Never had.
To the contrary.
I mean, now with this whole thing since October 7th, people will go with me.
Is it okay if I tell you, we're praying for you?
And always had just good things in terms of religion.
Let's pause there for just one second.
Talk about what's going on in Israel and Gaza and how your community is processing that.
I haven't asked you about that.
Right.
So look, it's a hard thing to process on so many levels.
Every aspect that's going on, to think today, we just celebrated Passover, which is probably the most family holiday in the Jewish calendar.
The family sits together at the Passover Seder.
And to think that there are 133 people that didn't have that opportunity, they're stuck somewhere in some tunnel or God knows where and what they're going through, that's a hard thing to process.
I think it was a big blow.
October 7th was scary.
It was Holocaust proportions in terms of, since the Holocaust, it was the first time that so many Jews were killed in one day.
And it was in our country, in our homeland.
It wasn't like something happened in some other country.
There's the IDF there to protect.
Where were they? What happened? There's the failure on the political side, on the military side.
One of the things, and I don't know if you've paid attention, but something that I always say, our physical health depends on our spiritual health.
There's no question about that.
And spiritually in Israel at that time, the politics has dragged people to a point where they were very splintered.
And we know that here in our country sometimes.
But in a smaller country where it's one family, it's much harder to see it.
And I think that spiritual health was shaky and it affected us physically.
And you saw the turnaround right after, which hopefully will stick around.
So you were talking about how the spiritual health of a country or a person really connects to the physical health.
And that Israel is dealing with that as well.
And so this was a traumatic thing.
We were talking off camera about how through history when Israel would fall away, there would be something that would happen.
That would jolt the spiritual sensibilities.
Has that been part of the reckoning here as well?
There's no question.
I feel so strongly.
It's in Deuteronomy again and again.
Moses, before he passes away, tells the people, look, I'm not going with you.
You're going to go.
But let me tell you what's going to happen.
And he tells them what's going to happen.
And boom, it happened.
And it continues to happen.
But I think that more than the spiritual health in terms of what we do and how we do it, I think unity is the number one thing.
And that's an issue everywhere.
But the chosen people, we're the light onto the nation.
If we have a problem, it reflects all the way down.
It goes throughout to the right, to the left, up and down.
And I think that for ourselves, you never asked me to understand my religion.
But the respect that I have for you and you have for me was because we're two humans.
That's the way it should be.
If I believe in God, then the same God that put you here, or put me here, put you here.
So who am I to judge?
I think that when you have so many different ways of practicing or lack of, put that aside for a moment.
There's a human being here that God put into this world.
Number one, respect.
That was lacking as well.
So back to the school, you said Jewish children have a unique challenge.
You said even here.
I mean, it's what we've heard, and I think there was an article once by, I can't remember who it was,
but someone who wrote that she was sort of, I can't remember the expression,
but it was hard on her children to be the token Jew in their class.
And that's because those Chanukah comes, oh, tell us about Chanukah.
I'm like, you know, we didn't study that in Hebrew school yet, or I don't remember.
So it wasn't because they were being picked on, but they were asked to stand up to what they perhaps know and didn't necessarily know.
So that's when my wife and I, who came here to strengthen the Jewish community, said, okay, it looks like we need a day school here.
And it was like, well, actually, the full story was we had a mommy and me program that then evolved in a Hebrew school program.
And when those kids were reaching kindergarten, they came to us and they said, the parents and said, like, hey, can you continue this?
And we were like, whoa, that's when we actually found out that the seeds were already planted.
In 1978, they tried to establish a day school here and then again throughout history.
So when we came, it wasn't like, you know, Johnny come lately, hello, we're here, we're starting a school.
The seeds were already planted and it was perfect timing for that.
And we started a school.
And what was interesting is, he said about the collaborative learning.
My wife, who was the educator on that thing, what's interesting, we were dating my wife and I, and we knew that we're both going somewhere, you know, like Knoxville.
Not Knoxville, but we knew we're going to join that, you know, the Rebbe's Army, what we call.
And my wife says the one thing I'm not going to do is be involved in a school.
Both her parents are involved in schools and here she is, you know.
But we, she knew that there's not, we don't have the numbers, definitely not in the beginning, to have full classrooms.
So we're going to have to have kindergarten with first or first and second, you know, joined classes.
But when you're going to try and recruit students, you know, that seems like a negative, not a positive.
So she went to look, says, I am sure there's a school somewhere that has it, not because they need to, but because they want to, because there's so much to gain of it.
And then boom, she was right.
We found a school in Chicago that did it.
They had actually two first and seconds, two third and fourth, and so on and so forth, even though they had enough to make separate classes.
But it's the older kids being the example to the younger kids.
The younger kids looking up to the older kids, when am I going to do that?
That creates a sense of leadership, a sense of learning from the young kids.
And that's what we have at the Knoxville Jewish Day School.
How many students do you have now?
This year 55.
Is the school open to anyone or is it specifically for Jewish students?
So it's, you know, it's the Knoxville Jewish Day School.
The curriculum is very much Jewish, but we have some non-Jews as well.
You know, if it fits there, you know, what happens?
We celebrate only the Jewish holidays there.
So it's really, that's the focus.
So there are several non-Jews families there that want that.
Either they went to the, you know, Einstein Jewish Community Preschool.
So they, hey, you know, we like this, let's continue.
And it's just through fifth grade.
And the education there is, you know, yeah, obviously, it's unbelievable.
You guys have to feel great about what's happening there.
I always love these places where people have an opportunity to experience possibility.
When you said one of your big ahaz is how small we are, but how big we could be by the grace of God.
That's what I saw there.
I saw these young minds, these eyes dazzling with the joy of learning.
And that's something I want to talk to you about as well.
My guest is Rabbi Yasee.
I want you to stick around because I want to explore further something that I'm really passionate about that you've helped me with.
And thank you for not only being here, but being in our community and being a light of possibility.
And for landing here in Knoxville.
That to me is a wonderful thing.
I'm very, very happy of this combination.
I love Knoxville and thank you for having me.
And I've learned to think of two of that from you too.