Rav Avigdor Miller on Chabad Farbrengens
Q:
How can you contract the hatred of the am ha'aretz towards the talmidei chachamim?
A:
One way is to show them affection and to honor them. Another way is to bribe them with certain forms of good times and happiness in order to make them want to come.
Now I'll explain how each one of these is being used.
Affection and honor. If you're mechabed every person, if you honor every man, he cannot help being bribed by you. You show affection for him, you treat him with respect, and that’s the first step to being mikareiv him.
A second way is to bribe him with good times. Now this is what Lubavitch does when they make an encounter of college people with Lubavitch – “An Encounter With Chabad,” they call it.
So you might think that the college boys and girls come carrying philosophical books under their arms and Chabad comes to greet them with sefarim like Chizuk Emunah and Kuzari and Moreh Nevuchim and there's a philosophical encounter. No, it’s nothing like that. Here’s the encounter. They all sit together and they hear a tune sung, a niggun. And as a result of this niggun, there are a number of people who have come over and become ba'alei teshuvah.
Now, it may seem silly to you but that's how people are. If you would come head-on in an intellectual collision with these people, you've accomplished nothing because they don't have any sense anyhow. Don't think college people have sense. How do you think they became bums? They yielded to their environment. He went to college and all around him is nothing but overalls and barbarianism so he yielded to them. Now they're in Lubavitch and they're listening to a niggun and so they're overwhelmed by emotion and they yield this way. Emotion is a very big factor.
And therefore there are ways of bribing people and getting them to like you and that may overcome to some extent this barrier of hatred. If you try to win over Jews, you could win them over.
Now this doesn't mean that you shouldn't use intellectual explanations for people. But don't rely on this alone because it's not effective in itself. You must show friendship. You must show character. You must show idealism. And then that person may listen to your intellectual approach too. And then he can become sympathetic to your cause.
TAPE # 27