Divine Detour series: Rabbi Mendel Kalmenson on Meaning, Struggle, & Wisdom

Hello, Rabbi Mendel

Kallmannsen.

Thank you so much for coming on the Divine Detour podcast.

I am so excited to have you.

We are all very big fans of your wife, Chana.

who graced us with this month's podcast of The New Moon of Of.

I'm very excited.

And Rabbi Mendel is a rabbi, an author, a speaker.

And I just finished his book On Purpose, which is quite aligned with my topic here of divine purpose.

And it's mostly thoughts based on the teachings of the rabbi.

Is that correct? Yes.

Yeah, definitely.

As with most cases, the Rebbe's teachings are rooted in classic Jewish literature and text.

As he made the point himself, someone once tried to hype up how the Rebbe was a radical innovator and so forth, and the Rebbe played it down, saying really and truly not.

I'm really here to basically to place an emphasis or to accentuate certain Jewish strains of thought.

I think that's a very valuable insight, both in terms of the Rebbe's humility, but also in terms of the Rebbe's genius, because it takes certain genius to be able to articulate something new from a very rich corpus of text-based thinking that was seen conventionally a certain way, but now framed differently, really produces life-affirming and life-transforming wisdom for our times.

Thank you.

Yes.

I love the way you put that.

That's so important.

And thank you for sharing that.

So the book On Purpose really gets into the purpose of people and humanity.

And there's so many beautiful, I really suggest everyone read it.

It's a fantastic book.

And there's all these great stories where it's like letters back and forth with the Rebbe and someone's questions and requests.