Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. It gives me great pleasure to welcome you tonight to our special Torah Center in the City evening. As you know, every Wednesday we have our five or six rabbis groups studying. Tonight, we thought it would be a special night to have our guest rabbi. So I also want to take the opportunity to welcome our guest rabbi, my dear friend, Rabbi Eli Mansour, to the city, to Manhattan, to our congregation. It's not the first time he's been here. He's been here a few times, and he has also spoken here in this congregation. So it gives us really great pleasure and honor to have you, Rabbi Eli.
I want to be straightforward, and I'm sure many of you have heard many, many things. There has never been or has been or there is any confrontation, any war, or anything between me and Rabbi Eli. We are good friends. We have been good friends for many years now. What there was, it was just political posturing. That's all. That's all. But then, you know, again, Rabbi Eli, if you wanted to come and give a class, you could have just told me directly without having to go through all of that. So it's really a great, great pleasure to have you here tonight.
I would kiss him right in front of all of you, but I'm sick. I've been in bed for three days, and I came especially for this lecture. I don't want him to go back to Brooklyn again and say, "Look, I go to Manhattan, I come back with a cold." So next time, we'll kiss you on both cheeks, Rabbi Mansour. It's really a great, great pleasure to have you here. And again, you know, for people who are very well-versed in media, bad publicity is good publicity. So for either one of us. I have to tell you, you know, that's very well known in the media, among politicians, and among many people out there. Bad publicity is still good publicity. So I hope that something positive will come out. At least one thing: the positive is that Rabbi Eli Mansour came tonight to speak here to all of us, so we can hear his chochmah (wisdom) and his degree of Torah. I'm not going to take more of your time. It's a pleasure to have you. Baruch Haba.
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Once again, it is a great pleasure for me to be here tonight in this highly prominent synagogue that bears the name of one of the world's greatest benefactors, Mr. Edmund J. Safra, a name that's synonymous with goodness, unselfishness, and charity. I am also humbled to be here tonight at the invitation of your revered leader, Rabbi Abadi, Hashem yishmerehu vichayehu (May Hashem protect and sustain him), whom I am proud to call a colleague and a friend. You are my friend. You are a very lucky kahal (congregation) to have such a rabbi, a scholar who stands foursquare on Jewish tradition, unwavering and loyal and devoted to our dat (religion). At the same time, your rabbi has a keen understanding of the contemporary world and culture of our time. He has a perfect understanding of the world. He has a perfect balance between old and new.
In Judaism, new bottles are never disturbing, as long as they contain old wine. And I say to my dear colleague, he's absolutely correct. All this talk, or politics as they call it, had to be good because look at the results. It brought Baruch Hashem. It brought us together so we could talk Divrei Torah (words of Torah). From bad doesn't come good. And therefore, this confirms to me tonight that our friendship is true.
And B'ezrat Hashem, I hope that I'll be able to reciprocate, to invite the rabbi to our congregation in New York, and, B'ezrat Hashem, afford you, Rabbi, the same honor and derech kavod (respectful manner) that you've given me here tonight. And B'ezrat Hashem, by then, I hope you recover from your cold. And we can make up our formalities there.