In a podcast interview, Rabbi Shlomo Bistritzky, shliach to North Ranch, California, for close to forty years, sits with his son Rabbi Mendy Bistritzky on “The Long Short Way” and shares fascinating stories and memories spanning his parents’ home on the Lower East Side, his years learning in Montreal, his brother’s shlichus in Tzfas, and decades of raising a family while serving as a rav.

Rabbi Shlomo traces much of what drives him back to his parents’ home. His father, without any medical training, responded to a Jew’s death from a heart attack in the early 1970s by tracking down another concerned neighbor and improvising a first-aid response that grew into Hatzalah.

“He was very, very hard every single day of his life,” Rabbi Shlomo says, describing how his father would leave the keys to his kosher market on the counter for customers to ring themselves out while he answered emergency calls.

His mother, meanwhile, spent Thursday nights baking large pans of food to deliver to out-of-town yeshiva bochurim living in the dormitory, together with cases of canned goods and paper products.

He recalls his years learning under the mashpia Reb Zev Volf Greenglass in Montreal, describing a moment when he quietly noticed he had forgotten to say his morning brachos and whispered a reminder in his ear rather than correcting him publicly.

“It always comes back to great people that remain grounded and connected and never forget what all of it’s about,” Rabbi Shlomo says of the encounter.

A central thread of the conversation is the personal attention the Rebbe gave to individuals regardless of how small the request seemed. Rabbi Shlomo points to his older brother, Rabbi Levi Bistritzky, who served as shliach and later chief rabbi in Tzfas and the Galil.

During the Lebanon war, an Israeli soldier passed along a request from a Jewish shopkeeper in Lebanon whose wife had no functioning mikvah nearby. The request reached the Rebbe, who directed Rabbi Levi to arrange for the mikvah to be repaired, in the middle of a war zone, for the sake of one family.

The project required smuggling in supplies with a military escort, and because a natural mikvah needs flowing water in a desert climate, the team had to order dozens of bricks of ice to be delivered, a request so unusual that the Lebanese ice supplier assumed it was a mistake and initially delivered only a handful. When the mikvah was completed, the Rebbe asked whether it was heated, and when told it wasn’t, sent word that it should be, then insisted on personally covering the entire cost out of his own pocket.

The conversation also turns to parenting, where Rabbi Shlomo distinguishes between love given from a place of calm and love given from panic. He argues that many parents today are “parenting scared,” shaped by constant exposure to bad news, even when no actual crisis is present.

“If it’s love from panic, that’s not love,” he says, describing how a child can sense that fear even when a parent tries to mask it with a smile.

The Long Short Way is a podcast hosted by Rabbi Mendy Bistritzky, featuring candid conversations with family and guests from across the Jewish community, where meaningful stories meet soulful conversations.

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