The Word (according to Joe)

He paid millions to save his footy club but Joe Gutnick’s greatest passion is for things spiritual. By Larry Schwartz.

“Faith is not absence of reason; it is a skill in its own right, which, when cultivated, allows us to experience the ultimate.” (The Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson).

GENIAL chatter reveals a camaraderie and humor at odds with sombre appearances. The rabbi is a little late. But he soon arrives to take his place in fervent prayer and song.

“Come my friend, to meet the bride; let us welcome the presence of the Sabbath . . .” We are gathered in communal reverence, chanting the Hebrew lyric in which the day of rest is personified as a newlywed.

As if to ward off all distraction, a figure draped in a white prayer shawl sways back and forth. Black hats on yarmulka-clad heads, long black coats, gloriously full beards and tasselled earlocks abound in a setting that seems straight out of pre-Holocaust eastern Europe.

The devout meet in the plush-carpeted function room of the Kimberley Gardens motel in East St Kilda. A box of soft, white tissues has been placed on each of the white-clothed tables at which they pray.

“Good shabbos,” you say as you enter. “Good shabbos,” comes the ready reply from the world of our fathers.

This is the other, private world of Joseph Gutnick, the inner sanctum of one who has become an increasingly public figure since he emerged as the savior of the Melbourne Football Club. Here, in a motel he owns, he is rabbi, treasurer and president of his very own fledgling congregation.

Gutnick is a powerful figure in an influential sect whose dress code and strict religious practice set it apart not just from most other Australian Jews. In a society that finds it easy to understand the faith that fills the MCG, the fervor that leads football supporters to attend angry rallies to save teams, there is an odd uneasiness when someone is so public in their commitment to religion.

Gutnick was lampooned on the top-rating ‘The Footy Show’ by Sam Newman, who adopted the guise of a reject from ‘Fiddler On the Roof’, but he is confident that this is a time of relative acceptance.

At 44, Gutnick is of a generation of Jews less influenced by the horror of the Holocaust than by Israeli nationhood. “We stand up and voice our opinions and so maybe that helps,” he says. “I suppose I wouldn’t have this pride if the state of Israel today wouldn’t exist.”

Dismissing conventional typecasting, Gutnick sees no need for embarrassment at being an orthodox Jew whether following the footy, visiting the Prime Minister at the Lodge or running his mining companies.

“It’s a type of trend in the ’90s to accept people as they are and I’m not hiding my religion . . . and I don’t hide the fact that I don’t go to the football on Saturday.”
Between afternoon and evening services, the rabbi shows me around Bet Chabad, his breakaway synagogue. A lone worshipper keeps her own counsel in a separate room for women. More attend on Saturday mornings, he says. We walk in darkness in the library. On the Sabbath you are not permitted to switch on a light.

A door is ajar at an office where Gutnick attends to the affairs of his congregation when not involved in the mining empire in which he holds a $500 million personal holdings. And football.

GOD created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. So the story goes. The Sabbath is not just a break from the merry-go-round of the working week but a time of introspection and spirituality.

To the faithful, the restrictions – such as the bar on driving a car or turning on a TV set – are not frustrations. This is a weekly taste of paradise, not an ordeal.

However hectic his schedule, Gutnick makes sure he is home in time for the ceremonial lighting of candles before sunset on Friday with his wife, Stera, and their 10 children, aged 20 to three. He showers, washing away the cares of the working week, changes into a fresh, sombre suit, dons a dark hat and heads off to prayer.

At the synagogue he wields an authority that enabled him, for instance, to sack a cantor who publicly owned up to a viewpoint at odds with Gutnick’s avowed right-wing stance on Israel.

But he has struck a chord with football supporters, becoming an unlikely club president – one who cannot attend matches on the Sabbath but admits that a much-desired grand final appearance would test his faith.

“I can’t imagine 20 years ago someone walking through the Long Room at the MCG in a yarmulka and a beard and not feeling uncomfortable about it,” he says. “If someone had wanted to be president of Melbourne Football Club they’d have hidden the fact that they were religious because maybe they wouldn’t be accepted.

“But I don’t particularly care if they accept me or not. I want to be friends with them. But if they don’t like my religious beliefs, well, tough luck for them.”

This day the business pages trumpet a “dazzling gold discovery” by his mining stable in Western Australia. On the walls of his St Kilda Road office, lined up like trophies, he proudly displays newspaper stories about himself.
Throughout our meeting he keeps an eye on market prices on a screen. Our conversation is repeatedly interrupted by telephone calls. It is the day of the football draft. “Six foot five, that’s good,” he tells one caller.

In a workplace where spiritual and temporal (and sport) merge, you await an audience in an entrance where an aerial photograph of one of his mines is displayed and enter through doorposts with small cases called mezuzot, each containing a traditional
prayer. Inside, the room is festooned with blue and red balloons to celebrate the Melbourne Demons.

Filling much of the wall opposite his desk is a huge portrait of his late mentor, Menachem Mendel Schneerson. It was he who predicted that Gutnick would find gold and diamonds just when he seemed likely to be another casualty of the 1987 stockmarket crash.

The white-bearded “Rebbe”, who died in June 1994, attracted a fervent following. Some, though not Gutnick, speculated he might be the long-awaited Messiah.

Hasidic rebbes were never just priests but charismatic intermediaries between their followers and the divine. “To live close to such a man,” as one commentator has put it, “in the circle of his disciples, was to escape from a brown world into a golden one.”

The Ukraine-born, Sorbonne-educated Lubavitcher Rebbe transformed a tiny branch of a mystical movement founded in the backwaters of eastern and central Europe in the mid-18th century into an aggressive force in Jewish affairs after he reluctantly succeeded his father-in-law in 1951.

“Acceptance – real acceptance – was conditional,” a close relative of Gutnick has written of this world. “. . . Inside, well, there is inside and inside. There are secrets and cliques. The privileged dispense information and control its flow as a tool to keep the others in their place. Only those at politburo level – in local hierarchies as well as the Rebbe’s court – have access to all information . . . Full acceptance is conditional on how closely you toe the line.”

Gutnick laughs. Is he toeing the line in his role on a football club, he asks? Few, though, enjoyed access to the Rebbe like Joseph Isaac Gutnick, who, in the old man’s latter years, became his special emissary to Israel. Elsewhere on an office wall, Gutnick is pictured alongside the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Gutnick spent his earliest years in the Sydney suburb of Bondi. He came to Melbourne at six when his father was appointed rabbi at Elwood synagogue. The son thrived in a close-knit community whose rigid practices would frustrate another temperament.

A cousin, Mottel Gutnick, has written that this kind of upbringing in the 1960s gave him a love of Judaism and pride in his heritage but it became emotionally and intellectually stifling.

Mottel’sfather was also a rabbi. A year younger than Joseph, Mottel wrote television was viewed with suspicion. Topical issues such as the hanging of Ronald Ryan or Vietnam War protests had little impact compared with the outcry at the execution of an Israeli spy in Damascus.

Joseph Gutnick, on the other hand, believes his cousin presented their upbringing out of context. It was never possible in Melbourne to be quite so insulated, he says. He still worries about the adverse influence of TV.
Yes, there had been a wariness of universities but you could still achieve there. The separation of the sexes was partly to prevent distraction during prayer.

When Joseph was growing up, there was no question of dating, let alone premarital sex. His was an arranged marriage but one that did not take place against his wife’s will.
“I knew my wife as a young kid. I had an eye on her and she had an eye on me . . . Someone arranged that we should meet (but) if my wife wouldn’t have liked me, or I wouldn’t have liked her, we wouldn’t have married . . .”

FROM a long line of Hasidic rabbis ministering to congregations in cities as distant as London and Kiev, Gutnick is named after the Rebbe’s predecessor. He hesitates when discussing Schneerson.
“You’re talking about something very personal,” he cautions. “I still read his letters and his teachings and that I will do for the rest of my life.”

It is telling that, discussing faith, the talk invariably turns to the Rebbe, probably the best known contemporary in a line of holy men, or “tzaddikim”, in a renewal movement that made a virtue of the joyous, exuberance of chant, dance and the miraculous where others insisted on rigorous study of the written word.

Gutnick would have leapt over a cliff had his Rebbe so commanded him. He is confident he will never meet his like again. Such was the Rebbe’s stature, the movement has not sought a successor.

Gutnick says he has come to a level of faith developed over years of adherence to the teachings of the Rebbe. “I would follow him to the end of the earth,” he says. “I would listen to whatever he said . . . I knew, most importantly, that he was a man of God.”

There is a joke around town. The Rebbe comes to Joseph Gutnick in a dream. “Diamonds,” he tells Gutnick, “I said diamonds, not Demons.” Gutnick interrupts, laughing. He has heard it before.

Schneerson would quote a rabbi who had said: “The fortunes of man are like a turning wheel. He who sits atop the wheel and laughs is a fool, for should the wheel turn he may find himself lower than those at whom he was laughing.”

When the wheel turned after the stockmarket crash, Gutnick sought the Rebbe’s advice and was told he would find gold and diamonds.

To the collective sniggers of the financial community, he mounted a massive exploration program and discovered the Bronzewing gold deposit in Western Australia, regarded as among the most significant in Australia. He is still confident he will find diamonds.

Gutnick says that the Rebbe lived simply and had little use for the trappings of wealth. “He encouraged me to look for gold and diamonds because of the hope that good things would come of it.” It had enabled him to do charitable work, founding religious and other institutions in Israel and elsewhere.

Dov Baer, son of the sect founder, once wrote of an ultimate aspiration of faith. The more prayer, meditation and vision, the less the ego (or “yesh”). At the highest level, the ego dissolved and one lost oneself in the “ayin”, a Hebrew word that alludes to divine nothingness.

Gutnick restates this in simpler terms. He talks of a constant battle between desires of the body and soul, good and evil inclinations.

“He (Dov Baer) is saying, the more a person gets involved in spiritual matters, the less influence his bodily desires . . . the more a person stoops to materialism, the less effect the soul has.”

His is a tradition that neither encourages wealth nor poverty. The aim is not to be an ascetic hermit but to live in the world and seek the spiritual dimension in the mundane. To liberate divine sparks in any being or thing. Like rich gold deposits in the brown land.

The Sunday Age, 03-Nov-1996