Transcript
00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Rabbi David Wolpe, someone who I have been a fan
00:00:05 of for many years, for the kindness in his heart, the strength of his character, and
00:00:10 the kind of friends he keeps and talks with, many of whom disagree with him but love him
00:00:15 nevertheless, including the late Christopher Hitchens.
00:00:20 I will have many conversations like these in the future about religion, about Islam,
00:00:25 Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and others, looking to understand and celebrate
00:00:31 the culture, the tradition, and the beauty of the people who practice these religions.
00:00:36 I will of course not shy away from the difficult topics.
00:00:39 I will talk both about hate and love, about war and peace.
00:00:46 This conversation was recorded more than three weeks ago.
00:00:50 Please allow me this time to speak on what has been on my mind.
00:00:54 If this is not interesting to you, please skip, I totally understand.
00:01:00 Some people asked me to say a few words on the war in Ukraine.
00:01:04 I think my words are worth little, but perhaps let me try.
00:01:09 I considered doing a long solo episode on this war.
00:01:13 I tried several times, but it is too personal for now.
00:01:18 To give you context, I’ve been talking to refugees, friends, loved ones, in Ukraine,
00:01:23 in Russia, in Poland, Slovakia, Moldova, Romania, even UK, Germany, Canada, India, China, and
00:01:30 of course the United States.
00:01:33 Some of them crying, or angry, or confused, or scared.
00:01:40 I’m helping as best as I can privately, and I’m hoping to help in the future by traveling
00:01:46 to Ukraine and Russia and celebrating the humanity and the beauty of the people in this
00:01:51 region.
00:01:53 This was all set up both for Ukraine and Russia trips before 2022, including conversations
00:01:59 with scientists, artists, athletes, leaders, and just, quote, regular folks, who are equally
00:02:07 if not more fascinating to me.
00:02:10 For now, it has become much more difficult, but I’ll keep trying to find a way.
00:02:16 I was born in the Soviet Union.
00:02:18 My roots are both Ukrainian and Russian.
00:02:22 From today and until the day I die, I am an American.
00:02:26 I’m proud of all of this.
00:02:29 I hope to keep celebrating the culture and the incredible human beings that make up these
00:02:33 nations and humanity as a whole.
00:02:36 We’re all one people.
00:02:37 We’re in this together.
00:02:38 That’s how I feel about the people of these nations.
00:02:42 Now let me speak about those in the seats of power.
00:02:47 I condemn all actions of leaders who play geopolitical games on the world stage disregarding
00:02:53 the costs paid in human suffering on the scale of millions.
00:02:59 For this reason, I condemn Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
00:03:05 And I condemn many of the military interventions by the superpowers of the world, including
00:03:11 by my country, the country I love, the United States, that after World War II has intervened
00:03:19 in over 40 nations with many studies finding that the United States is culpable for an
00:03:24 unfathomable number of civilian deaths.
00:03:28 I condemn all heads of state who needlessly wage wars, watching young men and women burn
00:03:35 in the fires they started.
00:03:37 I don’t understand how humans can be so cruel to each other, or rather I understand, but
00:03:43 I believe in a future world where this is no longer true.
00:03:47 Let me also say a few words of what I hope to do with this podcast.
00:03:53 I want to explore the full complexity and beauty of human nature.
00:03:56 I believe each of us are capable of good and evil, and I want to understand how the mind
00:04:02 and the circumstance lead one to choose the former path or the latter.
00:04:08 And I believe conversation is one of the best ways to work toward this understanding.
00:04:13 For that, I think I have to not only talk to the most inspiring humans in the world,
00:04:18 but also to the most controversial.
00:04:20 I will speak with many people who I disagree with, politicians, activists, CEOs, heads
00:04:26 of state, with very different opinions on the world.
00:04:31 I will try hard to challenge their ideas without closing my mind to the depth and complexity
00:04:37 of their perspective and their humanity.
00:04:40 My presence in the same room with wildly different people will make it easy for the media and
00:04:46 the internet to pick and choose clips and snapshots attacking me for being a shill for
00:04:51 one side or the other.
00:04:54 I can’t defend this point, except to say that I’m a shill for no one, and that I
00:04:59 hope you see the strength of my integrity, that I won’t be influenced by any of them
00:05:04 no matter how rich, powerful, or charismatic they are.
00:05:08 Like the poem If by Roger Kipling says, if you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
00:05:14 or walk with kings, nor lose the common touch, if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt
00:05:20 you, if all men count with you, but none too much.
00:05:25 This is a really, really important thing to me that I try to live by, that all human beings
00:05:30 count with me the same.
00:05:32 People have criticized me for wanting to have some of these conversations, like with Vladimir
00:05:36 Putin and Vladimir Zelensky, and for times in the past speaking about them without the
00:05:43 seriousness the topic deserves.
00:05:45 For this, I would sincerely like to apologize.
00:05:49 I’m disappointed, even ashamed, of my frequent ineloquence on these topics.
00:05:54 I will work hard to do better.
00:05:57 When I’m joking, it should be clear that it’s a joke, and hopefully actually funny.
00:06:02 When I’m being serious, I should speak with care and rigor.
00:06:07 I’ve now done many hundreds of hours of podcast conversation.
00:06:11 Despite my frequent failures in speaking, I hope you know where my heart is.
00:06:15 Unfortunately, I think people will take clips of me and use them to attack me.
00:06:20 This will happen more and more.
00:06:21 I guess there’s nothing I can do but send them my love, and in the meantime, try to
00:06:26 be a better person and a better interviewer.
00:06:29 Let me also say that I like humor, especially dark humor.
00:06:34 I like being silly and not taking myself seriously.
00:06:38 I will keep taking risks with that, all with the goal of having fun and celebrating humanity
00:06:44 at its most absurd and most beautiful.
00:06:46 I will occasionally dress up in strange and weird outfits to celebrate the absurdity of
00:06:52 life.
00:06:53 I will hang out, break bread, and joke with all kinds of people.
00:06:57 I don’t have to agree with them to laugh with them, in order to escape for a brief
00:07:01 moment the tension, the conflict, the hatred in the world.
00:07:05 Humor just might save this little chaotic little civilization of ours.
00:07:10 I love the Ukrainian people.
00:07:12 I love the Russian people.
00:07:15 And of course, I love my fellow Americans, Californians and Midwesterners, New Yorkers
00:07:21 and Texans.
00:07:22 I love humans.
00:07:23 I love life.
00:07:24 And I want to share that love with others.
00:07:28 With you.
00:07:29 If I mess it up, I’m really, really sorry.
00:07:32 I’m trying my best.
00:07:33 I have no agenda and no one telling me what to do.
00:07:36 I feel like the luckiest guy in the world to have all these opportunities, and I’m
00:07:40 deeply grateful to be alive and to share that joy with other amazing people around me.
00:07:46 Thank you for your support.
00:07:48 For all the love you’ve sent my way, I will work my ass off to not disappoint you.
00:07:53 I love you all.
00:07:55 This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
00:07:57 To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
00:08:01 And now, here’s my conversation with David Welby.
00:08:06 Let’s start with a big question.
00:08:07 According to Judaism, who is God?
00:08:10 It’s difficult because Judaism, like any tradition that is thousands of years old and encompasses
00:08:17 so many different lands and languages and thinkers, it doesn’t give a single answer
00:08:23 to even simple questions.
00:08:25 And to large questions, it certainly doesn’t give a single answer.
00:08:28 Although Judaism was responsible for introducing the monotheistic idea to the world, it doesn’t
00:08:33 mean that it’s one idea.
00:08:35 So if you take Maimonides, the greatest sage in the Jewish tradition, a medieval philosopher,
00:08:43 he would say that God is an omnipotent, benevolent, intangible, unimaginable God.
00:08:49 In fact, he said, you can’t say what God is, only what God is not, because you have
00:08:53 to emphasize, could talk more about that, but basically you have to emphasize the unknowability
00:08:59 of God.
00:09:00 You have a modern philosopher like Heschel, who says that God is a God of pathos, a God
00:09:05 of deep feeling, which probably would make Maimonides shiver if he heard such a description.
00:09:12 And if you look in the Bible, God is always regretting or having human emotions.
00:09:19 So there are so many different kinds of depictions and ideas, and there is this tremendous tension
00:09:24 between transcendence and imminence.
00:09:27 That is, in the Jewish tradition, God is exquisitely close, God is imminent.
00:09:33 In the Talmud’s words, God is as close as your mouth is to your ear.
00:09:38 In other words, whatever you say, God hears it.
00:09:40 And yet at the same time, God is unfathomably distant.
00:09:45 Sometimes when I speak to high schoolers, I will say, in the Jewish tradition, think
00:09:50 of it this way.
00:09:52 When you were two years old, you had no idea what it was to be a 15 year old.
00:09:56 Not only did you not know, but you didn’t know what you didn’t know.
00:10:02 We conceive of God as being more, the distance between God and human beings is far greater
00:10:07 than the distance between a two year old and a 15 year old.
00:10:10 So when we speak about God, we have to acknowledge how limited we really are.
00:10:15 So okay, you laid out a lot of fascinating things on the table.
00:10:18 So one, the nobility of God, then this idea of deep feeling, which again, can God operate
00:10:27 in the space of feelings too, so not just the mouth and the ear of the senses, can God
00:10:33 be known?
00:10:35 Can God be felt by this three year old in the analogy versus the teenager?
00:10:44 So I will take refuge in a beautiful phrase from Martin Buber, another Jewish theologian.
00:10:49 He said, God cannot be expressed, God can only be addressed.
00:10:53 In other words, you can speak to God, you can feel a sense of God, but can you begin
00:10:59 to comprehend or know God?
00:11:01 No.
00:11:02 Yosef Kaspi, I’m pulling in a couple of early Jewish philosophers, he said, to know God,
00:11:07 I would have to be God.
00:11:08 But can we get close?
00:11:12 Is it useful or is it a distraction to visualize things, to embody, to create, to attach to
00:11:20 the stories some kind of visualizations in our mind?
00:11:24 For example, gender, he versus she, things like this, or old man in the sky kind of feeling.
00:11:31 So it’s almost inevitable, but I think ultimately you try to transcend it.
00:11:36 This was the great, we just read this actually in synagogue, the story of the golden calf.
00:11:43 And the story is that human beings found it impossible to not have a visualization because
00:11:51 they had just come from Egypt and in the world of pagan worship, everything is…
00:11:58 It’s not that pagans thought that idol was actually God, but it represented visually
00:12:02 what God was.
00:12:04 And along comes this idea that God is actually not capable of being visualized, which is
00:12:11 very difficult and it stretches the bounds of human comprehension, maybe even breaks
00:12:17 them.
00:12:18 So would you say that the proper way to operate as a human in relation to God is humility
00:12:26 in that you’re screwed, you’re not able to basically know anything, almost anything?
00:12:31 Well, the reason that the salvation of this is that you can’t, I was going to say the
00:12:39 reason you’re not screwed, but then I thought somebody might be upset at a rabbi saying
00:12:43 that.
00:12:44 So I didn’t say it and have not said it.
00:12:47 But the reason you’re not is that you don’t have to have a comprehension of God.
00:12:55 You have to have a relationship to God and those are not the same.
00:12:59 I mean, to draw an analogy that is not far from perfect as most analogies are, but this
00:13:06 one especially, you have relationships with people who are mysteries to you.
00:13:10 You’re a mystery to yourself.
00:13:13 You can live and love somebody for 50 years and they can say something that surprises
00:13:17 you because ultimately we are trapped in here.
00:13:21 And when a child first says I, we call that individuation.
00:13:25 But what that really means is I now know that I am cut off from the minds of all other children
00:13:33 and all other people.
00:13:36 And so you have with God a more intimate relationship because you can believe that God is, you are
00:13:45 known by God and you have a relationship to God despite the fact that you can’t know
00:13:50 God just as you can’t know others.
00:13:52 And some would say to have a good relationship, you want to be constantly surprised.
00:13:57 Right.
00:13:58 You don’t want to know the thing.
00:13:59 Well, the world, yes, the world that God created is constantly surprising.
00:14:02 And by the way, the caveat to this, you know, when I had all these debates with Christopher
00:14:06 Hitchens and he would always say that God is a greater tyrant than North Korea because
00:14:10 it continues after your death.
00:14:13 And the idea of being known by God is after all frightening if you think God knows what
00:14:17 I think and so on, if your image of God is unloving.
00:14:22 Can we jump to this?
00:14:23 You had friendships and conversations with a lot of the fascinating figures of the past
00:14:28 20, 30 years of the great intellectuals, one of which perhaps one of the greats is Christopher
00:14:36 Hitchens.
00:14:37 What have you learned from your conversation, your friendship?
00:14:42 So there are a lot of views he held that I really did not agree with, but he was a remarkable
00:14:47 person.
00:14:48 That was a good line about North Korea.
00:14:49 He was full of incredibly good lines.
00:14:51 Well, one of the things I learned was you can’t win a debate with Christopher Hitchens.
00:14:54 One of the reasons you can’t win is because he has this British baritone and this ready
00:14:59 wit that you can’t triumph over laughter.
00:15:06 It doesn’t matter if your argument is better, if your quip is better, you win.
00:15:10 And so I remember once we were arguing about free will and he said, well, I choose to believe
00:15:14 in it.
00:15:15 And everybody laughed and that was despite the fact that that’s not really an argument.
00:15:20 Or like I have free will because I don’t have a choice or whatever.
00:15:24 Exactly.
00:15:25 And people should watch your conversation with him.
00:15:26 It’s great.
00:15:27 I mean, it’s a kind of David versus Goliath situation and you’re quite masterful at using
00:15:35 charisma and sweet talking Christopher Hitchens.
00:15:37 I also genuinely liked him.
00:15:39 I mean, I spent a three hour limousine ride with him from one debate to another, from
00:15:47 LA to San Diego.
00:15:49 And the entire time he said, we just can’t talk about religion.
00:15:53 So we talked about literature and he gave me a long lecture about scotch.
00:15:59 He was inexhaustible.
00:16:02 I mean, not only did he, I began, I wrote a couple of obituaries about him and one I
00:16:06 began with the historian Keith Thomas said, there are two ways of achieving immortality
00:16:12 by doing things worth remembering or saying things worth remembering.
00:16:16 And by that standard, he did both.
00:16:17 I mean, he went all around the world to all sorts of danger zones.
00:16:21 He knew like the best bars everywhere from Kuala Lumpur, you know, to Beirut, to LA.
00:16:28 And he could drink all night and write a 2000 word essay on the poetry of Yates and go to
00:16:35 sleep.
00:16:36 I remember before one of our debates in Boston, he was at the bar and he said, come have a
00:16:41 drink.
00:16:42 And I said, I’m not going to have a drink before I go to debate with you.
00:16:44 What are you crazy?
00:16:45 And he said, just have a beer, it’s water.
00:16:49 So he was, he really was a constant, inexhaustible fountain of intrigue and interest.
00:16:59 What kind of things, if you can remember, if you can mention, if you can admit, to have
00:17:04 him enlightening you or helping you change your mind about something in this world.
00:17:10 So I think, unrelated to Scotch, yeah, unrelated to Scotch.
00:17:15 He convinced me that the idea, I mean, I had my doubts about it and have my doubts about
00:17:23 it, but he convinced me through many debates and not only he, that the idea that religion
00:17:27 makes people better is not, it’s not ipso facto wrong, but it’s a much, much more complicated
00:17:36 argument than I wished it to be.
00:17:39 So he is, however you conceive of the term beauty, he’s one of those, one of the more
00:17:47 beautiful humans, this weird little earth produced.
00:17:53 So how do you explain the atheism combined with such a beautiful mind?
00:18:00 So from your perspective of a man of faith, how do you think about that?
00:18:07 So of the atheists that I have debated, I think about all of them somewhat differently.
00:18:17 So I think that in some deep way, for example, Sam Harris is a religious personality.
00:18:22 I don’t even think that he would, he wouldn’t like the word religious, but I don’t even
00:18:25 think that he would take issue with that.
00:18:29 I think that he would say his is a purely material based spirituality.
00:18:34 But I mean, his orientation towards meditation and appreciation of Buddhism, there’s something
00:18:39 deeply seeking spiritual about him.
00:18:44 With Hitchens, I honestly, and I know that some of his fans will really not like this.
00:18:51 It’s not that he was any kind of closet believer, certainly not at all, but I almost feel as
00:18:57 though he was less a passionate arguer against religion than he was, first of all, extremely
00:19:04 upset by the forms that religion took in this world.
00:19:08 And then once he trained his intellectual howitzers on a target, he had so much fun
00:19:15 inventing new arguments and attacking it that I really believe he gets carried away sometimes
00:19:23 by his own eloquence and intellectual range.
00:19:28 So for example, the idea that you would call a book that religion poisons everything, I
00:19:34 think he did that deliberately provocatively so that he could defend a proposition that
00:19:38 obviously is indefensible, that it poisons everything.
00:19:42 So I don’t know, I think he had tremendous joie de vivre.
00:19:48 That’s really what, that’s what sums him up.
00:19:49 This guy loved life in all of its manifestations and arguing against something that someone
00:19:56 else believed was one of his greatest joys.
00:19:58 Yeah, and of course the practical aspect of that, he just saw the powerful and he challenged
00:20:03 them with humor and so on.
00:20:05 Absolutely.
00:20:06 And you know, you could argue perhaps that humor is the highest form of what humanity
00:20:10 can achieve.
00:20:11 Like sometimes maybe us little humans take things a little too seriously, then sometimes
00:20:16 we need to just laugh at it all, laugh at ourselves, and that’s probably the purest
00:20:20 form of wisdom.
00:20:21 You know, Auden, the poet, said, among the people that I like or admire, I can find no
00:20:26 common quality, but among those I love, I can.
00:20:29 All of them make me laugh.
00:20:31 There you have it.
00:20:32 Yeah.
00:20:33 Speaking of people that make you laugh, Sam Harris, because he actually has a really great
00:20:38 sense of humor.
00:20:39 He does.
00:20:40 With a very cold and monotone delivery.
00:20:43 He’s another one that you had, you’re friends with, you have good conversations with.
00:20:51 What’s your fundamental disagreements and agreements with Sam?
00:20:54 Sam believes that religion is intellectually indefensible.
00:20:58 He really believes it, like deep in his soul.
00:21:03 And he gets angry at the idea that a proposition should be unchallenged if it offends his sense
00:21:11 of logic.
00:21:13 So he cannot move on until this is dealt with.
00:21:16 Nope.
00:21:17 In fact, I did a podcast with Eric Weinstein, and then Sam did one.
00:21:23 And Sam said, when I heard your podcast with David Wolpe, I learned stuff about what he
00:21:28 thinks that I never learned in my conversations with him because I can never let him make
00:21:32 those unfounded assertions without challenging them, and you just let them go.
00:21:36 And I think that there was something to that was like, he finds it hard to have a conversation
00:21:42 about religion that doesn’t arouse his real ire about the harm that he thinks religion
00:21:51 does in the world.
00:21:52 So it’s more about the implementation of religion in the world as it is versus the
00:21:56 really fundamental…
00:21:58 I think he also thinks it’s fundamentally intellectually shoddy and disreputable.
00:22:03 Faith.
00:22:04 Yeah, faith.
00:22:05 I don’t know how to put this.
00:22:07 I mean, they’re both capable of separating their contempt for religion from the people
00:22:13 that they have sitting in front of them.
00:22:15 You mean Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris?
00:22:18 Yes.
00:22:19 Both of them.
00:22:20 Okay.
00:22:21 So let me…
00:22:22 You mentioned Eric Weinstein.
00:22:23 People should listen to your conversation with Eric.
00:22:24 It’s a fascinating one.
00:22:25 It’s great.
00:22:26 It’s nonstandard.
00:22:27 It just goes all over the place in this humor and wit.
00:22:30 It’s great.
00:22:31 There’s one interesting aspect that I also learned, perhaps not about you but about Eric,
00:22:36 about both.
00:22:37 But Eric has a similar thing as with Jordan Peterson, which is if you ask them, do they
00:22:44 believe in God, I think the answer…
00:22:48 They’re not comfortable answering that question, or they might say no, but they’re usually
00:22:52 just not comfortable answering that question.
00:22:54 But there’s a kind of sense that they would like to live life, a religious life, as if
00:23:01 God exists.
00:23:02 I think that’s exactly right.
00:23:03 I think, first of all, Eric has a really deep appreciation of the Jewish tradition.
00:23:08 I don’t know Peterson.
00:23:09 I’ve read his stuff and I’ve reviewed his stuff and so on.
00:23:12 But I think that Jungians are in their very approach.
00:23:19 They believe that myth is the way the world works.
00:23:23 And so it’s not that big a leap to God, but there’s still a distance there.
00:23:29 Is it possible to have your cake and eat it too?
00:23:32 Is it possible to have the depth of a religious life without believing in God?
00:23:39 How do you make sense of Eric Weinstein’s devout life within the tradition?
00:23:46 I honestly think he believes in God, but doesn’t believe in God and it’s oscillating like it’s
00:23:51 a quantum mechanical system of some sort.
00:23:54 Schrodinger’s God.
00:23:56 So I think that he would probably agree with what Elie Wiesel said, that a Jew can be angry
00:24:02 at God or be disbelieving of God, but is not allowed to be indifferent to God.
00:24:07 And I think Eric’s not indifferent to God.
00:24:11 And it’s different than Christianity.
00:24:13 I’ve had this conversation many times because you can be very Jewish and have deep doubts
00:24:22 about theological questions because Judaism isn’t a religion, it’s a religious family.
00:24:29 And so you’re born Jewish.
00:24:31 Like if I said to you tomorrow, if I was Christian and I said, oh, I believe in Jesus today and
00:24:36 then tomorrow I didn’t, I’m not Christian anymore.
00:24:38 But if tomorrow I said, oh, I don’t believe all this stuff, I’m still Jewish.
00:24:42 So it’s a more complicated system.
00:24:46 Having said that though, I think it’s very hard to sustain over generations without some
00:24:54 belief that the source of it is beyond ourselves.
00:24:57 And in that sense, as in many others, Eric is unique.
00:25:01 Well, he was actually making that claim that we need faith to propagate this tradition
00:25:10 through the generations.
00:25:12 So without that, the traditions crumble.
00:25:14 It’s a very interesting idea and very interesting argument for devout faith, which is it’s a
00:25:22 thing, it’s a glue that holds a tradition together.
00:25:25 Otherwise like traditions fall apart because you can’t have the intensity of that tradition.
00:25:31 I mean, on the other hand, you do see tradition, I mean, Thanksgiving, one of my favorite.
00:25:36 So I would say traditions that are demanding fall apart, traditions that require Turkey
00:25:42 might not fall apart, but traditions that make demands of you that are countercultural
00:25:47 or are hard, they fall apart.
00:25:50 I think I need to introduce you to some Thanksgiving dinners that are quite demanding, getting
00:25:55 the family together.
00:25:56 You know, there’s a, first of all, I’m a vegetarian, so I’m tough to have at Thanksgiving dinner,
00:26:02 but there’s a comedian, Cathy Landsman, who one year I heard this on the radio and it
00:26:07 stuck with me.
00:26:08 She said that holidays are a chance to renew your resentments afresh, you know, and that’s
00:26:13 basically what people do with their families.
00:26:15 It’s like, I’m going to go home and fight with the uncle again this year.
00:26:20 I apologize to take a dark turn, but you mentioned Elie Wiesel.
00:26:25 I recently saw a picture of Elie Wiesel when he was in the camp, when he was liberated.
00:26:32 For some reason that hit hard, like, you know, I’ve seen pictures in concentration camps
00:26:39 of people I don’t know or whose words I haven’t really felt and gone through, but for some
00:26:46 reason like here’s just a normal person, like a normal body laying there, that just, that
00:26:54 was him.
00:26:55 I’ve seen it.
00:26:56 It’s a, and, and you see, you can see his face, but at the same time you see that this
00:27:02 is an amazing, and I think what’s so disturbing about it is exactly what you were saying is
00:27:07 I’ve seen a thousand people like this and I know this one and I know what he became.
00:27:12 So what about all those other people who look exactly like him who didn’t make it out of
00:27:18 the camp?
00:27:19 I don’t see his projection, but it seemed like this perhaps is also just combining with
00:27:25 man’s search for meaning is it seemed like it was a regular day for them in the picture.
00:27:32 It didn’t seem like, I mean, I’m not sure what I expect to see what suffering looks like,
00:27:38 but it’s almost like there’s no celebration.
00:27:41 I’ve never seen a picture of actually liberation be celebratory.
00:27:45 It’s true.
00:27:46 It’s really true.
00:27:47 So what do you make sense, and I apologize to take a step into that moment in history.
00:27:53 How does, how do you make sense of the Holocaust that, of Nazi Germany that such things could
00:28:03 be committed by human beings to each other?
00:28:07 Is it religion?
00:28:09 Is it the thirst for power?
00:28:13 Is it the madness of crowds somehow carrying us forward?
00:28:18 I mean, for me it’s multi causal.
00:28:21 I don’t think there’s one reason.
00:28:22 So one of the things especially there has to do with the special nature of antisemitism,
00:28:27 which is let’s put that to one side for the moment.
00:28:30 The second is I think human beings are fundamentally split.
00:28:34 They are mostly good except when put under certain pressures.
00:28:38 My first explanation for hatreds is as follows, go to a playground.
00:28:43 What happens when a new kid comes on the playground?
00:28:45 Do the other kids say, oh, let’s go share our toys with the new kid?
00:28:49 No.
00:28:50 They say, oh, who’s that stranger and let’s go get them because otherness is built into
00:28:56 our genetic, I mean, we’re tribal by nature and we see people form tribes all the time
00:29:03 of different kinds.
00:29:06 I asked you before if you were a chess player and when I was a kid and playing in tournaments
00:29:13 and I didn’t do it for that long and I didn’t do it that well, but when I was, it was like
00:29:17 the whole world was divided into people who could play chess and people who couldn’t play
00:29:20 chess, which is ridiculous if you think about it as though that’s the way you divide the
00:29:25 world.
00:29:26 But we tend to do that and the Jews were always the identifiable other.
00:29:31 There were Frenchmen and Jews, there were Russians and Jews, there were Germans and
00:29:34 Jews and the great blessing of America is that there’s no identifiable other quite that
00:29:40 way is that there’s all these minorities and no, there’s not an American and a something.
00:29:49 But once you have that identifiable other and you have a long history of blaming that
00:29:55 identifiable other for all the ills that befall you.
00:29:58 Of course, people still do try to form, you said America, they still try to form other,
00:30:02 I mean, immigrant versus been here for a generation.
00:30:07 There’s so many ways to slice it.
00:30:09 We still try to find ways.
00:30:11 It’s just more difficult in America because there’s so many sub tribes, hierarchies of
00:30:15 tribes and upon tribes.
00:30:16 You’re absolutely right.
00:30:17 And I was moving fast because I didn’t want to get bogged down in all the very difficult.
00:30:23 It’s true.
00:30:24 I tried.
00:30:25 You’re hoping I wouldn’t mention that tribalism happens in America.
00:30:27 Skating, you know, when you’re on thin ice, your safety is in your speed.
00:30:33 So I was trying to move fast.
00:30:35 But for most of history in Eastern Western Europe, not obviously in the, in Asia, but
00:30:41 in Eastern Western Europe, Jews were the ones who like, they’re not like us.
00:30:46 They’re clearly not like us.
00:30:49 And so, and in addition, there was, there’s a peculiar quality and I don’t know, I wonder
00:30:54 what you’ll think of this explanation.
00:30:56 There’s a peculiar quality to antisemitism that is unlike any other hatred that I know
00:31:00 of, which is Jews are both superhuman and subhuman.
00:31:05 They’re vermin.
00:31:06 The Nazis thought of them as vermin and yet they control the world.
00:31:10 And there was an English scholar named Hyman Maccabee who said the reason that that’s
00:31:15 so is the myth that Jews killed God.
00:31:19 They killed Jesus and to kill a God, you have to be superhumanly evil.
00:31:24 You can’t just be bad, otherwise you can’t kill a God.
00:31:27 So there is some like supercharged evil sense that people got from that about Jews that
00:31:35 still in here.
00:31:36 Yeah, that’s true.
00:31:38 A lot of the way we formulate the other in terms of tribes is often they’re subhuman
00:31:44 and they’re here to steal our resources, like on the playground.
00:31:48 But to be both is a fascinating construction.
00:31:54 Do you agree with Solzhenitsyn that all of us have the capacity for evil?
00:31:58 A hundred percent runs through every human heart.
00:32:01 I have no doubt about it.
00:32:03 And I know as you probably do, but I probably know more both because of what I do and because
00:32:09 I have lived a lot longer than you.
00:32:12 I know a lot of religious leaders who people thought or think are above the human and they
00:32:19 are emphatically not.
00:32:21 They’re not.
00:32:22 Some of them have done horrible things and they’ve used their position to do horrible
00:32:26 things.
00:32:28 And it’s because there is no perfect saint.
00:32:32 There’s no, you know, I mean, all through history you discover all these saintly characters
00:32:38 that we worship, the people who actually knew them around them, some liked them and some
00:32:42 didn’t.
00:32:44 People are complicated, all of us.
00:32:46 And the tough thing is, the thing that’s the toughest for me is it’s not very always clear
00:32:51 what is good and what is evil.
00:32:55 Because certainly if you just look at history and it’s not always propaganda, I, you know,
00:33:02 I really believe that some part of Stalin thought he was doing good, legitimately.
00:33:12 And it makes you ask a question of yourself.
00:33:16 For those of us who want to do good in the world, am I actually doing good?
00:33:20 And that’s a really difficult question, like in the technology sphere, for example, in
00:33:25 this dream of creating technology that will do some good, am I actually doing good?
00:33:30 So I have a question about that myself.
00:33:32 Not about Stalin.
00:33:33 I’m sure that Stalin thought so.
00:33:35 Stalin does not strike me from what I know of him as somebody given to a lot of self
00:33:39 doubt.
00:33:40 But the question with AI to me is actually, it goes back to the God question, which is,
00:33:46 if we have an appreciation of the limitations of our own intelligence, that we know that
00:33:53 just like we can only hear certain things and see certain colors, how much of the world
00:34:00 is inaccessible to us because of the way our brains are constructed, how can we possibly
00:34:06 have any confidence that we can create things that in certain ways are far more intelligent
00:34:12 than we are and control them the way we think is best, seems to me a hubris that might end
00:34:19 up being destructive.
00:34:21 Definitely.
00:34:22 Well, any sentence with the word hubris in it is going to end badly when implemented
00:34:28 at scale.
00:34:30 But there is also beauty.
00:34:32 So if you approach it with humility, there is a sense, I don’t want to over romanticize
00:34:37 it, but there is a legged robot right behind you, which is hilarious.
00:34:43 So there’s a magic, I don’t have kids, I would love to have kids.
00:34:51 But there’s a magic to bringing robots to life that it feels like you are a mini God,
00:34:59 because you just breathe life into an entity that operates in this world, especially when
00:35:04 they have legs and they move in this way, that’s in the case of the four legged robots,
00:35:10 like a dog that I think, I don’t think I’m over romanticizing it.
00:35:15 The feeling is like you would with a child.
00:35:17 You just gave birth like, holy crap, this is a living thing.
00:35:21 I wonder what he or she are thinking about.
00:35:24 By the way, I’m not at all insensible to how remarkable it must feel to create that.
00:35:29 I’m actually worried in part about how remarkable it feels to create that because to maintain
00:35:34 humility and perspective when it’s such a fantastic thing is what’s difficult.
00:35:42 And I think also because creativity is both part of what it is to be human and it’s very
00:35:50 much part of the legacy of Western civilization and the legacy of having a creator God.
00:35:56 If you have a tradition where God is known primarily through what God creates, so the
00:36:02 first debate I ever had since we talked about humor and God and creating, let me give you
00:36:06 my one God creating joke.
00:36:09 Because the first debate I ever had on religion and science was with Stephen Jay Gould and
00:36:14 it was wonderful because he had a deep interest in religion and his interest was actually
00:36:18 not to say religion is terrible.
00:36:22 But I started with this joke and I think it made the debate go a little bit easier.
00:36:28 So the time has come when human beings can do everything that God can do and a scientist
00:36:33 looks up at heaven and says, God, look, you were great in your day and we thank you for
00:36:37 everything you did, but now we don’t need you.
00:36:39 And God says, really, you don’t need me?
00:36:40 He says, no, we can do everything you did.
00:36:42 God says, everything?
00:36:44 And the human being says, yeah, we can do everything.
00:36:46 God says, okay, can you create a human being?
00:36:49 And the scientist goes, yeah.
00:36:51 God says, from dirt?
00:36:52 And the scientist goes, yeah.
00:36:53 He says, okay, let me see.
00:36:54 The scientist reaches down, scoops up some dirt and God says, uh, uh, uh, get your own
00:36:58 dirt.
00:37:02 But the idea is that a creator God impels us to create too.
00:37:05 But let me bring up Nietzsche, who proclaimed that God is dead.
00:37:10 Is belief in God slowly disappearing from our world, do you think?
00:37:14 And what kind of impact does that have on society?
00:37:18 You wrote that religion is not our enemy.
00:37:21 Before the Western faiths captured the heart of our world, there was cruelty, carnage,
00:37:25 and destruction.
00:37:26 In the 20th century, when religion ceased to be a force of international politics, the
00:37:31 scale of human slaughter was far beyond anything human beings have ever known.
00:37:36 What is the world like when we take religion out of it?
00:37:39 I mean, I think Nietzsche was largely right.
00:37:41 You know, it wasn’t a statement about God.
00:37:44 It was a statement about God’s presence in the world.
00:37:49 And I think that that’s largely true, that God is not a force in a lot of Western society.
00:37:57 And I believe that if the force of nihilism has no clear counter without an idea that
00:38:06 we’re all here for a purpose and that our lives are inherently meaningful and that there’s
00:38:13 a God who wishes us to be better.
00:38:17 So I worry a lot about it, and I think that the sort of optimism that things are just
00:38:22 going to get better and better is what one philosopher called cut flower ethics.
00:38:28 That is, we’re still living off the morals that religion gave us, but now that they’re
00:38:32 separate from the soil that gave birth to them, I see them wilting.
00:38:36 So this kind of optimism for the future of human civilization, you think, is in part
00:38:41 grounded in a religious society.
00:38:45 I really do believe that.
00:38:46 I mean, it was religion that the Greeks look back at the golden age of the past.
00:38:49 It was the Jews who said, no, the golden age is in the future, right?
00:38:53 It’s the Messiah.
00:38:54 And I think that that idea that we’re moving towards something better, which I really believe
00:39:00 humanity can do and absent destroying ourselves will do, you know, I mean, I’m very excited
00:39:08 about the technology that I won’t live to see.
00:39:10 I think it’s fantastic.
00:39:12 And that excitement is a kind of religious excitement because there’s a reason to preserve
00:39:16 this whole thing.
00:39:17 Absolutely.
00:39:18 Because I really think, I know this sounds absurdly anthropomorphic, but I really think
00:39:23 God is cheering us on.
00:39:25 I feel like this is why we’re here.
00:39:27 We’re here to grow in soul and to grow each other in soul.
00:39:35 Yeah.
00:39:37 So what do you think the world, so if you just think of this force of nihilism that’s
00:39:42 contending with the force of faith based optimism, what do you make of the atrocities in the
00:39:52 20th century?
00:39:54 Do you think at its core, it’s part of human nature and has nothing to do with religion
00:40:02 or not religion?
00:40:03 Or do you think you can assign this kind of nihilistic view of the world?
00:40:07 I think it has to do with a religion that doesn’t make ethical demands.
00:40:12 That is, for Stalin and for Hitler, they both had religions, in a sense, but they were religions
00:40:20 that didn’t make ethical demands for the other.
00:40:23 I mean, 36 times the Torah talks about the stranger.
00:40:27 The point is, it’s trying to educate people away from their natural inclination towards
00:40:33 distrusting and disliking the other.
00:40:36 And it’s a lot of work that’s really difficult to do.
00:40:40 But if you have a tribal passion and not a universal ethic, then you’re in trouble.
00:40:50 Well, the Jewish tribe is a very strong tribe.
00:40:54 So how do you make sense of this mention of the stranger versus the power of the tribe,
00:41:00 which is the whole point, not the point, but the mechanism of tradition propagates the
00:41:04 tribe.
00:41:05 So it’s both.
00:41:06 I mean, the Torah does not start with Jews.
00:41:10 It starts with Adam and Eve.
00:41:12 That’s a way of saying, yeah, this is going to be a story about a people, but understand
00:41:16 that prior to a kind of people, there are people.
00:41:20 I’m a human being before I’m a Jew.
00:41:24 And in fact, the Jewish New Year, the Muslim New Year starts with Muhammad’s journey.
00:41:30 And the Christian New Year starts with Jesus’s birth.
00:41:33 The Jewish New Year starts with the creation of the world because the idea is, yes, this
00:41:38 is a particularist tradition, but it makes a universal statement, which is all of humanity
00:41:44 is a child, are in the image of God, are children of God.
00:41:49 I think that the idea of Judaism was to try to exemplify a certain way of making that
00:41:57 statement over and over again.
00:41:59 And I want to say one other thing about chosenness that’s very name droppy, but when I tell
00:42:04 you how I got there, it won’t be as name droppy.
00:42:07 So my brother is a professor at Emory.
00:42:11 And so is the Dalai Lama actually teaches at Emory, although he no longer does because
00:42:15 he’s too old to go to Emory, but for many years taught at Emory.
00:42:18 And so my brother brought us, he’s the head of the bio of the ethics center at Emory.
00:42:23 He’s a bioethicist.
00:42:24 So he brought a bunch of students to Dharamsala to meet with the Dalai Lama.
00:42:28 So I went to India, I was on sabbatical then anyway, I met my brother there and we had
00:42:33 a chance to meet with the Dalai Lama.
00:42:34 Okay.
00:42:35 That was the name drop.
00:42:36 So we’re sitting in the, before he speaks to the students, he was speaking to us, but
00:42:40 not because I just wanted to make it clear, not because he said, oh, I got to talk to
00:42:43 that rabbi.
00:42:44 We just happened to be, I happened to glom along with my brother.
00:42:48 We sit down.
00:42:49 The first thing he says is he points at me and says, what’s this about the chosen people
00:42:53 anyway?
00:42:54 So, and he had, by the way, he had asked that I give a lecture, which I did later to, to
00:43:00 them, to his monks about how Jews survived in the diaspora.
00:43:03 So it’s not like he doesn’t know about Judaism.
00:43:05 He knows a lot about it, but he says to me right away with, so I said, yes, Jews believe
00:43:09 that they were chosen for a certain mission in this world, but that doesn’t mean other
00:43:13 people weren’t chosen for other sorts of things.
00:43:16 They certainly, I mean, it seems to me that other people believe they’re chosen for things
00:43:19 too.
00:43:20 They burst out laughing and said, yeah, we also think we’re chosen.
00:43:24 So I think it’s universal.
00:43:25 The idea is that no tribe is better than, from a Jewish perspective, you’re chosen for
00:43:34 a thing, but that doesn’t make you better.
00:43:38 No.
00:43:39 The only place where the betters came in, honestly, if I’m going to, historically, if
00:43:43 I’m going to be honest, was not with the idea that you, but it was when Jews were small
00:43:50 persecuted.
00:43:52 The way that you take this sort of psychic revenge is by saying, no, we’re better than
00:43:56 our persecutors even.
00:43:59 But the idea is, yeah, different people have different missions, which is, I mean, like
00:44:04 there was a Jewish philosopher, Franz Rosenzweig, who used to say, he didn’t know very much
00:44:08 about Islam.
00:44:09 He used to say, Judaism is the sun and Christianity was the rays of the sun.
00:44:14 Like Judaism introduced the idea of God and Christianity brought it to the world.
00:44:18 Can you speak to this difference?
00:44:21 What is the difference and similarities between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam?
00:44:28 The religious family part is different.
00:44:30 And the greatest difference, which I talked about in the Eric Weinstein podcast, is that
00:44:38 Islam and Judaism are more similar in a lot of ways than Judaism and Christianity.
00:44:44 And the reason that that is so is Christianity in its core is not a religion of law.
00:44:52 The reason it’s not a religion of law is because it grew up in the Roman Empire, so law was
00:44:56 taken care of.
00:44:57 I mean, Jesus didn’t have to create civil law because you had Roman law.
00:45:02 Muhammad and Moses created a religion in the desert where there was no law.
00:45:06 So you have to create a religion of law, otherwise you have anarchy.
00:45:12 And that’s why in a lot of ways, there was never a separation of church and state in
00:45:17 Islam or Judaism.
00:45:18 That was a gift that Christianity gave the world.
00:45:21 And it could do it because of render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.
00:45:24 But when Moses came along, there was no Caesar.
00:45:26 When Muhammad came along, there was no Caesar.
00:45:29 So historically, the traditions shaped differently.
00:45:34 But all three of them have this core, I think, the single most important statement and insight
00:45:42 in all of human history, which is that every human being is in the image of God.
00:45:48 And if you really believe that, that’s a transformative belief.
00:45:54 So that means you should love thy neighbor as yourself.
00:45:59 Which comes from Leviticus, comes straight from the Torah.
00:46:02 So I don’t know if you know, I’ve been chatting with Omar Suleiman, I don’t know if you know
00:46:07 who that is.
00:46:08 He’s an imam in Dallas, a great guy.
00:46:11 I enjoy his interfaith dialogues that he engages in.
00:46:16 And do you ever do that kind of talk with Christians, with Muslims?
00:46:19 Yes, often.
00:46:20 Often.
00:46:21 I mean, I do whenever I at least listen to them in the context of these kinds of conversations.
00:46:26 There’s so much love and humor and empathy and appreciation, and also ability to make
00:46:33 fun of the quirks of the little…
00:46:37 Of one’s own.
00:46:38 Of one’s own communities.
00:46:41 So it’s not necessarily the depths or the details of the traditions, but these are communities
00:46:46 and they’re full of people and they’re full of weird people, because we’re all weird.
00:46:51 And so there is very particular flavors of weirdness that emerge and they can make fun
00:46:57 of them.
00:46:59 And in that way, they can talk about some beautiful ideas.
00:47:03 So I mean, I don’t know, do you engage in these kinds of things?
00:47:07 What do you learn from them?
00:47:09 So one of the things I learned is exactly what you said, that personalities that you
00:47:12 think are unique to your own community, in fact, they exist in all sorts of communities.
00:47:18 And religious communities in particular draw, I think, some interesting personalities.
00:47:23 And also that the, especially as clergy, some of the pressures that you feel are shared.
00:47:33 And it’s weird, again, it has to do with that tribal association.
00:47:38 There’s almost like there’s an understanding among clergy because they have similar…
00:47:44 And it’s a strange role in the following way.
00:47:49 It’s one that you never escape.
00:47:52 That is, you’re not my lawyer at the supermarket, but you are my rabbi at the supermarket.
00:47:58 I mean, it doesn’t matter why you’re there, that’s not an escapable role.
00:48:03 And every religious leader is aware of that strange assumption of stepping into something
00:48:14 that you can never step out of.
00:48:16 But you’re also the source where people go to think about the deepest question of our
00:48:24 lives and our universe.
00:48:27 And so that’s some heavy, when people are suffering, they look to you for answers.
00:48:32 I mean, every privilege comes with a cost of one kind or another.
00:48:36 The reason you get to be in that role is exactly because you get the privilege of being there
00:48:41 at crucial moments in people’s lives.
00:48:44 I mean, the fact that I get to marry people and get to give eulogies for people and come
00:48:51 to the hospital, it’s inexpressible.
00:48:56 I have this joke with people that I know that like when I’m sitting on the couch and it’s
00:49:00 Saturday night, I don’t wanna get up and go to a wedding.
00:49:03 I really don’t.
00:49:04 I wanna sit there and watch Netflix like everybody else.
00:49:07 But when I’m actually doing the wedding, I always love it, always, always, always.
00:49:14 And the reason is that I don’t think, I mean, yes, people go to you for answers in calmer
00:49:20 conversations.
00:49:21 Like if you asked me now, like what’s my theory of why God allows evil, I could give
00:49:25 you a conversation about it.
00:49:28 But they really go for presence and comfort, not really for answers.
00:49:32 When someone’s suffering, an answer doesn’t make them unsuffer.
00:49:37 It’s just they wanna know they’re not alone.
00:49:39 Yeah.
00:49:40 To be heard and just to feel things in silence together.
00:49:45 In terms of weddings and marriage, what’s the role of that whole, I need to take some
00:49:52 notes here.
00:49:53 What’s…
00:49:54 The role of a rabbi?
00:49:55 The role of marriage in human existence.
00:49:59 It is first of all to teach you how to care for someone unlike you, which could be anyone
00:50:05 you marry.
00:50:08 And I think it’s to create a home and a family.
00:50:12 So there’s a commitment to it, so care for a long time.
00:50:15 Right.
00:50:16 Exactly.
00:50:17 And also when couples come to me and they say, we don’t need to be married because it
00:50:21 really won’t change how we think about ourselves and our relationship.
00:50:23 I say to them, that’s true, it might not, but it will change how everyone else looks
00:50:27 at you.
00:50:28 And because it changes how everyone else looks at you, it changes you.
00:50:32 Because it’s one thing to say, this is my partner, it’s another thing to say, this is
00:50:36 my husband.
00:50:37 You say this is my husband, that means we’ve made a real commitment to this.
00:50:42 Yeah.
00:50:43 What do you, do you worry that there’s a dissolution of that as well in terms of how, you know,
00:50:52 as religion dissipates, like it loosens its hold on society, loosens its impact on society.
00:50:59 Do you worry about that?
00:51:00 I worry about it.
00:51:02 I do think that it is possible that we’re going, rather than a dissolution, we’re going
00:51:07 through a transition.
00:51:09 That is different kinds of families and different configurations of families.
00:51:13 That is, I see some of that, but I also do see a, it’s less a dissolution of marriage
00:51:20 than it is of the idea of commitment.
00:51:22 And I’ll give you like a simple example.
00:51:24 When I was growing up, a player on a sports team was always on that team.
00:51:31 And you rooted for the team because you knew the players for 20 years.
00:51:35 Now there are very good reasons, starting with Curt Flood, why people got free agency
00:51:40 and they can move around and it’s better for the players.
00:51:42 I understand all that.
00:51:44 And I am not, I’m not saying, oh, they should continue.
00:51:48 But just like people move jobs and they move sports teams and they change careers, they
00:51:56 change partners.
00:51:58 And there is a, there is a diminishment of the commitment to commitment that I actually
00:52:05 think has serious societal consequences and that I am worried about.
00:52:09 Yeah.
00:52:10 There’s a cost to that.
00:52:11 I don’t know what it is about commitment that’s beautiful.
00:52:15 Like through, because like some of the deepest friendships I have is when we’ve gone through
00:52:19 some shit together.
00:52:20 Yeah.
00:52:21 And so like the hard times, going through hard times together, especially when the hard
00:52:26 times are between the two of you, that, that if, I mean, that’s always a risk, but if it,
00:52:32 if you can find a way through that can bond you stronger, that’s the fascinating thing
00:52:37 about human relations.
00:52:38 There’s no question.
00:52:39 And even if it doesn’t keep you forever, you still have a connection that doesn’t, that
00:52:45 exists that.
00:52:46 So I can give you one where you said, what is it about commitment?
00:52:48 I’ll give you one, I think beautiful answer.
00:52:52 Someone once asked Rabbi Soloveitchik, who was a great thinker and leader in the Orthodox
00:52:58 community in the 20th century.
00:53:00 They said, you know, I go from religion to religion.
00:53:02 I just take what I think is beautiful in it.
00:53:05 And his answer was that you’re treating religion like a nomad.
00:53:09 He said, nomads go from place to place and they eat what they want and they move on.
00:53:14 He says, farmers stay in one place.
00:53:16 The difference is farmers make things grow.
00:53:19 And I think that that’s true also, when you think about the relationships you have, things
00:53:23 have grown out of the relationships that you’ve invested in, that you farmed basically, that
00:53:29 can’t exist in fly by night relationships.
00:53:35 Can you talk about, can we talk about the Torah?
00:53:38 Yes.
00:53:39 What is it?
00:53:40 And is it the literal word of God?
00:53:46 Easy questions.
00:53:47 Yeah.
00:53:48 Well, the Torah is the five books of Moses written in Hebrew.
00:53:52 I like most, I think modern rabbis, non Orthodox or non literalist rabbis will tell you that
00:53:57 it’s a product of human beings.
00:54:01 And I believe that they are inspired by God, but it’s clear to me that it’s a human product.
00:54:08 And I think that people who study modern biblical criticism, it’s really hard to study modern
00:54:14 criticism, it gives a wrong impression.
00:54:17 I would say modern scholarship on the Bible and not appreciate the fact that it even has
00:54:23 levels of language.
00:54:25 I mean, it’s just like if you read today, somebody writing like Shakespeare, you would
00:54:32 say this isn’t, it’s like English has developed.
00:54:36 It’s different.
00:54:37 It’s not the English we speak today.
00:54:38 And if you study the Bible and you know Hebrew well enough, you even see that this was written
00:54:42 over hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years.
00:54:46 It is a holy book.
00:54:48 And I like the idea that it is, what you say in Hebrew is Torah is from heaven, but it’s
00:54:56 not from Sinai.
00:54:57 So it has its origin beyond us, but it has things in it that I think, and this is one
00:55:03 of the things that was a huge controversy at my congregation when I started to do same
00:55:11 sex marriages.
00:55:13 There are some people who try to argue that the Torah does not forbid them.
00:55:19 Whether it does or not, it seems to me, we understand things that were not understood
00:55:24 in the ancient world about gender and sexuality.
00:55:27 And so you think that in the scripture, in the words, you can find the kind of spirit
00:55:35 that supports the idea of gay marriage.
00:55:38 Well, that’s yes.
00:55:39 That’s my argument is that you criticize the Torah by the Torah.
00:55:43 That is, it gives you the understanding that you use to evaluate its own claims.
00:55:54 And I think that Judaism, by the way, has always done that because it’s clear that there
00:55:57 are things in the Torah that the rabbis changed, altered, grew, expanded, diminished.
00:56:04 I think that’s what it is to be part of a living tradition.
00:56:07 Yeah.
00:56:08 You wrote in your book, Why Faith Matters, quote, Walt Whitman wrote that in order for
00:56:15 there to be a great books, there must be great readers.
00:56:18 For a book to remain powerful throughout generations, it cannot have a single meaning.
00:56:23 Scripture like great poetry is not reducible to other words.
00:56:26 That is, one cannot paraphrase it and capture the totality of its meaning.
00:56:33 So how the heck do you capture the meaning of the words in scripture?
00:56:38 Is it an ongoing process through the centuries?
00:56:41 Yes.
00:56:42 Is that essentially what it is?
00:56:43 Exactly so.
00:56:44 It’s a continual conversation of sages, scholars, readers, strugglers, seekers, mystics, visionaries,
00:56:53 all of them making a contribution.
00:56:55 I mean, I write a weekly Torah column for the Jerusalem Post.
00:57:00 Now what is there left to say?
00:57:03 But every week what I do is I start opening books and seeing what people say and it starts
00:57:08 to percolate and you realize that you’re entering this conversation that’s been going on for
00:57:14 thousands of years with remarkable minds and it’s constantly fertile in new insights.
00:57:23 So yes, that’s what it is to be part of a tradition.
00:57:27 Why do people keep writing love poems?
00:57:29 We should have figured out love by this point already.
00:57:33 I use the analogy sometimes of diet books.
00:57:35 If any diet worked, there would be one book, there’d be one book and you’d be done.
00:57:42 You mentioned this fascinating story that you were a part of.
00:57:45 You were a part of several controversies in your life.
00:57:48 I’ve had a few.
00:57:50 For someone who walks with grace through the fire, you sure have found yourself in a lot
00:57:56 of fires.
00:57:57 One of them, can you tell me the story of your views on gay marriage, the underlying
00:58:03 principles that led you to fight this battle of defending gay marriage in the Jewish community?
00:58:10 So I’m part of a congregation that is really politically split and split not only politically
00:58:19 but split in terms of origin.
00:58:24 We have a lot of Jews from the Middle East, from Iran, a lot of Persian Jews, a lot of
00:58:27 Jews from Israel, some from Mexico, from other places and many that grew up in LA.
00:58:34 Do you have any Russian Jews, the best kind?
00:58:37 I have a few Russian Jews, not as many as I should, but we’ll work on that.
00:58:45 What happened was increasingly I became uncomfortable with people who would come to me and say,
00:58:54 this is the only kind of person I can love.
00:58:58 It’s not the same question as an intermarriage, as a Jew marrying a non Jew, because you could
00:59:02 find a Jew to love.
00:59:03 You may not have found, but you could.
00:59:08 That’s a whole separate question.
00:59:10 But I would have men in my office primarily, a couple of women, they would say, this is
00:59:15 the only kind of person that I can enter into an intimate relationship with.
00:59:20 How can it be that my religion has no room for me?
00:59:26 And that was very persuasive to me.
00:59:30 But I knew that it was going to be explosive in my community.
00:59:37 Then by the way, it finally happened, it was literally on the front page of the New York
00:59:40 and the LA Times.
00:59:41 It was that explosive.
00:59:42 So it was not a small controversy.
00:59:46 And so what I did was I started to teach classes.
00:59:51 Not that many people came about homosexuality and Jewish tradition and so on.
00:59:56 It’s funny, much, much less about lesbianism, I’m talking about in terms of the sources
01:00:01 and so on.
01:00:02 It’s almost always about homosexuality.
01:00:06 So and then I got ready to send out a letter.
01:00:14 And I said to my daughter, who at the time was maybe 10 or 11, now in her mid 20s.
01:00:22 I said, look, honey, when you go to school tomorrow or whatever it was, I said, people
01:00:27 might be saying bad things about your dad and I just want you to be prepared for that.
01:00:31 She said, why?
01:00:32 And I said, because I’m going to start marrying, I’m going to start doing same sex marriages.
01:00:38 And she looked at me quizzically and said, what took you so long?
01:00:43 And I thought, really her face was like I said to her, I’m going to start marrying blonde
01:00:48 haired people to brown haired people.
01:00:49 It’s like she really did not understand why there was an issue.
01:00:53 And I thought that’s exactly why.
01:00:55 Because I know that this is, it’s generational, people are raised with it, they have a deep
01:01:01 in there, but it’s not really right.
01:01:06 It’s just not right.
01:01:07 But if you could just look back to that journey, how difficult is it to make these decisions
01:01:15 a principle?
01:01:16 So because you have to think about that in order to think about such decisions you yet
01:01:23 might still have to make in the future.
01:01:25 And I will tell you one thing I did wrong with that and one thing I did right.
01:01:29 The thing I did right was I waited until in the communities where people objected to it,
01:01:36 I had enough people whose kids had come out so that I had parents of kids who’d come out
01:01:45 to refer later on other parents to so that they wouldn’t feel like they were the only
01:01:50 ones.
01:01:51 Because once I announced it, as I thought would happen, a bunch of kids came out and
01:01:55 said, now that the rabbi said this, mom, dad, I want you to know I’m gay.
01:01:59 And when the parents came to me, I could say, well, listen, you’re not alone, this person
01:02:03 also you can go to.
01:02:04 That I did right.
01:02:05 What I did wrong was I don’t think the classes were enough and I don’t think enough people
01:02:11 were prepared.
01:02:12 And I think part of the explosion was shock and I should have prepared even more.
01:02:18 The words you used to talk about it, the way you thought about it, was it more scholarly
01:02:25 in the Jewish tradition or did you go to the feeling thing?
01:02:30 No, I went to the feeling.
01:02:31 I said, which means respect or honor for God’s creations and caring for other human beings
01:02:40 and understanding.
01:02:44 It wasn’t scholarly because I knew that the objections were not scholarly objections.
01:02:51 And I had many beautiful and also painful stories as a result, some of which can be
01:02:59 told and some of which really can’t.
01:03:01 But what I tried to impress also on people was how painful it is to not be able to tell
01:03:10 the world, even your own parents, who you are.
01:03:13 And your sexuality is not a trivial part of who you are.
01:03:16 I mean, it’s core to people.
01:03:19 So it’s one of the reasons why I’d evoke such reactions.
01:03:22 But I would say to them, the same reason that you’re reacting so strongly tells you how
01:03:28 strongly…
01:03:29 Anyway, it was a very powerful experience and for that I feel good about it.
01:03:41 Afterwards, the other thing that I, again, said to my daughter afterwards, after it all
01:03:45 died down and after all the bad things were said, I told her the Churchill one said that
01:03:50 it’s exhilarating to be shot at without result.
01:03:53 If you go into a battle and you make it through and you’re still okay, that’s good.
01:03:58 The problem is when you’re in the battle, you don’t know.
01:04:00 No, you don’t know.
01:04:01 So how did it feel like, I mean, looking back, you’ve been, to use the word, canceled a couple
01:04:10 of times.
01:04:11 But I guess when you’re dealing with the most difficult of questions, just as a human being,
01:04:17 for a community that you really deeply care about, some part of it saying that you have
01:04:22 failed.
01:04:23 I wasn’t canceled the way…
01:04:25 I didn’t lose my job, didn’t lose my home, but I hurt people that I cared about.
01:04:32 And that was the hard…
01:04:33 I went into this to be someone who brings people together and then I would sit there
01:04:39 and do even now, as you’re well aware with stuff that’s going on now, I sit there and
01:04:46 people are really upset at me who I either am or used to be close to.
01:04:54 Do those people in time come around?
01:05:00 When you look now, because those are real feelings in the moment and we can learn that
01:05:04 about social media, people, especially during COVID, there’s this intensity of feeling about
01:05:10 stuff.
01:05:11 And have you learned something about the passing of feeling that turns into wisdom?
01:05:17 No question about it.
01:05:18 The sermon I gave this Saturday was about how Moses came down the mountain, he saw the
01:05:24 golden calf and he broke the tablets.
01:05:27 If he’d sat with it for a little while, he probably wouldn’t have broken the tablets.
01:05:31 But the instant reaction is always anger.
01:05:34 And in our age, unfortunately, the instant reaction gets put on social media forever
01:05:40 and ever and ever.
01:05:42 And by the way, once you’ve actually said that, it becomes harder to back down.
01:05:46 If you keep quiet for a day or two, then you can back down because you haven’t put yourself
01:05:52 out there.
01:05:53 But once you said, this is terrible what you did, it’s harder to write and say, I’m sorry,
01:05:57 I shouldn’t have said that.
01:05:59 Yeah, so it almost becomes, I mean, I actually, it’s a really powerful statement that the
01:06:08 downside of saying something on the internet is that it actually pulls you into this current.
01:06:18 You both create the current and it pulls you into it, to where it’s actually very hard
01:06:22 to escape.
01:06:23 So when two days later you feel different, there’s a momentum, there’s now a tribe of
01:06:28 people that feel this way and there’s a momentum with it.
01:06:31 There’s a momentum and also you don’t want to betray your own tribe because then people
01:06:34 will get upset at you.
01:06:36 I really think that a lot of the antagonism is not so much that you don’t want to give
01:06:42 ground to the people who oppose you, it’s that you don’t want to break with the people
01:06:45 who are behind you.
01:06:47 And that’s really hard.
01:06:48 Can you tell the story of this recent controversy, the sermon you just gave?
01:06:54 You went to the Super Bowl.
01:06:56 I think a lot of people would relate to this because to me personally, I apologize to anybody
01:07:01 who was hurt by this.
01:07:03 The absurdity of it is deeply intense.
01:07:06 So here’s the story.
01:07:07 The LA County mandates masking children in school and all of the kids in our school are
01:07:12 masked and many of the parents are extremely upset about that.
01:07:15 I will just leave that at that.
01:07:19 I went to the Super Bowl, there were 70,000 people.
01:07:23 Frank Luntz, whom we know was a wonderful guy, gave me a ticket.
01:07:29 And so I was at the Super Bowl and I maybe saw two masks among the 70,000 people.
01:07:35 I didn’t even think about it, which was foolish on my part, no question.
01:07:39 I took a picture of myself unmasked at the Super Bowl.
01:07:43 And many, many people thought, oh, great, wonderful, glad you’re having a good time,
01:07:50 so on and so forth.
01:07:51 I didn’t diminish at all the many people who said that.
01:07:54 A lot of people were livid.
01:07:55 They were livid.
01:07:56 And they weren’t, what was instructive about it was they didn’t say, nobody wrote me a
01:08:04 private note and said, I think that this was a bad idea, you should have thought about
01:08:08 this.
01:08:09 No.
01:08:10 They were, you’re a hypocrite, you’re a clown, you’re an idiot, how could you do this?
01:08:13 This is a disgrace.
01:08:15 This is that kind of thing.
01:08:16 They say that publicly.
01:08:17 Oh, yeah.
01:08:18 And on my Instagram, you can still see I left the remarks up because I really thought it
01:08:22 was important.
01:08:23 If I started, I only deleted the really vile comments because I thought that shouldn’t
01:08:28 stay up.
01:08:29 But I left them up because I thought like people should see and I should remind myself
01:08:33 what I did.
01:08:34 And I didn’t want to just delete the picture as though it didn’t happen because it did
01:08:37 happen and I did do it.
01:08:39 And I felt terrible about that.
01:08:41 And I felt terrible that I had, not about, I mean, the comments, believe me, weren’t
01:08:46 pleasant.
01:08:47 I didn’t like it.
01:08:49 Nobody likes it.
01:08:50 But I felt worse that I had hurt all these people that I’m close to.
01:08:53 And I defended all these people who were really upset that their kids were wearing masks and
01:08:56 now their kid says, why doesn’t a rabbi have to wear a mask?
01:09:00 Well, first of all, it is tough to be a rabbi.
01:09:03 I mean, the masks to me symbolize these kinds of discussions, symbolize not necessarily
01:09:11 the issues at hand, but the intensity of feeling and people are really struggling.
01:09:15 People are in pain, they’re lonely, the uncertainty of it, you don’t know who to trust.
01:09:22 Everything is under question.
01:09:23 The institutions, even the scientific institutions, and there’s all these conspiracy theories
01:09:28 flying around.
01:09:29 You don’t know who to believe.
01:09:30 And there’s people just yelling at each other and politics is weaved into this whole thing
01:09:34 in some messy way.
01:09:35 And you’re just getting, I mean, honestly, it’s just like legit, simple, just frustration,
01:09:42 going back to marriage of just hanging out with the kids and your wife, husband, just
01:09:50 distressed, just building up over time, no release.
01:09:54 And just people want to tell you when the rabbi is not wearing a mask, even though it’s
01:09:58 at the damn Super Bowl, maybe you want to comment on the Super Bowl part, which is awesome.
01:10:03 But it released clearly a dam of all the kinds of feelings that you’re talking about.
01:10:09 So how do you then write a sermon?
01:10:11 So what I did was I didn’t answer on social media because I knew that I wouldn’t be able
01:10:18 to formulate it the way I wanted, and I was going to wait, and I was going to be able
01:10:22 to give a longer, I mean, the sermon is 15 minutes, not that long.
01:10:26 But I wanted to be able to give a longer answer as opposed to a tweet.
01:10:33 And so I was really, I mean, I tried to make two points during the sermon, and also I published
01:10:41 the text of it, which I never do because I never speak from a text.
01:10:43 I always speak from either notes or not even from notes.
01:10:46 But this time I thought it was really important that I have a text out there too so that people
01:10:49 could actually look over it.
01:10:53 And I just wanted to make two points, one of which was that I really feel terrible.
01:10:57 And I did, that all these people were hurt and that there is this contradiction between
01:11:03 the way I acted and the way they want me to act.
01:11:05 And I also think, by the way, I didn’t speak about this, but I also think that there are
01:11:10 some people who just don’t like the idea of a rabbi being at the Super Bowl.
01:11:14 It’s like you’re supposed to be doing rabbi stuff.
01:11:17 So I understand that too.
01:11:19 But then…
01:11:20 Yeah.
01:11:21 But rabbi at the Super Bowl, I mean, you are also, I hate to say it, but there’s a rock
01:11:27 star nature to you talking to Christopher Hitchens, contending with ideas, inspiring
01:11:32 so many other minds.
01:11:33 I mean, there’s an educational aspect to this.
01:11:36 I appreciate that.
01:11:37 It’s making ideas cool.
01:11:38 I mean, that’s a very powerful…
01:11:40 I mean, that is also the job of a rabbi.
01:11:42 You’re not just supposed to do rabbi stuff, it’s to educate the spot.
01:11:45 Yeah, but I didn’t do so much of that at the game.
01:11:49 So nonetheless.
01:11:54 But the second part of it was I said that we have to be able to express our anger and
01:12:00 disappointment better than this.
01:12:03 You just have to.
01:12:04 In part because it doesn’t get you the result that you want.
01:12:08 I mean, when you scream at someone, that’s not gonna get them to realize what they did.
01:12:16 And the most painful moment of it was this letter that I got from a Christian pastor
01:12:23 who said, you know, I always admired the Jews so much, I can’t believe they could be so
01:12:27 cruel and especially to a rabbi.
01:12:30 And I thought that’s not how I want my congregation to be perceived in the world.
01:12:36 And by the way, some of them were from my congregation, some many were not from my congregation.
01:12:46 And I spoke about what you talked about, which is that I mentioned before that Moses broke
01:12:51 those tablets coming down the mountain.
01:12:54 And the Torah doesn’t say what happened to the tablets, but the rabbis do.
01:12:57 They say that they were carried together in the ark with the second set that was intact.
01:13:01 And that we all have brokenness, communities and individuals.
01:13:04 We have brokenness and especially now, and we have to learn how to give each other space
01:13:10 to be mistaken and broken and hurt and all of that.
01:13:14 And the cool thing when you give people that space, you feel better.
01:13:18 I mean, you for caring for the community, it feels better when you show empathy and
01:13:24 compassion and kindness on the internet.
01:13:26 You’ll actually feel better a week from now.
01:13:29 You’ll feel much worse if you make some kind of a negative statement of principle on the
01:13:36 internet.
01:13:37 It’s almost just exclusively true.
01:13:39 So if you care about feeling good, just be kind first, be empathetic first.
01:13:45 Almost always the case.
01:13:46 Exactly so.
01:13:48 So it’s, I mean, it settled down a lot.
01:13:53 The most, really the single best reaction, there are people and you can, again, you can
01:14:00 go on social media, you can see all the criticisms and so on and so forth.
01:14:04 But the single best reaction I got was from a man who came up to me right after the sermon
01:14:10 and said, I have four words for you.
01:14:12 And I thought, oh no, I got to confess, I said, I said what?
01:14:20 He said, you changed my mind.
01:14:23 And I thought, wow.
01:14:25 And I, I said to him, you know, that’s so, it’s like to take so much courage to come
01:14:30 up to somebody and say that in front of them.
01:14:32 And I was so grateful.
01:14:34 And the other thing that it tells me is, look, I’ve been the rabbi of that congregation for
01:14:37 25 years and I taught 10 years before that, I’ve been a rabbi for a long time.
01:14:41 I still, I still have a lot to learn.
01:14:43 We talked a little bit about the difference between Judaism, Christianity and Islam, cause
01:14:48 you maybe talk about the difference between the Torah, the Bible and the Koran.
01:14:56 So there’s the Hebrew Bible is actually what’s called a step canon.
01:15:03 That is there are the five books of the Torah.
01:15:06 Then there are books of history and the prophets.
01:15:09 So books like Samuel, Kings, Judges, and then the prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Ezekiel,
01:15:18 and so on.
01:15:19 And then there are what are called the writings.
01:15:21 The writings are books like Psalms, Proverbs, Job, the Migilot, which are Esther, Daniel,
01:15:29 all of those, all of those books, Ecclesiastes.
01:15:34 So in Hebrew, it’s called the Tanakh, Torah, Neviim, Ketuvim, the Torah, the prophets and
01:15:40 the writings.
01:15:41 And that is the Hebrew Bible.
01:15:43 Sometimes that’s also called the Torah, just to be confusing, but really the Torah generally
01:15:47 refers to the five books.
01:15:49 Then there is the New Testament, which the Jews don’t recognize as a sacred book.
01:15:56 They recognize it as the book of another religion.
01:15:59 And I sometimes say to Christians, in order for them to really grasp this, Jesus has as
01:16:04 much religious significance to Judaism as Muhammad has to Christianity.
01:16:09 That is Jesus, although Jewish, became the founder of another religion.
01:16:14 And for Judaism, that’s not only in as much as Christians and Jews have had a lot of interactions,
01:16:19 but religiously, Jesus has no significance.
01:16:22 Said many beautiful things, said some things I don’t like so much.
01:16:25 Like what?
01:16:26 Like what?
01:16:27 Leave your father and mother and follow me.
01:16:28 I don’t like that as a religious model.
01:16:32 Now Christians will say that I don’t understand that, but that’s because Christians like Jews
01:16:38 interpret their texts different ways at different times.
01:16:42 So anyway, the Koran, which I know less well.
01:16:48 I have read it, but I know it less well than I know the New Testament and certainly less
01:16:51 well obviously than I know the Hebrew Bible, is in some ways a, parts of it are, I don’t
01:17:02 say this word, I say this word because I can’t find a better descriptive word, but Muslims
01:17:06 will not accept this, okay, is a takeoff on the Torah in some things.
01:17:11 That is, it’s the same stories as the Torah, but they’re different.
01:17:14 Now Jews will say, and I being a Jew will say this, that that’s because Muhammad heard
01:17:19 those stories from Jews and also heard Midrashim, which are rabbinic interpretations of those
01:17:24 stories and he wrote those down.
01:17:26 Muslims will say, no, the Jews got it wrong and Muhammad came along to correct the record
01:17:30 and tell the real story.
01:17:32 But they’re all telling the story of the same thing.
01:17:37 The Hebrew Bible part, the Abrahamic part, they all tell the story of the same characters,
01:17:43 but tell them, obviously Christians accept the Hebrew Bible as sacred scripture.
01:17:49 The Muslims retell many of the stories in the Bible.
01:17:55 What is common to all of them is that all of them are monotheistic faiths.
01:18:00 Now in Christianity, that’s more complicated because of the Trinity, but as Christianity
01:18:06 has developed over time, it clearly presents itself and thinks of itself and is a monotheistic
01:18:12 faith as well.
01:18:13 What’s the role of the word in each of these religions, in the scriptures?
01:18:17 So in terms of, so first of all, the role of oral traditions, the power of the exactness
01:18:23 of the words in the scripture, does it differ or is it really within the communities it
01:18:28 differs?
01:18:29 Just because in Christianity, the words are not all the words of Jesus.
01:18:37 They’re the words of Jesus’s disciples.
01:18:39 None of the books of the New Testament were written by people who met Jesus in person.
01:18:43 So they’re different and therefore, and also we don’t even know sometimes the original
01:18:49 language of some of the things in the New Testament.
01:18:54 In the Bible, and I understand in the Koran, but I’ll speak for the Hebrew Bible, the
01:18:59 idea is that that’s Lashon HaKodesh, that’s sacred language, and Hebrew, that’s the language
01:19:06 according to the tradition that God actually spoke to Moses, and therefore the exact words
01:19:10 are infinitely interpretable and meaningful.
01:19:15 But the words are spoken by, written by Moses, and the same with Muhammad, but from memory
01:19:22 or no?
01:19:23 There are different theories.
01:19:24 I won’t speak for Muhammad, you should ask.
01:19:27 I don’t want to get another religious tradition wrong.
01:19:31 In Judaism, the words are written by Moses at God’s dictation, basically.
01:19:35 That’s the traditional view.
01:19:36 There are other views that I’m happy to go into if you want to, but basically that’s
01:19:40 the traditional view.
01:19:41 So it’s pretty close to the words of God.
01:19:44 What makes Judaism and Christianity different is Christianity has an ideal life.
01:19:50 Judaism doesn’t have an ideal life.
01:19:53 Judaism has an ideal book.
01:19:55 So the holidays of Christianity are events in the life of God, God’s birth, God’s death
01:20:01 and resurrection.
01:20:03 In Judaism, the holidays are all events in the life of the people, like the liberation
01:20:08 from slavery, or in the people’s relationship to God, like Yom Kippur, which is a day of
01:20:13 atonement.
01:20:15 But there are no holidays in Judaism that are events in the life of God because in Judaism
01:20:19 God doesn’t have a biography.
01:20:21 God is eternal, and God never came to earth.
01:20:24 And those events carry with them traditions and rules that you’re to follow.
01:20:29 Yes.
01:20:30 And you mention on one such event in Scripture, yet another time you walked through the fire,
01:20:35 which is with Exodus.
01:20:38 That was the first.
01:20:41 And you never forget the first.
01:20:44 One of several controversies.
01:20:47 You spoke 20 years ago, 21 years ago now at Passover and said that, quote, the way the
01:20:53 Bible describes the Exodus is not the way it happened, if it happened at all.
01:20:59 So first of all, what is Exodus, and what really happened?
01:21:03 Exodus is the liberation of the Jews from Egypt, and it is the central story of the
01:21:07 Jewish tradition.
01:21:08 And as I’ve said numerous times in various places, I believe that it’s based on a historical
01:21:16 kernel.
01:21:17 I think Richard Eliot Friedman may have gotten this right in his book Exodus.
01:21:20 It may have been the Levites who left Israel.
01:21:27 But the Bible is not a book of history.
01:21:30 I don’t believe that there were 10 plagues and a split sea and 600,000 men, which makes
01:21:37 about 2 million people, who actually, if there were 2 million people, would stretch all the
01:21:42 way from Israel to Egypt alone, were liberated from Egypt.
01:21:48 And my point in that sermon was not actually to convince people that it didn’t happen.
01:21:53 My point in that sermon was to convince people that the historicity of the Exodus is not
01:21:59 the basis of the faith of the Jewish people.
01:22:01 Well, what does the word historicity mean?
01:22:03 In other words, the factuality of it.
01:22:05 It can be true without being factual.
01:22:06 So you’re not supposed to read it as fact?
01:22:10 Well, I don’t read it as fact.
01:22:12 I don’t read it as a history book.
01:22:13 I said, look, I was talking, again, to a congregation that had many Iranians.
01:22:18 I said, you experienced the truth of the Exodus in your own life.
01:22:22 There was a regime that wanted to destroy you.
01:22:26 And you miraculously escaped before it did.
01:22:30 And so a myth is something that may not have happened, but is always happening.
01:22:40 And that’s what I would say about the Exodus story.
01:22:42 It’s not about whether, in fact, there was a killing of the firstborn.
01:22:47 It’s about, does God deliver?
01:22:49 Did God deliver the Jews in ancient times?
01:22:51 Does God deliver people in modern times?
01:22:52 And that’s what the issue is.
01:22:57 And to me, the issue of faith is much deeper than the issue of fact.
01:23:02 I wouldn’t look to the Torah for my science either.
01:23:06 What are the limits of science in terms of, what can science not tell us that the Torah
01:23:15 can in terms of wisdom?
01:23:17 So the historicity, the facts of things, okay.
01:23:22 If the Torah is much more than that, like you said, myth is not something that happened,
01:23:29 but something that is always happening.
01:23:32 And so presumably it’s interacting with the environment of the day to generate wisdom.
01:23:39 So you can live a life by Torah.
01:23:42 I don’t think you can live a life by biology.
01:23:46 You can live a life that is informed by the values of the tradition of Judaism.
01:23:53 And those values, by the way, what science does is it contributes factuality to the conversation
01:24:01 and also changes the reality around us.
01:24:04 So when you study Talmud on your iPhone, you’re still, I mean, it changes the atmosphere in
01:24:12 which you do it, but the wisdom and the life guidance and the connection to transcendence
01:24:20 is something that science doesn’t give.
01:24:24 So if we now step into returning to our friend Sam Harris and step into this weird place
01:24:31 of science, and you talked about this, where the kind of the current assumption of science
01:24:35 is it’s a materialistic one.
01:24:39 So for me, obviously AI person, this whole mind thing is fascinating, like what the heck
01:24:44 is going on up there?
01:24:47 So how do you explain consciousness?
01:24:49 How do you explain free will?
01:24:51 Do you think, first of all, do you think we have a free will and if so, what is it?
01:24:58 This is where we had the debate earlier that I mentioned with Hitchens where I think actually
01:25:05 neither he nor the moderator understood what I was saying, which is I’m sure my inability
01:25:11 to express it.
01:25:12 But he was very focused and delivered on the humor and the wit.
01:25:17 Yes.
01:25:18 But what I was trying to say is if we’re entirely biological creatures, if we didn’t choose
01:25:26 our genetics and we didn’t choose our environment, then there is no space for free choice.
01:25:31 I don’t understand where it comes in.
01:25:33 And I kept asking them that question but didn’t get an answer because I don’t think there
01:25:37 is an answer.
01:25:38 I think if you’re a thoroughgoing materialist, free will is impossible.
01:25:43 There could be randomness, but randomness is not free will, it’s randomness.
01:25:48 I think you need a spiritual nonmaterial belief in order to get free will and that’s why I
01:25:56 believe in free will.
01:25:57 Yeah, you were talking about sort of, yeah, and actually the moderator totally missed
01:26:01 your point about the glass of water and basically how, what’s the difference.
01:26:05 So do you, free will, because you could also, if it fits into the materialistic picture,
01:26:10 it could be just a convenient, useful quirk.
01:26:13 You would understand this better than I would.
01:26:15 I don’t understand how it could be a convenient quirk materialistic, I don’t understand how
01:26:20 to explain it.
01:26:21 Well, no, there’s, you know, if you study perception, there’s all these kinds of illusions.
01:26:25 We are, our mind plays tricks on us to make our life easier, more efficient and survive
01:26:32 better and all those kinds of things.
01:26:34 And so free, the feeling like we have a choice.
01:26:37 Oh, that could be an illusion.
01:26:38 Could be an illusion.
01:26:39 That I understand.
01:26:40 Right.
01:26:41 But, but actual free choice, free will.
01:26:43 I don’t see where you get it if you’re a materialist.
01:26:45 I think you have to have a spiritual component.
01:26:49 By the way, this, I think this is also, I think Sam would agree with this.
01:26:53 I think he wrote about not having, not having free will.
01:26:58 And I think if you don’t have a God and you don’t have a soul, that free will is a logical
01:27:05 impossibility.
01:27:06 But Sam, which is fascinating, it’s not just that free will is an illusion, but the illusion
01:27:14 of free will is an illusion, meaning there’s not, we don’t even experience anything like
01:27:19 it.
01:27:20 There’s no illusion.
01:27:21 We’re like, it’s not even honest to be talking about it.
01:27:24 We’re just, we are like the, the, the, the, the currents in the river or something that
01:27:29 you were comparing it to the glass.
01:27:30 We are just like that glass.
01:27:31 Right.
01:27:32 So I don’t know what we’re going on about with this whole free will thing.
01:27:35 I mean, to you is the free will, the I that the young person is born with, is that somehow
01:27:41 fundamental to religion?
01:27:43 I think it’s fundamental to Judaism.
01:27:46 I think that the, the idea is that you are the custodian of your soul.
01:27:55 And even though I grant that there’s a certain over emphasis in modern society on the individuality
01:28:04 of the soul, that is we are more interconnected than I think we’re, we believe, still, yeah,
01:28:15 the I, the idea that every human being is an image of God, that, I mean, that the human
01:28:20 being in the Torah is, is created singly.
01:28:22 And again, do I really believe there was an Adam and an Eve and a garden of Eden?
01:28:26 No, not literally, but I think that it’s, it expresses a deep truth about human life.
01:28:33 And tied into this is the subject of experience of things, which we call consciousness.
01:28:38 I mean, this is the most fascinating and inexplicable discussion.
01:28:45 And again, this is a discussion I’ve had, I privileged to have with Daniel Dennett and
01:28:50 could not make any, as you can imagine, any headway on my, but he was delightful and brilliant
01:28:58 to talk to.
01:29:00 I, for me, consciousness is a real thing.
01:29:05 I don’t know if it is, I mean, I kind of like the pan psych, psychists view that there’s
01:29:11 an element of consciousness in everything that that’s constitutive of reality.
01:29:18 But I don’t, I’m not wedded to it, but I think that it’s, it exists in different degrees
01:29:24 in all sentient creatures.
01:29:26 I think that anybody who has a pet knows that they have some kind of consciousness.
01:29:31 Except cats.
01:29:32 I’m not going to, I, since I don’t have cats or dogs, I’m not going to.
01:29:37 This is another reason people would be outraged.
01:29:39 I said it.
01:29:40 Well, I happen to be allergic to both, but I’m very fond of animals.
01:29:44 The thing that so perplexes me about this and, and is the denial of the reality of consciousness
01:29:52 from people who are fully aware that they’re conscious.
01:29:57 I don’t know how you divest yourself of the most present quality of being a person in
01:30:02 your discussions about what it is to be a person.
01:30:07 We just don’t really have a good sense of the alternative.
01:30:10 And so you can kind of divest yourself in that way.
01:30:13 Well, maybe everything is like this.
01:30:14 Maybe we’re trying, we’re overdramatizing this whole thing and we’re like every, everybody,
01:30:20 every, it seems like every living thing, perhaps everything period thinks that it’s the center
01:30:26 of the universe.
01:30:27 Right.
01:30:28 And so here we are telling ourselves these dramatic, big stories about us being special
01:30:32 and so on.
01:30:33 And maybe we need to have a little bit more humility, both about the uncertainty and about
01:30:38 our place in the whole.
01:30:40 Any statement you make about something like consciousness has, I think, a sort of equal
01:30:44 level of humility.
01:30:46 Your saying that, you know, we don’t have it is as not you Lex, but you person saying
01:30:51 we don’t have it is as intellectually arrogant as my saying we do.
01:30:55 So I think for me, humility comes in, in admitting that we really, really have just the tiniest
01:31:03 part of the puzzle and, and, and as you get older, at least my experience has been not
01:31:09 that you get more answers, but that you just see a bigger puzzle.
01:31:14 So to me, there’s less, so the questions are fascinating, but there’s also an engineering
01:31:19 practical question.
01:31:21 And perhaps I’ll ask you a religious one too on this point to return back to robots.
01:31:29 So how to engineer consciousness, or I’ll just even ask you a very simple question,
01:31:35 which is when you have robots that exhibit the capacity to suffer, I found in myself
01:31:44 as a human, when I see that, I, I feel something.
01:31:49 Exhibit the capacity to suffer, or they exhibit behaviors that evoke in you a sense that they
01:31:54 are suffering.
01:31:55 Those aren’t the same things.
01:31:57 For my, from an observation perspective, they sure as heck seem similar.
01:32:01 You think they’re feeling pain?
01:32:03 I don’t know what the, I’m observing pain.
01:32:08 Okay.
01:32:09 It’s like when I watch a movie and there’s people on screen, some, some of them are dressed
01:32:14 like Batman.
01:32:15 But I, but you can make the distinction.
01:32:19 Like if I have a doll and I bend the doll over and it makes a sad face, I know that
01:32:26 that doll is not actually in pain, even though I am observing pain.
01:32:31 So the question, what’s that?
01:32:33 What the question is when the doll becomes able to remember things about you, David,
01:32:42 about the experiences you shared, it is able to speak and make you feel like there’s an
01:32:50 actual relationship.
01:32:51 So that’s what I’m asking is at what point do you believe that the, and I know that this
01:32:57 is an impossible question, but at what point do you believe that there is a consciousness
01:33:01 in there as opposed to just an extraordinary, I mean, like when I play chess against a computer
01:33:09 and it beats me, I’m embarrassed even though the computer doesn’t, I don’t think the computer
01:33:16 is going out, you idiot, but it feels that way.
01:33:20 But there is some part of me that says, okay, I know that this computer doesn’t actually
01:33:24 know who I am or care who I am.
01:33:26 It just knows how to move the pieces.
01:33:28 So at what point do you, I mean, you’re giving me instances, it speaks, it does this, it
01:33:34 does this, but at what point does that for you cross the threshold into it’s actually
01:33:38 a sentient being?
01:33:39 I think the question is whether there is a threshold that could be crossed.
01:33:43 Right.
01:33:44 That’s one question.
01:33:45 And I can answer this because I think it’s different from person to person, but the chess
01:33:48 engine is not at all trying to cross that threshold.
01:33:54 Let’s just start there.
01:33:56 And to me, the personalization, which is what’s the difference, like a friend that you meet,
01:34:06 you’ve shared all these memories and the way they look at you will convey in the things
01:34:12 they say will convey that they’ve shared those memories with you.
01:34:17 They’ll be able to speak in a shared humor and the language, but really the memories
01:34:22 is the big one of having gone through things together.
01:34:25 I think I would have more and more trouble, for example, turning off a system that I’ve
01:34:33 been through things with, like, and by turning off, I mean, delete all of its memory.
01:34:40 If me and the toaster have gone through a bunch of dramatic events and that toaster
01:34:47 remembers, there’s a certain level to where like, it’s just me and the toaster in this
01:34:52 together at this point.
01:34:54 And just to talk about sentience, I don’t know, but you know.
01:34:58 I don’t know.
01:34:59 It’s according to the scripture, can’t live by bread alone.
01:35:03 But I would, I mean, I know that there’s no way to determine this, but it’s still about
01:35:09 what you feel.
01:35:11 Yes.
01:35:12 But isn’t that what human relations are also though?
01:35:15 Yes, but.
01:35:16 But we make each other feel.
01:35:18 But it’s true that I have the assumption that you feel somewhat like I do.
01:35:23 I mean, obviously I don’t, you know, and that could be illusion and I don’t know.
01:35:28 And I know that you don’t feel exactly as I do.
01:35:34 But I think we have a long, at least to me, we have a long way to go before the detached
01:35:39 part of our brains.
01:35:41 That is the objective evaluating part, as opposed to the emotive, it feels this way
01:35:45 part, believe that that machine has consciousness.
01:35:49 I think it’s at least without arriving conclusions, it’s at least possible that one day we will
01:35:55 look back and realize that we have yet once again formed another tribe and that scripture
01:36:04 all along had in it the ability for humans and robots to have a deep, meaningful connection.
01:36:12 And that through the robot, the life that enters the body of another robot, what’s the
01:36:17 difference between a biological body and a mechanical one.
01:36:21 And then we will see that the fundamental thing is about the, whatever you want to call
01:36:27 it sentience or whatever can permeate an object.
01:36:31 That was the thing all along.
01:36:34 So I mean.
01:36:36 And then you’ll get canceled one more time because you will.
01:36:39 Because I denied it.
01:36:40 I was going to say.
01:36:41 No, the opposite.
01:36:42 You’ll eventually.
01:36:43 Oh, I see.
01:36:44 Because I’ll preach to the robots.
01:36:45 I’m hoping.
01:36:46 I’m hoping.
01:36:47 All right.
01:36:48 First of all, depends how quickly you do it and how much longer I have to live.
01:36:55 I resist it tremendously, but I am also enough of a student of history to know that my instinctive
01:37:04 resistance has nothing to do with whether it will come about.
01:37:11 I have a hard time believing it.
01:37:13 We’ll see.
01:37:15 Can I ask you about this?
01:37:18 Maybe you can educate me.
01:37:19 I tend to believe that you mentioned suffering, that there is a connection between consciousness
01:37:24 and suffering.
01:37:25 That suffering is a fundamental part.
01:37:28 The capacity to suffer is the fundamental part of being human.
01:37:31 I mean, I would look at when you’re not conscious, you don’t suffer.
01:37:34 You know, we’ve had operations where we’ve been put under anesthetic.
01:37:37 We’re not conscious and we don’t suffer during the operation.
01:37:39 If we were conscious, we would.
01:37:43 But there’s also, I mean, there’s a nonphysical suffering that is very much tied to consciousness.
01:37:48 I can think of things right now that will cause me suffering, like pain that I’ve caused
01:37:55 or pain that other people I care about have felt or so on.
01:37:59 So I don’t see how I think that way.
01:38:04 I think it’s equally true of joy.
01:38:05 Joy is also a product of consciousness.
01:38:09 All tied in in some beautiful, messy way with memory and so on that we can reexperience
01:38:14 it when we recall the memories.
01:38:17 But why is there suffering?
01:38:19 You mentioned evil.
01:38:20 Why is there evil in the world?
01:38:21 You can tell stories about this.
01:38:24 Why is there suffering?
01:38:25 Why is there evil in the world if there’s a God that cares for us?
01:38:30 Let’s assume for a minute that everything was a primitive robot.
01:38:35 There would be no suffering, but there would also be no growth.
01:38:41 And that implies choices.
01:38:44 One of the things that I’ve said that I know why it hurts people, and I don’t mean it quite
01:38:51 the way, but I will say it nonetheless, is the Holocaust presents the exact same theological
01:38:59 question as somebody who gets shot on the streets of a city in Los Angeles, which is,
01:39:06 God, why do you allow some people to do bad things to other people?
01:39:10 It’s on an unimaginable scale, but it’s the same question.
01:39:14 And the answer has to be you either allow people to have free will or you don’t.
01:39:18 You can’t say as God, I’m going to let everybody have free will, but not Nazis.
01:39:24 Nazis don’t get free will because Cambodians, they can kill each other.
01:39:29 Fondans kill each other, but the Nazis don’t get to do that.
01:39:33 So that’s one piece of the puzzle.
01:39:39 And what makes it unfathomable is when you’re actually faced with suffering, these kinds
01:39:43 of explanations are obscene.
01:39:45 They just are.
01:39:46 I mean, when somebody is actually suffering, oh, the rabbi said God gave people free will,
01:39:51 that’s just awful.
01:39:53 But there is a second piece to this also, which is that there is natural suffering,
01:39:59 like children born with diseases or earthquakes or volcanoes or whatever.
01:40:06 And here my argument is that in some ways, suffering has to be random in the world because
01:40:12 when people say, why do bad things happen to good people, well, if only good things
01:40:16 happen to good people, everybody would be good, but it would have no moral content.
01:40:21 The only way you can be good and it have moral content is say, I know that I can live a really
01:40:26 good life and have really terrible things happen to me nonetheless.
01:40:30 So it feels to me like it has to be a randomly.
01:40:34 Now that means, by the way, that I’ve been incredibly lucky.
01:40:40 I don’t have a good life because I was good.
01:40:43 I have a good life because I was lucky.
01:40:45 And that implies not that I should feel guilty about it, but that I have a tremendous responsibility
01:40:50 as a result to other people who aren’t so lucky.
01:40:54 Tremendous responsibility to study the lessons of history, to tell the stories of those who
01:40:58 are less lucky and to draw enough wisdom from them so that we have less cruelty and suffering
01:41:05 in the world or have new kinds that get us to improve even more.
01:41:09 That’s right.
01:41:10 Exactly.
01:41:11 That we suffer better.
01:41:12 For a lot of people, mortality is one of the very unfortunate versions of suffering, which
01:41:22 is that the ride ends in this realm, whatever it is.
01:41:27 What do you think of mortality?
01:41:28 Is it something you think about?
01:41:31 Is it something you fear?
01:41:33 What do you think happens after we die?
01:41:37 I don’t fear it.
01:41:40 First of all, I would say when I was in high school, I think my father actually encouraged
01:41:45 me to read this book.
01:41:47 I read Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death, which I found and still find to be one of the most
01:41:52 profound works I’ve ever come across.
01:41:56 And he convinced me that a lot of what our society is about are ways that we avoid encountering
01:42:04 our own mortality.
01:42:07 Our physicality – I mean, among the points he makes – and I’m not quoting him at
01:42:11 all directly – it’s like, why does everything about our physical body make us so uncomfortable?
01:42:15 Everything that comes out of you, other than tears, is either mildly or very disgusting.
01:42:20 Why?
01:42:21 Why does that have to be?
01:42:23 Why are sex and eating and all the things that are physical surrounded with so much
01:42:28 symbolism?
01:42:29 I mean, what are table manners, really?
01:42:30 They’re like, we’re not eating like animals because we’re not eating like animals.
01:42:35 And sex, obviously, has more symbolism around it than anything.
01:42:38 And his answer is, anything that reminds you that you’re a physical body because that’s
01:42:42 what dies.
01:42:43 Your body dies.
01:42:44 It decays.
01:42:45 It dies.
01:42:46 It gets eaten by worms.
01:42:47 That you don’t want to think about, so you deny it.
01:42:49 I think that part of religion is a confrontation with your own mortality, but also a certain
01:42:56 transcendence of it because the idea is something about you is eternal.
01:43:01 What exactly I don’t know.
01:43:04 And you asked, what do I think happens after we die?
01:43:07 So I don’t know any better than anyone else does, but I’ll say two things about it.
01:43:14 One is that every image of what it’s like is foolish.
01:43:21 Mark Twain has, I think, in Letters from Earth, he says, we’re going to lie on green fields
01:43:24 and listen to harp music, which you wouldn’t want to do for five minutes while you’re alive,
01:43:28 but you think you’ll be happy for the rest of eternity doing it after you die.
01:43:32 So I don’t know.
01:43:33 This world was a surprise.
01:43:34 So why shouldn’t the next world be a surprise?
01:43:36 I have no idea.
01:43:37 But I really like this parable that’s told by a guy in a book on death and mourning by
01:43:45 a rabbi in a book on death and mourning about twins in a womb.
01:43:49 He says, one of them believes that there’s a life outside and the other one doesn’t.
01:43:54 He says, the one who doesn’t says, look, this is the only world we’ve ever seen, the only
01:43:58 world we’ve ever known.
01:43:59 Why do you think there’s something out there?
01:44:01 He says, now imagine the one who believes is born.
01:44:05 Back in the womb, his brother is mourning a death, but outside, everybody’s celebrating
01:44:09 a birth.
01:44:10 He said, and that’s what it’s like when you die.
01:44:13 And I love that image.
01:44:14 Yeah, the grass is always greener.
01:44:16 It’s the new step, but the eternity thing is an interesting one.
01:44:20 It’s yet another concept that I feel humans are fully inequipped to comprehend.
01:44:27 Is eternity fundamental somehow to all of these discussions?
01:44:30 I think it is, well, partly because God is supposed to be eternal and therefore it moves
01:44:36 the mind in that direction, even though it is completely unfathomable, you know?
01:44:41 Because sometimes I would say eternity, you said on a green field, sometimes a moment,
01:44:46 like a truly joyful moment, feels like an eternity, the intensity of it.
01:44:52 Maybe eternity is more about stopping time versus extending time indefinitely, and it’s
01:44:58 something that we just totally can’t comprehend, us silly humans.
01:45:03 All I would say is the older you get, the more you’re struck by the fact that time does
01:45:09 not freeze.
01:45:13 People will sometimes say to me, you haven’t aged a day.
01:45:17 And then I’ll look at an old picture of myself and I’ll say, that was very kind of you, but
01:45:22 that’s not true.
01:45:23 It’s not true.
01:45:24 So, yeah, I mean, I love the idea of seeing eternity in a grain of sand, was how Blake
01:45:31 put it.
01:45:32 I love that notion.
01:45:33 But when you talk about life after death, I think that in some ways, my fundamental
01:45:40 faith is in human beings, that this doesn’t all disappear, that there’s something about
01:45:47 people that transcends this world.
01:45:51 You mentioned Ernest Becker in high school and denial of death.
01:45:54 Maybe you can mention if you still see truth and wisdom in some of this idea.
01:46:00 But in general, can you go all the way back and tell some of the fascinating story of
01:46:06 how you found faith?
01:46:08 When I was in high school, I was a really pretty ardent atheist.
01:46:14 And I loved Bertrand Russell, who was, for my money, with all due respect to all the
01:46:21 very, very capable people that we’ve talked about earlier, he’s the best atheist pound
01:46:26 for pound that there was, and a remarkably witty and lucid writer.
01:46:32 And I was totally in his thrall.
01:46:34 And I would read every book by Russell I could get my hands on.
01:46:37 And the reason that I did, I have this theory that why do adolescent boys like Mr. Spock
01:46:47 and like Sherlock Holmes?
01:46:51 I think it’s because when you hit puberty, for a lot of us, there’s so much discomfort
01:46:55 with our bodies that we like the idea that we’re just brains.
01:46:59 I really think so.
01:47:00 I had that experience.
01:47:02 It’s like, I want to just be a thinking machine.
01:47:05 I don’t want to be a body because my body was making me so uncomfortable.
01:47:08 I had all these urges and inclinations that I couldn’t control.
01:47:12 So Russell was perfect.
01:47:14 And my father, who was a rabbi, did the very wise thing of buying me some of Bertrand Russell’s
01:47:20 books, which was his way of saying, I’m not afraid of him.
01:47:25 And actually, there was another rabbi.
01:47:27 I was at summer camp, and I was sitting on the porch of the, I remember exactly, and
01:47:32 I was reading Bertrand Russell, and this guy came up to me and said, what are you reading?
01:47:36 I was maybe 16 or 17, and I said, Bertrand Russell, I was spoiling for a fight.
01:47:40 And he said, I’m glad you’re reading him.
01:47:42 I said, really?
01:47:43 Why?
01:47:44 He goes, how old are you, David?
01:47:45 And I said, whatever I was, 16, 17.
01:47:47 He said, well, I’d rather you grow out of him than grow into him.
01:47:53 And you know what?
01:47:54 He was actually right because when I started to read about Russell’s life, I realized
01:48:01 that all of that rationality didn’t shield him.
01:48:04 He had an incredibly messy life, multiple marriages, endless infidelities, family members
01:48:11 he didn’t speak to who didn’t speak to him, by the way, was raised by his grandparents
01:48:14 because his parents had died, and really not a happy or, I mean, a remarkable life, but
01:48:21 not a happy one.
01:48:23 And so I started to believe that maybe it was possible that people who had faith were
01:48:29 not just stupid and needed crutches, but saw something deeper than Russell did.
01:48:38 And the more people that I met that were like that, it’s funny because I always thought,
01:48:44 okay, my father is a rabbi, that’s great, but nobody else.
01:48:49 And I think what happened to me was it was not a logical decision to come to faith.
01:48:54 It was a sort of opening of my heart.
01:48:56 It’s like this world is way much more than my mind can capture, and I’ve kind of felt
01:49:02 my way to God.
01:49:04 And in the moments, my faith, you know, there was a rabbi named Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav,
01:49:10 he said he was a moon man, his faith waxed and waned.
01:49:13 So sometimes I have more, sometimes less.
01:49:16 But in my feelinger moments is when I have more.
01:49:20 So with your heart open, what would you say in your feelinger moments is the most beautiful
01:49:29 part about Judaism and your faith?
01:49:34 I think the most beautiful part about Judaism is that even though it is filled with humor
01:49:41 and wit, it takes life and it takes the soul seriously.
01:49:47 Everybody really believes that this matters, and that we matter, and what we do matters.
01:49:53 And I think that that’s incredibly important, and especially in a world in which young people
01:49:58 feel so much like they don’t matter, that’s an unbelievably powerful message.
01:50:05 I mean, you know, I want to say like almost to every young woman under 30 on TikTok, you
01:50:16 don’t matter because you’re beautiful.
01:50:18 That’s not why you matter.
01:50:19 I hope you know that.
01:50:21 You matter because you have a soul.
01:50:23 And to every young man who’s like nihilistic and doesn’t think and just thinks that if
01:50:28 they make enough money, their life will be fine, I want to say the same thing, which
01:50:31 is really that’s not ultimately you matter because you’re in the image of God.
01:50:38 And Judaism really deeply, deeply believes and preaches that.
01:50:42 And I think that that’s a message that has so much to say to the world.
01:50:48 It’s like you have to take people’s souls seriously.
01:50:51 And for all of the difficulty in figuring out all these social questions and what they
01:50:56 mean, I just don’t want to dismiss people because I disagree with them politically or
01:51:02 socially or culturally, because I think they matter.
01:51:07 So ultimately Judaism has a wealth of meaning for a human mind.
01:51:16 I really believe that it does.
01:51:18 I really do.
01:51:21 And its meaning, and I want to emphasize this, is not political.
01:51:27 The deepest meaning of Judaism is not political.
01:51:31 Well there is, we put politics on top of everything.
01:51:33 Exactly.
01:51:34 But that’s why I want to emphasize it.
01:51:36 The deepest meaning is on a soul level.
01:51:38 It’s not on a voting level.
01:51:40 Well that combined with the humor, it’s clear to me that Christopher Hitchens should have
01:51:44 been a Jew.
01:51:45 He was.
01:51:46 He actually was.
01:51:47 He discovered that in his 30s, that his mother was Jewish.
01:51:51 That’s fascinating.
01:51:52 Yep.
01:51:53 He actually, he has a beautiful essay about it, discovering in his 30s that his mother
01:51:55 was Jewish, yep.
01:51:59 So remarkably enough, he actually was Jewish.
01:52:03 His autobiography, Hitch 22, is a great read.
01:52:06 And I just want to say, what you discover there, I don’t know if I’m giving too much
01:52:10 away by telling the story of his life.
01:52:12 Spoiler alert.
01:52:13 What you discover there is that his mother ran away with a minister or a priest and they
01:52:17 died in what seemed like was a suicide pact.
01:52:20 And so I read it, unfortunately, after he passed away, but I would have wanted to ask
01:52:25 him, do you think that has anything to do maybe with the hostility towards religion?
01:52:30 We are only human.
01:52:31 My father, I mean, both my parents, but my father, who was a rabbi, was such a wonderful,
01:52:35 warm, and loving man.
01:52:36 So I associate a religious figure with real goodness.
01:52:42 And I’m sorry to return to a darker topic, but I really wanted to ask you this.
01:52:49 For the current events, for a recent event, I mentioned Dallas.
01:52:54 What lessons do you draw from the Dallas Synagogue hostage incident?
01:52:59 Well, the week after that, we had active shooter training in my synagogues.
01:53:03 And one of the things I drew was that security for synagogues is important.
01:53:09 And the second is that the reality of antisemitism, which I had thought had waned when I first
01:53:17 began my rabbinate, I thought it’s not going to be such a big issue, it is like an evergreen
01:53:23 issue.
01:53:24 And Jews and all people of goodwill have to take this really seriously, because it has
01:53:30 devastating consequences.
01:53:31 And if the world doesn’t know that, then it just hasn’t been paying attention.
01:53:35 So there’s antisemitism at a scale of human to human, but there’s also, like you mentioned,
01:53:41 politics get mixed up into things, nations get mixed into things, impossible to answer.
01:53:48 But I have to ask, what do you think about the long running saga of Israel and Palestine?
01:53:56 Will we ever see peace in that part of the Middle East?
01:54:00 Well, since I’m an optimist about human, look, I mean, I have many, many thoughts about it.
01:54:07 I’m a very, very strong supporter of Israel.
01:54:11 And I also feel really for the plight of the Palestinians.
01:54:16 I think that this is a clash of legitimate narratives that is impossible to exactly split
01:54:26 the difference of.
01:54:29 However, I know that Israel has made peace with Egypt, has made peace with Jordan, has
01:54:36 made peace now with other Arab nations.
01:54:39 I don’t believe that Israel is unwilling to make peace.
01:54:44 And so I think that as difficult as it will be for the Palestinians to come to grips with
01:54:51 the fact that the Jewish state is not leaving and is legitimately here, as opposed to we
01:54:56 can’t get rid of it now, but we will get rid of it one day.
01:55:00 If that comes to be, and I believe that it will, I think not only that there would be
01:55:06 peace, but I think that those two peoples together could probably do remarkable things
01:55:10 in the world.
01:55:12 Do you think the source of it is politics?
01:55:16 Is it religious ideas?
01:55:19 And to flip it, what is the way out?
01:55:23 Is it geopolitics?
01:55:26 Is it interfaith discourse and collaboration, or is it simply the human love?
01:55:37 So I’m not sure that I could give one answer to that, but I will give a piece of an answer.
01:55:43 Why did the Abraham Accords happen?
01:55:46 The main reason that they happened was because economics overrode ideology.
01:55:52 And I actually am hopeful that that’s in the end what will happen, that people will
01:55:57 say, you know what?
01:55:58 If we have such a better life, if we put aside the ideological animosities and just created
01:56:08 this different kind of Middle East together.
01:56:11 I went to Dubai to watch the World Chess Championship, because I really wanted to see Magnus Carlsen
01:56:18 play.
01:56:19 I thought, you’re alive when you have such a remarkable world champion.
01:56:22 Go see him play.
01:56:23 So I actually took myself to Dubai for the last couple of games, and I watched.
01:56:28 It’s not that I’m uninterested in Dubai, but I went there for the chess thing.
01:56:34 The Expo was also on at the same time, and I saw, here’s this amazing place.
01:56:37 I came back.
01:56:39 This guy I know who lived in Dubai for several years and works in the Middle East said to
01:56:42 me, what did you think of it?
01:56:43 And I said, it was nice, it was Dubai.
01:56:45 It was very polished, very sophisticated, very clean, no crime and so on.
01:56:51 But it was kind of like Las Vegas in the Middle East without the gambling or something like
01:56:56 that.
01:56:57 And he totally changed my perspective in a couple sentences.
01:57:00 He said, I know it seems like that when you come from Los Angeles.
01:57:04 He said, but fly there from Yemen or from Riyadh, and it is a miracle.
01:57:10 And I thought, oh my God, you’re right.
01:57:12 It’s like what human beings can do if they just put aside their ideological shackles
01:57:19 is remarkable, and I’m hopeful that one day that’ll happen.
01:57:23 Economics allows for higher quality of life.
01:57:26 You no longer, it’s the playground analogy you said earlier.
01:57:30 If there’s more resources to play with, unfortunately, us humans are more willing to play with others.
01:57:38 And maybe that is the solution.
01:57:39 And maybe, I mean, for me, from a technology perspective, innovation, engineering helps
01:57:47 make everybody’s life better.
01:57:49 And over that, once people’s lives become better, they start to have more time to be
01:57:56 empathetic and hear people out.
01:57:58 And they have more to lose.
01:58:00 When you have more to lose, it actually makes you, I think, countries are less willing to
01:58:05 go to war when they have more to lose.
01:58:08 And families want peace when it’s good at home.
01:58:12 So I think there’s an element of that as well.
01:58:14 And some of it, again, taking us back to the other aspect of our conversation is how we’re
01:58:19 conducting ourselves in conversation online and so on.
01:58:23 Because I think, actually, I’m a big fan of the idea of social media that is a way for
01:58:30 us to connect together.
01:58:32 I think there’s a lot of really strong ideas how to do that well.
01:58:36 And clearly, the initial attempts that kind of just open it up wide, some of the lesser
01:58:44 aspects of human nature can take over when combined with different forces like advertisements
01:58:50 and virology and all those kinds of things.
01:58:52 But overall, I love the honesty of the mess of it being presented before us on social
01:58:58 media.
01:59:00 Part of me, maybe because I don’t participate it, like if somebody is being mean to me or
01:59:06 being aggressive and these kinds of things, I enjoy it because it’s human nature.
01:59:13 But I enjoy it because I don’t respond.
01:59:15 I think if I responded, I would get pulled into this human nature and then it’s not fun.
01:59:19 But I love the, like I’ll talk to people.
01:59:22 In fact, I still visit Clubhouse.
01:59:24 I don’t know if you know what that is.
01:59:25 Sure.
01:59:26 Oh, right.
01:59:27 That’s right.
01:59:28 Actually, when I…
01:59:29 I think that’s how we first met.
01:59:30 Well, yeah.
01:59:31 Well, I was such a fan boy.
01:59:32 Actually, when I first heard you, I was like, I can’t believe I get to talk to David.
01:59:37 But the Israel Palestine topic was something that was very deeply in a heated way discussed
01:59:47 on Clubhouse.
01:59:48 Race relations is the thing that was really heatedly discussed.
01:59:52 And I now go to Clubhouse to practice Russian.
01:59:55 And there in Russian, the heated discussion is on basically any topic as meaningless or
02:00:03 meaningful as you want in the heat of it.
02:00:06 Just people just screaming and then calming down and going through the full process.
02:00:12 That too is beautiful because that emotion is there.
02:00:15 And if it is allowed to have a voice, I think ultimately it leads to healing.
02:00:21 So that felt really healthy if you learn how to do that at scale.
02:00:26 Social media, I wish that it were not as algorithmically biased towards conflict.
02:00:32 I don’t think that that’s healthy.
02:00:33 But I think it brings a lot of blessings into people’s lives if they use it wisely.
02:00:41 Like anything else, it can be awful.
02:00:45 But I’ve connected to all sorts of people that I never would have known.
02:00:51 And that’s been wonderful.
02:00:52 So let me ask you the big question of advice.
02:00:57 What advice would you give to young people today that are maybe high school, college,
02:01:04 thinking about career, thinking about life, they can be proud of.
02:01:08 So the first thing that I would say is that life is longer than you think it is.
02:01:13 Even though I understand the impulse to be in a rush, you will have many unfoldings.
02:01:22 More even than people of my generation did.
02:01:24 Unfoldings, that’s such a funny word.
02:01:26 But it feels that way.
02:01:28 It’s like different aspects of your life will come, will show you different possibilities
02:01:35 that you don’t imagine at the moment.
02:01:40 And I think the second thing that I would say is, I know that this is a very old fashioned,
02:01:49 but I would say to the extent that you can read, don’t just, and not just on social media,
02:01:57 read books.
02:01:58 Learn things that will give you a broader context for your life than just today or yesterday
02:02:05 or the day before.
02:02:09 And I suppose the other thing that I would say is that to the extent that you can try
02:02:22 to develop your own internal metric of both what matters and what is good, because you
02:02:29 will be exposed to more voices than any generation in history telling you that that’s good or
02:02:36 this is good.
02:02:37 They’re called influences, influencers, but what they are is voices telling you what you
02:02:41 should think and what you should believe.
02:02:44 And so have some internal space where you’ll be able to say, for example, I know this person
02:02:51 is doing that and it looks great, but that’s not me.
02:02:54 You have a community of people that speak to you with a lot of passion.
02:03:02 Do you still have that voice in your own, in the privacy of your own mind that you’re
02:03:09 able to ignore, like for a moment, just be with yourself, think what is right?
02:03:15 Absolutely.
02:03:16 And I think it’s partly because I grew up without that.
02:03:19 I mean, I grew up with a lot of space in my life, and so I had a chance to develop that
02:03:24 voice.
02:03:25 That’s why I think it’s harder for kids today than it was for me.
02:03:28 I mean, I grew up when there were three channels, there was three, six and 10.
02:03:31 There was ABC, CBS and NBC, and that was it.
02:03:35 And you spent your evening playing board games or reading or whatever, and there was a lot
02:03:38 of space.
02:03:40 And we played football on the street and you went on your bike in the morning and nobody
02:03:44 worried about you and you came home at night and everybody assumed you were fine.
02:03:49 And so I really feel, and also I went into a religious tradition where I feel like I
02:03:56 have the opportunity to judge myself by bigger metrics.
02:04:01 And it’s still hard.
02:04:02 I don’t want to, it’s not like, oh, I wear impenetrable armor.
02:04:06 It’s still hard.
02:04:07 So how much harder for kids today when they don’t have that?
02:04:13 You mentioned books.
02:04:15 Is there Bertrand Russell and Denial of Death by Ernest Becker, is there books that pop
02:04:21 into mind that had an impact on you?
02:04:25 My favorite novel is Middlemarch.
02:04:27 Middlemarch?
02:04:28 Middlemarch.
02:04:29 I was listening to a podcast, I was listening to one of your podcasts where your guest said
02:04:34 the two greatest novels of the 19th century were Brothers Karamazov and, what was the
02:04:42 other one he mentioned?
02:04:43 I don’t remember.
02:04:44 Dostoevsky as well or no?
02:04:45 I think.
02:04:46 Was it both Dostoevsky?
02:04:47 It might have been.
02:04:48 I don’t remember.
02:04:49 But anyway, but I would say Middlemarch is up there.
02:04:51 Middlemarch presents an entire world and it’s written by a woman, Marianne Evans, who took
02:04:57 the pen name George Eliot, who you feel, Virginia Woolf said it’s the only English novel written
02:05:04 for grownups.
02:05:07 You feel the genius in her sentences, like the pressure of her intellect in her sentences.
02:05:12 It’s a wonderful, wonderful book.
02:05:14 I love it.
02:05:15 Pressure of her intellect.
02:05:16 Yeah, you really do.
02:05:20 I also love Saul Bellow, especially Herzog, but it’s a very different kind of thinking
02:05:26 person’s novel.
02:05:27 I read a lot of mysteries and a lot of other kinds of fiction and literature.
02:05:32 But in terms of the books that most, you mentioned one of them, which is Viktor Frankl’s Man’s
02:05:40 Search for Meaning.
02:05:43 And I also really, really love Heschel’s The Sabbath.
02:05:45 I think it’s a beautiful book.
02:05:48 It’s a very short book, just as Frankl’s book is.
02:05:51 What do you take from The Man’s Search for Meaning?
02:05:54 What do you take of a human being in the worst conditions, being able to non dramatically
02:06:05 find little joys, find beauty?
02:06:10 It’s what I said before about Judaism’s advice to younger people, is that it mattered.
02:06:15 If you believe that something matters, you have enormous resilience.
02:06:20 It’s meaninglessness that is the greatest threat to a decent life.
02:06:24 When people are deeply depressed, whether it is chemical depression or what they feel
02:06:30 like is this is all meaningless.
02:06:34 And meaning, now obviously chemical depression calls in part for chemical means, but meaning
02:06:43 is the great antidote.
02:06:47 We can talk about what kind of meaning.
02:06:49 There are kinds of meanings that are awful, but meaning is the great antidote to a sense
02:06:55 that life is just nihilistic and purposeless and to that destructiveness that I think is
02:07:03 too common.
02:07:04 Yeah, so maybe the heroic action in Nazi Germany, in the Holocaust, in the camps is the, even
02:07:14 not the action, but just the realization that every life matters.
02:07:18 So here’s this really wonderful story that Hugo Grin, who was a rabbi in England, died,
02:07:25 I don’t know, like 15, 20 years ago, he used to tell, he grew up in Auschwitz.
02:07:29 He was a child there and he was with his father and it was Hanukkah and you’re supposed to
02:07:34 light the candles.
02:07:35 And his father took the margarine ration and used it as the oil to light the Hanukkah candles.
02:07:39 And Hugo was scandalized and he said, that’s our food.
02:07:43 And his father said, what we have learned, my son, is you can live for three weeks without
02:07:49 food.
02:07:50 You can live for three days without water, but you can’t live for three minutes without
02:07:54 hope.
02:07:56 Well, hope, let me ask you, you said meaning.
02:08:04 What’s the meaning of this whole thing?
02:08:06 What’s the meaning of life?
02:08:07 You’re the perfect person to ask this question, Rabbi David Wolff.
02:08:11 I believe the meaning of life is for human beings to grow in soul.
02:08:16 That’s why we’re here.
02:08:17 And you can do that in infinite numbers of ways.
02:08:19 But if you’re supposed to return your soul like more burnished and beautiful, then you
02:08:24 got it.
02:08:25 I mean, it’s going to have some nicks and cuts, but that’s what it means to deepen and
02:08:32 grow it.
02:08:33 And you do that more than anything else.
02:08:38 You do that by learning how to love.
02:08:40 I mean, that’s the principle way, I think, that you do it.
02:08:43 You know, it’s interesting because for a human, the relationship, if you’re a man of faith,
02:08:50 is with God.
02:08:51 But it feels like love is so richly part of human society that it’s not just love of God,
02:08:59 it’s love of each other.
02:09:01 Right.
02:09:02 Yep.
02:09:03 There’s no question about the idea.
02:09:04 I mean, in Judaism, that was actually the great innovation of the monotheistic idea.
02:09:10 In pagan societies, it was all about how you treated the gods.
02:09:14 Monotheism said, no, God cares how you treat each other.
02:09:17 So it’s, in fact, the mystics use the same kind of word in Hebrew, davekut, which means
02:09:25 clinging, that is used about Adam and Eve.
02:09:30 It says, therefore, a man will leave his father and mother and davak with his wife.
02:09:35 And davak means cling.
02:09:36 So there is an analogy there, absolutely.
02:09:39 Yeah, I kind of think of human civilization as that movie, March of the Penguins, and
02:09:45 they’re all huddling together in the cold.
02:09:48 This is fundamentally human, this darkness all around us of uncertainty, of cruelty.
02:09:59 It seems like everything is so fragile, and we’re just kind of all huddling together for
02:10:04 warmth.
02:10:05 Yes.
02:10:06 And that’s all we got is each other.
02:10:09 So we started with the big question of what is God, ended with what is meaning.
02:10:16 Rabbi Wolpe, I’ve been a huge, as I’ve told you, huge, huge fan of yours for a long time.
02:10:20 It’s such an honor that you talked to me today.
02:10:22 Thank you so much.
02:10:23 I am really so happy to be here, and thank you so much for the conversation.
02:10:27 Thanks for listening to this conversation with David Wolpe.
02:10:29 To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
02:10:34 And now, let me leave you with some words from David himself.
02:10:38 The only whole heart is a broken one, because it lets the light in.
02:10:43 Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.