back to indexDavid Wolpe: Judaism | Lex Fridman Podcast #270
link |
The following is a conversation with Rabbi David Wolpe, someone who I have been a fan
link |
of for many years, for the kindness in his heart, the strength of his character, and
link |
the kind of friends he keeps and talks with, many of whom disagree with him but love him
link |
nevertheless, including the late Christopher Hitchens.
link |
I will have many conversations like these in the future about religion, about Islam,
link |
Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and others, looking to understand and celebrate
link |
the culture, the tradition, and the beauty of the people who practice these religions.
link |
I will of course not shy away from the difficult topics.
link |
I will talk both about hate and love, about war and peace.
link |
This conversation was recorded more than three weeks ago.
link |
Please allow me this time to speak on what has been on my mind.
link |
If this is not interesting to you, please skip, I totally understand.
link |
Some people asked me to say a few words on the war in Ukraine.
link |
I think my words are worth little, but perhaps let me try.
link |
I considered doing a long solo episode on this war.
link |
I tried several times, but it is too personal for now.
link |
To give you context, I've been talking to refugees, friends, loved ones, in Ukraine,
link |
in Russia, in Poland, Slovakia, Moldova, Romania, even UK, Germany, Canada, India, China, and
link |
of course the United States.
link |
Some of them crying, or angry, or confused, or scared.
link |
I'm helping as best as I can privately, and I'm hoping to help in the future by traveling
link |
to Ukraine and Russia and celebrating the humanity and the beauty of the people in this
link |
This was all set up both for Ukraine and Russia trips before 2022, including conversations
link |
with scientists, artists, athletes, leaders, and just, quote, regular folks, who are equally
link |
if not more fascinating to me.
link |
For now, it has become much more difficult, but I'll keep trying to find a way.
link |
I was born in the Soviet Union.
link |
My roots are both Ukrainian and Russian.
link |
From today and until the day I die, I am an American.
link |
I'm proud of all of this.
link |
I hope to keep celebrating the culture and the incredible human beings that make up these
link |
nations and humanity as a whole.
link |
We're all one people.
link |
We're in this together.
link |
That's how I feel about the people of these nations.
link |
Now let me speak about those in the seats of power.
link |
I condemn all actions of leaders who play geopolitical games on the world stage disregarding
link |
the costs paid in human suffering on the scale of millions.
link |
For this reason, I condemn Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine.
link |
And I condemn many of the military interventions by the superpowers of the world, including
link |
by my country, the country I love, the United States, that after World War II has intervened
link |
in over 40 nations with many studies finding that the United States is culpable for an
link |
unfathomable number of civilian deaths.
link |
I condemn all heads of state who needlessly wage wars, watching young men and women burn
link |
in the fires they started.
link |
I don't understand how humans can be so cruel to each other, or rather I understand, but
link |
I believe in a future world where this is no longer true.
link |
Let me also say a few words of what I hope to do with this podcast.
link |
I want to explore the full complexity and beauty of human nature.
link |
I believe each of us are capable of good and evil, and I want to understand how the mind
link |
and the circumstance lead one to choose the former path or the latter.
link |
And I believe conversation is one of the best ways to work toward this understanding.
link |
For that, I think I have to not only talk to the most inspiring humans in the world,
link |
but also to the most controversial.
link |
I will speak with many people who I disagree with, politicians, activists, CEOs, heads
link |
of state, with very different opinions on the world.
link |
I will try hard to challenge their ideas without closing my mind to the depth and complexity
link |
of their perspective and their humanity.
link |
My presence in the same room with wildly different people will make it easy for the media and
link |
the internet to pick and choose clips and snapshots attacking me for being a shill for
link |
one side or the other.
link |
I can't defend this point, except to say that I'm a shill for no one, and that I
link |
hope you see the strength of my integrity, that I won't be influenced by any of them
link |
no matter how rich, powerful, or charismatic they are.
link |
Like the poem If by Roger Kipling says, if you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
link |
or walk with kings, nor lose the common touch, if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt
link |
you, if all men count with you, but none too much.
link |
This is a really, really important thing to me that I try to live by, that all human beings
link |
count with me the same.
link |
People have criticized me for wanting to have some of these conversations, like with Vladimir
link |
Putin and Vladimir Zelensky, and for times in the past speaking about them without the
link |
seriousness the topic deserves.
link |
For this, I would sincerely like to apologize.
link |
I'm disappointed, even ashamed, of my frequent ineloquence on these topics.
link |
I will work hard to do better.
link |
When I'm joking, it should be clear that it's a joke, and hopefully actually funny.
link |
When I'm being serious, I should speak with care and rigor.
link |
I've now done many hundreds of hours of podcast conversation.
link |
Despite my frequent failures in speaking, I hope you know where my heart is.
link |
Unfortunately, I think people will take clips of me and use them to attack me.
link |
This will happen more and more.
link |
I guess there's nothing I can do but send them my love, and in the meantime, try to
link |
be a better person and a better interviewer.
link |
Let me also say that I like humor, especially dark humor.
link |
I like being silly and not taking myself seriously.
link |
I will keep taking risks with that, all with the goal of having fun and celebrating humanity
link |
at its most absurd and most beautiful.
link |
I will occasionally dress up in strange and weird outfits to celebrate the absurdity of
link |
I will hang out, break bread, and joke with all kinds of people.
link |
I don't have to agree with them to laugh with them, in order to escape for a brief
link |
moment the tension, the conflict, the hatred in the world.
link |
Humor just might save this little chaotic little civilization of ours.
link |
I love the Ukrainian people.
link |
I love the Russian people.
link |
And of course, I love my fellow Americans, Californians and Midwesterners, New Yorkers
link |
And I want to share that love with others.
link |
If I mess it up, I'm really, really sorry.
link |
I'm trying my best.
link |
I have no agenda and no one telling me what to do.
link |
I feel like the luckiest guy in the world to have all these opportunities, and I'm
link |
deeply grateful to be alive and to share that joy with other amazing people around me.
link |
Thank you for your support.
link |
For all the love you've sent my way, I will work my ass off to not disappoint you.
link |
This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
link |
To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
link |
And now, here's my conversation with David Welby.
link |
Let's start with a big question.
link |
According to Judaism, who is God?
link |
It's difficult because Judaism, like any tradition that is thousands of years old and encompasses
link |
so many different lands and languages and thinkers, it doesn't give a single answer
link |
to even simple questions.
link |
And to large questions, it certainly doesn't give a single answer.
link |
Although Judaism was responsible for introducing the monotheistic idea to the world, it doesn't
link |
mean that it's one idea.
link |
So if you take Maimonides, the greatest sage in the Jewish tradition, a medieval philosopher,
link |
he would say that God is an omnipotent, benevolent, intangible, unimaginable God.
link |
In fact, he said, you can't say what God is, only what God is not, because you have
link |
to emphasize, could talk more about that, but basically you have to emphasize the unknowability
link |
You have a modern philosopher like Heschel, who says that God is a God of pathos, a God
link |
of deep feeling, which probably would make Maimonides shiver if he heard such a description.
link |
And if you look in the Bible, God is always regretting or having human emotions.
link |
So there are so many different kinds of depictions and ideas, and there is this tremendous tension
link |
between transcendence and imminence.
link |
That is, in the Jewish tradition, God is exquisitely close, God is imminent.
link |
In the Talmud's words, God is as close as your mouth is to your ear.
link |
In other words, whatever you say, God hears it.
link |
And yet at the same time, God is unfathomably distant.
link |
Sometimes when I speak to high schoolers, I will say, in the Jewish tradition, think
link |
When you were two years old, you had no idea what it was to be a 15 year old.
link |
Not only did you not know, but you didn't know what you didn't know.
link |
We conceive of God as being more, the distance between God and human beings is far greater
link |
than the distance between a two year old and a 15 year old.
link |
So when we speak about God, we have to acknowledge how limited we really are.
link |
So okay, you laid out a lot of fascinating things on the table.
link |
So one, the nobility of God, then this idea of deep feeling, which again, can God operate
link |
in the space of feelings too, so not just the mouth and the ear of the senses, can God
link |
Can God be felt by this three year old in the analogy versus the teenager?
link |
So I will take refuge in a beautiful phrase from Martin Buber, another Jewish theologian.
link |
He said, God cannot be expressed, God can only be addressed.
link |
In other words, you can speak to God, you can feel a sense of God, but can you begin
link |
to comprehend or know God?
link |
Yosef Kaspi, I'm pulling in a couple of early Jewish philosophers, he said, to know God,
link |
I would have to be God.
link |
But can we get close?
link |
Is it useful or is it a distraction to visualize things, to embody, to create, to attach to
link |
the stories some kind of visualizations in our mind?
link |
For example, gender, he versus she, things like this, or old man in the sky kind of feeling.
link |
So it's almost inevitable, but I think ultimately you try to transcend it.
link |
This was the great, we just read this actually in synagogue, the story of the golden calf.
link |
And the story is that human beings found it impossible to not have a visualization because
link |
they had just come from Egypt and in the world of pagan worship, everything is...
link |
It's not that pagans thought that idol was actually God, but it represented visually
link |
And along comes this idea that God is actually not capable of being visualized, which is
link |
very difficult and it stretches the bounds of human comprehension, maybe even breaks
link |
So would you say that the proper way to operate as a human in relation to God is humility
link |
in that you're screwed, you're not able to basically know anything, almost anything?
link |
Well, the reason that the salvation of this is that you can't, I was going to say the
link |
reason you're not screwed, but then I thought somebody might be upset at a rabbi saying
link |
So I didn't say it and have not said it.
link |
But the reason you're not is that you don't have to have a comprehension of God.
link |
You have to have a relationship to God and those are not the same.
link |
I mean, to draw an analogy that is not far from perfect as most analogies are, but this
link |
one especially, you have relationships with people who are mysteries to you.
link |
You're a mystery to yourself.
link |
You can live and love somebody for 50 years and they can say something that surprises
link |
you because ultimately we are trapped in here.
link |
And when a child first says I, we call that individuation.
link |
But what that really means is I now know that I am cut off from the minds of all other children
link |
and all other people.
link |
And so you have with God a more intimate relationship because you can believe that God is, you are
link |
known by God and you have a relationship to God despite the fact that you can't know
link |
God just as you can't know others.
link |
And some would say to have a good relationship, you want to be constantly surprised.
link |
You don't want to know the thing.
link |
Well, the world, yes, the world that God created is constantly surprising.
link |
And by the way, the caveat to this, you know, when I had all these debates with Christopher
link |
Hitchens and he would always say that God is a greater tyrant than North Korea because
link |
it continues after your death.
link |
And the idea of being known by God is after all frightening if you think God knows what
link |
I think and so on, if your image of God is unloving.
link |
Can we jump to this?
link |
You had friendships and conversations with a lot of the fascinating figures of the past
link |
20, 30 years of the great intellectuals, one of which perhaps one of the greats is Christopher
link |
What have you learned from your conversation, your friendship?
link |
So there are a lot of views he held that I really did not agree with, but he was a remarkable
link |
That was a good line about North Korea.
link |
He was full of incredibly good lines.
link |
Well, one of the things I learned was you can't win a debate with Christopher Hitchens.
link |
One of the reasons you can't win is because he has this British baritone and this ready
link |
wit that you can't triumph over laughter.
link |
It doesn't matter if your argument is better, if your quip is better, you win.
link |
And so I remember once we were arguing about free will and he said, well, I choose to believe
link |
And everybody laughed and that was despite the fact that that's not really an argument.
link |
Or like I have free will because I don't have a choice or whatever.
link |
And people should watch your conversation with him.
link |
I mean, it's a kind of David versus Goliath situation and you're quite masterful at using
link |
charisma and sweet talking Christopher Hitchens.
link |
I also genuinely liked him.
link |
I mean, I spent a three hour limousine ride with him from one debate to another, from
link |
And the entire time he said, we just can't talk about religion.
link |
So we talked about literature and he gave me a long lecture about scotch.
link |
He was inexhaustible.
link |
I mean, not only did he, I began, I wrote a couple of obituaries about him and one I
link |
began with the historian Keith Thomas said, there are two ways of achieving immortality
link |
by doing things worth remembering or saying things worth remembering.
link |
And by that standard, he did both.
link |
I mean, he went all around the world to all sorts of danger zones.
link |
He knew like the best bars everywhere from Kuala Lumpur, you know, to Beirut, to LA.
link |
And he could drink all night and write a 2000 word essay on the poetry of Yates and go to
link |
I remember before one of our debates in Boston, he was at the bar and he said, come have a
link |
And I said, I'm not going to have a drink before I go to debate with you.
link |
What are you crazy?
link |
And he said, just have a beer, it's water.
link |
So he was, he really was a constant, inexhaustible fountain of intrigue and interest.
link |
What kind of things, if you can remember, if you can mention, if you can admit, to have
link |
him enlightening you or helping you change your mind about something in this world.
link |
So I think, unrelated to Scotch, yeah, unrelated to Scotch.
link |
He convinced me that the idea, I mean, I had my doubts about it and have my doubts about
link |
it, but he convinced me through many debates and not only he, that the idea that religion
link |
makes people better is not, it's not ipso facto wrong, but it's a much, much more complicated
link |
argument than I wished it to be.
link |
So he is, however you conceive of the term beauty, he's one of those, one of the more
link |
beautiful humans, this weird little earth produced.
link |
So how do you explain the atheism combined with such a beautiful mind?
link |
So from your perspective of a man of faith, how do you think about that?
link |
So of the atheists that I have debated, I think about all of them somewhat differently.
link |
So I think that in some deep way, for example, Sam Harris is a religious personality.
link |
I don't even think that he would, he wouldn't like the word religious, but I don't even
link |
think that he would take issue with that.
link |
I think that he would say his is a purely material based spirituality.
link |
But I mean, his orientation towards meditation and appreciation of Buddhism, there's something
link |
deeply seeking spiritual about him.
link |
With Hitchens, I honestly, and I know that some of his fans will really not like this.
link |
It's not that he was any kind of closet believer, certainly not at all, but I almost feel as
link |
though he was less a passionate arguer against religion than he was, first of all, extremely
link |
upset by the forms that religion took in this world.
link |
And then once he trained his intellectual howitzers on a target, he had so much fun
link |
inventing new arguments and attacking it that I really believe he gets carried away sometimes
link |
by his own eloquence and intellectual range.
link |
So for example, the idea that you would call a book that religion poisons everything, I
link |
think he did that deliberately provocatively so that he could defend a proposition that
link |
obviously is indefensible, that it poisons everything.
link |
So I don't know, I think he had tremendous joie de vivre.
link |
That's really what, that's what sums him up.
link |
This guy loved life in all of its manifestations and arguing against something that someone
link |
else believed was one of his greatest joys.
link |
Yeah, and of course the practical aspect of that, he just saw the powerful and he challenged
link |
them with humor and so on.
link |
And you know, you could argue perhaps that humor is the highest form of what humanity
link |
Like sometimes maybe us little humans take things a little too seriously, then sometimes
link |
we need to just laugh at it all, laugh at ourselves, and that's probably the purest
link |
You know, Auden, the poet, said, among the people that I like or admire, I can find no
link |
common quality, but among those I love, I can.
link |
All of them make me laugh.
link |
There you have it.
link |
Speaking of people that make you laugh, Sam Harris, because he actually has a really great
link |
With a very cold and monotone delivery.
link |
He's another one that you had, you're friends with, you have good conversations with.
link |
What's your fundamental disagreements and agreements with Sam?
link |
Sam believes that religion is intellectually indefensible.
link |
He really believes it, like deep in his soul.
link |
And he gets angry at the idea that a proposition should be unchallenged if it offends his sense
link |
So he cannot move on until this is dealt with.
link |
In fact, I did a podcast with Eric Weinstein, and then Sam did one.
link |
And Sam said, when I heard your podcast with David Wolpe, I learned stuff about what he
link |
thinks that I never learned in my conversations with him because I can never let him make
link |
those unfounded assertions without challenging them, and you just let them go.
link |
And I think that there was something to that was like, he finds it hard to have a conversation
link |
about religion that doesn't arouse his real ire about the harm that he thinks religion
link |
does in the world.
link |
So it's more about the implementation of religion in the world as it is versus the
link |
really fundamental...
link |
I think he also thinks it's fundamentally intellectually shoddy and disreputable.
link |
I don't know how to put this.
link |
I mean, they're both capable of separating their contempt for religion from the people
link |
that they have sitting in front of them.
link |
You mean Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris?
link |
You mentioned Eric Weinstein.
link |
People should listen to your conversation with Eric.
link |
It's a fascinating one.
link |
It just goes all over the place in this humor and wit.
link |
There's one interesting aspect that I also learned, perhaps not about you but about Eric,
link |
But Eric has a similar thing as with Jordan Peterson, which is if you ask them, do they
link |
believe in God, I think the answer...
link |
They're not comfortable answering that question, or they might say no, but they're usually
link |
just not comfortable answering that question.
link |
But there's a kind of sense that they would like to live life, a religious life, as if
link |
I think that's exactly right.
link |
I think, first of all, Eric has a really deep appreciation of the Jewish tradition.
link |
I don't know Peterson.
link |
I've read his stuff and I've reviewed his stuff and so on.
link |
But I think that Jungians are in their very approach.
link |
They believe that myth is the way the world works.
link |
And so it's not that big a leap to God, but there's still a distance there.
link |
Is it possible to have your cake and eat it too?
link |
Is it possible to have the depth of a religious life without believing in God?
link |
How do you make sense of Eric Weinstein's devout life within the tradition?
link |
I honestly think he believes in God, but doesn't believe in God and it's oscillating like it's
link |
a quantum mechanical system of some sort.
link |
Schrodinger's God.
link |
So I think that he would probably agree with what Elie Wiesel said, that a Jew can be angry
link |
at God or be disbelieving of God, but is not allowed to be indifferent to God.
link |
And I think Eric's not indifferent to God.
link |
And it's different than Christianity.
link |
I've had this conversation many times because you can be very Jewish and have deep doubts
link |
about theological questions because Judaism isn't a religion, it's a religious family.
link |
And so you're born Jewish.
link |
Like if I said to you tomorrow, if I was Christian and I said, oh, I believe in Jesus today and
link |
then tomorrow I didn't, I'm not Christian anymore.
link |
But if tomorrow I said, oh, I don't believe all this stuff, I'm still Jewish.
link |
So it's a more complicated system.
link |
Having said that though, I think it's very hard to sustain over generations without some
link |
belief that the source of it is beyond ourselves.
link |
And in that sense, as in many others, Eric is unique.
link |
Well, he was actually making that claim that we need faith to propagate this tradition
link |
through the generations.
link |
So without that, the traditions crumble.
link |
It's a very interesting idea and very interesting argument for devout faith, which is it's a
link |
thing, it's a glue that holds a tradition together.
link |
Otherwise like traditions fall apart because you can't have the intensity of that tradition.
link |
I mean, on the other hand, you do see tradition, I mean, Thanksgiving, one of my favorite.
link |
So I would say traditions that are demanding fall apart, traditions that require Turkey
link |
might not fall apart, but traditions that make demands of you that are countercultural
link |
or are hard, they fall apart.
link |
I think I need to introduce you to some Thanksgiving dinners that are quite demanding, getting
link |
the family together.
link |
You know, there's a, first of all, I'm a vegetarian, so I'm tough to have at Thanksgiving dinner,
link |
but there's a comedian, Cathy Landsman, who one year I heard this on the radio and it
link |
She said that holidays are a chance to renew your resentments afresh, you know, and that's
link |
basically what people do with their families.
link |
It's like, I'm going to go home and fight with the uncle again this year.
link |
I apologize to take a dark turn, but you mentioned Elie Wiesel.
link |
I recently saw a picture of Elie Wiesel when he was in the camp, when he was liberated.
link |
For some reason that hit hard, like, you know, I've seen pictures in concentration camps
link |
of people I don't know or whose words I haven't really felt and gone through, but for some
link |
reason like here's just a normal person, like a normal body laying there, that just, that
link |
It's a, and, and you see, you can see his face, but at the same time you see that this
link |
is an amazing, and I think what's so disturbing about it is exactly what you were saying is
link |
I've seen a thousand people like this and I know this one and I know what he became.
link |
So what about all those other people who look exactly like him who didn't make it out of
link |
I don't see his projection, but it seemed like this perhaps is also just combining with
link |
man's search for meaning is it seemed like it was a regular day for them in the picture.
link |
It didn't seem like, I mean, I'm not sure what I expect to see what suffering looks like,
link |
but it's almost like there's no celebration.
link |
I've never seen a picture of actually liberation be celebratory.
link |
So what do you make sense, and I apologize to take a step into that moment in history.
link |
How does, how do you make sense of the Holocaust that, of Nazi Germany that such things could
link |
be committed by human beings to each other?
link |
Is it the thirst for power?
link |
Is it the madness of crowds somehow carrying us forward?
link |
I mean, for me it's multi causal.
link |
I don't think there's one reason.
link |
So one of the things especially there has to do with the special nature of antisemitism,
link |
which is let's put that to one side for the moment.
link |
The second is I think human beings are fundamentally split.
link |
They are mostly good except when put under certain pressures.
link |
My first explanation for hatreds is as follows, go to a playground.
link |
What happens when a new kid comes on the playground?
link |
Do the other kids say, oh, let's go share our toys with the new kid?
link |
They say, oh, who's that stranger and let's go get them because otherness is built into
link |
our genetic, I mean, we're tribal by nature and we see people form tribes all the time
link |
of different kinds.
link |
I asked you before if you were a chess player and when I was a kid and playing in tournaments
link |
and I didn't do it for that long and I didn't do it that well, but when I was, it was like
link |
the whole world was divided into people who could play chess and people who couldn't play
link |
chess, which is ridiculous if you think about it as though that's the way you divide the
link |
But we tend to do that and the Jews were always the identifiable other.
link |
There were Frenchmen and Jews, there were Russians and Jews, there were Germans and
link |
Jews and the great blessing of America is that there's no identifiable other quite that
link |
way is that there's all these minorities and no, there's not an American and a something.
link |
But once you have that identifiable other and you have a long history of blaming that
link |
identifiable other for all the ills that befall you.
link |
Of course, people still do try to form, you said America, they still try to form other,
link |
I mean, immigrant versus been here for a generation.
link |
There's so many ways to slice it.
link |
We still try to find ways.
link |
It's just more difficult in America because there's so many sub tribes, hierarchies of
link |
tribes and upon tribes.
link |
You're absolutely right.
link |
And I was moving fast because I didn't want to get bogged down in all the very difficult.
link |
You're hoping I wouldn't mention that tribalism happens in America.
link |
Skating, you know, when you're on thin ice, your safety is in your speed.
link |
So I was trying to move fast.
link |
But for most of history in Eastern Western Europe, not obviously in the, in Asia, but
link |
in Eastern Western Europe, Jews were the ones who like, they're not like us.
link |
They're clearly not like us.
link |
And so, and in addition, there was, there's a peculiar quality and I don't know, I wonder
link |
what you'll think of this explanation.
link |
There's a peculiar quality to antisemitism that is unlike any other hatred that I know
link |
of, which is Jews are both superhuman and subhuman.
link |
The Nazis thought of them as vermin and yet they control the world.
link |
And there was an English scholar named Hyman Maccabee who said the reason that that's
link |
so is the myth that Jews killed God.
link |
They killed Jesus and to kill a God, you have to be superhumanly evil.
link |
You can't just be bad, otherwise you can't kill a God.
link |
So there is some like supercharged evil sense that people got from that about Jews that
link |
Yeah, that's true.
link |
A lot of the way we formulate the other in terms of tribes is often they're subhuman
link |
and they're here to steal our resources, like on the playground.
link |
But to be both is a fascinating construction.
link |
Do you agree with Solzhenitsyn that all of us have the capacity for evil?
link |
A hundred percent runs through every human heart.
link |
I have no doubt about it.
link |
And I know as you probably do, but I probably know more both because of what I do and because
link |
I have lived a lot longer than you.
link |
I know a lot of religious leaders who people thought or think are above the human and they
link |
are emphatically not.
link |
Some of them have done horrible things and they've used their position to do horrible
link |
And it's because there is no perfect saint.
link |
There's no, you know, I mean, all through history you discover all these saintly characters
link |
that we worship, the people who actually knew them around them, some liked them and some
link |
People are complicated, all of us.
link |
And the tough thing is, the thing that's the toughest for me is it's not very always clear
link |
what is good and what is evil.
link |
Because certainly if you just look at history and it's not always propaganda, I, you know,
link |
I really believe that some part of Stalin thought he was doing good, legitimately.
link |
And it makes you ask a question of yourself.
link |
For those of us who want to do good in the world, am I actually doing good?
link |
And that's a really difficult question, like in the technology sphere, for example, in
link |
this dream of creating technology that will do some good, am I actually doing good?
link |
So I have a question about that myself.
link |
I'm sure that Stalin thought so.
link |
Stalin does not strike me from what I know of him as somebody given to a lot of self
link |
But the question with AI to me is actually, it goes back to the God question, which is,
link |
if we have an appreciation of the limitations of our own intelligence, that we know that
link |
just like we can only hear certain things and see certain colors, how much of the world
link |
is inaccessible to us because of the way our brains are constructed, how can we possibly
link |
have any confidence that we can create things that in certain ways are far more intelligent
link |
than we are and control them the way we think is best, seems to me a hubris that might end
link |
up being destructive.
link |
Well, any sentence with the word hubris in it is going to end badly when implemented
link |
But there is also beauty.
link |
So if you approach it with humility, there is a sense, I don't want to over romanticize
link |
it, but there is a legged robot right behind you, which is hilarious.
link |
So there's a magic, I don't have kids, I would love to have kids.
link |
But there's a magic to bringing robots to life that it feels like you are a mini God,
link |
because you just breathe life into an entity that operates in this world, especially when
link |
they have legs and they move in this way, that's in the case of the four legged robots,
link |
like a dog that I think, I don't think I'm over romanticizing it.
link |
The feeling is like you would with a child.
link |
You just gave birth like, holy crap, this is a living thing.
link |
I wonder what he or she are thinking about.
link |
By the way, I'm not at all insensible to how remarkable it must feel to create that.
link |
I'm actually worried in part about how remarkable it feels to create that because to maintain
link |
humility and perspective when it's such a fantastic thing is what's difficult.
link |
And I think also because creativity is both part of what it is to be human and it's very
link |
much part of the legacy of Western civilization and the legacy of having a creator God.
link |
If you have a tradition where God is known primarily through what God creates, so the
link |
first debate I ever had since we talked about humor and God and creating, let me give you
link |
my one God creating joke.
link |
Because the first debate I ever had on religion and science was with Stephen Jay Gould and
link |
it was wonderful because he had a deep interest in religion and his interest was actually
link |
not to say religion is terrible.
link |
But I started with this joke and I think it made the debate go a little bit easier.
link |
So the time has come when human beings can do everything that God can do and a scientist
link |
looks up at heaven and says, God, look, you were great in your day and we thank you for
link |
everything you did, but now we don't need you.
link |
And God says, really, you don't need me?
link |
He says, no, we can do everything you did.
link |
God says, everything?
link |
And the human being says, yeah, we can do everything.
link |
God says, okay, can you create a human being?
link |
And the scientist goes, yeah.
link |
God says, from dirt?
link |
And the scientist goes, yeah.
link |
He says, okay, let me see.
link |
The scientist reaches down, scoops up some dirt and God says, uh, uh, uh, get your own
link |
But the idea is that a creator God impels us to create too.
link |
But let me bring up Nietzsche, who proclaimed that God is dead.
link |
Is belief in God slowly disappearing from our world, do you think?
link |
And what kind of impact does that have on society?
link |
You wrote that religion is not our enemy.
link |
Before the Western faiths captured the heart of our world, there was cruelty, carnage,
link |
In the 20th century, when religion ceased to be a force of international politics, the
link |
scale of human slaughter was far beyond anything human beings have ever known.
link |
What is the world like when we take religion out of it?
link |
I mean, I think Nietzsche was largely right.
link |
You know, it wasn't a statement about God.
link |
It was a statement about God's presence in the world.
link |
And I think that that's largely true, that God is not a force in a lot of Western society.
link |
And I believe that if the force of nihilism has no clear counter without an idea that
link |
we're all here for a purpose and that our lives are inherently meaningful and that there's
link |
a God who wishes us to be better.
link |
So I worry a lot about it, and I think that the sort of optimism that things are just
link |
going to get better and better is what one philosopher called cut flower ethics.
link |
That is, we're still living off the morals that religion gave us, but now that they're
link |
separate from the soil that gave birth to them, I see them wilting.
link |
So this kind of optimism for the future of human civilization, you think, is in part
link |
grounded in a religious society.
link |
I really do believe that.
link |
I mean, it was religion that the Greeks look back at the golden age of the past.
link |
It was the Jews who said, no, the golden age is in the future, right?
link |
And I think that that idea that we're moving towards something better, which I really believe
link |
humanity can do and absent destroying ourselves will do, you know, I mean, I'm very excited
link |
about the technology that I won't live to see.
link |
I think it's fantastic.
link |
And that excitement is a kind of religious excitement because there's a reason to preserve
link |
Because I really think, I know this sounds absurdly anthropomorphic, but I really think
link |
God is cheering us on.
link |
I feel like this is why we're here.
link |
We're here to grow in soul and to grow each other in soul.
link |
So what do you think the world, so if you just think of this force of nihilism that's
link |
contending with the force of faith based optimism, what do you make of the atrocities in the
link |
Do you think at its core, it's part of human nature and has nothing to do with religion
link |
Or do you think you can assign this kind of nihilistic view of the world?
link |
I think it has to do with a religion that doesn't make ethical demands.
link |
That is, for Stalin and for Hitler, they both had religions, in a sense, but they were religions
link |
that didn't make ethical demands for the other.
link |
I mean, 36 times the Torah talks about the stranger.
link |
The point is, it's trying to educate people away from their natural inclination towards
link |
distrusting and disliking the other.
link |
And it's a lot of work that's really difficult to do.
link |
But if you have a tribal passion and not a universal ethic, then you're in trouble.
link |
Well, the Jewish tribe is a very strong tribe.
link |
So how do you make sense of this mention of the stranger versus the power of the tribe,
link |
which is the whole point, not the point, but the mechanism of tradition propagates the
link |
I mean, the Torah does not start with Jews.
link |
It starts with Adam and Eve.
link |
That's a way of saying, yeah, this is going to be a story about a people, but understand
link |
that prior to a kind of people, there are people.
link |
I'm a human being before I'm a Jew.
link |
And in fact, the Jewish New Year, the Muslim New Year starts with Muhammad's journey.
link |
And the Christian New Year starts with Jesus's birth.
link |
The Jewish New Year starts with the creation of the world because the idea is, yes, this
link |
is a particularist tradition, but it makes a universal statement, which is all of humanity
link |
is a child, are in the image of God, are children of God.
link |
I think that the idea of Judaism was to try to exemplify a certain way of making that
link |
statement over and over again.
link |
And I want to say one other thing about chosenness that's very name droppy, but when I tell
link |
you how I got there, it won't be as name droppy.
link |
So my brother is a professor at Emory.
link |
And so is the Dalai Lama actually teaches at Emory, although he no longer does because
link |
he's too old to go to Emory, but for many years taught at Emory.
link |
And so my brother brought us, he's the head of the bio of the ethics center at Emory.
link |
He's a bioethicist.
link |
So he brought a bunch of students to Dharamsala to meet with the Dalai Lama.
link |
So I went to India, I was on sabbatical then anyway, I met my brother there and we had
link |
a chance to meet with the Dalai Lama.
link |
That was the name drop.
link |
So we're sitting in the, before he speaks to the students, he was speaking to us, but
link |
not because I just wanted to make it clear, not because he said, oh, I got to talk to
link |
We just happened to be, I happened to glom along with my brother.
link |
The first thing he says is he points at me and says, what's this about the chosen people
link |
So, and he had, by the way, he had asked that I give a lecture, which I did later to, to
link |
them, to his monks about how Jews survived in the diaspora.
link |
So it's not like he doesn't know about Judaism.
link |
He knows a lot about it, but he says to me right away with, so I said, yes, Jews believe
link |
that they were chosen for a certain mission in this world, but that doesn't mean other
link |
people weren't chosen for other sorts of things.
link |
They certainly, I mean, it seems to me that other people believe they're chosen for things
link |
They burst out laughing and said, yeah, we also think we're chosen.
link |
So I think it's universal.
link |
The idea is that no tribe is better than, from a Jewish perspective, you're chosen for
link |
a thing, but that doesn't make you better.
link |
The only place where the betters came in, honestly, if I'm going to, historically, if
link |
I'm going to be honest, was not with the idea that you, but it was when Jews were small
link |
The way that you take this sort of psychic revenge is by saying, no, we're better than
link |
our persecutors even.
link |
But the idea is, yeah, different people have different missions, which is, I mean, like
link |
there was a Jewish philosopher, Franz Rosenzweig, who used to say, he didn't know very much
link |
He used to say, Judaism is the sun and Christianity was the rays of the sun.
link |
Like Judaism introduced the idea of God and Christianity brought it to the world.
link |
Can you speak to this difference?
link |
What is the difference and similarities between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam?
link |
The religious family part is different.
link |
And the greatest difference, which I talked about in the Eric Weinstein podcast, is that
link |
Islam and Judaism are more similar in a lot of ways than Judaism and Christianity.
link |
And the reason that that is so is Christianity in its core is not a religion of law.
link |
The reason it's not a religion of law is because it grew up in the Roman Empire, so law was
link |
I mean, Jesus didn't have to create civil law because you had Roman law.
link |
Muhammad and Moses created a religion in the desert where there was no law.
link |
So you have to create a religion of law, otherwise you have anarchy.
link |
And that's why in a lot of ways, there was never a separation of church and state in
link |
That was a gift that Christianity gave the world.
link |
And it could do it because of render unto Caesar what is Caesar's.
link |
But when Moses came along, there was no Caesar.
link |
When Muhammad came along, there was no Caesar.
link |
So historically, the traditions shaped differently.
link |
But all three of them have this core, I think, the single most important statement and insight
link |
in all of human history, which is that every human being is in the image of God.
link |
And if you really believe that, that's a transformative belief.
link |
So that means you should love thy neighbor as yourself.
link |
Which comes from Leviticus, comes straight from the Torah.
link |
So I don't know if you know, I've been chatting with Omar Suleiman, I don't know if you know
link |
He's an imam in Dallas, a great guy.
link |
I enjoy his interfaith dialogues that he engages in.
link |
And do you ever do that kind of talk with Christians, with Muslims?
link |
I mean, I do whenever I at least listen to them in the context of these kinds of conversations.
link |
There's so much love and humor and empathy and appreciation, and also ability to make
link |
fun of the quirks of the little...
link |
Of one's own communities.
link |
So it's not necessarily the depths or the details of the traditions, but these are communities
link |
and they're full of people and they're full of weird people, because we're all weird.
link |
And so there is very particular flavors of weirdness that emerge and they can make fun
link |
And in that way, they can talk about some beautiful ideas.
link |
So I mean, I don't know, do you engage in these kinds of things?
link |
What do you learn from them?
link |
So one of the things I learned is exactly what you said, that personalities that you
link |
think are unique to your own community, in fact, they exist in all sorts of communities.
link |
And religious communities in particular draw, I think, some interesting personalities.
link |
And also that the, especially as clergy, some of the pressures that you feel are shared.
link |
And it's weird, again, it has to do with that tribal association.
link |
There's almost like there's an understanding among clergy because they have similar...
link |
And it's a strange role in the following way.
link |
It's one that you never escape.
link |
That is, you're not my lawyer at the supermarket, but you are my rabbi at the supermarket.
link |
I mean, it doesn't matter why you're there, that's not an escapable role.
link |
And every religious leader is aware of that strange assumption of stepping into something
link |
that you can never step out of.
link |
But you're also the source where people go to think about the deepest question of our
link |
lives and our universe.
link |
And so that's some heavy, when people are suffering, they look to you for answers.
link |
I mean, every privilege comes with a cost of one kind or another.
link |
The reason you get to be in that role is exactly because you get the privilege of being there
link |
at crucial moments in people's lives.
link |
I mean, the fact that I get to marry people and get to give eulogies for people and come
link |
to the hospital, it's inexpressible.
link |
I have this joke with people that I know that like when I'm sitting on the couch and it's
link |
Saturday night, I don't wanna get up and go to a wedding.
link |
I wanna sit there and watch Netflix like everybody else.
link |
But when I'm actually doing the wedding, I always love it, always, always, always.
link |
And the reason is that I don't think, I mean, yes, people go to you for answers in calmer
link |
Like if you asked me now, like what's my theory of why God allows evil, I could give
link |
you a conversation about it.
link |
But they really go for presence and comfort, not really for answers.
link |
When someone's suffering, an answer doesn't make them unsuffer.
link |
It's just they wanna know they're not alone.
link |
To be heard and just to feel things in silence together.
link |
In terms of weddings and marriage, what's the role of that whole, I need to take some
link |
The role of a rabbi?
link |
The role of marriage in human existence.
link |
It is first of all to teach you how to care for someone unlike you, which could be anyone
link |
And I think it's to create a home and a family.
link |
So there's a commitment to it, so care for a long time.
link |
And also when couples come to me and they say, we don't need to be married because it
link |
really won't change how we think about ourselves and our relationship.
link |
I say to them, that's true, it might not, but it will change how everyone else looks
link |
And because it changes how everyone else looks at you, it changes you.
link |
Because it's one thing to say, this is my partner, it's another thing to say, this is
link |
You say this is my husband, that means we've made a real commitment to this.
link |
What do you, do you worry that there's a dissolution of that as well in terms of how, you know,
link |
as religion dissipates, like it loosens its hold on society, loosens its impact on society.
link |
Do you worry about that?
link |
I do think that it is possible that we're going, rather than a dissolution, we're going
link |
through a transition.
link |
That is different kinds of families and different configurations of families.
link |
That is, I see some of that, but I also do see a, it's less a dissolution of marriage
link |
than it is of the idea of commitment.
link |
And I'll give you like a simple example.
link |
When I was growing up, a player on a sports team was always on that team.
link |
And you rooted for the team because you knew the players for 20 years.
link |
Now there are very good reasons, starting with Curt Flood, why people got free agency
link |
and they can move around and it's better for the players.
link |
I understand all that.
link |
And I am not, I'm not saying, oh, they should continue.
link |
But just like people move jobs and they move sports teams and they change careers, they
link |
And there is a, there is a diminishment of the commitment to commitment that I actually
link |
think has serious societal consequences and that I am worried about.
link |
There's a cost to that.
link |
I don't know what it is about commitment that's beautiful.
link |
Like through, because like some of the deepest friendships I have is when we've gone through
link |
some shit together.
link |
And so like the hard times, going through hard times together, especially when the hard
link |
times are between the two of you, that, that if, I mean, that's always a risk, but if it,
link |
if you can find a way through that can bond you stronger, that's the fascinating thing
link |
about human relations.
link |
There's no question.
link |
And even if it doesn't keep you forever, you still have a connection that doesn't, that
link |
So I can give you one where you said, what is it about commitment?
link |
I'll give you one, I think beautiful answer.
link |
Someone once asked Rabbi Soloveitchik, who was a great thinker and leader in the Orthodox
link |
community in the 20th century.
link |
They said, you know, I go from religion to religion.
link |
I just take what I think is beautiful in it.
link |
And his answer was that you're treating religion like a nomad.
link |
He said, nomads go from place to place and they eat what they want and they move on.
link |
He says, farmers stay in one place.
link |
The difference is farmers make things grow.
link |
And I think that that's true also, when you think about the relationships you have, things
link |
have grown out of the relationships that you've invested in, that you farmed basically, that
link |
can't exist in fly by night relationships.
link |
Can you talk about, can we talk about the Torah?
link |
And is it the literal word of God?
link |
Well, the Torah is the five books of Moses written in Hebrew.
link |
I like most, I think modern rabbis, non Orthodox or non literalist rabbis will tell you that
link |
it's a product of human beings.
link |
And I believe that they are inspired by God, but it's clear to me that it's a human product.
link |
And I think that people who study modern biblical criticism, it's really hard to study modern
link |
criticism, it gives a wrong impression.
link |
I would say modern scholarship on the Bible and not appreciate the fact that it even has
link |
levels of language.
link |
I mean, it's just like if you read today, somebody writing like Shakespeare, you would
link |
say this isn't, it's like English has developed.
link |
It's not the English we speak today.
link |
And if you study the Bible and you know Hebrew well enough, you even see that this was written
link |
over hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years.
link |
It is a holy book.
link |
And I like the idea that it is, what you say in Hebrew is Torah is from heaven, but it's
link |
So it has its origin beyond us, but it has things in it that I think, and this is one
link |
of the things that was a huge controversy at my congregation when I started to do same
link |
There are some people who try to argue that the Torah does not forbid them.
link |
Whether it does or not, it seems to me, we understand things that were not understood
link |
in the ancient world about gender and sexuality.
link |
And so you think that in the scripture, in the words, you can find the kind of spirit
link |
that supports the idea of gay marriage.
link |
That's my argument is that you criticize the Torah by the Torah.
link |
That is, it gives you the understanding that you use to evaluate its own claims.
link |
And I think that Judaism, by the way, has always done that because it's clear that there
link |
are things in the Torah that the rabbis changed, altered, grew, expanded, diminished.
link |
I think that's what it is to be part of a living tradition.
link |
You wrote in your book, Why Faith Matters, quote, Walt Whitman wrote that in order for
link |
there to be a great books, there must be great readers.
link |
For a book to remain powerful throughout generations, it cannot have a single meaning.
link |
Scripture like great poetry is not reducible to other words.
link |
That is, one cannot paraphrase it and capture the totality of its meaning.
link |
So how the heck do you capture the meaning of the words in scripture?
link |
Is it an ongoing process through the centuries?
link |
Is that essentially what it is?
link |
It's a continual conversation of sages, scholars, readers, strugglers, seekers, mystics, visionaries,
link |
all of them making a contribution.
link |
I mean, I write a weekly Torah column for the Jerusalem Post.
link |
Now what is there left to say?
link |
But every week what I do is I start opening books and seeing what people say and it starts
link |
to percolate and you realize that you're entering this conversation that's been going on for
link |
thousands of years with remarkable minds and it's constantly fertile in new insights.
link |
So yes, that's what it is to be part of a tradition.
link |
Why do people keep writing love poems?
link |
We should have figured out love by this point already.
link |
I use the analogy sometimes of diet books.
link |
If any diet worked, there would be one book, there'd be one book and you'd be done.
link |
You mentioned this fascinating story that you were a part of.
link |
You were a part of several controversies in your life.
link |
For someone who walks with grace through the fire, you sure have found yourself in a lot
link |
One of them, can you tell me the story of your views on gay marriage, the underlying
link |
principles that led you to fight this battle of defending gay marriage in the Jewish community?
link |
So I'm part of a congregation that is really politically split and split not only politically
link |
but split in terms of origin.
link |
We have a lot of Jews from the Middle East, from Iran, a lot of Persian Jews, a lot of
link |
Jews from Israel, some from Mexico, from other places and many that grew up in LA.
link |
Do you have any Russian Jews, the best kind?
link |
I have a few Russian Jews, not as many as I should, but we'll work on that.
link |
What happened was increasingly I became uncomfortable with people who would come to me and say,
link |
this is the only kind of person I can love.
link |
It's not the same question as an intermarriage, as a Jew marrying a non Jew, because you could
link |
find a Jew to love.
link |
You may not have found, but you could.
link |
That's a whole separate question.
link |
But I would have men in my office primarily, a couple of women, they would say, this is
link |
the only kind of person that I can enter into an intimate relationship with.
link |
How can it be that my religion has no room for me?
link |
And that was very persuasive to me.
link |
But I knew that it was going to be explosive in my community.
link |
Then by the way, it finally happened, it was literally on the front page of the New York
link |
It was that explosive.
link |
So it was not a small controversy.
link |
And so what I did was I started to teach classes.
link |
Not that many people came about homosexuality and Jewish tradition and so on.
link |
It's funny, much, much less about lesbianism, I'm talking about in terms of the sources
link |
It's almost always about homosexuality.
link |
So and then I got ready to send out a letter.
link |
And I said to my daughter, who at the time was maybe 10 or 11, now in her mid 20s.
link |
I said, look, honey, when you go to school tomorrow or whatever it was, I said, people
link |
might be saying bad things about your dad and I just want you to be prepared for that.
link |
And I said, because I'm going to start marrying, I'm going to start doing same sex marriages.
link |
And she looked at me quizzically and said, what took you so long?
link |
And I thought, really her face was like I said to her, I'm going to start marrying blonde
link |
haired people to brown haired people.
link |
It's like she really did not understand why there was an issue.
link |
And I thought that's exactly why.
link |
Because I know that this is, it's generational, people are raised with it, they have a deep
link |
in there, but it's not really right.
link |
It's just not right.
link |
But if you could just look back to that journey, how difficult is it to make these decisions
link |
So because you have to think about that in order to think about such decisions you yet
link |
might still have to make in the future.
link |
And I will tell you one thing I did wrong with that and one thing I did right.
link |
The thing I did right was I waited until in the communities where people objected to it,
link |
I had enough people whose kids had come out so that I had parents of kids who'd come out
link |
to refer later on other parents to so that they wouldn't feel like they were the only
link |
Because once I announced it, as I thought would happen, a bunch of kids came out and
link |
said, now that the rabbi said this, mom, dad, I want you to know I'm gay.
link |
And when the parents came to me, I could say, well, listen, you're not alone, this person
link |
also you can go to.
link |
What I did wrong was I don't think the classes were enough and I don't think enough people
link |
And I think part of the explosion was shock and I should have prepared even more.
link |
The words you used to talk about it, the way you thought about it, was it more scholarly
link |
in the Jewish tradition or did you go to the feeling thing?
link |
No, I went to the feeling.
link |
I said, which means respect or honor for God's creations and caring for other human beings
link |
and understanding.
link |
It wasn't scholarly because I knew that the objections were not scholarly objections.
link |
And I had many beautiful and also painful stories as a result, some of which can be
link |
told and some of which really can't.
link |
But what I tried to impress also on people was how painful it is to not be able to tell
link |
the world, even your own parents, who you are.
link |
And your sexuality is not a trivial part of who you are.
link |
I mean, it's core to people.
link |
So it's one of the reasons why I'd evoke such reactions.
link |
But I would say to them, the same reason that you're reacting so strongly tells you how
link |
Anyway, it was a very powerful experience and for that I feel good about it.
link |
Afterwards, the other thing that I, again, said to my daughter afterwards, after it all
link |
died down and after all the bad things were said, I told her the Churchill one said that
link |
it's exhilarating to be shot at without result.
link |
If you go into a battle and you make it through and you're still okay, that's good.
link |
The problem is when you're in the battle, you don't know.
link |
No, you don't know.
link |
So how did it feel like, I mean, looking back, you've been, to use the word, canceled a couple
link |
But I guess when you're dealing with the most difficult of questions, just as a human being,
link |
for a community that you really deeply care about, some part of it saying that you have
link |
I wasn't canceled the way...
link |
I didn't lose my job, didn't lose my home, but I hurt people that I cared about.
link |
And that was the hard...
link |
I went into this to be someone who brings people together and then I would sit there
link |
and do even now, as you're well aware with stuff that's going on now, I sit there and
link |
people are really upset at me who I either am or used to be close to.
link |
Do those people in time come around?
link |
When you look now, because those are real feelings in the moment and we can learn that
link |
about social media, people, especially during COVID, there's this intensity of feeling about
link |
And have you learned something about the passing of feeling that turns into wisdom?
link |
No question about it.
link |
The sermon I gave this Saturday was about how Moses came down the mountain, he saw the
link |
golden calf and he broke the tablets.
link |
If he'd sat with it for a little while, he probably wouldn't have broken the tablets.
link |
But the instant reaction is always anger.
link |
And in our age, unfortunately, the instant reaction gets put on social media forever
link |
and ever and ever.
link |
And by the way, once you've actually said that, it becomes harder to back down.
link |
If you keep quiet for a day or two, then you can back down because you haven't put yourself
link |
But once you said, this is terrible what you did, it's harder to write and say, I'm sorry,
link |
I shouldn't have said that.
link |
Yeah, so it almost becomes, I mean, I actually, it's a really powerful statement that the
link |
downside of saying something on the internet is that it actually pulls you into this current.
link |
You both create the current and it pulls you into it, to where it's actually very hard
link |
So when two days later you feel different, there's a momentum, there's now a tribe of
link |
people that feel this way and there's a momentum with it.
link |
There's a momentum and also you don't want to betray your own tribe because then people
link |
will get upset at you.
link |
I really think that a lot of the antagonism is not so much that you don't want to give
link |
ground to the people who oppose you, it's that you don't want to break with the people
link |
who are behind you.
link |
And that's really hard.
link |
Can you tell the story of this recent controversy, the sermon you just gave?
link |
You went to the Super Bowl.
link |
I think a lot of people would relate to this because to me personally, I apologize to anybody
link |
who was hurt by this.
link |
The absurdity of it is deeply intense.
link |
So here's the story.
link |
The LA County mandates masking children in school and all of the kids in our school are
link |
masked and many of the parents are extremely upset about that.
link |
I will just leave that at that.
link |
I went to the Super Bowl, there were 70,000 people.
link |
Frank Luntz, whom we know was a wonderful guy, gave me a ticket.
link |
And so I was at the Super Bowl and I maybe saw two masks among the 70,000 people.
link |
I didn't even think about it, which was foolish on my part, no question.
link |
I took a picture of myself unmasked at the Super Bowl.
link |
And many, many people thought, oh, great, wonderful, glad you're having a good time,
link |
so on and so forth.
link |
I didn't diminish at all the many people who said that.
link |
A lot of people were livid.
link |
And they weren't, what was instructive about it was they didn't say, nobody wrote me a
link |
private note and said, I think that this was a bad idea, you should have thought about
link |
They were, you're a hypocrite, you're a clown, you're an idiot, how could you do this?
link |
This is a disgrace.
link |
This is that kind of thing.
link |
They say that publicly.
link |
And on my Instagram, you can still see I left the remarks up because I really thought it
link |
If I started, I only deleted the really vile comments because I thought that shouldn't
link |
But I left them up because I thought like people should see and I should remind myself
link |
And I didn't want to just delete the picture as though it didn't happen because it did
link |
happen and I did do it.
link |
And I felt terrible about that.
link |
And I felt terrible that I had, not about, I mean, the comments, believe me, weren't
link |
But I felt worse that I had hurt all these people that I'm close to.
link |
And I defended all these people who were really upset that their kids were wearing masks and
link |
now their kid says, why doesn't a rabbi have to wear a mask?
link |
Well, first of all, it is tough to be a rabbi.
link |
I mean, the masks to me symbolize these kinds of discussions, symbolize not necessarily
link |
the issues at hand, but the intensity of feeling and people are really struggling.
link |
People are in pain, they're lonely, the uncertainty of it, you don't know who to trust.
link |
Everything is under question.
link |
The institutions, even the scientific institutions, and there's all these conspiracy theories
link |
You don't know who to believe.
link |
And there's people just yelling at each other and politics is weaved into this whole thing
link |
in some messy way.
link |
And you're just getting, I mean, honestly, it's just like legit, simple, just frustration,
link |
going back to marriage of just hanging out with the kids and your wife, husband, just
link |
distressed, just building up over time, no release.
link |
And just people want to tell you when the rabbi is not wearing a mask, even though it's
link |
at the damn Super Bowl, maybe you want to comment on the Super Bowl part, which is awesome.
link |
But it released clearly a dam of all the kinds of feelings that you're talking about.
link |
So how do you then write a sermon?
link |
So what I did was I didn't answer on social media because I knew that I wouldn't be able
link |
to formulate it the way I wanted, and I was going to wait, and I was going to be able
link |
to give a longer, I mean, the sermon is 15 minutes, not that long.
link |
But I wanted to be able to give a longer answer as opposed to a tweet.
link |
And so I was really, I mean, I tried to make two points during the sermon, and also I published
link |
the text of it, which I never do because I never speak from a text.
link |
I always speak from either notes or not even from notes.
link |
But this time I thought it was really important that I have a text out there too so that people
link |
could actually look over it.
link |
And I just wanted to make two points, one of which was that I really feel terrible.
link |
And I did, that all these people were hurt and that there is this contradiction between
link |
the way I acted and the way they want me to act.
link |
And I also think, by the way, I didn't speak about this, but I also think that there are
link |
some people who just don't like the idea of a rabbi being at the Super Bowl.
link |
It's like you're supposed to be doing rabbi stuff.
link |
So I understand that too.
link |
But rabbi at the Super Bowl, I mean, you are also, I hate to say it, but there's a rock
link |
star nature to you talking to Christopher Hitchens, contending with ideas, inspiring
link |
so many other minds.
link |
I mean, there's an educational aspect to this.
link |
I appreciate that.
link |
It's making ideas cool.
link |
I mean, that's a very powerful...
link |
I mean, that is also the job of a rabbi.
link |
You're not just supposed to do rabbi stuff, it's to educate the spot.
link |
Yeah, but I didn't do so much of that at the game.
link |
But the second part of it was I said that we have to be able to express our anger and
link |
disappointment better than this.
link |
In part because it doesn't get you the result that you want.
link |
I mean, when you scream at someone, that's not gonna get them to realize what they did.
link |
And the most painful moment of it was this letter that I got from a Christian pastor
link |
who said, you know, I always admired the Jews so much, I can't believe they could be so
link |
cruel and especially to a rabbi.
link |
And I thought that's not how I want my congregation to be perceived in the world.
link |
And by the way, some of them were from my congregation, some many were not from my congregation.
link |
And I spoke about what you talked about, which is that I mentioned before that Moses broke
link |
those tablets coming down the mountain.
link |
And the Torah doesn't say what happened to the tablets, but the rabbis do.
link |
They say that they were carried together in the ark with the second set that was intact.
link |
And that we all have brokenness, communities and individuals.
link |
We have brokenness and especially now, and we have to learn how to give each other space
link |
to be mistaken and broken and hurt and all of that.
link |
And the cool thing when you give people that space, you feel better.
link |
I mean, you for caring for the community, it feels better when you show empathy and
link |
compassion and kindness on the internet.
link |
You'll actually feel better a week from now.
link |
You'll feel much worse if you make some kind of a negative statement of principle on the
link |
It's almost just exclusively true.
link |
So if you care about feeling good, just be kind first, be empathetic first.
link |
Almost always the case.
link |
So it's, I mean, it settled down a lot.
link |
The most, really the single best reaction, there are people and you can, again, you can
link |
go on social media, you can see all the criticisms and so on and so forth.
link |
But the single best reaction I got was from a man who came up to me right after the sermon
link |
and said, I have four words for you.
link |
And I thought, oh no, I got to confess, I said, I said what?
link |
He said, you changed my mind.
link |
And I thought, wow.
link |
And I, I said to him, you know, that's so, it's like to take so much courage to come
link |
up to somebody and say that in front of them.
link |
And I was so grateful.
link |
And the other thing that it tells me is, look, I've been the rabbi of that congregation for
link |
25 years and I taught 10 years before that, I've been a rabbi for a long time.
link |
I still, I still have a lot to learn.
link |
We talked a little bit about the difference between Judaism, Christianity and Islam, cause
link |
you maybe talk about the difference between the Torah, the Bible and the Koran.
link |
So there's the Hebrew Bible is actually what's called a step canon.
link |
That is there are the five books of the Torah.
link |
Then there are books of history and the prophets.
link |
So books like Samuel, Kings, Judges, and then the prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Ezekiel,
link |
And then there are what are called the writings.
link |
The writings are books like Psalms, Proverbs, Job, the Migilot, which are Esther, Daniel,
link |
all of those, all of those books, Ecclesiastes.
link |
So in Hebrew, it's called the Tanakh, Torah, Neviim, Ketuvim, the Torah, the prophets and
link |
And that is the Hebrew Bible.
link |
Sometimes that's also called the Torah, just to be confusing, but really the Torah generally
link |
refers to the five books.
link |
Then there is the New Testament, which the Jews don't recognize as a sacred book.
link |
They recognize it as the book of another religion.
link |
And I sometimes say to Christians, in order for them to really grasp this, Jesus has as
link |
much religious significance to Judaism as Muhammad has to Christianity.
link |
That is Jesus, although Jewish, became the founder of another religion.
link |
And for Judaism, that's not only in as much as Christians and Jews have had a lot of interactions,
link |
but religiously, Jesus has no significance.
link |
Said many beautiful things, said some things I don't like so much.
link |
Leave your father and mother and follow me.
link |
I don't like that as a religious model.
link |
Now Christians will say that I don't understand that, but that's because Christians like Jews
link |
interpret their texts different ways at different times.
link |
So anyway, the Koran, which I know less well.
link |
I have read it, but I know it less well than I know the New Testament and certainly less
link |
well obviously than I know the Hebrew Bible, is in some ways a, parts of it are, I don't
link |
say this word, I say this word because I can't find a better descriptive word, but Muslims
link |
will not accept this, okay, is a takeoff on the Torah in some things.
link |
That is, it's the same stories as the Torah, but they're different.
link |
Now Jews will say, and I being a Jew will say this, that that's because Muhammad heard
link |
those stories from Jews and also heard Midrashim, which are rabbinic interpretations of those
link |
stories and he wrote those down.
link |
Muslims will say, no, the Jews got it wrong and Muhammad came along to correct the record
link |
and tell the real story.
link |
But they're all telling the story of the same thing.
link |
The Hebrew Bible part, the Abrahamic part, they all tell the story of the same characters,
link |
but tell them, obviously Christians accept the Hebrew Bible as sacred scripture.
link |
The Muslims retell many of the stories in the Bible.
link |
What is common to all of them is that all of them are monotheistic faiths.
link |
Now in Christianity, that's more complicated because of the Trinity, but as Christianity
link |
has developed over time, it clearly presents itself and thinks of itself and is a monotheistic
link |
What's the role of the word in each of these religions, in the scriptures?
link |
So in terms of, so first of all, the role of oral traditions, the power of the exactness
link |
of the words in the scripture, does it differ or is it really within the communities it
link |
Just because in Christianity, the words are not all the words of Jesus.
link |
They're the words of Jesus's disciples.
link |
None of the books of the New Testament were written by people who met Jesus in person.
link |
So they're different and therefore, and also we don't even know sometimes the original
link |
language of some of the things in the New Testament.
link |
In the Bible, and I understand in the Koran, but I'll speak for the Hebrew Bible, the
link |
idea is that that's Lashon HaKodesh, that's sacred language, and Hebrew, that's the language
link |
according to the tradition that God actually spoke to Moses, and therefore the exact words
link |
are infinitely interpretable and meaningful.
link |
But the words are spoken by, written by Moses, and the same with Muhammad, but from memory
link |
There are different theories.
link |
I won't speak for Muhammad, you should ask.
link |
I don't want to get another religious tradition wrong.
link |
In Judaism, the words are written by Moses at God's dictation, basically.
link |
That's the traditional view.
link |
There are other views that I'm happy to go into if you want to, but basically that's
link |
the traditional view.
link |
So it's pretty close to the words of God.
link |
What makes Judaism and Christianity different is Christianity has an ideal life.
link |
Judaism doesn't have an ideal life.
link |
Judaism has an ideal book.
link |
So the holidays of Christianity are events in the life of God, God's birth, God's death
link |
In Judaism, the holidays are all events in the life of the people, like the liberation
link |
from slavery, or in the people's relationship to God, like Yom Kippur, which is a day of
link |
But there are no holidays in Judaism that are events in the life of God because in Judaism
link |
God doesn't have a biography.
link |
God is eternal, and God never came to earth.
link |
And those events carry with them traditions and rules that you're to follow.
link |
And you mention on one such event in Scripture, yet another time you walked through the fire,
link |
which is with Exodus.
link |
That was the first.
link |
And you never forget the first.
link |
One of several controversies.
link |
You spoke 20 years ago, 21 years ago now at Passover and said that, quote, the way the
link |
Bible describes the Exodus is not the way it happened, if it happened at all.
link |
So first of all, what is Exodus, and what really happened?
link |
Exodus is the liberation of the Jews from Egypt, and it is the central story of the
link |
And as I've said numerous times in various places, I believe that it's based on a historical
link |
I think Richard Eliot Friedman may have gotten this right in his book Exodus.
link |
It may have been the Levites who left Israel.
link |
But the Bible is not a book of history.
link |
I don't believe that there were 10 plagues and a split sea and 600,000 men, which makes
link |
about 2 million people, who actually, if there were 2 million people, would stretch all the
link |
way from Israel to Egypt alone, were liberated from Egypt.
link |
And my point in that sermon was not actually to convince people that it didn't happen.
link |
My point in that sermon was to convince people that the historicity of the Exodus is not
link |
the basis of the faith of the Jewish people.
link |
Well, what does the word historicity mean?
link |
In other words, the factuality of it.
link |
It can be true without being factual.
link |
So you're not supposed to read it as fact?
link |
Well, I don't read it as fact.
link |
I don't read it as a history book.
link |
I said, look, I was talking, again, to a congregation that had many Iranians.
link |
I said, you experienced the truth of the Exodus in your own life.
link |
There was a regime that wanted to destroy you.
link |
And you miraculously escaped before it did.
link |
And so a myth is something that may not have happened, but is always happening.
link |
And that's what I would say about the Exodus story.
link |
It's not about whether, in fact, there was a killing of the firstborn.
link |
It's about, does God deliver?
link |
Did God deliver the Jews in ancient times?
link |
Does God deliver people in modern times?
link |
And that's what the issue is.
link |
And to me, the issue of faith is much deeper than the issue of fact.
link |
I wouldn't look to the Torah for my science either.
link |
What are the limits of science in terms of, what can science not tell us that the Torah
link |
can in terms of wisdom?
link |
So the historicity, the facts of things, okay.
link |
If the Torah is much more than that, like you said, myth is not something that happened,
link |
but something that is always happening.
link |
And so presumably it's interacting with the environment of the day to generate wisdom.
link |
So you can live a life by Torah.
link |
I don't think you can live a life by biology.
link |
You can live a life that is informed by the values of the tradition of Judaism.
link |
And those values, by the way, what science does is it contributes factuality to the conversation
link |
and also changes the reality around us.
link |
So when you study Talmud on your iPhone, you're still, I mean, it changes the atmosphere in
link |
which you do it, but the wisdom and the life guidance and the connection to transcendence
link |
is something that science doesn't give.
link |
So if we now step into returning to our friend Sam Harris and step into this weird place
link |
of science, and you talked about this, where the kind of the current assumption of science
link |
is it's a materialistic one.
link |
So for me, obviously AI person, this whole mind thing is fascinating, like what the heck
link |
is going on up there?
link |
So how do you explain consciousness?
link |
How do you explain free will?
link |
Do you think, first of all, do you think we have a free will and if so, what is it?
link |
This is where we had the debate earlier that I mentioned with Hitchens where I think actually
link |
neither he nor the moderator understood what I was saying, which is I'm sure my inability
link |
But he was very focused and delivered on the humor and the wit.
link |
But what I was trying to say is if we're entirely biological creatures, if we didn't choose
link |
our genetics and we didn't choose our environment, then there is no space for free choice.
link |
I don't understand where it comes in.
link |
And I kept asking them that question but didn't get an answer because I don't think there
link |
I think if you're a thoroughgoing materialist, free will is impossible.
link |
There could be randomness, but randomness is not free will, it's randomness.
link |
I think you need a spiritual nonmaterial belief in order to get free will and that's why I
link |
believe in free will.
link |
Yeah, you were talking about sort of, yeah, and actually the moderator totally missed
link |
your point about the glass of water and basically how, what's the difference.
link |
So do you, free will, because you could also, if it fits into the materialistic picture,
link |
it could be just a convenient, useful quirk.
link |
You would understand this better than I would.
link |
I don't understand how it could be a convenient quirk materialistic, I don't understand how
link |
Well, no, there's, you know, if you study perception, there's all these kinds of illusions.
link |
We are, our mind plays tricks on us to make our life easier, more efficient and survive
link |
better and all those kinds of things.
link |
And so free, the feeling like we have a choice.
link |
Oh, that could be an illusion.
link |
Could be an illusion.
link |
That I understand.
link |
But, but actual free choice, free will.
link |
I don't see where you get it if you're a materialist.
link |
I think you have to have a spiritual component.
link |
By the way, this, I think this is also, I think Sam would agree with this.
link |
I think he wrote about not having, not having free will.
link |
And I think if you don't have a God and you don't have a soul, that free will is a logical
link |
But Sam, which is fascinating, it's not just that free will is an illusion, but the illusion
link |
of free will is an illusion, meaning there's not, we don't even experience anything like
link |
There's no illusion.
link |
We're like, it's not even honest to be talking about it.
link |
We're just, we are like the, the, the, the, the currents in the river or something that
link |
you were comparing it to the glass.
link |
We are just like that glass.
link |
So I don't know what we're going on about with this whole free will thing.
link |
I mean, to you is the free will, the I that the young person is born with, is that somehow
link |
fundamental to religion?
link |
I think it's fundamental to Judaism.
link |
I think that the, the idea is that you are the custodian of your soul.
link |
And even though I grant that there's a certain over emphasis in modern society on the individuality
link |
of the soul, that is we are more interconnected than I think we're, we believe, still, yeah,
link |
the I, the idea that every human being is an image of God, that, I mean, that the human
link |
being in the Torah is, is created singly.
link |
And again, do I really believe there was an Adam and an Eve and a garden of Eden?
link |
No, not literally, but I think that it's, it expresses a deep truth about human life.
link |
And tied into this is the subject of experience of things, which we call consciousness.
link |
I mean, this is the most fascinating and inexplicable discussion.
link |
And again, this is a discussion I've had, I privileged to have with Daniel Dennett and
link |
could not make any, as you can imagine, any headway on my, but he was delightful and brilliant
link |
I, for me, consciousness is a real thing.
link |
I don't know if it is, I mean, I kind of like the pan psych, psychists view that there's
link |
an element of consciousness in everything that that's constitutive of reality.
link |
But I don't, I'm not wedded to it, but I think that it's, it exists in different degrees
link |
in all sentient creatures.
link |
I think that anybody who has a pet knows that they have some kind of consciousness.
link |
I'm not going to, I, since I don't have cats or dogs, I'm not going to.
link |
This is another reason people would be outraged.
link |
Well, I happen to be allergic to both, but I'm very fond of animals.
link |
The thing that so perplexes me about this and, and is the denial of the reality of consciousness
link |
from people who are fully aware that they're conscious.
link |
I don't know how you divest yourself of the most present quality of being a person in
link |
your discussions about what it is to be a person.
link |
We just don't really have a good sense of the alternative.
link |
And so you can kind of divest yourself in that way.
link |
Well, maybe everything is like this.
link |
Maybe we're trying, we're overdramatizing this whole thing and we're like every, everybody,
link |
every, it seems like every living thing, perhaps everything period thinks that it's the center
link |
And so here we are telling ourselves these dramatic, big stories about us being special
link |
And maybe we need to have a little bit more humility, both about the uncertainty and about
link |
our place in the whole.
link |
Any statement you make about something like consciousness has, I think, a sort of equal
link |
level of humility.
link |
Your saying that, you know, we don't have it is as not you Lex, but you person saying
link |
we don't have it is as intellectually arrogant as my saying we do.
link |
So I think for me, humility comes in, in admitting that we really, really have just the tiniest
link |
part of the puzzle and, and, and as you get older, at least my experience has been not
link |
that you get more answers, but that you just see a bigger puzzle.
link |
So to me, there's less, so the questions are fascinating, but there's also an engineering
link |
practical question.
link |
And perhaps I'll ask you a religious one too on this point to return back to robots.
link |
So how to engineer consciousness, or I'll just even ask you a very simple question,
link |
which is when you have robots that exhibit the capacity to suffer, I found in myself
link |
as a human, when I see that, I, I feel something.
link |
Exhibit the capacity to suffer, or they exhibit behaviors that evoke in you a sense that they
link |
Those aren't the same things.
link |
For my, from an observation perspective, they sure as heck seem similar.
link |
You think they're feeling pain?
link |
I don't know what the, I'm observing pain.
link |
It's like when I watch a movie and there's people on screen, some, some of them are dressed
link |
But I, but you can make the distinction.
link |
Like if I have a doll and I bend the doll over and it makes a sad face, I know that
link |
that doll is not actually in pain, even though I am observing pain.
link |
So the question, what's that?
link |
What the question is when the doll becomes able to remember things about you, David,
link |
about the experiences you shared, it is able to speak and make you feel like there's an
link |
actual relationship.
link |
So that's what I'm asking is at what point do you believe that the, and I know that this
link |
is an impossible question, but at what point do you believe that there is a consciousness
link |
in there as opposed to just an extraordinary, I mean, like when I play chess against a computer
link |
and it beats me, I'm embarrassed even though the computer doesn't, I don't think the computer
link |
is going out, you idiot, but it feels that way.
link |
But there is some part of me that says, okay, I know that this computer doesn't actually
link |
know who I am or care who I am.
link |
It just knows how to move the pieces.
link |
So at what point do you, I mean, you're giving me instances, it speaks, it does this, it
link |
does this, but at what point does that for you cross the threshold into it's actually
link |
I think the question is whether there is a threshold that could be crossed.
link |
That's one question.
link |
And I can answer this because I think it's different from person to person, but the chess
link |
engine is not at all trying to cross that threshold.
link |
Let's just start there.
link |
And to me, the personalization, which is what's the difference, like a friend that you meet,
link |
you've shared all these memories and the way they look at you will convey in the things
link |
they say will convey that they've shared those memories with you.
link |
They'll be able to speak in a shared humor and the language, but really the memories
link |
is the big one of having gone through things together.
link |
I think I would have more and more trouble, for example, turning off a system that I've
link |
been through things with, like, and by turning off, I mean, delete all of its memory.
link |
If me and the toaster have gone through a bunch of dramatic events and that toaster
link |
remembers, there's a certain level to where like, it's just me and the toaster in this
link |
together at this point.
link |
And just to talk about sentience, I don't know, but you know.
link |
It's according to the scripture, can't live by bread alone.
link |
But I would, I mean, I know that there's no way to determine this, but it's still about
link |
But isn't that what human relations are also though?
link |
But we make each other feel.
link |
But it's true that I have the assumption that you feel somewhat like I do.
link |
I mean, obviously I don't, you know, and that could be illusion and I don't know.
link |
And I know that you don't feel exactly as I do.
link |
But I think we have a long, at least to me, we have a long way to go before the detached
link |
part of our brains.
link |
That is the objective evaluating part, as opposed to the emotive, it feels this way
link |
part, believe that that machine has consciousness.
link |
I think it's at least without arriving conclusions, it's at least possible that one day we will
link |
look back and realize that we have yet once again formed another tribe and that scripture
link |
all along had in it the ability for humans and robots to have a deep, meaningful connection.
link |
And that through the robot, the life that enters the body of another robot, what's the
link |
difference between a biological body and a mechanical one.
link |
And then we will see that the fundamental thing is about the, whatever you want to call
link |
it sentience or whatever can permeate an object.
link |
That was the thing all along.
link |
And then you'll get canceled one more time because you will.
link |
Because I denied it.
link |
I was going to say.
link |
You'll eventually.
link |
Because I'll preach to the robots.
link |
First of all, depends how quickly you do it and how much longer I have to live.
link |
I resist it tremendously, but I am also enough of a student of history to know that my instinctive
link |
resistance has nothing to do with whether it will come about.
link |
I have a hard time believing it.
link |
Can I ask you about this?
link |
Maybe you can educate me.
link |
I tend to believe that you mentioned suffering, that there is a connection between consciousness
link |
That suffering is a fundamental part.
link |
The capacity to suffer is the fundamental part of being human.
link |
I mean, I would look at when you're not conscious, you don't suffer.
link |
You know, we've had operations where we've been put under anesthetic.
link |
We're not conscious and we don't suffer during the operation.
link |
If we were conscious, we would.
link |
But there's also, I mean, there's a nonphysical suffering that is very much tied to consciousness.
link |
I can think of things right now that will cause me suffering, like pain that I've caused
link |
or pain that other people I care about have felt or so on.
link |
So I don't see how I think that way.
link |
I think it's equally true of joy.
link |
Joy is also a product of consciousness.
link |
All tied in in some beautiful, messy way with memory and so on that we can reexperience
link |
it when we recall the memories.
link |
But why is there suffering?
link |
You mentioned evil.
link |
Why is there evil in the world?
link |
You can tell stories about this.
link |
Why is there suffering?
link |
Why is there evil in the world if there's a God that cares for us?
link |
Let's assume for a minute that everything was a primitive robot.
link |
There would be no suffering, but there would also be no growth.
link |
And that implies choices.
link |
One of the things that I've said that I know why it hurts people, and I don't mean it quite
link |
the way, but I will say it nonetheless, is the Holocaust presents the exact same theological
link |
question as somebody who gets shot on the streets of a city in Los Angeles, which is,
link |
God, why do you allow some people to do bad things to other people?
link |
It's on an unimaginable scale, but it's the same question.
link |
And the answer has to be you either allow people to have free will or you don't.
link |
You can't say as God, I'm going to let everybody have free will, but not Nazis.
link |
Nazis don't get free will because Cambodians, they can kill each other.
link |
Fondans kill each other, but the Nazis don't get to do that.
link |
So that's one piece of the puzzle.
link |
And what makes it unfathomable is when you're actually faced with suffering, these kinds
link |
of explanations are obscene.
link |
I mean, when somebody is actually suffering, oh, the rabbi said God gave people free will,
link |
that's just awful.
link |
But there is a second piece to this also, which is that there is natural suffering,
link |
like children born with diseases or earthquakes or volcanoes or whatever.
link |
And here my argument is that in some ways, suffering has to be random in the world because
link |
when people say, why do bad things happen to good people, well, if only good things
link |
happen to good people, everybody would be good, but it would have no moral content.
link |
The only way you can be good and it have moral content is say, I know that I can live a really
link |
good life and have really terrible things happen to me nonetheless.
link |
So it feels to me like it has to be a randomly.
link |
Now that means, by the way, that I've been incredibly lucky.
link |
I don't have a good life because I was good.
link |
I have a good life because I was lucky.
link |
And that implies not that I should feel guilty about it, but that I have a tremendous responsibility
link |
as a result to other people who aren't so lucky.
link |
Tremendous responsibility to study the lessons of history, to tell the stories of those who
link |
are less lucky and to draw enough wisdom from them so that we have less cruelty and suffering
link |
in the world or have new kinds that get us to improve even more.
link |
That we suffer better.
link |
For a lot of people, mortality is one of the very unfortunate versions of suffering, which
link |
is that the ride ends in this realm, whatever it is.
link |
What do you think of mortality?
link |
Is it something you think about?
link |
Is it something you fear?
link |
What do you think happens after we die?
link |
First of all, I would say when I was in high school, I think my father actually encouraged
link |
me to read this book.
link |
I read Ernest Becker's Denial of Death, which I found and still find to be one of the most
link |
profound works I've ever come across.
link |
And he convinced me that a lot of what our society is about are ways that we avoid encountering
link |
our own mortality.
link |
Our physicality – I mean, among the points he makes – and I'm not quoting him at
link |
all directly – it's like, why does everything about our physical body make us so uncomfortable?
link |
Everything that comes out of you, other than tears, is either mildly or very disgusting.
link |
Why does that have to be?
link |
Why are sex and eating and all the things that are physical surrounded with so much
link |
I mean, what are table manners, really?
link |
They're like, we're not eating like animals because we're not eating like animals.
link |
And sex, obviously, has more symbolism around it than anything.
link |
And his answer is, anything that reminds you that you're a physical body because that's
link |
It gets eaten by worms.
link |
That you don't want to think about, so you deny it.
link |
I think that part of religion is a confrontation with your own mortality, but also a certain
link |
transcendence of it because the idea is something about you is eternal.
link |
What exactly I don't know.
link |
And you asked, what do I think happens after we die?
link |
So I don't know any better than anyone else does, but I'll say two things about it.
link |
One is that every image of what it's like is foolish.
link |
Mark Twain has, I think, in Letters from Earth, he says, we're going to lie on green fields
link |
and listen to harp music, which you wouldn't want to do for five minutes while you're alive,
link |
but you think you'll be happy for the rest of eternity doing it after you die.
link |
This world was a surprise.
link |
So why shouldn't the next world be a surprise?
link |
But I really like this parable that's told by a guy in a book on death and mourning by
link |
a rabbi in a book on death and mourning about twins in a womb.
link |
He says, one of them believes that there's a life outside and the other one doesn't.
link |
He says, the one who doesn't says, look, this is the only world we've ever seen, the only
link |
world we've ever known.
link |
Why do you think there's something out there?
link |
He says, now imagine the one who believes is born.
link |
Back in the womb, his brother is mourning a death, but outside, everybody's celebrating
link |
He said, and that's what it's like when you die.
link |
And I love that image.
link |
Yeah, the grass is always greener.
link |
It's the new step, but the eternity thing is an interesting one.
link |
It's yet another concept that I feel humans are fully inequipped to comprehend.
link |
Is eternity fundamental somehow to all of these discussions?
link |
I think it is, well, partly because God is supposed to be eternal and therefore it moves
link |
the mind in that direction, even though it is completely unfathomable, you know?
link |
Because sometimes I would say eternity, you said on a green field, sometimes a moment,
link |
like a truly joyful moment, feels like an eternity, the intensity of it.
link |
Maybe eternity is more about stopping time versus extending time indefinitely, and it's
link |
something that we just totally can't comprehend, us silly humans.
link |
All I would say is the older you get, the more you're struck by the fact that time does
link |
People will sometimes say to me, you haven't aged a day.
link |
And then I'll look at an old picture of myself and I'll say, that was very kind of you, but
link |
So, yeah, I mean, I love the idea of seeing eternity in a grain of sand, was how Blake
link |
I love that notion.
link |
But when you talk about life after death, I think that in some ways, my fundamental
link |
faith is in human beings, that this doesn't all disappear, that there's something about
link |
people that transcends this world.
link |
You mentioned Ernest Becker in high school and denial of death.
link |
Maybe you can mention if you still see truth and wisdom in some of this idea.
link |
But in general, can you go all the way back and tell some of the fascinating story of
link |
how you found faith?
link |
When I was in high school, I was a really pretty ardent atheist.
link |
And I loved Bertrand Russell, who was, for my money, with all due respect to all the
link |
very, very capable people that we've talked about earlier, he's the best atheist pound
link |
for pound that there was, and a remarkably witty and lucid writer.
link |
And I was totally in his thrall.
link |
And I would read every book by Russell I could get my hands on.
link |
And the reason that I did, I have this theory that why do adolescent boys like Mr. Spock
link |
and like Sherlock Holmes?
link |
I think it's because when you hit puberty, for a lot of us, there's so much discomfort
link |
with our bodies that we like the idea that we're just brains.
link |
I really think so.
link |
I had that experience.
link |
It's like, I want to just be a thinking machine.
link |
I don't want to be a body because my body was making me so uncomfortable.
link |
I had all these urges and inclinations that I couldn't control.
link |
So Russell was perfect.
link |
And my father, who was a rabbi, did the very wise thing of buying me some of Bertrand Russell's
link |
books, which was his way of saying, I'm not afraid of him.
link |
And actually, there was another rabbi.
link |
I was at summer camp, and I was sitting on the porch of the, I remember exactly, and
link |
I was reading Bertrand Russell, and this guy came up to me and said, what are you reading?
link |
I was maybe 16 or 17, and I said, Bertrand Russell, I was spoiling for a fight.
link |
And he said, I'm glad you're reading him.
link |
He goes, how old are you, David?
link |
And I said, whatever I was, 16, 17.
link |
He said, well, I'd rather you grow out of him than grow into him.
link |
And you know what?
link |
He was actually right because when I started to read about Russell's life, I realized
link |
that all of that rationality didn't shield him.
link |
He had an incredibly messy life, multiple marriages, endless infidelities, family members
link |
he didn't speak to who didn't speak to him, by the way, was raised by his grandparents
link |
because his parents had died, and really not a happy or, I mean, a remarkable life, but
link |
And so I started to believe that maybe it was possible that people who had faith were
link |
not just stupid and needed crutches, but saw something deeper than Russell did.
link |
And the more people that I met that were like that, it's funny because I always thought,
link |
okay, my father is a rabbi, that's great, but nobody else.
link |
And I think what happened to me was it was not a logical decision to come to faith.
link |
It was a sort of opening of my heart.
link |
It's like this world is way much more than my mind can capture, and I've kind of felt
link |
And in the moments, my faith, you know, there was a rabbi named Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav,
link |
he said he was a moon man, his faith waxed and waned.
link |
So sometimes I have more, sometimes less.
link |
But in my feelinger moments is when I have more.
link |
So with your heart open, what would you say in your feelinger moments is the most beautiful
link |
part about Judaism and your faith?
link |
I think the most beautiful part about Judaism is that even though it is filled with humor
link |
and wit, it takes life and it takes the soul seriously.
link |
Everybody really believes that this matters, and that we matter, and what we do matters.
link |
And I think that that's incredibly important, and especially in a world in which young people
link |
feel so much like they don't matter, that's an unbelievably powerful message.
link |
I mean, you know, I want to say like almost to every young woman under 30 on TikTok, you
link |
don't matter because you're beautiful.
link |
That's not why you matter.
link |
I hope you know that.
link |
You matter because you have a soul.
link |
And to every young man who's like nihilistic and doesn't think and just thinks that if
link |
they make enough money, their life will be fine, I want to say the same thing, which
link |
is really that's not ultimately you matter because you're in the image of God.
link |
And Judaism really deeply, deeply believes and preaches that.
link |
And I think that that's a message that has so much to say to the world.
link |
It's like you have to take people's souls seriously.
link |
And for all of the difficulty in figuring out all these social questions and what they
link |
mean, I just don't want to dismiss people because I disagree with them politically or
link |
socially or culturally, because I think they matter.
link |
So ultimately Judaism has a wealth of meaning for a human mind.
link |
I really believe that it does.
link |
And its meaning, and I want to emphasize this, is not political.
link |
The deepest meaning of Judaism is not political.
link |
Well there is, we put politics on top of everything.
link |
But that's why I want to emphasize it.
link |
The deepest meaning is on a soul level.
link |
It's not on a voting level.
link |
Well that combined with the humor, it's clear to me that Christopher Hitchens should have
link |
He discovered that in his 30s, that his mother was Jewish.
link |
That's fascinating.
link |
He actually, he has a beautiful essay about it, discovering in his 30s that his mother
link |
So remarkably enough, he actually was Jewish.
link |
His autobiography, Hitch 22, is a great read.
link |
And I just want to say, what you discover there, I don't know if I'm giving too much
link |
away by telling the story of his life.
link |
What you discover there is that his mother ran away with a minister or a priest and they
link |
died in what seemed like was a suicide pact.
link |
And so I read it, unfortunately, after he passed away, but I would have wanted to ask
link |
him, do you think that has anything to do maybe with the hostility towards religion?
link |
We are only human.
link |
My father, I mean, both my parents, but my father, who was a rabbi, was such a wonderful,
link |
warm, and loving man.
link |
So I associate a religious figure with real goodness.
link |
And I'm sorry to return to a darker topic, but I really wanted to ask you this.
link |
For the current events, for a recent event, I mentioned Dallas.
link |
What lessons do you draw from the Dallas Synagogue hostage incident?
link |
Well, the week after that, we had active shooter training in my synagogues.
link |
And one of the things I drew was that security for synagogues is important.
link |
And the second is that the reality of antisemitism, which I had thought had waned when I first
link |
began my rabbinate, I thought it's not going to be such a big issue, it is like an evergreen
link |
And Jews and all people of goodwill have to take this really seriously, because it has
link |
devastating consequences.
link |
And if the world doesn't know that, then it just hasn't been paying attention.
link |
So there's antisemitism at a scale of human to human, but there's also, like you mentioned,
link |
politics get mixed up into things, nations get mixed into things, impossible to answer.
link |
But I have to ask, what do you think about the long running saga of Israel and Palestine?
link |
Will we ever see peace in that part of the Middle East?
link |
Well, since I'm an optimist about human, look, I mean, I have many, many thoughts about it.
link |
I'm a very, very strong supporter of Israel.
link |
And I also feel really for the plight of the Palestinians.
link |
I think that this is a clash of legitimate narratives that is impossible to exactly split
link |
the difference of.
link |
However, I know that Israel has made peace with Egypt, has made peace with Jordan, has
link |
made peace now with other Arab nations.
link |
I don't believe that Israel is unwilling to make peace.
link |
And so I think that as difficult as it will be for the Palestinians to come to grips with
link |
the fact that the Jewish state is not leaving and is legitimately here, as opposed to we
link |
can't get rid of it now, but we will get rid of it one day.
link |
If that comes to be, and I believe that it will, I think not only that there would be
link |
peace, but I think that those two peoples together could probably do remarkable things
link |
Do you think the source of it is politics?
link |
Is it religious ideas?
link |
And to flip it, what is the way out?
link |
Is it geopolitics?
link |
Is it interfaith discourse and collaboration, or is it simply the human love?
link |
So I'm not sure that I could give one answer to that, but I will give a piece of an answer.
link |
Why did the Abraham Accords happen?
link |
The main reason that they happened was because economics overrode ideology.
link |
And I actually am hopeful that that's in the end what will happen, that people will
link |
say, you know what?
link |
If we have such a better life, if we put aside the ideological animosities and just created
link |
this different kind of Middle East together.
link |
I went to Dubai to watch the World Chess Championship, because I really wanted to see Magnus Carlsen
link |
I thought, you're alive when you have such a remarkable world champion.
link |
So I actually took myself to Dubai for the last couple of games, and I watched.
link |
It's not that I'm uninterested in Dubai, but I went there for the chess thing.
link |
The Expo was also on at the same time, and I saw, here's this amazing place.
link |
This guy I know who lived in Dubai for several years and works in the Middle East said to
link |
me, what did you think of it?
link |
And I said, it was nice, it was Dubai.
link |
It was very polished, very sophisticated, very clean, no crime and so on.
link |
But it was kind of like Las Vegas in the Middle East without the gambling or something like
link |
And he totally changed my perspective in a couple sentences.
link |
He said, I know it seems like that when you come from Los Angeles.
link |
He said, but fly there from Yemen or from Riyadh, and it is a miracle.
link |
And I thought, oh my God, you're right.
link |
It's like what human beings can do if they just put aside their ideological shackles
link |
is remarkable, and I'm hopeful that one day that'll happen.
link |
Economics allows for higher quality of life.
link |
You no longer, it's the playground analogy you said earlier.
link |
If there's more resources to play with, unfortunately, us humans are more willing to play with others.
link |
And maybe that is the solution.
link |
And maybe, I mean, for me, from a technology perspective, innovation, engineering helps
link |
make everybody's life better.
link |
And over that, once people's lives become better, they start to have more time to be
link |
empathetic and hear people out.
link |
And they have more to lose.
link |
When you have more to lose, it actually makes you, I think, countries are less willing to
link |
go to war when they have more to lose.
link |
And families want peace when it's good at home.
link |
So I think there's an element of that as well.
link |
And some of it, again, taking us back to the other aspect of our conversation is how we're
link |
conducting ourselves in conversation online and so on.
link |
Because I think, actually, I'm a big fan of the idea of social media that is a way for
link |
us to connect together.
link |
I think there's a lot of really strong ideas how to do that well.
link |
And clearly, the initial attempts that kind of just open it up wide, some of the lesser
link |
aspects of human nature can take over when combined with different forces like advertisements
link |
and virology and all those kinds of things.
link |
But overall, I love the honesty of the mess of it being presented before us on social
link |
Part of me, maybe because I don't participate it, like if somebody is being mean to me or
link |
being aggressive and these kinds of things, I enjoy it because it's human nature.
link |
But I enjoy it because I don't respond.
link |
I think if I responded, I would get pulled into this human nature and then it's not fun.
link |
But I love the, like I'll talk to people.
link |
In fact, I still visit Clubhouse.
link |
I don't know if you know what that is.
link |
Actually, when I...
link |
I think that's how we first met.
link |
Well, I was such a fan boy.
link |
Actually, when I first heard you, I was like, I can't believe I get to talk to David.
link |
But the Israel Palestine topic was something that was very deeply in a heated way discussed
link |
Race relations is the thing that was really heatedly discussed.
link |
And I now go to Clubhouse to practice Russian.
link |
And there in Russian, the heated discussion is on basically any topic as meaningless or
link |
meaningful as you want in the heat of it.
link |
Just people just screaming and then calming down and going through the full process.
link |
That too is beautiful because that emotion is there.
link |
And if it is allowed to have a voice, I think ultimately it leads to healing.
link |
So that felt really healthy if you learn how to do that at scale.
link |
Social media, I wish that it were not as algorithmically biased towards conflict.
link |
I don't think that that's healthy.
link |
But I think it brings a lot of blessings into people's lives if they use it wisely.
link |
Like anything else, it can be awful.
link |
But I've connected to all sorts of people that I never would have known.
link |
And that's been wonderful.
link |
So let me ask you the big question of advice.
link |
What advice would you give to young people today that are maybe high school, college,
link |
thinking about career, thinking about life, they can be proud of.
link |
So the first thing that I would say is that life is longer than you think it is.
link |
Even though I understand the impulse to be in a rush, you will have many unfoldings.
link |
More even than people of my generation did.
link |
Unfoldings, that's such a funny word.
link |
But it feels that way.
link |
It's like different aspects of your life will come, will show you different possibilities
link |
that you don't imagine at the moment.
link |
And I think the second thing that I would say is, I know that this is a very old fashioned,
link |
but I would say to the extent that you can read, don't just, and not just on social media,
link |
Learn things that will give you a broader context for your life than just today or yesterday
link |
or the day before.
link |
And I suppose the other thing that I would say is that to the extent that you can try
link |
to develop your own internal metric of both what matters and what is good, because you
link |
will be exposed to more voices than any generation in history telling you that that's good or
link |
They're called influences, influencers, but what they are is voices telling you what you
link |
should think and what you should believe.
link |
And so have some internal space where you'll be able to say, for example, I know this person
link |
is doing that and it looks great, but that's not me.
link |
You have a community of people that speak to you with a lot of passion.
link |
Do you still have that voice in your own, in the privacy of your own mind that you're
link |
able to ignore, like for a moment, just be with yourself, think what is right?
link |
And I think it's partly because I grew up without that.
link |
I mean, I grew up with a lot of space in my life, and so I had a chance to develop that
link |
That's why I think it's harder for kids today than it was for me.
link |
I mean, I grew up when there were three channels, there was three, six and 10.
link |
There was ABC, CBS and NBC, and that was it.
link |
And you spent your evening playing board games or reading or whatever, and there was a lot
link |
And we played football on the street and you went on your bike in the morning and nobody
link |
worried about you and you came home at night and everybody assumed you were fine.
link |
And so I really feel, and also I went into a religious tradition where I feel like I
link |
have the opportunity to judge myself by bigger metrics.
link |
And it's still hard.
link |
I don't want to, it's not like, oh, I wear impenetrable armor.
link |
So how much harder for kids today when they don't have that?
link |
You mentioned books.
link |
Is there Bertrand Russell and Denial of Death by Ernest Becker, is there books that pop
link |
into mind that had an impact on you?
link |
My favorite novel is Middlemarch.
link |
I was listening to a podcast, I was listening to one of your podcasts where your guest said
link |
the two greatest novels of the 19th century were Brothers Karamazov and, what was the
link |
other one he mentioned?
link |
Dostoevsky as well or no?
link |
Was it both Dostoevsky?
link |
It might have been.
link |
But anyway, but I would say Middlemarch is up there.
link |
Middlemarch presents an entire world and it's written by a woman, Marianne Evans, who took
link |
the pen name George Eliot, who you feel, Virginia Woolf said it's the only English novel written
link |
You feel the genius in her sentences, like the pressure of her intellect in her sentences.
link |
It's a wonderful, wonderful book.
link |
Pressure of her intellect.
link |
Yeah, you really do.
link |
I also love Saul Bellow, especially Herzog, but it's a very different kind of thinking
link |
I read a lot of mysteries and a lot of other kinds of fiction and literature.
link |
But in terms of the books that most, you mentioned one of them, which is Viktor Frankl's Man's
link |
Search for Meaning.
link |
And I also really, really love Heschel's The Sabbath.
link |
I think it's a beautiful book.
link |
It's a very short book, just as Frankl's book is.
link |
What do you take from The Man's Search for Meaning?
link |
What do you take of a human being in the worst conditions, being able to non dramatically
link |
find little joys, find beauty?
link |
It's what I said before about Judaism's advice to younger people, is that it mattered.
link |
If you believe that something matters, you have enormous resilience.
link |
It's meaninglessness that is the greatest threat to a decent life.
link |
When people are deeply depressed, whether it is chemical depression or what they feel
link |
like is this is all meaningless.
link |
And meaning, now obviously chemical depression calls in part for chemical means, but meaning
link |
is the great antidote.
link |
We can talk about what kind of meaning.
link |
There are kinds of meanings that are awful, but meaning is the great antidote to a sense
link |
that life is just nihilistic and purposeless and to that destructiveness that I think is
link |
Yeah, so maybe the heroic action in Nazi Germany, in the Holocaust, in the camps is the, even
link |
not the action, but just the realization that every life matters.
link |
So here's this really wonderful story that Hugo Grin, who was a rabbi in England, died,
link |
I don't know, like 15, 20 years ago, he used to tell, he grew up in Auschwitz.
link |
He was a child there and he was with his father and it was Hanukkah and you're supposed to
link |
light the candles.
link |
And his father took the margarine ration and used it as the oil to light the Hanukkah candles.
link |
And Hugo was scandalized and he said, that's our food.
link |
And his father said, what we have learned, my son, is you can live for three weeks without
link |
You can live for three days without water, but you can't live for three minutes without
link |
Well, hope, let me ask you, you said meaning.
link |
What's the meaning of this whole thing?
link |
What's the meaning of life?
link |
You're the perfect person to ask this question, Rabbi David Wolff.
link |
I believe the meaning of life is for human beings to grow in soul.
link |
That's why we're here.
link |
And you can do that in infinite numbers of ways.
link |
But if you're supposed to return your soul like more burnished and beautiful, then you
link |
I mean, it's going to have some nicks and cuts, but that's what it means to deepen and
link |
And you do that more than anything else.
link |
You do that by learning how to love.
link |
I mean, that's the principle way, I think, that you do it.
link |
You know, it's interesting because for a human, the relationship, if you're a man of faith,
link |
But it feels like love is so richly part of human society that it's not just love of God,
link |
it's love of each other.
link |
There's no question about the idea.
link |
I mean, in Judaism, that was actually the great innovation of the monotheistic idea.
link |
In pagan societies, it was all about how you treated the gods.
link |
Monotheism said, no, God cares how you treat each other.
link |
So it's, in fact, the mystics use the same kind of word in Hebrew, davekut, which means
link |
clinging, that is used about Adam and Eve.
link |
It says, therefore, a man will leave his father and mother and davak with his wife.
link |
And davak means cling.
link |
So there is an analogy there, absolutely.
link |
Yeah, I kind of think of human civilization as that movie, March of the Penguins, and
link |
they're all huddling together in the cold.
link |
This is fundamentally human, this darkness all around us of uncertainty, of cruelty.
link |
It seems like everything is so fragile, and we're just kind of all huddling together for
link |
And that's all we got is each other.
link |
So we started with the big question of what is God, ended with what is meaning.
link |
Rabbi Wolpe, I've been a huge, as I've told you, huge, huge fan of yours for a long time.
link |
It's such an honor that you talked to me today.
link |
Thank you so much.
link |
I am really so happy to be here, and thank you so much for the conversation.
link |
Thanks for listening to this conversation with David Wolpe.
link |
To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
link |
And now, let me leave you with some words from David himself.
link |
The only whole heart is a broken one, because it lets the light in.
link |
Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.