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David Wolpe: Judaism | Lex Fridman Podcast #270


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The following is a conversation with Rabbi David Wolpe, someone who I have been a fan
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of for many years, for the kindness in his heart, the strength of his character, and
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the kind of friends he keeps and talks with, many of whom disagree with him but love him
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nevertheless, including the late Christopher Hitchens.
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I will have many conversations like these in the future about religion, about Islam, Christianity,
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Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and others, looking to understand and celebrate the culture,
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the tradition, and the beauty of the people who practice these religions.
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I will of course not shy away from the difficult topics.
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I will talk both about hate and love, about war and peace.
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This conversation was recorded more than three weeks ago.
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Please allow me this time to speak on what has been on my mind.
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If this is not interesting to you, please skip, I totally understand.
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Some people asked me to say a few words on the war in Ukraine.
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I think my words are worth little, but perhaps let me try.
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I consider doing a long solo episode on this war.
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I tried several times, but it is too personal for now.
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To give you context, I have been talking to refugees, friends, loved ones,
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in Ukraine, in Russia, in Poland, Slovakia, Moldova, Romania,
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even UK, Germany, Canada, India, China, and of course the United States.
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Some of them crying, or angry, or confused, or scared.
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I am helping as best as I can privately, and I am hoping to help in the future
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by traveling to Ukraine and Russia, and celebrating the humanity
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and the beauty of the people in this region. This was all set up
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both for Ukraine and Russia trips before 2022, including conversations
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with scientists, artists, athletes, leaders, and just, quote, regular folks
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who are equally, if not more, fascinating to me.
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For now, it has become much more difficult, but I'll keep trying to find a way.
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I was born in the Soviet Union. My roots are both Ukrainian and Russian.
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And today, and until the day I die, I am an American. I am proud of all of this.
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I hope to keep celebrating the culture and the incredible human beings
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that make up these nations, and humanity as a whole.
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We are all one people. We are in this together.
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That's how I feel about the people of these nations.
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Now, let me speak about those in the seats of power.
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I condemn all actions of leaders who play geopolitical games on the world stage
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disregarding the costs paid in human suffering on the scale of millions.
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For this reason, I condemn Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine.
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And I condemn many of the military interventions
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by the superpowers of the world, including by my country, the country I love, the United States.
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That after World War II has intervened in over 40 nations,
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with many studies finding that the United States is cupable
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for an unfathomable number of civilian deaths.
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I condemn all heads of state who needlessly wage wars,
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watching young men and women burn in the fires they started.
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I don't understand how humans can be so cruel to each other.
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Or rather, I understand, but I believe in a future world where this is no longer true.
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Let me also say a few words of what I hope to do with this podcast.
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I want to explore the full complexity and beauty of human nature.
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I believe each of us are capable of good and evil.
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And I want to understand how the mind and the circumstance
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lead one to choose the former path or the latter.
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And I believe conversation is one of the best ways to work toward this understanding.
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For that, I think I have to not only talk to the most inspiring humans in the world,
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but also to the most controversial.
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I will speak with many people who I disagree with.
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Politicians, activists, CEOs, heads of state, with very different opinions on the world.
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I will try hard to challenge their ideas without closing my mind
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to the depth and complexity of their perspective and their humanity.
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My presence in the same room with wildly different people will make it easy for the media
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and the internet to pick and choose clips and snapshots attacking me for being
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a shill for one side or the other.
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I can't defend this point, except to say that I'm a shill for no one,
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and that I hope you see the strength of my integrity,
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that I won't be influenced by any of them, no matter how rich, powerful, or charismatic they are.
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Like the poem If by Roger Kipling says,
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If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, or walk with kings, nor lose the common touch.
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If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, if all men count with you, but none too much.
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This is a really, really important thing to me that I try to live by,
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that all human beings count with me the same.
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People have criticized me for wanting to have some of these conversations,
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like with Vladimir Putin and Vladimir Zelensky,
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and for times in the past speaking about them without the seriousness the topic deserves.
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For this, I would sincerely like to apologize.
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I'm disappointed, even ashamed, of my frequent ineliquence
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on these topics. I will work hard to do better.
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When I'm joking, it should be clear that it's a joke, and hopefully actually funny.
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When I'm being serious, I should speak with care and rigor.
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I've now done many hundreds of hours of podcast conversation.
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Despite my frequent failures and speaking, I hope you know where my heart is.
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Unfortunately, I think people will take clips of me and use them to attack me.
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This will happen more and more. I guess there's nothing I can do,
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but send them my love, and in the meantime, try to be a better person and a better interviewer.
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Let me also say that I like humor, especially dark humor.
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I like being silly and not taking myself seriously.
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I will keep taking risks with that.
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All with the goal of having fun and celebrating humanity at its most absurd and most beautiful.
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I will occasionally dress up in strange and weird outfits to celebrate the absurdity of life.
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I will hang out, break bread and joke with all kinds of people.
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I don't have to agree with them to laugh with them in order to escape for a brief moment
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of tension, the conflict, the hatred in the world.
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Humor just might save this little chaotic little civilization of ours.
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I love the Ukrainian people.
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I love the Ukrainian people.
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I love the Russian people.
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And of course, I love my fellow Americans, Californians and Midwesterners, New Yorkers and Texans.
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I love humans. I love life.
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And I want to share that love with others, with you.
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If I mess it up, I'm really, really sorry. I'm trying my best.
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I have no agenda and no one telling me what to do.
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I feel like the luckiest guy in the world to have all these opportunities.
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And I'm deeply grateful to be alive and to share that joy with other amazing people around me.
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Thank you for your support.
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For all the love you've sent my way, I will work my ass off to not disappoint you.
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I love you all.
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This is Alex Friedman podcast.
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To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
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And now, here's my conversation with David Wolpe.
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Let's start with a big question. According to Judaism, who is God?
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It's difficult because Judaism, like any tradition that is thousands of years old
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and encompasses so many different lands and languages and thinkers,
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it doesn't give a single answer to even simple questions.
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And to large questions, it certainly doesn't give a single answer.
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Although Judaism was responsible for introducing the monotheistic idea to the world,
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it doesn't mean that it's one idea.
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So if you take Maimonides, the greatest sage in the Jewish tradition, medieval philosopher,
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he would say that God is an omnipotent, benevolent, intangible, unimaginable God.
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In fact, he said you can't say what God is, only what God is not.
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Because you have to emphasize, could talk more about that,
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but basically you have to emphasize the unknowability of God.
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You have a modern philosopher like Heschel, who says that God is a God of pathos,
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a God of deep feeling, which probably would make Maimonides shiver if he heard such a description.
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And if you look in the Bible, God is always regretting or having human emotions.
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So there are so many different kinds of depictions and ideas.
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And there is this tremendous tension between transcendence and imminence.
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That is, in the Jewish tradition, God is exquisitely close, God is imminent.
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In the Talmud's words, God is as close as your mouth is to your ear.
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In other words, whatever you say, God hears it.
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And yet at the same time, God is unfathomably distant.
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Sometimes when I speak to high schoolers, I will say, in the Jewish tradition, think of it this way.
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When you were two years old, you had no idea what it was to be a 15 year old.
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Not only did you not know, but you didn't know what you didn't know.
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We conceive of God as being more...
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The distance between God and human beings is far greater than the distance between a two year old and a 15 year old.
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So when we speak about God, we have to acknowledge how limited we really are.
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So, okay, you laid out a lot of fascinating things on the table.
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So one, the nobility of God, then this idea of deep feeling, which again, can God be operating in the space of feelings too.
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So not just the mouth and the ear of the senses.
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Can God be known?
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Can God be felt by this three year old in the analogy versus the teenager?
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So I will take refuge in a beautiful phrase by from Martin Buber, another Jewish theologian.
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He said, God cannot be expressed.
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God can only be addressed.
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In other words, you can speak to God.
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You can feel a sense of God, but can you begin to comprehend or know God?
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No.
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Josef Kospi, I'm pulling in a couple of early Jewish philosophers.
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He said, to know God, I would have to be God.
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Can we get close? Is it useful or is it a distraction to visualize things, to embody, to create, to attach to the stories, some kind of visualizations in our mind.
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For example, gender, he versus she, things like this, or old man in the sky kind of feeling.
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So it's almost inevitable, but I think ultimately you try to transcend it.
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This was the great, you know, we just read this actually in synagogue, the story of the golden calf.
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And the story is that human beings found it impossible to not have a visualization because they had just come from Egypt and in the world of pagan worship, everything.
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It's not that pagans thought that idol was actually God, but it represented visually what God was and along comes this idea that God is actually not capable of being visualized, which is very difficult and it stretches the bounds of human comprehension, maybe even breaks them.
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So would you say the proper way to operate as a human in relation to God is humility in that you're screwed, you're not able to basically know anything, almost anything?
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Well, the reason that you're the salvation of this is that you can't, I was going to say the reason you're not screwed, but then I thought somebody might be upset at a rabbi saying that.
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So I didn't say it and have not said it.
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But the reason you're not is that you don't have to have a comprehension of God.
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You have to have a relationship to God and those are not the same.
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I mean, to draw an analogy that is not far from perfect as most analogies are, but this one especially, you have relationships with people who are mysteries to you.
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You're a mystery to yourself.
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You can live and love somebody for 50 years and they can say something that surprises you because ultimately we are trapped in here.
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And when a child first says, I, we call that individuation, but what that really means is I now know that I am cut off from the minds of all other children and all other people.
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And so you have with God a more intimate relationship because you can believe that God is, you are known by God and you have a relationship to God despite the fact that you can't know God just as you can't know others.
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And some would say to have a good relationship, you want to be constantly surprised.
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Right.
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You don't want to know the thing.
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Well, the world, yes, the world that God created is constantly surprising.
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And by the way, the caveat to this, you know, when I had all these debates with Christopher Hitchens and he would always say that God is a greater tyrant than North Korea because it continues after your death.
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And the idea of being known by God is after all frightening if you think God knows what I think and so on, if your image of God is unloving.
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Can we jump to this? You had friendships and conversations with a lot of the fascinating figures of the past 20, 30 years of the great intellectuals, one of which perhaps one of the greats is Christopher Hitchens.
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What have you learned from your conversation, your friendship?
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So there are a lot of views he held that I really did not agree with, but he was a remarkable person.
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That was a good line about North Korea.
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He was full of incredibly good lines.
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Well, one of the things I learned was you can't win a debate with Christopher Hitchens.
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One of the reasons you can't win is because he has this British baritone and this ready wit that you can't triumph over laughter.
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It doesn't matter if your argument is better. If your quip is better, you win.
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And so I remember once we were arguing about free will and he said, well, I choose to believe in it.
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And everybody laughed and that was despite the fact that that's not really an argument.
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And I remember like, I have free will because I don't have a choice or whatever.
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Right, exactly.
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And people should watch your conversation with him. It's great.
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I mean, it's a kind of David versus Goliath situation and you're quite masterful at using charisma and sweet talking with Hitchens.
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I also genuinely liked him.
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I spent a three hour limousine ride with him from one debate to another from LA to San Diego.
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And the entire time he said, we just can't talk about religion.
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So we talked about literature and he gave me a long lecture about Scotch.
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He was inexhaustible.
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I mean, not only did he, I began, I wrote a couple of obituaries about him and when I began with the historian Keith Thomas said there are two ways of achieving immortality by doing things worth remembering or saying things worth remembering.
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And by that standard, he did both.
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I mean, he went all around the world to all sorts of danger zones.
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He knew like the best bars everywhere from Kuala Lumpur to Beirut to LA and he could drink all night and write a 2000 word essay on the poetry of Yates and go to sleep.
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I remember before one of our debates in Boston, he was at the bar and he said, come have a drink.
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And I said, I'm going to have a drink before I go to debate with you.
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What are you crazy?
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And he said, just have a beer.
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It's water.
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So he really was a constant inexhaustible fountain of intrigue and interest.
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What kind of things, if you can remember, if you can mention, if you can admit to have him enlightening you or helping you change your mind about something in this world?
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So I think...
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Unrelated to Scotch.
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Yeah, unrelated to Scotch.
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He convinced me that the idea...
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I mean, I had my doubts about it and have my doubts about it, but he convinced me through many debates and not only he, that the idea that religion makes people better is not...
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It's not ipso facto wrong, but it's a much, much more complicated argument than I wished it to be.
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So he is, however you conceive of the term beauty, he's one of the more beautiful humans, this weird little earth produced.
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So how do you explain the atheism combined with such a beautiful mind?
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So from your perspective of a man of faith, how do you think about that?
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So of the atheists that I have debated, I think about all of them somewhat differently.
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So I think that in some deep way, for example, Sam Harris is a religious personality.
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I don't even think that he would...
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He wouldn't like the word religious, but I don't even think that he would take issue with that.
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I think that he would say his is a purely material based spirituality, but I mean his orientation towards meditation and appreciation of Buddhism.
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There's something deeply seeking spiritual about him.
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With Hitchens, I honestly, and I know that some of his fans will really not like this.
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It's not that he was any kind of closet believer, certainly not at all.
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But I almost feel as though he was less a passionate arguer against religion than he was, first of all, extremely upset by the forms that religion took in this world.
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And then once he trained his intellectual howitzers on a target, he had so much fun inventing new arguments and attacking it that I really believe he gets carried away sometimes by his own eloquence.
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And intellectual range.
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So for example, the idea that you would call a book that religion poisons everything.
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I think he did that deliberately, provocatively so that he could defend a proposition that obviously is indefensible, that it poisons everything.
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So I don't know.
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I think he had tremendous joie de vieux.
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That's really what that's what sums him up.
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This guy who loved life in all of its manifestations and arguing against something that someone else believed was one of his greatest joys.
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Yeah.
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And of course, the practical aspect of that, he just saw the powerful and he challenged them with humor and so on.
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Absolutely.
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And you could argue perhaps that humor is the highest form of what humanity can achieve.
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Like sometimes maybe us little humans take things a little too seriously, then sometimes we need to just laugh at it all, laugh at ourselves and that's probably the purest form of wisdom.
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You know, Auden, the poet said, among the people that I like or admire, I can find no common quality, but among those I love, I can.
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All of them make me laugh.
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There you have it.
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Speaking of people that make you laugh, Sam Harris, because he's actually has a really great sense of humor.
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He does.
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Very cold and monotone delivery.
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He's another one that you had your friends with.
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Yes.
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You have good conversations with.
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Where's your fundamental disagreements and agreements with Sam?
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Sam believes that religion is intellectually indefensible.
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He really believes it, like deep in his soul.
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And he gets angry at the idea that a proposition should be unchallenged if it offends his sense of logic.
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Yeah.
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So he cannot move on until this is dealt with.
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No.
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In fact, I mean, I did a podcast with Eric Weinstein.
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And then Sam did one.
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And Sam said, when I heard your podcast with David Wolpe, I learned stuff about what he thinks that I never learned in my conversations with him because I can never let him make those unfounded assertions without challenging them and you just let them go.
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And I think that there was something to that was like, he finds it hard to have a conversation about religion that doesn't arouse his real ire about the harm that he thinks religion does in the world.
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Is this more about the implementation of religion in the world as it is versus the really fundamental?
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I think he also thinks it's fundamentally intellectually shoddy and disreputable.
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Faith.
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Yeah.
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Faith.
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I don't know how to put this.
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I mean, they're both capable of separating their contempt for religion from the people that they have sitting in front of them.
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You mean Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris?
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Yes.
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Both of them.
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Okay, so let me, you mentioned Eric Weinstein, people should listen to your conversation with Eric because it's a fascinating one.
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00:22:24.160
It's great.
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00:22:25.160
It's a nonstandard.
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00:22:26.160
It just goes all over the place in this humor and wit.
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00:22:29.160
It's great.
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00:22:30.160
So one interesting aspect that I also learned, perhaps not about you, but about Eric, about both, but Eric has a similar thing with Jordan Peterson, which is, if you ask him, do they believe in God?
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00:22:46.160
I think the answer, they're not comfortable answering that question or they might say no, but they're usually just not comfortable answering that question.
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00:22:54.160
But there's a kind of sense that they would like to live life, a religious life, as if God exists.
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00:23:02.160
I think that's exactly right.
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00:23:04.160
I think, first of all, Eric has a really deep appreciation of the Jewish tradition.
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00:23:08.160
I don't know Peterson.
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00:23:10.160
I've read his stuff and I've reviewed his stuff and so on.
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00:23:12.160
But I think that Jungians are, in their very approach, they believe that myth is the way the world works.
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00:23:23.160
And so it's not that big a leap to God, but it's still, there's still a distance there.
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00:23:29.160
Is it possible to have your cake and eat it too?
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00:23:32.160
Is it possible to have the depth of a religious life without believing in God?
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00:23:39.160
How do you make sense of Eric Weinstein's devout life within the tradition?
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00:23:45.160
I mean, I honestly think he believes in God but doesn't believe in God and it's oscillating like it's a quantum mechanical system of some sort.
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00:23:53.160
Schrodinger's God.
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00:23:55.160
So I think that he would probably agree with what Elie Wiesel said, that a Jew can be angry at God or be disbelieving of God but is not allowed to be indifferent to God.
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00:24:07.160
And I think Eric's not indifferent to God.
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00:24:10.160
And it's different than Christianity.
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00:24:13.160
I've had this conversation many times because you can be very Jewish and have deep doubts about theological questions because Judaism isn't a religion.
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00:24:27.160
It's a religious family.
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00:24:29.160
And so you're born Jewish.
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00:24:31.160
Like if I said to you tomorrow, if I was Christian and I said, oh, I believe in Jesus today and then tomorrow I didn't, I'm not Christian anymore.
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00:24:38.160
But if tomorrow I said, oh, I don't believe all this stuff, I'm still Jewish.
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00:24:42.160
So it's a more complicated system.
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00:24:46.160
Having said that though, I think it's very hard to sustain over generations without some belief that the source of it is beyond ourselves.
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00:24:57.160
And in that sense, as in many others, Eric is unique.
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00:25:01.160
Well, he was actually making that claim that we need faith to propagate this tradition through the generations.
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00:25:11.160
So without that, the traditions crumble.
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00:25:14.160
It's a very interesting idea and a very interesting argument for devout faith, which is it's a thing.
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00:25:23.160
It's a glue that holds a tradition together. Otherwise, like traditions fall apart.
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00:25:27.160
So you can't have the intensity of that tradition.
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00:25:31.160
I mean, on the other hand, you do see tradition.
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00:25:33.160
I mean, Thanksgiving, one of my favorites.
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00:25:36.160
So I would say traditions that are demanding fall apart.
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00:25:40.160
Traditions that require turkey might not fall apart.
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00:25:43.160
But traditions that make demands of you that are countercultural or are hard, they fall apart.
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00:25:50.160
I think I need to introduce you to some Thanksgiving dinners that are quite demanding.
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00:25:55.160
Getting the family together.
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00:25:57.160
First of all, I'm a vegetarian.
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00:25:59.160
So I'm tough to have at Thanksgiving dinner.
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00:26:02.160
But there's a comedian named Kathy Landsman who, one year I heard this on the radio and it stuck with me.
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00:26:08.160
She said that holidays are a chance to renew your resentments afresh.
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00:26:13.160
And that's basically what people do with their families.
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00:26:15.160
It's like, I'm going to go home and fight with the uncle again this year.
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00:26:19.160
I apologize to take a dark turn, but you mentioned Ali Wazel.
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00:26:25.160
I recently saw a picture of Ali Wazel when he was in the camp when he was liberated.
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00:26:31.160
For some reason that hit hard.
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00:26:34.160
Like, you know, I've seen pictures in concentration camps of people I don't know.
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00:26:41.160
Or whose words I haven't really felt and gone through.
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00:26:45.160
But for some reason, like here's just a normal person, like a normal body laying there.
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00:26:52.160
That was him.
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00:26:54.160
I've seen it.
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00:26:56.160
And you see, you can see his face, but at the same time you see that this is an amazing.
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00:27:02.160
And I think what's so disturbing about it is exactly what you were saying is I've seen a thousand people like this.
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00:27:09.160
And I know this one and I know what he became.
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00:27:12.160
So what about all those other people who look exactly like him who didn't make it out of the camp?
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00:27:19.160
You know, maybe it's projection, but it seemed like this perhaps is also just combining with math's search for meaning.
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00:27:28.160
It seemed like it was a regular day for them in the picture.
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00:27:32.160
It didn't seem like, I mean, I'm not sure what I expect to see what suffering looks like, but it's almost like there's no celebration.
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00:27:41.160
I've never seen a picture of actually liberation be celebratory. It's true. It's really true.
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00:27:47.160
So what do you make sense? And I apologize to take a step into that moment in history.
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00:27:53.160
How do you make sense of the Holocaust, of Nazi Germany, that such things could be committed by human beings to each other?
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00:28:07.160
Is it religion? Is it the thirst for power? Is it the madness of crowds somehow carrying us forward?
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00:28:18.160
I mean, for me, it's multicausal. I don't think there's one reason.
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00:28:22.160
One of the things especially there has to do with the special nature of antisemitism, which is let's put that to one side for the moment.
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00:28:29.160
The second is I think human beings are fundamentally split. They are mostly good except when put under certain pressures.
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00:28:37.160
My first explanation for hatred is as follows. Go to a playground. What happens when a new kid comes on the playground?
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00:28:45.160
Do the other kids say, oh, let's go share our toys with the new kid? No.
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00:28:49.160
They say, oh, who's that stranger? And let's go get them because otherness is built into our genetic, I mean, we're tribal by nature.
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00:29:00.160
And we see people form tribes all the time of different kinds.
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00:29:06.160
I asked you before if you were a chess player. And when I was a kid and playing in tournaments and I didn't do it for that long and I didn't do it that well.
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00:29:15.160
But when I was, it was like the whole world was divided into people who could play chess and people who couldn't play chess.
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00:29:21.160
Which is ridiculous if you think about it, as though that's the way you divide the world.
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00:29:25.160
But we tend to do that. And the Jews were always the identifiable other. There were Frenchmen and Jews.
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00:29:32.160
There were Russians and Jews. There were Germans and Jews.
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00:29:35.160
And the great blessing of America is that there's no identifiable other quite that way is that there's all these minorities and no, there's not an American and a something.
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00:29:47.160
But once you have that identifiable other and you have a long history of blaming that identifiable other for all the ills that befall you.
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00:29:58.160
Of course, people still do try to form, you said, America. They still try to form other, I mean, immigrant versus grown, been here for a generation.
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00:30:07.160
There's so many ways to slice it. We still try to find ways. It's just more difficult in America because there's so many sub tribes, hierarchies of tribes and upon tribes.
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00:30:17.160
You're absolutely right. And I was moving fast because I didn't want to get bogged down and all the very difficult. It's true. I tried.
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00:30:24.160
You're hoping I wouldn't mention that tribalism happens in America.
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00:30:27.160
I was skating, you know, when you run thin ice, your safety is in your speed. So I was trying to move fast.
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00:30:35.160
But for most of history in Eastern Western Europe, not obviously in Asia, but in Eastern Western Europe, Jews were the ones who like they're not like us.
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00:30:46.160
They're clearly not like us. And so, and in addition, there's a peculiar quality.
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00:30:53.160
And I don't know, I wonder what you'll think of this explanation. There's a peculiar quality to antisemitism that is unlike any other hatred that I know of, which is Jews are both superhuman and subhuman.
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00:31:04.160
They're vermin. The Nazis thought of them as vermin, and yet they control the world.
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00:31:10.160
And there was an English scholar named Hyman Maccabee who said the reason that that's so is the myth that Jews killed God.
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00:31:19.160
They killed Jesus. And to kill a God, you have to be superhumanly evil. You can't just be bad. Otherwise, you can't kill a God.
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00:31:27.160
So there is some like supercharged evil sense that people got from that about Jews that still inheres.
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00:31:37.160
Yeah, that's true. A lot of the way we formulate the other in terms of tribes is often they're subhuman and they're here to steal our resources like on the playground.
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00:31:47.160
But to be both is a fascinating construction.
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00:31:53.160
Do you agree with Solzhenitsyn that all of us have the capacity for evil?
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00:31:58.160
100% runs through every human heart. I have no doubt about it.
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00:32:03.160
And I know, as you probably do, but I probably know more both because of what I do and because I've lived a lot longer than you.
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00:32:12.160
I know a lot of religious leaders who people thought or think are above the human and they are emphatically not. They're not.
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00:32:22.160
Some of them have done horrible things and they've used their position to do horrible things.
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00:32:27.160
And it's because there is no perfect saint.
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00:32:32.160
I mean, all through history, you discover all these saintly characters that we worship, the people who actually knew them around them, some like them and some didn't.
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00:32:43.160
People are complicated, all of us.
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00:32:46.160
And the tough thing is, the thing that's the toughest for me is it's not very always clear what is good and what is evil.
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00:32:55.160
Because certainly if you just look at history and it's not always propaganda, I really believe that some part of Stalin thought he was doing good legitimately.
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00:33:11.160
And it makes you ask a question of yourself, for those of us who want to do good in the world, am I actually doing good?
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00:33:20.160
And that's a really difficult question, like in the technology sphere, for example.
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00:33:25.160
In this dream of creating technology that will do some good, am I actually doing good?
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00:33:30.160
So I have a question about that myself.
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00:33:32.160
Not about Stalin.
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00:33:33.160
I'm sure that Stalin thought so.
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00:33:35.160
Stalin does not strike me from what I know of him as somebody given to a lot of self doubt.
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00:33:40.160
But the question with AI to me is actually it goes back to the God question, which is, if we have an appreciation of the limitations of our own intelligence,
link |
00:33:51.160
that we know that just like we can only hear certain things and see certain colors, how much of the world is inaccessible to us because of the way our brains are constructed.
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00:34:04.160
How can we possibly have any confidence that we can create things that in certain ways are far more intelligent than we are and control them the way we think is best seems to me a hubris that might end up being destructive.
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00:34:22.160
Definitely.
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00:34:23.160
Well, any sentence with the word hubris in it is going to end badly when implemented at scale.
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00:34:29.160
But there is also beauty, so if you approach it with humility, there is a sense, I don't want to over romanticize it, but there is a legged robot right behind you, which is hilarious.
link |
00:34:40.160
So there's a magic, I don't have kids, I would love to have kids, but there's a magic to bringing robots to life that it feels like you are a mini God.
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00:34:58.160
Right.
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00:34:59.160
Because you just breathe life into an entity that operates in this world, especially when they have legs and they move in this way.
link |
00:35:07.160
That's in the case of the four legged robots, like a dog, that I think, I don't think I'm over romanticizing it.
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00:35:15.160
The feeling is like you would with a child.
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00:35:17.160
You just gave birth, like holy crap, this is a living thing.
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00:35:21.160
I wonder what he or she are thinking about.
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00:35:24.160
By the way, I'm not at all insensible to how remarkable it must feel to create that.
link |
00:35:29.160
I'm actually worried in part about how remarkable it feels to create that because to maintain humility and perspective when it's such a fantastic thing is what's difficult.
link |
00:35:42.160
And I think also because creativity is both part of what it is to be human and it's very much part of the legacy of Western civilization and the legacy of having a creator God.
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00:35:56.160
If you have a tradition where God is known primarily through what God creates, so the first debate I ever had since we talked about humor and God and creating, let me give you my one God creating joke.
link |
00:36:08.160
Because the first debate I ever had on religion and science was with Steven J. Gould.
link |
00:36:13.160
And it was wonderful because he had a deep interest in religion and his interest was actually not to say religion is terrible.
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00:36:21.160
But I started with this joke and I think it made the debate go a little bit easier.
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00:36:28.160
So the time has come when human beings can do everything that God can do and a scientist looks up at heaven and says, God, look, you are great in your day and we thank you for everything you did.
link |
00:36:37.160
But now we don't need you.
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00:36:39.160
And God says, really, you don't need me?
link |
00:36:40.160
He says, no, we can do everything you did.
link |
00:36:42.160
God says everything.
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00:36:43.160
And human beings says, yeah, we can do everything.
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00:36:46.160
God says, OK, can you create a human being?
link |
00:36:49.160
And the scientist goes, yeah, God says from dirt.
link |
00:36:52.160
The scientist goes, yeah, he says, OK, let me see.
link |
00:36:54.160
The scientist reaches down, scoops up some dirt and God says, uh, uh, uh, get your own dirt.
link |
00:37:01.160
But the idea is that a creator God impels us to create too.
link |
00:37:05.160
But let me bring up Nietzsche who proclaimed that God is dead.
link |
00:37:10.160
Is belief in God slowly disappearing from our world?
link |
00:37:13.160
Do you think?
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00:37:14.160
And what kind of impact does that have on society?
link |
00:37:17.160
You wrote that religion is not our enemy.
link |
00:37:21.160
Before the Western faiths captured the heart of our world, there was cruelty, carnage and destruction.
link |
00:37:26.160
In the 20th century, when religion ceased to be a force of international politics,
link |
00:37:30.160
the scale of human slaughter was far beyond anything human beings have ever known.
link |
00:37:35.160
What is the world like when we take religion out of it?
link |
00:37:39.160
I mean, I think Nietzsche was largely right.
link |
00:37:41.160
You know, it wasn't a statement about God.
link |
00:37:44.160
It was a statement about God's presence in the world.
link |
00:37:48.160
And I think that that's largely true, that God is not a force in a lot of Western society.
link |
00:37:56.160
And I believe that if the force of nihilism has no clear counter
link |
00:38:03.160
without an idea that we're all here for a purpose and that our lives are inherently meaningful
link |
00:38:11.160
and that there's a God who wishes us to be better.
link |
00:38:16.160
So I worry a lot about it.
link |
00:38:19.160
And I don't think, I think that the sort of optimism that things are just going to get better and better
link |
00:38:23.160
is what one philosopher called cut flower ethics.
link |
00:38:28.160
That is, we're still living off the morals that religion gave us,
link |
00:38:31.160
but now that they're separate from the soil that gave birth to them, I see them wilting.
link |
00:38:37.160
So that's kind of optimism for the future of human civilization,
link |
00:38:40.160
you think isn't part grounded in a religious society.
link |
00:38:45.160
I really do believe that.
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00:38:46.160
I mean, it was religion that the Greeks looked back at a golden age of the past.
link |
00:38:50.160
It was the Jews who said, no, the golden age is in the future, right?
link |
00:38:53.160
It's the Messiah.
link |
00:38:54.160
And I think that that idea that we're moving towards something better,
link |
00:38:57.160
which I really believe humanity can do and absent destroying ourselves will do.
link |
00:39:05.160
I mean, I'm very excited about the technology that I won't live to see.
link |
00:39:10.160
I think it's fantastic.
link |
00:39:11.160
And that excitement is a kind of religious excitement
link |
00:39:14.160
because there's a reason to preserve this whole thing.
link |
00:39:16.160
Absolutely, because I really think
link |
00:39:19.160
I know this sounds absurdly anthropomorphic,
link |
00:39:22.160
but I really think God is cheering us on.
link |
00:39:24.160
I feel like this is why we're here.
link |
00:39:27.160
We're here to grow in soul and to grow each other in soul.
link |
00:39:36.160
Yeah.
link |
00:39:37.160
So what do you think the world, so if you just think of this force of nihilism
link |
00:39:42.160
that's contending with the force of faith based optimism.
link |
00:39:48.160
Right.
link |
00:39:49.160
What do you make of the atrocities in the 20th century?
link |
00:39:54.160
Do you think at its core it's part of human nature
link |
00:40:00.160
and has nothing to do with religion or not religion?
link |
00:40:03.160
Or do you think you can assign this kind of nihilistic view of the world?
link |
00:40:07.160
I think it has to do with a religion that doesn't make ethical demands.
link |
00:40:12.160
That is for Stalin and for Hitler, they both had religions,
link |
00:40:18.160
but they were in a sense, but they were religions that didn't make ethical demands for the other.
link |
00:40:23.160
I mean, 36 times the Torah talks about the stranger.
link |
00:40:27.160
The point is it's trying to educate people away from their natural inclination
link |
00:40:33.160
towards distrusting and disliking the other.
link |
00:40:36.160
And it's a lot of work that's really difficult to do.
link |
00:40:39.160
But if you have a tribal passion and not a universal ethic, then you're in trouble.
link |
00:40:49.160
Well, the Jewish tribe is a very strong tribe.
link |
00:40:54.160
So how do you make sense of this mention of the stranger versus the power of the tribe,
link |
00:41:00.160
which is the whole point, not the point, but the mechanism of tradition propagates the tribe?
link |
00:41:05.160
So it's both.
link |
00:41:06.160
I mean, the Torah does not start with Jews.
link |
00:41:10.160
It starts with Adam and Eve.
link |
00:41:11.160
That's a way of saying, yeah, this is going to be a story about a people,
link |
00:41:16.160
but understand that prior to a kind of people, there are people.
link |
00:41:20.160
I'm a human being before I'm a Jew.
link |
00:41:23.160
And in fact, the Jewish New Year, the Muslim New Year starts with Muhammad's journey.
link |
00:41:30.160
And the Christian New Year starts with Jesus's birth.
link |
00:41:33.160
The Jewish New Year starts with the creation of the world because the idea is, yes,
link |
00:41:38.160
this is a particularist tradition, but it makes a universal statement,
link |
00:41:42.160
which is all if humanity is a child or in the image of God or children of God.
link |
00:41:50.160
I think that the idea of Judaism was to try to exemplify a certain way of making that statement
link |
00:41:58.160
over and over again.
link |
00:41:59.160
And I want to say one other thing about chosenness that's very name dropy.
link |
00:42:03.160
But when I tell you how I got there, it won't be his name dropy.
link |
00:42:06.160
So my brother is a professor at Emory.
link |
00:42:10.160
And so is the Dalai Lama actually teaches at Emory, although he no longer does
link |
00:42:15.160
because he's too old to go to Emory, but for many years taught at Emory.
link |
00:42:18.160
And so my brother brought us, he's the head of the Ethic Center at Emory.
link |
00:42:23.160
He's a bioethicist.
link |
00:42:24.160
So he brought a bunch of students to Darm Salah to meet with the Dalai Lama.
link |
00:42:27.160
So I went to India, I was on sabbatical.
link |
00:42:30.160
Then anyway, I met my brother there and we had a chance to meet with the Dalai Lama.
link |
00:42:34.160
Okay, that was the name drop.
link |
00:42:36.160
So we're sitting in the hall before he speaks to the students.
link |
00:42:38.160
He was speaking to us, but not because I just wanted to make it clear,
link |
00:42:41.160
not because he said, oh, I got to talk to that rabbi.
link |
00:42:43.160
We just happened to be, I happened to glom along with my brother.
link |
00:42:47.160
We sit down.
link |
00:42:48.160
The first thing he says, he points at me and says,
link |
00:42:51.160
what's this about the chosen people anyway?
link |
00:42:53.160
By the way, he had asked that I give a lecture,
link |
00:42:58.160
which I did later, to his monks about how Jews survived in the diaspora.
link |
00:43:03.160
So it's not like he doesn't know about Jews.
link |
00:43:05.160
He knows a lot about it, but he's just being right away with.
link |
00:43:08.160
So I said, yes, Jews believe that they were chosen for a certain mission in this world.
link |
00:43:12.160
That doesn't mean other people weren't chosen for other sorts of things.
link |
00:43:15.160
They certainly, I mean, seems to me that other people believe they're chosen for things too.
link |
00:43:19.160
He burst out laughing and said, yeah, we also think we're chosen.
link |
00:43:23.160
So the idea is that no tribe is better than it.
link |
00:43:28.160
Better? No.
link |
00:43:29.160
From a Jewish perspective, you're chosen for a thing, but that doesn't make you better.
link |
00:43:38.160
No.
link |
00:43:39.160
The only place where the betters came in, honestly, if I'm going to, historically,
link |
00:43:42.160
if I'm going to be honest, was not with the idea that you,
link |
00:43:46.160
but it was when Jews were small, persecuted,
link |
00:43:51.160
the way that you take this sort of psychic revenge is by saying,
link |
00:43:55.160
no, we're better than our persecutors, even.
link |
00:43:57.160
Yeah.
link |
00:43:58.160
But the idea is, yeah, different people have different missions,
link |
00:44:02.160
which is, I mean, there was a Jewish philosopher, Franz Rosenzweig, who used to say,
link |
00:44:07.160
he didn't know very much about Islam.
link |
00:44:09.160
He used to say, Judaism is the sun, and Christianity was the rays of the sun.
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00:44:14.160
Like, Judaism introduced the idea of God, and Christianity brought it to the world.
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00:44:18.160
Can you speak to this difference?
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00:44:21.160
What is the difference and similarities between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam?
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00:44:27.160
The religious family part is different.
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00:44:30.160
And the greatest difference, which I talked about in the Eric Weinstein podcast,
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00:44:36.160
is that Islam and Judaism are more similar in a lot of ways than Judaism and Christianity.
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00:44:43.160
And the reason that that is so is Christianity in its core is not a religion of law.
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00:44:51.160
The reason it's not a religion of law is because it grew up in the Roman Empire.
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00:44:56.160
So law was taken care of.
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00:44:58.160
I mean, Jesus didn't have to create civil law because you had Roman law.
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00:45:02.160
Muhammad and Moses created a religion in the desert where there was no law.
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00:45:06.160
So you have to create a religion of law.
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00:45:08.160
Otherwise, you have anarchy.
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00:45:11.160
And that's why in a lot of ways, like, there was never a separation of church and state in Islam or Judaism.
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00:45:18.160
That was a gift that Christianity gave the world.
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00:45:20.160
And it could do it because of render unto Caesar what is Caesar's.
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00:45:24.160
But when Moses came along, there was no Caesar.
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00:45:26.160
When Muhammad came along, there was no Caesar.
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00:45:28.160
So historically, the traditions shaped differently.
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00:45:33.160
But all three of them have this core, I think, the single most important statement and insight in all of human history,
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00:45:44.160
which is that every human being is in the image of God.
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00:45:47.160
And if you believe, if you really believe that, that's a transformative belief.
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00:45:53.160
So that means you should love, you know, by neighbor as yourself.
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00:45:59.160
Which comes from Leviticus, comes straight from the Torah.
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00:46:02.160
So I don't know if you know, I've been chatting with Omar Salaman.
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00:46:06.160
I don't know if you know who that is.
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00:46:08.160
He's an Imam and Dallas great guy.
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00:46:11.160
I enjoy his interfaith dialogues that he engages in.
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00:46:15.160
And do you ever do that kind of talk with Christians, with Muslims?
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00:46:19.160
Yes, often, often.
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00:46:21.160
I mean, I do whenever I at least listen to them in the context of these kinds of conversations.
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00:46:26.160
There's so much love and humor and empathy and appreciation.
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00:46:32.160
And also ability to make fun of the quirks of the little.
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00:46:37.160
Of one's own.
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00:46:38.160
Of one's own communities, you know, like, so it's not, you know, necessarily the depths of the details of the traditions.
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00:46:44.160
But you know, these are communities and they're full of people and they're full of weird people because we're all weird.
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00:46:51.160
And so you, there is very particular flavors of weirdness that emerge and they can make fun of them.
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00:46:58.160
And in that way, they can talk about some like beautiful ideas.
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00:47:03.160
So I mean, I don't know, do you engage in these kinds of things?
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00:47:06.160
What would you learn from them?
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00:47:08.160
So one of the things I learned is exactly what you said.
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00:47:11.160
The personalities that you think are unique to your own community.
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00:47:14.160
In fact, they exist in all sorts of communities and religious communities in particular.
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00:47:19.160
Draw, I think, some interesting personalities.
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00:47:22.160
And also that the, especially as clergy, some of the pressures that you feel are shared.
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00:47:30.160
And it's weird.
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00:47:34.160
Again, it has to do with that tribal association.
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00:47:37.160
There's almost like there's an understanding among clergy because they have similar straight and it's a strange role in the following way.
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00:47:48.160
It's one that you never escape.
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00:47:51.160
That is, you're not my lawyer at the supermarket, but you are my rabbi at the supermarket.
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00:47:58.160
I mean, it doesn't matter why you're there.
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00:48:01.160
That's not an escapable role and every religious leader is aware of that strange assumption of stepping into something that you can never step out of.
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00:48:16.160
But you're also the source where people go to think about the deepest question of our lives and our universe.
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00:48:27.160
And so that's some heavy, you know, when people are suffering, they look to you for answers.
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00:48:32.160
I mean, every privilege comes with a cost of one kind or another.
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00:48:36.160
The reason you get to be in that role is exactly because you get the privilege of being there at crucial moments in people's lives.
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00:48:44.160
I mean, the fact that I get to marry people and get to give eulogies for people and come to the hospital, it's inexpressible.
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00:48:56.160
I have this joke with people that I know that when I'm sitting on the couch and it's Saturday night, I don't want to get up and go to a wedding.
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00:49:03.160
I really don't.
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00:49:04.160
I want to sit there and watch Netflix like everybody else.
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00:49:07.160
But when I'm actually doing the wedding, I always love it, always, always, always.
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00:49:13.160
And the reason is that I don't think, I mean, yes, people go to you for answers in calmer conversations.
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00:49:21.160
Like, if you ask me now, like, what's my theory of why God allows evil, I could give you a conversation about it.
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00:49:27.160
But they really go for presence and comfort, not really for answers.
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00:49:32.160
When someone's suffering, an answer doesn't make them unsuffer.
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00:49:36.160
You know, it's just they want to know they're not alone.
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00:49:39.160
Yeah, to be heard and just to feel things in silence together.
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00:49:43.160
Exactly.
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00:49:44.160
Yeah.
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00:49:45.160
In terms of weddings and marriage, what's the role of that?
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00:49:51.160
I'm just, I need to take some notes here.
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00:49:53.160
What's the role of a rabbi?
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00:49:55.160
The role of marriage in human existence.
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00:49:58.160
It is, first of all, to teach you how to care for someone unlike you, which could be anyone you marry.
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00:50:06.160
And I think it's to create a home and a family.
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00:50:12.160
So there's a commitment to it, so care for a long time.
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00:50:15.160
Right, exactly.
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00:50:16.160
And also, when couples come to me and they say, we don't need to be married because it really won't change how we think about ourselves and our relationship.
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00:50:23.160
I say to them, that's true.
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00:50:24.160
It might not.
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00:50:25.160
But it will change how everyone else looks at you.
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00:50:27.160
Yeah.
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00:50:28.160
And because it changes how everyone else looks at you, it changes you.
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00:50:31.160
Because it's one thing to say, this is my partner, it's another thing to say, this is my husband.
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00:50:36.160
You say this is my husband, that means we've made a real commitment to this.
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00:50:42.160
Yeah.
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00:50:44.160
Do you worry that there's a dissolution of that as well in terms of how, you know, as religion dissipates, it loosens its hold on society, loosens its impact on society.
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00:50:58.160
Do you worry about that?
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00:51:00.160
I worry about it.
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00:51:02.160
I do think that it is possible that we're going, rather than a dissolution, we're going through a transition.
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00:51:09.160
That is different kinds of families and different configurations of families.
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00:51:13.160
That is, I see some of that.
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00:51:16.160
But I also do see, it's less a dissolution of marriage than it is of the idea of commitment.
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00:51:22.160
And I'll give you like a simple example.
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00:51:24.160
When I was growing up, a player on a sports team was always on that team.
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00:51:31.160
And you've rooted for the team because you knew the players for 20 years.
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00:51:35.160
Now, there are very good reasons, starting with Kurt Flood, why people got free agency and they can move around and it's better for the players.
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00:51:42.160
I understand all that.
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00:51:44.160
And I am not saying, oh, they should continue.
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00:51:48.160
But just like people move jobs and they move sports teams and they change careers, they change partners.
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00:51:58.160
And there is a diminishment of the commitment to commitment that I actually think has serious societal consequences and that I am worried about.
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00:52:10.160
Yeah, there's a cost to that.
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00:52:12.160
I don't know what it is about commitment that's beautiful.
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00:52:16.160
Because some of the deepest friendships I have is when we've gone through some shit together.
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00:52:21.160
And so going through hard times together, especially when the hard times are between the two of you, that's always a risk.
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00:52:31.160
But if you can find a way through, that can bond you stronger.
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00:52:36.160
That's the fascinating thing about human relations.
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00:52:38.160
There's no question.
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00:52:39.160
Even if it doesn't keep you forever, you still have a connection that doesn't, that exists.
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00:52:46.160
So I can give you one, you said, what is it about commitment?
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00:52:49.160
I'll give you one, I think, beautiful answer.
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00:52:52.160
Someone once asked Rabbi Soloveitchik, who is a great thinker and leader in the Orthodox community in the 20th century.
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00:53:00.160
They said, you know, I go from religion to religion.
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00:53:02.160
I just take what I think is beautiful in it.
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00:53:05.160
And his answer was that you're treating religion like a nomad.
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00:53:09.160
He said, nomads go from place to place and they eat what they want and they move on.
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00:53:14.160
He says, farmers stay in one place.
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00:53:16.160
The difference is farmers make things grow.
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00:53:19.160
And I think that that's true also when you think about the relationships you have.
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00:53:23.160
Things have grown out of the relationships that you've invested in, that you farmed basically, that can't exist in fly by night relationships.
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00:53:34.160
Can you talk about, can we talk about the Torah?
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00:53:38.160
Yes.
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00:53:39.160
What is it?
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00:53:40.160
And is it the literal word of God?
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00:53:44.160
Easy questions today.
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00:53:46.160
Yeah.
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00:53:47.160
Well, the Torah is the five books of Moses written in Hebrew.
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00:53:52.160
I, like most, I think modern rabbis, non Orthodox or non literalist rabbis will tell you that it's a product of human beings.
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00:54:00.160
And I believe that they are inspired by God, but it's clear to me that it's a human product.
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00:54:08.160
And I think that people who study modern biblical criticism, it's really hard to study modern, modern.
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00:54:15.160
Criticism gives a wrong impression.
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00:54:18.160
I would say modern scholarship on the Bible and not appreciate the fact that it even has levels of language.
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00:54:25.160
I mean, it's just like if you read today, somebody writing like Shakespeare, you would say this isn't, it's like English has developed.
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00:54:35.160
It's different.
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00:54:36.160
It's not the English we speak today.
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00:54:38.160
And if you study the Bible and you know Hebrew well enough, you even see that this was written over hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years.
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00:54:46.160
It is a holy book and I like the idea that it is what, what you say in Hebrew is Torami Hashamiim and not Torami Sinai.
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00:54:54.160
That is the Torah is from heaven, but it's not from Sinai.
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00:54:57.160
So it has its origin beyond us, but it has things in it that I think, and this is one of the, one of the things that was a huge controversy at my congregation when I started to do same sex marriages.
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00:55:12.160
There are some people who try to argue that the Torah does not forbid them.
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00:55:18.160
Whether it does or not, it seems to me we understand things that were not understood in the ancient world about gender and sexuality.
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00:55:27.160
And so.
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00:55:28.160
So you think that in the scripture, in the words, you can find the kind of spirit that supports the idea of gay marriage.
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00:55:37.160
Well, that's yes, that's my argument is that you criticize the Torah by the Torah.
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00:55:42.160
That is, it gives you the understanding that you use to evaluate its own claims.
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00:55:53.160
And I think that Judaism, by the way, has always done that because it's clear that there are things in the Torah that the rabbis changed, altered, grew, expanded, diminished.
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00:56:04.160
I think that's what it is to be part of a living tradition.
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00:56:07.160
Yeah, you wrote in your book, Why Faith Matters.
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00:56:12.160
Walt Whitman wrote that in order for there to be a great books, there must be great readers for a book to remain powerful throughout generations.
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00:56:20.160
It cannot have a single meaning.
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00:56:22.160
Scripture like great poetry is not reducible to other words.
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00:56:26.160
That is, one cannot paraphrase it and capture the totality of its meaning.
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00:56:33.160
So how the heck do you capture the meaning of the words in scripture?
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00:56:38.160
Is it an ongoing process through the centuries?
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00:56:41.160
Yes, exactly so.
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00:56:43.160
It's a continual conversation of sages, scholars, readers, strugglers, seekers, mystics, visionaries, all of them making a contribution.
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00:56:55.160
I mean, I write a weekly Torah column for the Jerusalem Post.
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00:56:59.160
Now, what is there left to say?
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00:57:03.160
But every week what I do is I start opening books and seeing what people say and it starts to percolate and you realize that you're entering this conversation that's been going on for thousands of years with remarkable minds and it constantly fertile in new insights.
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00:57:23.160
So yes, that's what it is to be part of a tradition.
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00:57:26.160
Yeah, why do people keep writing love poems?
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00:57:29.160
We should have figured out love by this point already.
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00:57:32.160
I use the analogy sometimes of diet books.
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00:57:35.160
If any diet worked, there would be one book.
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00:57:38.160
There'd be one book and you'd be done.
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00:57:41.160
You mentioned this fascinating story that you were a part of.
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00:57:45.160
You were a part of several controversies in your life.
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00:57:48.160
I've had a few.
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00:57:50.160
For someone who walks with grace through the fire, you sure have found yourself in a lot of fires.
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00:57:57.160
One of them, can you tell me the story of your views on gay marriage, the underlying principles that led you to fight this battle of defending gay marriage in the Jewish community?
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00:58:10.160
So I'm part of a congregation that is really politically split and split not only politically, but split in terms of origin.
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00:58:24.160
We have a lot of Jews from the Middle East from Iran, a lot of Persian Jews, a lot of Jews from Israel, some from Mexico, from other places and many that grew up in LA.
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00:58:35.160
Do you have any Russian Jews the best country?
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00:58:37.160
I have a few Russian Jews, not as many as I should, but we'll work on that.
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00:58:43.160
But what happened was, increasingly, I became uncomfortable with people who would come to me and say, this is the only kind of person I can love.
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00:58:57.160
It's not the same question as an intermarriage, as a Jew marrying a non Jew, because you could find a Jew to love.
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00:59:04.160
You could have found, but you could, and that's a whole separate question.
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00:59:09.160
But I would have men in my office, primarily, a couple of women, they would say, like, this is the only kind of person that I can enter into an intimate relationship with.
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00:59:20.160
How can it be that my religion has no room for me?
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00:59:24.160
And that was very persuasive to me.
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00:59:29.160
But I knew that it was going to be explosive in my community.
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00:59:37.160
When, by the way, it finally happened, it was literally on the front page of the New York and the LA Times.
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00:59:41.160
It was that explosive.
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00:59:42.160
So it was not a small controversy.
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00:59:48.160
So what I did was, I started to teach classes, not that many people came about homosexuality and Jewish tradition and so on.
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00:59:56.160
It's funny, much, much less about lesbianism.
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00:59:59.160
I'm talking about in terms of the sources and so on.
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01:00:02.160
It's almost always about homosexuality.
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01:00:06.160
And then I got ready to send out a letter.
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01:00:14.160
And I said to my daughter, who at the time was maybe 10 or 11, now in her mid 20s, I said, look, honey, when you go to school tomorrow or whatever it was,
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01:00:25.160
I said, people might be saying bad things about your dad, and I just want you to be prepared for that.
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01:00:31.160
She said, why?
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01:00:32.160
And I said, because I'm going to start marrying, I'm going to start doing same sex marriages.
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01:00:38.160
And she looked at me quizzically and said, what took you so long?
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01:00:42.160
And I thought, really, her face was like, I said to her, I'm going to start marrying blonde haired people to brown haired people.
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01:00:49.160
It's like she really did not understand why there was an issue.
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01:00:53.160
And I thought that's exactly why.
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01:00:55.160
Because I know that this is, it's generational.
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01:00:59.160
People are raised with it.
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01:01:01.160
They have a deep in there, but it's not really right.
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01:01:06.160
It's just not right.
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01:01:07.160
But if you could just look back to that journey, how difficult is it to make these decisions a principle?
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01:01:17.160
Because you have to think about that in order to think about such decisions you yet might still have to make in the future.
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01:01:25.160
And I will tell you one thing I did wrong with that and one thing I did right.
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01:01:29.160
The thing I did right was I waited until in the communities where people objected to it.
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01:01:36.160
I had enough people whose kids had come out so that I had parents of kids who'd come out to refer later on other parents to so that they wouldn't feel like they were the only ones.
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01:01:50.160
Because once I announced it, as I thought would happen, a bunch of kids came out and said, you know, now the rabbi said this mom, dad, I want you to know I'm gay.
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01:01:58.160
And when the parents came to me, I could say, well, listen, you're not alone.
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01:02:02.160
This person also you can go to.
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01:02:04.160
That I did right.
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01:02:06.160
What I did wrong was I don't think the classes were enough and I don't think enough people were prepared.
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01:02:12.160
And I think part of the explosion was shock.
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01:02:15.160
And I should have prepared even more.
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01:02:18.160
The words you used to talk about it, the way you thought about it, was it more scholarly in the Jewish tradition or did you go to the feeling?
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01:02:30.160
No, I went to the feeling.
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01:02:31.160
I said quote Habriot, which means respect or honor for God's creations and caring for other human beings and understanding.
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01:02:44.160
It wasn't scholarly because I knew that the objections were not scholarly objections.
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01:02:50.160
And I had many beautiful and also painful stories as a result, some of which can be told and some of which really can't.
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01:03:01.160
But what I tried to impress also on people was how painful it is to not be able to tell the world, even your own parents, who you are.
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01:03:13.160
And your sexuality is not a trivial part of who you are.
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01:03:16.160
I mean, it's core to people.
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01:03:18.160
So it's one of the reasons why it evokes such reactions.
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01:03:21.160
But I would say to them, the same reason that you're reacting so strongly tells you how strongly, you know.
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01:03:29.160
Anyway, it was a very powerful experience.
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01:03:34.160
And for that, I feel good about it.
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01:03:49.160
I told the Churchill one said that it's exhilarating to be shot at without result.
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01:03:54.160
If you go into a battle and you make it through and you're still okay, that's good.
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01:03:58.160
The problem is when you're in the battle, you don't know.
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01:04:01.160
No, you don't know.
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01:04:02.160
How did it feel like, I mean, looking back, you've been, you know, to use the word canceled a couple of times.
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01:04:11.160
I guess when you're dealing with the most difficult of questions, how did it, just as a human being, for a community that you really deeply care about some part of it saying that you have failed?
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01:04:23.160
I wasn't canceled the way, like I didn't lose my job, didn't lose my home.
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01:04:29.160
But I hurt people that I cared about.
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01:04:31.160
Yeah.
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01:04:32.160
And that was the hard, like I went into this, you know, to be someone who brings people together.
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01:04:38.160
And then I would sit there and do, even now, like as you're well aware with stuff that's going on now, I sit there and people are really upset at me who I either am or used to be close to.
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01:04:54.160
Do those people in time come around?
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01:05:00.160
When you look now, because those are real feelings in the moment, and we can learn that about social media, people, especially during COVID, there's this intensity of feeling about stuff.
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01:05:10.160
And have you learned something about the passing of feeling that turns into wisdom?
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01:05:17.160
No question about it.
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01:05:18.160
This sermon I gave this Saturday was about how, you know, Moses came down the mountain, he saw the golden calf and he broke the tablets.
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01:05:27.160
If he'd sat with it for a little while, he probably wouldn't have broken the tablets.
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01:05:30.160
But the instant reaction is always anger.
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01:05:33.160
And in our age, unfortunately, the instant reaction gets put on social media forever and ever and ever.
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01:05:41.160
And by the way, once you've actually said that, it becomes harder to back down.
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01:05:46.160
If you keep quiet for a day or two, then you can back down because you haven't put yourself out there.
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01:05:52.160
But once you've said, this is terrible, what you did, what you did, it's harder to write and say, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said that.
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01:05:59.160
Yeah, so it almost becomes, I mean, I actually, it's a really powerful statement that the downside of saying something on the internet is that it actually pulls you into this current.
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01:06:17.160
You both create the current and it pulls you into it to where it's actually very hard to escape.
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01:06:23.160
So when two days later you feel different, there's a momentum.
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01:06:27.160
There's not a tribe of people that feel this way and there's a momentum with it.
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01:06:31.160
There's a momentum and also you don't want to betray your own tribe because then people will get upset at you.
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01:06:36.160
I really think that a lot of the antagonism is not so much that you don't want to give ground to the people who oppose you.
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01:06:43.160
It's that you don't want to break with the people who are behind you and that's really hard.
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01:06:48.160
Can you tell the story of this recent controversy?
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Sure, why not?
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You went to the Super Bowl.
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I think a lot of people would relate to this because to me personally, I apologize to anybody who was hurt by this.
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01:07:02.160
The absurdity of it is deeply intense.
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So here's the story.
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The LA County mandates masking children in school and all of kids in our school are masked and many of the parents are extremely upset about that.
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I will just leave that at that.
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01:07:18.160
I went to the Super Bowl.
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There were 70,000 people.
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Frank Luntz, whom we know was a wonderful guy, gave me a ticket.
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So I was at the Super Bowl.
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I maybe saw two masks among the 70,000 people.
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I didn't even think about it, which was foolish on my part.
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01:07:37.160
No question.
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01:07:38.160
I took a picture of myself unmasked at the Super Bowl.
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And people were, I mean, many, many people thought, oh, great, wonderful, glad you're having a good time, so on and so forth.
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I don't want to diminish at all the many people who said that.
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A lot of people were livid.
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They were livid.
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And they weren't.
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What was instructive about it was they didn't say nobody wrote it.
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01:08:03.160
Nobody wrote me a private note and said, you know, I think that this was a bad idea.
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You should have thought about this.
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01:08:08.160
No.
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They were, you're a hypocrite.
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You're a clown.
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You're an idiot.
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How could you do this?
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This is a disgrace.
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This is...
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They say that publicly.
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01:08:17.160
Oh, yeah.
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On my Instagram, you can still see, I left the remarks up because I really thought it was important.
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If I started, I only deleted the really vile comments because I thought that shouldn't stay up.
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But I left them up because I thought like people should see and I should remind myself what I did.
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And I didn't want to just delete the picture as though it didn't happen because it did happen.
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And I did do it.
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And I felt terrible about that.
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01:08:41.160
And I felt terrible that I had not, not about, I mean, the comments will leave me weren't, weren't pleasant.
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I didn't like it.
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Nobody likes it.
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But I felt worse that I had hurt all these people that I'm close to.
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And I defended all these people who were really upset that their kids were wearing masks.
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And now they, their kid says, why doesn't the rabbi have to wear a mask?
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01:08:59.160
Well, first of all, it is tough to be a rabbi.
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01:09:02.160
If this is, I mean, the masks to me symbolize these kinds of discussions symbolize not necessarily the issues at hand, but the intensity of feeling.
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And people are really struggling.
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People are in pain.
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They're lonely.
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They're the uncertainty of it.
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You don't know who to trust.
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Everything's under question, the institutions, even the scientific institutions, and there's all these conspiracy theories flying around.
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You don't know who to believe.
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And there's people just yelling at each other and politics has weaved into this whole thing in some messy way.
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01:09:35.160
And you're just getting, I mean, honestly, it's just like legit, simple, just frustration.
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Going back to marriage of just hanging out with the kids and your wife, husband, just distressed, just building up over time.
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No release.
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01:09:53.160
And people want to tell you when the rabbi is not wearing a mask, even though it's at the damn Super Bowl.
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01:09:59.160
Maybe you want to comment on the Super Bowl part, which is awesome.
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01:10:03.160
But anyway, it released clearly a dam of all the kinds of feelings that you're talking about.
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01:10:08.160
So how do you then write a sermon?
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01:10:11.160
Well, so what I did was I didn't answer on social media because I knew that I wouldn't be able to formulate it the way I wanted.
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And I was going to wait.
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And I was going to be able to give a longer, I mean, the sermon is 15 minutes, not that long.
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But I wanted to be able to give a longer answer as opposed to a tweet.
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01:10:32.160
And so I was really, I mean, I tried to make two points during the sermon.
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01:10:39.160
And also I published the text of it, which I never do because I never speak from a text.
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I always speak from either notes or not even from notes.
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But this time I thought it was really important that I have a text out there too so that people could actually look over it.
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And I just wanted to make two points, one of which was that I really feel terrible.
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And I did, that all these people were hurt and that there is this contradiction between the way I acted and the way they want me to act.
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01:11:06.160
And I also think, by the way, I didn't speak about this, but I also think that there are some people who just don't like the idea of a rabbi being at the Super Bowl.
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It's like you're supposed to be doing rabbi stuff.
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So I understand that too.
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But then?
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01:11:20.160
Yeah, but rabbi at the Super Bowl, I mean, you are also, I hate to say it, but there's a rock star nature to you talking to Christopher Hitchens,
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contending with ideas, inspiring so many other minds.
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I mean, there's an educational aspect to this.
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I appreciate that.
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It's making ideas cool.
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I mean, that's a very powerful, I mean, that is also the job of a rabbi.
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You're not just supposed to do rabbi stuff.
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Yeah, but I didn't do so much of that at the game.
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I see.
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Nonetheless, but the second part of it was I said that we have to be able to express our anger and disappointment better than this.
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You just have to.
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In part because it doesn't get you the result that you want.
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I mean, when you scream at someone, that's not going to get them to realize what they did.
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01:12:14.160
And the most painful moment of it was this letter that I got from a Christian pastor who said,
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you know, I always admired the Jews so much, I can't believe they could be so cruel and especially to a rabbi.
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And I thought, that's not how I want my congregation to be perceived in the world.
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And by the way, some of them were from my congregation, some were, many were not from my congregation.
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And I spoke about what you talked about, which is that, you know, I mentioned before that Moses broke those tablets coming down the mountain.
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And the Torah doesn't say what happened to the tablets, but the rabbis do.
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They say that they were carried together in the ark with the second set that was intact.
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01:13:01.160
And that we all have brokenness, communities and individuals.
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We have brokenness and especially now.
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And we have to learn how to give each other space to be mistaken and broken and hurt and all of that.
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And the cool thing when you give people that space, you feel better.
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I mean, you for caring for the community, it feels better when you show empathy and compassion and kindness on the internet.
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You'll actually feel better a week from now.
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01:13:29.160
You'll feel much worse if you make some kind of negative statement of principle on the internet.
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It's almost just exclusively true.
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So if you care about feeling good, just be kind first.
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Right.
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Be empathetic first.
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Almost always the case, exactly so.
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So it's, I mean, it settled down a lot.
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The most really the single best reaction.
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There are people, and you can again, you can go on social media, you can see all the criticisms and so on and so forth.
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01:14:04.160
But the single best reaction I got was from a man who came up to me right after the sermon and said,
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I have four words for you.
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And I thought, oh no.
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Nothing good comes in fourth.
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I got to confess.
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I said, what?
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He said, you changed my mind.
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And I thought, wow.
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And I said to him, you know, that's so, it's like to take so much courage to come up to somebody and say that in front of them.
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And I was so grateful.
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And the other thing that it tells me is, look, I've been the rabbi of that congregation for 25 years and I taught 10 years before that.
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I've been a rabbi for a long time.
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I still, I still have a lot to learn.
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01:14:43.160
We talked a little bit about the difference between Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
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Because you maybe talk about the difference between the Torah, the Bible and the Koran.
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01:14:55.160
So there's, the Hebrew Bible is actually what's called a step canon.
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That is, there are the five books of the Torah.
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Then there are books of history and the prophets.
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So books like Samuel, Kings, Judges, and then the prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Ezekiel, so on.
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And then there are what are called the writings.
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The writings are books like Psalms, Proverbs, Job, the Megiloth, which are Esther, Daniel, all of those, all of those books, Ecclesiastes.
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So in Hebrew, it's called the Tanakh, Torah, Neveim, Ketuvim, the Torah, the prophets and the writings.
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And that is the Hebrew Bible.
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Sometimes that's also called the Torah, just to be confusing, but really the Torah generally refers to the five books.
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Then there is the New Testament, which the Jews don't recognize as a sacred book.
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They recognize it as the book of another religion.
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And I sometimes say to Christians, in order for them to really grasp this, Jesus has as much religious significance to Judaism as Muhammad has to Christianity.
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That is, Jesus, although Jewish, became the founder of another religion.
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And for Judaism, that's not only in as much as Christians and Jews have had a lot of interactions, but religiously, Jesus has no significance.
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Said many beautiful things, said some things I don't like so much.
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Like what? Leave your father and mother and follow me. I don't like that as a religious model.
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Now, Christians will say that I don't understand that, but that's because Christians, like Jews, interpret their texts different ways at different times.
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So anyway, the Koran, which I know less well.
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I have read it, but I know it less well than I know the New Testament and certainly less well, obviously, than I know the Hebrew Bible.
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In some ways, parts of it are, I don't say this word.
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I say this word because I can't find a better descriptive word, but Muslims will not accept this.
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Is it take off on the Torah in some things?
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That is, it's the same stories as the Torah, but they're different.
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Now, Jews will say, and I being a Jew will say this, that that's because Muhammad heard those stories from Jews and also heard Midrashim,
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which are rabbinic interpretations of those stories, and he wrote those down.
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Muslims will say, no, the Jews got it wrong, and Muhammad came along to correct the record and tell the real story.
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But they're all telling the story of the same thing.
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The Hebrew Bible part, the Abrahamic part, they all tell the story of the same characters, but tell them, obviously, Christians accept the Hebrew Bible as sacred scripture.
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The Muslims retell many of the stories in the Bible.
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What is common to all of them is that all of them are monotheistic faiths.
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Now, in Christianity, that's more complicated because of the Trinity, but as Christianity has developed over time, it clearly presents itself and thinks of itself and is a monotheistic faith as well.
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What's the role of the word in each of these religions in the scriptures?
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So first of all, the role of oral traditions, the power of the exactness of the words in the scripture, does it differ, or is it really within the communities it differs?
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It differs because in Christianity, the words are not all the words of Jesus.
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They're the words of Jesus's disciples. None of the books of the New Testament were written by people who met Jesus in person, so they're different.
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And also, we don't even know sometimes the original language of some of the things in the New Testament.
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In the Bible, and I understand in the Quran, but I'll speak for the Hebrew Bible, the idea is that that's Lashon Hakodesh, that's sacred language, and Hebrew is, that's the language according to the tradition that God actually spoke to Moses, and therefore the exact words are infinitely interpretable and meaningful.
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But the words are spoken but written by Moses, and the same with Muhammad, but from memory?
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No.
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There are different theories. I won't speak for Muhammad. You should ask. I don't want to get that wrong. I don't want to get another religious tradition wrong.
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In Judaism, the words are written by Moses at God's dictation, basically. That's the traditional view. There are other views that I'm happy to go into if you want to, but basically that's the traditional view.
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So it's pretty close.
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What makes Judaism and Christianity different is Christianity has an ideal life. Judaism doesn't have an ideal life. Judaism has an ideal book.
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So the holidays of Christianity are events in the life of God, God's birth, God's death and resurrection.
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In Judaism, the holidays are all events in the life of the people, like the liberation from slavery, or in the people's relationship to God, like Yom Kippur, which is a day of atonement.
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But there are no holidays in Judaism that are events in the life of God because in Judaism, God doesn't have a biography. God is eternal, and God never came to earth.
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And those events carry with them traditions and rules that you're to follow. I mentioned on one such event in Scripture, yet another time you walked through the fire, which is with Exodus.
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That was the first.
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And you never forget the first. One of several controversies.
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You spoke 20 years ago, 21 years ago, now it passed over and said that, quote, the way the Bible describes the Exodus is not the way it happened if it happened at all.
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So first of all, what is Exodus? And what really happened?
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01:21:03.160
Exodus is the liberation of the Jews from Egypt, and it is the central story of the Jewish tradition.
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01:21:08.160
And as I've said numerous times in various places, I believe that it's based on a historical kernel.
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I think Richard Eliot Friedman may have gotten this right in his book Exodus. It may have been the Levites who left Israel.
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But historically, but the Bible is not a book of history.
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I don't believe that there were 10 plagues and a split sea and 600,000 men, which makes about 2 million people, who actually, if there were 2 million people would stretch all the way from Israel to Egypt alone, were liberated from Egypt.
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And my point in that sermon was not actually to convince people that it didn't happen.
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My point in that sermon was to convince people that the historicity of the Exodus is not the basis of the faith of the Jewish people.
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01:22:02.160
Well, what does the word historicity mean?
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In other words, the factuality of it. It can be true without being factual.
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So you're not supposed to read it as facts?
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Well, I don't read it as fact. I don't read it as a history book.
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I said, look, I was talking again to a congregation that had many Iranians.
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I said, you experienced the truth of the Exodus in your own life.
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There was a regime that wanted to destroy you and you miraculously escaped before it did.
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And so a myth is something that may not have happened, but is always happening.
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And that's what I would say about the Exodus story.
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It's not about whether, in fact, there was a killing of the firstborn.
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It's about, does God deliver? Did God deliver the Jews in ancient times? Does God deliver people in modern times?
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And that's what the issue is.
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And to me, the issue of faith is much deeper than the issue of fact.
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01:23:02.160
I wouldn't look to the Torah for my science either.
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What are the limits of science in terms of, what can science not tell us that the Torah can in terms of wisdom?
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So the historicity, the facts of things, okay, if the Torah is much more than that, is it's, like you said, myth.
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Myth is not something that happened, but something that is always happening.
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And so presumably it's interacting with the environment of the day to generate wisdom.
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So you can live a life by Torah. I don't think you can live a life by biology.
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You can live a life that is informed by the values of the tradition of Judaism.
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01:23:52.160
And those values, by the way, what science does is it contributes factuality to the conversation and also changes the reality around us.
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So when you study Talmud on your iPhone, you know, you're still, I mean, it changes the atmosphere in which you do it.
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But the wisdom and the life guidance and the connection to transcendence is something that science doesn't give.
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01:24:23.160
So if we now step into returning to our friend Sam Harris and step into this weird place of science,
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and you talked about this, where the kind of the current assumption of science is it's a materialistic one.
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So for me, obviously AI person, this whole mind thing is fascinating.
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Like what the heck is going on up there?
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So how do you explain consciousness? How do you explain free will?
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Do you think, first of all, do you think we have a free will? And if so, what is it?
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This is where we had the debate earlier that I mentioned with Hitchens, where I think actually neither he nor the moderator understood what I was saying, which is I'm sure my inability to express it.
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But he was very focused and delivered on the humor and the wit.
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01:25:17.160
Yes. But what I was trying to say is, if we're entirely biological creatures, if we didn't choose our genetics and we didn't choose our environment, then there is no space for free choice.
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I don't understand where it comes in. And I kept asking them that question, but didn't get an answer because I don't think there is an answer.
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I think if you're a thoroughgoing materialist, free will is impossible.
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There could be randomness, but randomness is not free will. It's randomness.
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I think you need a spiritual nonmaterial belief in order to get free will. And that's why I believe in free will.
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Okay, you were talking about, and actually the moderator totally missed your point about the glass of water and basically how was the difference. So do you free will, because you could also, if it fits into the materialistic picture, it could be just a convenient, useful quirk.
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01:26:14.160
You would understand this better than I would. I don't understand how it could be a convenient quirk materialistically. I don't understand how to explain it.
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If you study perception, there's all these kinds of illusions. Our mind plays tricks on us to make our life easier, more efficient, and survive better and all those kinds of things. And so free the feeling like we have a choice.
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01:26:37.160
Oh, that could be an illusion. That I understand. But actual free choice, free will. I don't see where you get it if you're a materialist.
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I think you have to have a spiritual component. By the way, I think Sam would agree with this. I think he wrote about not having free will. And I think if you don't have a God and you don't have a soul, that free will is a logical impossibility.
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01:27:07.160
Sam, which is fascinating, it's not just that free will is an illusion, but the illusion of free will is an illusion, meaning we don't even experience anything like it. There's no illusion. It's not even honest to be talking about it.
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We're just, we are like the current in the river or something. You were comparing it to the glass. We are just like that glass. I don't know what we're going on about with this whole free will thing. I mean, to use the free will, the eye that a young person is born with, is that somehow fundamental to religion?
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It's fundamental to Judaism. I think that the idea is that you are the custodian of your soul. And even though I grant that there's a certain over emphasis in modern society on the individuality of the soul, that is, we are more interconnected than I think we believe.
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01:28:13.160
Still, yeah, the eye, the idea that every human being is an image of God that, I mean, that the human being in the Torah is created singly. And again, do I really believe there was an Adam and an Eve and a Garden of Eden? No, not literally, but I think that it expresses a deep truth about human life.
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And tied into this, is this subjective experience of things which we call consciousness?
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I mean, this is the most fascinating and inexplicable discussion. And again, this is a discussion I've had, I privileged to have with Daniel Dennett and could not make any, as you can imagine, any headway on my, but he was delightful and brilliant to talk to.
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For me, consciousness is a real thing. I don't know if it is, I mean, I kind of like the panpsychist's view that there's an element of consciousness in everything, that that's constitutive of reality.
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01:29:17.160
But I don't, I'm not wedded to it. But I think that it's, it exists in different degrees and all sentient creatures. I think that anybody who has a pet knows that they have some kind of consciousness.
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Except cats.
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I'm not going to, since I don't have cats or dogs, I'm not going to.
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This is another reason people be outraged.
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Well, I happen to be allergic to both, but I'm very fond of animals.
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The thing that so perplexes me about this and is the denial of the reality of consciousness from people who are fully aware that they're conscious.
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01:29:57.160
I don't know how you divest yourself of the most present quality of being a person in your discussions about what it is to be a person.
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01:30:07.160
We just don't really have a good sense of the alternative. And so you can kind of divest yourself in that way. Well, maybe everything is like this.
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01:30:14.160
Maybe we're trying, we're over dramatizing this whole thing.
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01:30:18.160
It seems like every living thing, perhaps everything period thinks that it's the center of the universe.
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01:30:28.160
And so here we are telling ourselves these dramatic big stories about us being special and so on.
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01:30:33.160
And maybe we need to have a little bit more humility, both about the uncertainty and about our place in the whole.
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01:30:40.160
Any statement you make about something like consciousness has, I think, a sort of equal level of humility.
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01:30:46.160
You're saying that you know we don't have it is as not you, Lex, but you person saying we don't have it is as intellectually arrogant as my saying we do.
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01:30:55.160
So I think for me, humility comes in in admitting that we really, really have just the tiniest part of the puzzle.
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01:31:04.160
And as you get older, at least my experience has been not that you get more answers, but that you just see a bigger puzzle.
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01:31:14.160
So to me, there is less. So the questions are fascinating, but there's also an engineering practical question. And perhaps I'll ask you a religious one too on this point to return back to robots.
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01:31:29.160
So how to engineer consciousness, or I'll just even ask you a very simple question, which is when you have robots that exhibit the capacity to suffer.
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01:31:43.160
I found in myself as a human, when I see that, I feel something.
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01:31:48.160
Exhibit the capacity to suffer or they exhibit behaviors that evoke in you a sense that they are suffering. Those aren't the same things.
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01:31:56.160
From an observation perspective, they sure as heck seem similar.
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01:32:01.160
Do you think they're feeling pain?
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01:32:03.160
I don't know. I'm observing pain.
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01:32:08.160
It's like when I watch a movie and there's people on screen, some of them are dressed like Batman.
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01:32:17.160
But you can make the distinction. Like if I have a doll and I bend the doll over and it makes a sad face, I know that that doll is not actually in pain, even though I am observing pain.
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01:32:31.160
So the question, what's that?
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01:32:33.160
The question is when the doll becomes able to remember things about you, David, about the experiences you shared, it is able to speak and make you feel like there's an actual relationship.
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01:32:51.160
So that's what I'm asking, is at what point do you believe that the, and I know that this is an impossible question, but at what point do you believe that there is a consciousness in there as opposed to just an extraordinary, I mean, like when I play chess against a computer and it beats me.
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01:33:10.160
I'm embarrassed even though the computer doesn't, I don't think the computer is going, ah, you idiot, but it feels that way. But there is some part of me that says, okay, I know that this computer doesn't actually know who I am or care who I am, it just knows how to move the pieces.
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01:33:28.160
So at what point do you, I mean, you're giving me instances, it speaks, it does this, it does this, but at what point does that for you cross the threshold into it's actually a sentient being?
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01:33:39.160
I think the question is whether there is a threshold that could be crossed. That's one question. And I can answer this because I think it's different from person to person, but the chess engine is not at all trying to cross that threshold.
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01:33:54.160
Let's just start there. And to me, the personalization, which is what's the difference, like a friend that you meet, you've shared all these memories. The way they look at you will convey, and the things they say will convey that they've shared those memories with you.
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01:34:16.160
They'll be able to speak in the shared humor and the language, but really the memories is the big one of having gone through things together.
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01:34:25.160
I think I would have more and more trouble, for example, turning off a system that I've been through things with.
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01:34:36.160
And by turning off, I mean, delete all of its memory. If me and the toaster have gone through a bunch of dramatic events and that toaster remembers, there's a certain level to where like, it's just me and the toaster and this together at this point.
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01:34:53.160
And just to talk about sentience, I don't know, but you know.
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01:34:58.160
I don't know. It's according to the scripture, can't live by bread alone. But I would, I mean, I know that there's no way to determine this, but it's still about what you feel.
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01:35:11.160
Yes. But isn't that what human relations are also, though?
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01:35:15.160
Yes, but we make each other feel.
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01:35:17.160
It's true, but it's true that I have the assumption that you feel somewhat like I do. I mean, obviously, I don't, you know, and that could be illusion and I don't know. And I know that you don't feel exactly as I do.
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01:35:34.160
But I think we have a long, at least to me, we have a long way to go before the detached part of our brains. That is, the objective evaluating part, as opposed to the emotive, it feels this way part, believe that that machine has consciousness.
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01:35:49.160
I think it's at least, without arriving at conclusions, it's at least possible that one day we will look back and realize that we have yet, once again, formed another tribe and that scripture all along had in it the ability for humans and robots to have a deep, meaningful connection.
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01:36:11.160
And that, through the robot, the life that enters the body of another robot, what's the difference between a biological body and a mechanical one?
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01:36:20.160
And then we will see that the fundamental thing is about the, whatever you want to call it, sentience, whatever can permeate an object. That was the thing all along.
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01:36:34.160
So, I mean...
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01:36:36.160
And then you'll get cancelled one more time.
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01:36:38.160
Because I denied it. I was going to say...
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01:36:41.160
You'll eventually convince it.
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01:36:44.160
I'll preach to the robots.
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01:36:45.160
I'm hoping.
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01:36:46.160
I'm hoping.
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01:36:47.160
Look, I, first of all, depends how quickly you do it and how much longer I have to live.
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01:36:55.160
I resist it tremendously, but I am also enough of a student of history to know that my instinctive resistance has nothing to do with whether it will come about.
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01:37:11.160
I have a hard time believing it.
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01:37:13.160
We'll see.
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01:37:15.160
Can I ask you about this? Maybe you can educate me. I tend to believe that we mentioned suffering, that there is a connection between consciousness and suffering.
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01:37:25.160
That suffering is a fundamental part...
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01:37:28.160
The capacity to suffer is the fundamental part of being human.
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01:37:31.160
I mean, we look at when you're not conscious, you don't suffer.
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01:37:34.160
You know, we've had operations where we've been put under anesthetic and we're not conscious and we don't suffer during the operation.
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01:37:40.160
If we were conscious, we would.
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01:37:43.160
But there's also, I mean, there's a nonphysical suffering that is very much tied to consciousness.
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01:37:49.160
I can think of things right now that will cause me suffering, like pain that I've caused or pain that other people I care about have felt or so on.
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01:37:59.160
So I don't see how...
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01:38:03.160
I think that way, I think it's equally true of joy.
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01:38:06.160
Joy is also a product of consciousness.
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01:38:09.160
It's all tied in in some beautiful, messy way with memory and so on that we can reexperience it when we recall the memories.
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01:38:17.160
But why is there suffering? You mentioned evil. Why is there evil in the world?
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01:38:21.160
You can tell stories about this.
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01:38:24.160
Why is there suffering? Why is there evil in the world if there's a God that cares for us?
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01:38:29.160
So let's assume for a minute that everything was a primitive robot.
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01:38:35.160
There would be no suffering, but there would also be no growth.
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01:38:39.160
And that implies choices.
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01:38:43.160
One of the things that I've said that I know why it hurts people and I don't mean it quite the way that...
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01:38:52.160
But I will say it nonetheless, is the Holocaust presents the exact same theological question as somebody who gets shot on the streets of a city in Los Angeles.
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01:39:04.160
Which is, God, why do you allow some people to do bad things to other people?
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01:39:10.160
It's on an unimaginable scale, but it's the same question.
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01:39:13.160
And the answer has to be you either allow people that free will or you don't.
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01:39:18.160
You can't say as God, I'm going to have let everybody have free will, but not Nazis.
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01:39:23.160
Nazis don't get free will because Cambodians, they can kill each other.
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01:39:29.160
Rwandans kill each other, but the Nazis don't get to do that.
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01:39:33.160
So that's one piece of the puzzle.
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01:39:38.160
And what makes it unfathomable is when you're actually faced with suffering, these kinds of explanations are obscene.
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01:39:45.160
They just are.
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01:39:46.160
You can't...
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01:39:47.160
I mean, when somebody is actually suffering, oh, the rabbi said, God gave people free will, that's just awful.
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01:39:53.160
But there is a second piece to this also, which is that there is natural suffering.
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01:39:59.160
Like children were with diseases or earthquakes or volcanoes or whatever.
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01:40:05.160
And here my argument is that in some way suffering has to be random in the world because when people say, why do bad things happen to good people?
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01:40:15.160
Well, if only good things happen to good people, everybody would be good.
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01:40:18.160
But it would have no moral content.
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01:40:21.160
The only way you can be good and it have moral content is say, I know that I can live a really good life and have really terrible things happen to me nonetheless.
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01:40:28.160
So it feels to me like it has to be a randomly.
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01:40:33.160
Now that means, by the way, that I've been incredibly lucky.
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01:40:39.160
I don't have a good life because I was good.
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01:40:42.160
I have a good life because I was lucky.
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01:40:44.160
And that implies not that I should feel guilty about it, but that I have a tremendous responsibility as a result to other people who aren't so lucky.
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01:40:52.160
Tremendous responsibility to study the lessons of history, to tell the stories of those who are less lucky and to draw enough wisdom from them so that we have less cruelty and suffering in the world.
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01:41:05.160
Or have new kinds that get us to improve even more.
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01:41:09.160
That's right. Exactly.
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01:41:10.160
That we suffer better.
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01:41:11.160
Suffer better.
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01:41:13.160
For a lot of people, mortality is one of the very unfortunate versions of suffering, which is that the ride ends in this realm, whatever it is.
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01:41:27.160
What do you think of mortality?
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01:41:29.160
Is it something you think about?
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01:41:31.160
Is it something you fear?
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01:41:33.160
What do you think happens after we die?
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01:41:37.160
I don't fear it.
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01:41:39.160
First of all, I would say when I was in high school, I think my father actually encouraged me to read this book.
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01:41:46.160
I read Ernest Becker's Denial of Death, which I found and still find to be one of the most profound works I've ever come across.
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01:41:55.160
And he convinced me that a lot of what our society is about are ways that we avoid encountering our own mortality, our physicality.
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01:42:08.160
I mean, one of the points he makes, and I'm not quoting him at all directly, is like, why does everything about our physical body make us so uncomfortable?
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01:42:15.160
Everything that comes out of you, other than tears, is either mildly or very disgusting.
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01:42:20.160
Why? Why does that have to be?
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01:42:22.160
Why are sex and eating and all the things that are physical surrounded with so much symbolism?
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01:42:28.160
I mean, what are table manners, really?
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01:42:30.160
They're like, we're not eating like animals because we're not eating like animals.
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01:42:34.160
And sex, obviously, has more symbolism around it than anything.
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01:42:38.160
And his answer is anything that reminds you that you're a physical body because that's what dies.
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01:42:42.160
Your body dies, it decays, it dies, it gets eaten by worms.
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01:42:46.160
That you don't want to think about, so you deny it.
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01:42:49.160
I think that part of religion is a confrontation with your own mortality, but also a certain transcendence of it because the idea is something about you is eternal.
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01:43:00.160
What exactly I don't know, and you ask, what do I think happens after we die?
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01:43:06.160
So I don't know any better than anyone else does, but I will, I'll say two things about it.
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01:43:13.160
One is that every image of what it's like is foolish.
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01:43:20.160
Like Mark Twain has, I think in Letters from Earth, he says, we're going to lie on green fields and listen to harp music, which you wouldn't want to do for five minutes while you're alive.
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01:43:28.160
But you think you'll be happy for the rest of eternity doing it after you die.
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01:43:31.160
So I don't know, this world was a surprise, so why shouldn't the next world be a surprise?
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01:43:36.160
I have no idea.
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01:43:37.160
But I really like this parable that's told by a guy in a book on death and mourning by a rabbi and a book on death and mourning about twins in a womb.
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01:43:48.160
He says, one of them believes that there's a life outside and the other one doesn't.
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01:43:54.160
He says, the one who doesn't says, look, this is the only world we've ever seen, the only world we've ever known.
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01:43:59.160
Why do you think there's something out there?
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01:44:01.160
He says, now imagine the one who believes is born.
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01:44:05.160
Back in the womb, his brother is mourning a death, but outside, everybody's celebrating a birth.
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01:44:10.160
He said, and that's what it's like when you die.
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01:44:12.160
And I love that image.
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01:44:14.160
Yeah, the grass is always greener.
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01:44:16.160
It's the new step, but the eternity thing is an interesting one.
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01:44:20.160
It's yet another concept that I feel humans are fully inequipped to comprehend.
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01:44:26.160
Is eternity fundamental somehow to all of these discussions?
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01:44:30.160
I think it is.
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01:44:31.160
Well, partly because God is supposed to be eternal and therefore it moves the mind in that direction even though it is completely unfathomable.
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01:44:41.160
Because sometimes I would say eternity, you said on a green field, sometimes a moment, like a truly joyful moment feels like an eternity, the intensity of it.
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01:44:52.160
Maybe eternity is more about stopping time versus extending time indefinitely.
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01:44:58.160
And it's something that we just totally can't comprehend us silly humans.
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01:45:03.160
All I would say is the older you get, the more you're struck by the fact that time does not freeze.
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01:45:12.160
People will sometimes say to me, you have an age today, and then I'll look at an old picture of myself.
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01:45:19.160
And I'll say, that was very kind of you, but that's not true.
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01:45:23.160
It's not true.
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01:45:25.160
So yeah, I mean, I love the idea of seeing eternity in a grain of sand was how Blake put it, I love that notion.
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01:45:33.160
But when you talk about life after death, I really, I think that in some ways my fundamental faith is in human beings, that this doesn't all disappear, that there's something about people that transcends this world.
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01:45:51.160
You mentioned Ernest Becker in high school and the amount of death, maybe you can mention if you still see truth and wisdom and some of this idea.
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01:46:00.160
But in general, can you go all the way back and tell some of the fascinating story of how you found faith?
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01:46:08.160
When I was in high school, I was a really pretty ardent atheist.
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01:46:14.160
And I loved Bertrand Russell, who was, for my money, with all due respect to all the very, very capable people that we've talked about earlier, he's the best atheist pound for pound that there was.
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01:46:29.160
And a remarkably witty and lucid writer, and I was totally in his thrall, and I would read every book by Russell I could get my hands on.
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01:46:37.160
And the reason that I did, I have this theory that why do adolescent boys like Mr. Spock and like Sherlock Holmes, I think it's because when you hit puberty, for a lot of us, there's so much discomfort with our bodies that we like the idea that we're just brains.
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01:46:58.160
I really think so. I had that experience. It's like, I want to just be a thinking machine. I don't want to be a body because my body was making me so uncomfortable.
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01:47:08.160
I had all these urges and inclinations that I couldn't control. So Russell was perfect. And my father, who was a rabbi, did the very wise thing of buying me some of Bertrand Russell's books, which was his way of saying, I'm not afraid of him.
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01:47:23.160
And actually, there was another rabbi. I was at summer camp, and I was sitting on the porch of the, I remember exactly, and I was reading Bertrand Russell, and this guy came up to me and said, what are you reading?
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01:47:35.160
I was maybe 16 or 17. And I said, Bertrand Russell, I was spoiling for a fight. And he said, I'm glad you're reading him. I said, really, why? He goes, how old are you, David? And I said, whatever I was, 16, 17.
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01:47:47.160
He said, well, I'd rather you grow out of him than grow into him. And you know what? He was actually right because when I started to read about Russell's life, I realized that all of that rationality didn't shield him.
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01:48:04.160
He had an incredibly messy life, multiple marriages, endless infidelities, family members he didn't speak to, he didn't speak to him. It was raised by his grandparents because his parents had died and really not a happy or, I mean, a remarkable life, but not a happy one.
link |
01:48:22.160
And so I started to believe that maybe it was possible that people who had faith were not just stupid and needed crutches, but saw something deeper than Russell did. And the more people that I met that were like that, it's funny because I always thought, okay, my father is a rabbi, that's great, but nobody else.
link |
01:48:47.160
And I think what happened to me was it was not a logical decision to come to faith. It was a sort of opening of my heart. It's like this world is way much more than my mind can capture. And I've kind of felt my way to God.
link |
01:49:03.160
And in the moments, my faith, you know, there was a rabbi named Rabbi Nachman of Brotslav, he said he was a moon man, his faith waxed and waned. So sometimes I have more, sometimes less. But in my feeling girl moments is when I have more.
link |
01:49:20.160
So with your heart open, what would you say in your feeling girl moments is the most beautiful part about Judaism and your faith?
link |
01:49:33.160
I think the most beautiful part about Judaism is that even though it is filled with humor and wit, it takes life and it takes the soul seriously. It really believes that this matters and that we matter and what we do matters.
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01:49:52.160
And I think that that's incredibly important. And especially in a world in which young people feel so much like they don't matter. That's an unbelievably powerful message. I mean, you know, it's, you don't, I want to say like almost to every young woman under 30 on TikTok, you don't matter because you're beautiful.
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01:50:18.160
That's not why you matter. I hope you know that you matter because you have a soul. And to every young man who's like nihilistic and doesn't think and just thinks that if they make enough money, their life will be fine.
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01:50:30.160
I want to say the same thing, which is really that's not ultimately you matter because you're in the image of God and Judaism really deeply, deeply believes and preaches that. And I think that that's a message that has so much to say to the world.
link |
01:50:48.160
It's like, you have to take people's souls seriously. And for all of the difficulty in figuring out all these social questions and what they mean, I just don't want to dismiss people because I disagree with them politically or socially or culturally, because I think they matter.
link |
01:51:06.160
So ultimately, Judaism has a wealth of meaning. Yes. For a human mind. I really believe that it does. I really do. And it's meaning, and I want to emphasize this, is not political. The deepest meaning of Judaism is not political.
link |
01:51:30.160
Well, there is, we put politics on top of everything. Exactly. But that's why I want to emphasize it. The deepest meaning is on the soul level. It's not on a voting level.
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01:51:40.160
Well, that combined with the humor, it's clear to me that Christopher Hitchens should have been a Jew.
link |
01:51:44.160
He was. He actually was. He discovered that in his 30s, that his mother was Jewish.
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01:51:50.160
That's fascinating.
link |
01:51:51.160
Yep. He actually, he has a beautiful essay about it, discovering in his 30s that his mother was Jewish. Yep. So remarkably enough, he actually was Jewish. His autobiography, Hitch 22, is a great read. And I just want to say, like, what you discover there, I don't know if I'm giving too much away by telling the story of this.
link |
01:52:11.160
What you discover there is that his mother ran away with a minister or a priest, and they died in what seemed like was a suicide pact. And so I read it, unfortunately, after he passed away. But I would have wanted to ask him, do you think that has anything to do maybe with the hostility towards religion?
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01:52:29.160
We are only human.
link |
01:52:31.160
My father, I mean, both my parents, but my father who was a rabbi was such a wonderful, warm and loving man. So I associate a religious figure, you know, with real goodness.
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01:52:41.160
And I'm sorry to return to a darker topic, but I really wanted to ask you this. For the current events, for a recent event, I mentioned Dallas. What lessons do you draw from the Dallas synagogue hostage incident?
link |
01:52:59.160
Well, the week after that, we had active shooter training in my synagogues. And one of the things I drew was that security for synagogues is important. And the second is that the reality of antisemitism, which I had thought had waned when I first began my rabbinate, I thought it's not going to be such a big issue.
link |
01:53:20.160
It is like an evergreen issue. And Jews and all people of goodwill have to take this really seriously because it has devastating consequences. And if the world doesn't know that, then it just hasn't been paying attention.
link |
01:53:35.160
So there's antisemitism at a scale of human to human. But there's also, like you mentioned, politics get mixed up into things, nations get mixed into things, impossible to answer. But I have to ask, what do you think about the long running saga of Israel and Palestine? Will we ever see peace in that part of the Middle East?
link |
01:54:00.160
Well, since I'm an optimist about human, look, I mean, I have many, many thoughts about I'm a very, very strong supporter of Israel. And, and I also feel really for the plight of the Palestinians, I think that they're, you know, this is, this is a clash of legitimate narratives that is impossible to exactly split the difference
link |
01:54:27.160
of. However, I know that Israel has made peace with Egypt has made peace with Jordan has made peace now with other Arab nations. I don't believe that Israel is unwilling to make peace.
link |
01:54:43.160
And so I think that as difficult as it will be for the Palestinians to come to grips with the fact that the Jewish state is not leaving and is legitimately here, as opposed to we can't get rid of it now, but we will get rid of it one day.
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01:54:59.160
If that comes to be, and I believe that it will, I think not only that there would be peace, but I think that those two peoples together could probably do remarkable things in the world.
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01:55:11.160
Do you think the source of it is politics? Is it religious ideas? And to flip it, what is the way out? Is it geopolitics? Is it, you know, interfaith discourse and collaboration? Or is it simply the human, like, love?
link |
01:55:37.160
So I think that I'm not sure that I could give one answer to that, but I will give a piece of an answer. Why did the Abraham Accords happen? The main reason that they happened was because economics overrode ideology.
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01:55:52.160
And I actually am hopeful that that's in the end what will happen, that people will say, you know what, we could have such a better life if we put aside the ideological animosities and just created this different kind of Middle East together.
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01:56:10.160
I went to Dubai to watch the world chess championship because I really wanted to see Magnus Carlson play. I thought, you're alive when you have such a remarkable world champion, go see him play.
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01:56:23.160
So I actually took myself to Dubai for the last couple of games and I watched. And so I wasn't so much, I mean, it's not that I'm uninterested in Dubai, but I really, I went there for the chess thing.
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01:56:34.160
The Expo was also on at the same time and I saw, here's this amazing place. I came back. This guy I know who lived in Dubai for several years and works in the Middle East said to me, what did you think of it?
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And I said, this is Dubai. It was like very, you know, very polished, very sophisticated, very clean, very no crime and so on. But it was like, you know, kind of like Las Vegas in the Middle East without the gambling or something like that.
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And he said, you know, he totally changed my perspective in a couple sentences. He said, I know it seems like that when you come from Los Angeles. He said, but fly there from Yemen or from Riyadh. And it is a miracle.
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And I thought, oh my God, you're right. It's like what human beings can do if they just put aside their ideological shackles is remarkable. And I'm hopeful that one day that'll happen.
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Economics allows for higher quality of life. You no longer, it's the playground analogy. You said earlier, if there's more resources to play with, unfortunately, us humans are more willing to play with others.
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And maybe that is the solution. And maybe, I mean, for me, from a technology perspective, innovation, engineering helps make everybody's life better. And over that, once people's lives become better, they start to be, have more time to be empathetic and hear people.
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And they have more to lose. When you have more to lose, it actually makes you, I think countries are less willing to go to war when they have more to lose. And families want peace when it's good at home. So I think there's an element of that as well.
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And some of it, again, taking us back to the other aspect of our conversations, how we're conducting ourselves in conversation online and so on. Because I think actually, I'm a big fan of the idea of social media, that is a way for us to connect together.
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I think there's a lot of really strong ideas how to do that well. And clearly, the initial attempts that kind of just open it up wide, some of the lesser aspects of human nature can take over when combined with different forces like advertisements and virology and all those kinds of things.
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But overall, I love the honesty of the mess of it being presented before us on social media. Part of me, maybe because I don't participate it, like if somebody is being mean to me or being aggressive and these kinds of things, I enjoy it because it's human nature.
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But I enjoy it because I don't respond. I think if I responded, I would get pulled into this human nature and then it's not fun. But I love the, like I'll talk to people. In fact, I still visit clubhouse. I don't know if you know what that is.
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Sure.
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Oh, right. That's right.
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I think that's how we first met.
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Well, yeah. Well, I was such a fanboy. I actually, when I first heard you and I was like, I can't believe I get you. But the Israel Palestine topic was something that was very deeply in a heated way, discussed on clubhouse.
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Race relations is a thing that was really heatedly discussed. And I now go to clubhouse to practice Russian. And there in Russian, the heated discussion is on basically any topic as meaningless or meaningful as you want and the heat of it.
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Just people just screaming and then calming down and going through the full process. And that too is beautiful because that emotion is there. And if it is allowed to have a voice, I think ultimately it leads to healing.
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So that felt really healthy if you learn how to do that at scale.
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Social media, I wish that it were not as algorithmically biased towards conflict. I don't think that that's healthy. But I do, I think it brings a lot of blessings into people's lives if they use it wisely.
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You know, it can, like anything else, it can be awful. But it can't, I've connected to all sorts of people that I never would have known. And that's been wonderful.
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Let me ask you the big question of advice. What advice would you give to young people today? Or maybe high school, college, thinking about career, thinking about life that can be proud of?
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So the first thing that I would say is that life is longer than you think it is. Even though I understand the impulse to be in a rush, you will have many unfoldings.
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More even than people of my generation did.
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Unfoldings. That's such a funny word. It's a beautiful word.
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But it feels that way. It's like different aspects of your life will come, will show you different possibilities that you don't imagine at the moment.
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And I think the second thing that I would say is, I know that this is a very old fashioned, but I would say don't, to the extent that you can read, don't just, and not just on social media, read books,
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learn things that will give you a broader context for your life than just today or yesterday or the day before.
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And I suppose the other thing that I would say is that to the extent that you can, try to develop your own internal metric of both what matters and what is good, because you will be exposed to more voices than any generation in history telling you that that's good or this is good.
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They're called influencers, but what they are is voices telling you what you should think and what you should believe.
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And so have some internal space where you'll be able to say, for example, I know this person is doing that and it looks great, but that's not me.
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You have a community of people that speak to you with a lot of passion, and do you still have that voice in your own, in the privacy of your own mind that you're able to ignore, like for a moment, just be with yourself.
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Absolutely.
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Think what is right.
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Absolutely.
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And I think it's partly because I grew up without that.
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I mean, I grew up with a lot of space in my life, and so I had a chance to develop that voice.
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That's why I think it's harder for kids today than it was for me.
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I mean, I grew up when there were three channels.
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There was three, six, and ten.
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There was ABC, CBS, and NBC, and that was it.
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And you spent your evening, you know, playing board games or reading or whatever, and there was a lot of space.
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And we played football in the street, and you went on your bike in the morning, and nobody worried about you, and you came home at night, and everybody assumed you were fine.
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And so I really feel, and also I went into a religious tradition where I feel like I have the opportunity to judge myself by bigger metrics.
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And it's still hard.
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I don't want to, it's not like, oh, I wear impenetrable armor.
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It's still hard.
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So how much harder for kids today when they don't have that?
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You mentioned books.
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Is there Bertrand Russell and Denial of Death by Ernest Becker?
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Is there books that pop into mind that had an impact on you?
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My favorite novel is Middlemarch.
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Middlemarch?
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Middlemarch.
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I remember, like, I was listening to a podcast.
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I was listening to one of your podcasts where your guest said the two greatest novels of the 19th century were Brothers Karamazov and what was the other one he mentioned?
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I don't remember.
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I don't know.
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I think it was both.
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I might have been.
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I don't remember.
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Maybe.
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But anyway, but I would say Middlemarch is up there.
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Middlemarch, like, presents an entire world.
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And it's written by a woman, Mary Ann Evans, who took the pen named George Elliott, who you feel, Virginia Woolf said it's the only English novel written for grownups.
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You feel the genius in her sentences, like the pressure of her intellect in her sentences.
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It's a beautiful, wonderful book.
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I love it.
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Pressure of her intellect.
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Yeah, you really do.
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I also love, I love Saul Bellow, especially Herzog, but it's a very different kind of thinking person's novel.
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I read a lot of mysteries and a lot of other kinds of fiction and literature.
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But in terms of the books that most, you mentioned one of them, which is Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning.
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And I also really, really love Heschel's The Sabbath.
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I think it's a beautiful book.
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It's a very short book, just as Frankl's book is.
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What do you take from Man's Search for Meaning?
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What do you take of a human being in the worst conditions, being able to non dramatically find little joys, find beauty.
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It's what I said before about Judaism's advice to younger people, is that it mattered.
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If you believe that something matters, you have enormous resilience.
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It's meaninglessness that is the greatest threat to a decent life.
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When people are deeply depressed, whether it is chemical depression or what they feel like is this is all meaningless.
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And meaning, now, obviously, chemical depression calls in part for chemical means, but meaning is the great antidote.
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We can talk about what kind of meaning.
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I mean, there are kinds of meanings that are awful, but meaning is the great antidote to a sense that life is just nihilistic and purposeless and to that destructiveness that I think is too common.
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Yeah, so maybe the heroic action in Nazi Germany, in the Holocaust, in the camps is even not the action, but just the realization that every life matters.
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So here's this really wonderful story that Hugo Grin, who was a rabbi in England, died, I don't know, like 15, 20 years ago.
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He used to tell, he grew up in Auschwitz.
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He was a child there and he was with his father and it was Hanukkah and you're supposed to light the candles.
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And his father took the margarine ration and used it as the oil to light the Hanukkah candles.
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And Hugo was scandalized and he said, that's our food and his father said, what we have learned, my son, is you can live for three weeks without food.
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You can live for three days without water, but you can't live for three minutes without hope.
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Well, hope, let me ask you, he said meaning.
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What's the meaning of this whole thing?
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What's the meaning of life?
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You're the perfect person to ask this question.
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I believe the meaning of life is for human beings to grow in soul.
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That's why we're here and you can do that in infinite numbers of ways, but you're supposed to return your soul like more burnished and beautiful than you got it.
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I mean, it's going to have, you know, some nicks and cuts, but that's what it means to deepen and grow it.
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You do that more than anything else, you do that by learning how to love.
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I mean, that's the principle way I think that you do it.
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You know, it's interesting because for a human, the relationship, if you're a man of faith, is with God.
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But it feels like love is so richly part of human society that it's not just love of God, it's love of each other.
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Right, yep, there's no question about the idea.
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I mean, in Judaism, that was actually the great innovation of the monotheistic idea.
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In pagan societies, it was all about how you treat the gods.
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Monotheism said, no, God cares how you treat each other.
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So it's, in fact, the mystics use the same kind of word in Hebrew, dvekut, which means clinging, that is used about Adam and Eve, about it says, therefore, a man will leave his father and mother and davak with his wife.
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And davak means cling.
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So there is an analogy there, absolutely.
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Yeah, I kind of think of human civilization as that movie March of the Penguins, and they're all huddling together in the cold.
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This is fundamentally human.
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Is this just this darkness all around us of uncertainty, of cruelty, of just, it seems like everything is so fragile.
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And we're just kind of all huddling together for warmth.
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Yes.
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And that's all we got is each other.
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So we started with the big question of what is God, ended with what is meaning.
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Rabbi Wolpe, I've been a huge, as I've told you, huge, huge fanatist for a long time.
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It's such an honor that you talked to me today.
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I am really so happy to be here, and thank you so much for the conversation.
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Thanks for listening to this conversation with David Wolpe.
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To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
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And now let me leave you with some words from David himself.
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The only whole heart is a broken one, because it lets the light in.
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Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.