David Wolpe: Judaism | Lex Fridman Podcast #270

00:00:00.000 | The following is a conversation with Rabbi David Wolpe, someone who I have been a fan

00:00:05.040 | of for many years, for the kindness in his heart, the strength of his character, and

00:00:10.240 | the kind of friends he keeps and talks with, many of whom disagree with him but love him

00:00:15.280 | nevertheless, including the late Christopher Hitchens.

00:00:20.440 | I will have many conversations like these in the future about religion, about Islam,

00:00:25.640 | Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and others, looking to understand and celebrate

00:00:31.320 | the culture, the tradition, and the beauty of the people who practice these religions.

00:00:36.600 | I will of course not shy away from the difficult topics.

00:00:39.840 | I will talk both about hate and love, about war and peace.

00:00:46.420 | This conversation was recorded more than three weeks ago.

00:00:50.080 | Please allow me this time to speak on what has been on my mind.

00:00:54.640 | If this is not interesting to you, please skip.

00:00:57.200 | I totally understand.

00:01:00.000 | Some people asked me to say a few words on the war in Ukraine.

00:01:04.280 | I think my words are worth little, but perhaps let me try.

00:01:09.800 | I considered doing a long solo episode on this war.

00:01:13.320 | I tried several times, but it is too personal for now.

00:01:18.120 | To give you context, I have been talking to refugees, friends, loved ones, in Ukraine,

00:01:23.680 | in Russia, in Poland, Slovakia, Moldova, Romania, even UK, Germany, Canada, India, China, and

00:01:30.520 | of course the United States.

00:01:33.720 | Some of them crying, or angry, or confused, or scared.

00:01:40.560 | I am helping as best as I can privately, and I am hoping to help in the future by traveling

00:01:46.040 | to Ukraine and Russia and celebrating the humanity and the beauty of the people in this

00:01:51.640 | region.

00:01:53.040 | This was all set up both for Ukraine and Russia trips before 2022, including conversations

00:01:59.600 | with scientists, artists, athletes, leaders, and just "regular folks" who are equally

00:02:07.840 | if not more fascinating to me.

00:02:10.520 | For now, it has become much more difficult, but I will keep trying to find a way.

00:02:16.320 | I was born in the Soviet Union.

00:02:18.640 | My roots are both Ukrainian and Russian.

00:02:22.000 | And today, and until the day I die, I am an American.

00:02:26.880 | I am proud of all of this.

00:02:29.240 | I hope to keep celebrating the culture and the incredible human beings that make up these

00:02:33.080 | nations and humanity as a whole.

00:02:36.240 | We are all one people.

00:02:37.240 | We are in this together.

00:02:38.240 | That is how I feel about the people of these nations.

00:02:42.440 | Now let me speak about those in the seats of power.

00:02:47.600 | I condemn all actions of leaders who play geopolitical games on the world stage disregarding

00:02:53.840 | the costs paid in human suffering on the scale of millions.

00:02:59.200 | For this reason, I condemn Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

00:03:05.160 | And I condemn many of the military interventions by the superpowers of the world, including

00:03:11.640 | by my country, the country I love, the United States, that after World War II has intervened

00:03:19.000 | in over 40 nations, with many studies finding that the United States is culpable for an

00:03:24.760 | unfathomable number of civilian deaths.

00:03:28.440 | I condemn all heads of state who needlessly wage wars, watching young men and women burn

00:03:35.280 | in the fires they started.

00:03:37.640 | I don't understand how humans can be so cruel to each other, or rather I understand, but

00:03:43.360 | I believe in a future world where this is no longer true.

00:03:47.640 | Let me also say a few words of what I hope to do with this podcast.

00:03:53.080 | I want to explore the full complexity and beauty of human nature.

00:03:57.000 | I believe each of us are capable of good and evil, and I want to understand how the mind

00:04:02.760 | and the circumstance lead one to choose the former path or the latter.

00:04:08.600 | And I believe conversation is one of the best ways to work toward this understanding.

00:04:13.400 | For that, I think I have to not only talk to the most inspiring humans in the world,

00:04:18.200 | but also to the most controversial.

00:04:20.840 | I will speak with many people who I disagree with.

00:04:24.160 | Politicians, activists, CEOs, heads of state, with very different opinions on the world.

00:04:31.160 | I will try hard to challenge their ideas without closing my mind to the depth and complexity

00:04:37.040 | of their perspective and their humanity.

00:04:40.980 | My presence in the same room with wildly different people will make it easy for the media and

00:04:46.640 | the internet to pick and choose clips and snapshots attacking me for being a shill for

00:04:51.920 | one side or the other.

00:04:54.080 | I can't defend this point, except to say that I'm a shill for no one, and that I hope you

00:04:59.840 | see the strength of my integrity, that I won't be influenced by any of them, no matter how

00:05:04.880 | rich, powerful, or charismatic they are.

00:05:08.560 | Like the poem "If" by Roger Kipling says, "If you can talk with crowds and keep your

00:05:13.640 | virtue, or walk with kings, nor lose the common touch, if neither foes nor loving friends

00:05:19.680 | can hurt you, if all men count with you, but none too much."

00:05:25.680 | This is a really, really important thing to me that I try to live by, that all human beings

00:05:31.000 | count with me the same.

00:05:32.940 | People have criticized me for wanting to have some of these conversations, like with Vladimir

00:05:36.920 | Putin and Vladimir Zelensky, and for times in the past speaking about them without the

00:05:43.340 | seriousness the topic deserves.

00:05:45.600 | For this, I would sincerely like to apologize.

00:05:49.680 | I'm disappointed, even ashamed, of my frequent ineloquence on these topics.

00:05:54.200 | I will work hard to do better.

00:05:57.080 | When I'm joking, it should be clear that it's a joke, and hopefully actually funny.

00:06:02.860 | When I'm being serious, I should speak with care and rigor.

00:06:07.280 | I've now done many hundreds of hours of podcast conversation.

00:06:10.760 | Despite my frequent failures in speaking, I hope you know where my heart is.

00:06:15.480 | Unfortunately, I think people will take clips of me and use them to attack me.

00:06:20.200 | This will happen more and more.

00:06:21.920 | I guess there's nothing I can do but send them my love.

00:06:25.040 | In the meantime, try to be a better person and a better interviewer.

00:06:28.960 | Let me also say that I like humor, especially dark humor.

00:06:34.760 | I like being silly and not taking myself seriously.

00:06:38.080 | I will keep taking risks with that, all with the goal of having fun and celebrating humanity

00:06:44.180 | at its most absurd and most beautiful.

00:06:46.960 | I will occasionally dress up in strange and weird outfits to celebrate the absurdity of

00:06:52.680 | life.

00:06:53.680 | I will hang out, break bread, and joke with all kinds of people.

00:06:57.440 | I don't have to agree with them to laugh with them, in order to escape for a brief moment

00:07:01.920 | the tension, the conflict, the hatred in the world.

00:07:05.480 | Humor just might save this little chaotic little civilization of ours.

00:07:10.840 | I love the Ukrainian people.

00:07:13.000 | I love the Russian people.

00:07:15.080 | And of course, I love my fellow Americans, Californians and Midwesterners, New Yorkers

00:07:21.320 | and Texans.

00:07:22.600 | I love humans.

00:07:23.880 | I love life.

00:07:24.880 | And I want to share that love with others, with you.

00:07:28.600 | If I messed it up, I'm really, really sorry.

00:07:32.040 | I'm trying my best.

00:07:33.040 | I have no agenda and no one telling me what to do.

00:07:36.160 | I feel like the luckiest guy in the world to have all these opportunities.

00:07:40.200 | And I'm deeply grateful to be alive and to share that joy with other amazing people around

00:07:45.560 | me.

00:07:46.560 | Thank you for your support.

00:07:48.040 | For all the love you've sent my way, I will work my ass off to not disappoint you.

00:07:53.240 | I love you all.

00:07:55.520 | This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.

00:07:57.240 | To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

00:08:01.080 | And now, here's my conversation with David Welby.

00:08:06.080 | Let's start with a big question.

00:08:07.760 | According to Judaism, who is God?

00:08:10.840 | It's difficult because Judaism, like any tradition that is thousands of years old and encompasses

00:08:17.900 | so many different lands and languages and thinkers, it doesn't give a single answer

00:08:23.480 | to even simple questions and to large questions, it certainly doesn't give a single answer.

00:08:28.520 | Although Judaism was responsible for introducing the monotheistic idea to the world, it doesn't

00:08:33.400 | mean that it's one idea.

00:08:35.600 | So if you take Maimonides, the greatest sage in the Jewish tradition, medieval philosopher,

00:08:43.040 | he would say that God is an omnipotent, benevolent, intangible, unimaginable God.

00:08:49.280 | In fact, he said, "You can't say what God is, only what God is not," because you have

00:08:53.880 | to emphasize...

00:08:54.880 | I could talk more about that, but basically you have to emphasize the unknowability of

00:08:59.320 | God.

00:09:00.820 | You have a modern philosopher like Heschel, who says that God is a God of pathos, a God

00:09:05.040 | of deep feeling, which probably would make Maimonides shiver if he heard such a description.

00:09:12.880 | And if you look in the Bible, God is always regretting or having human emotions.

00:09:19.080 | So there are so many different kinds of depictions and ideas, and there is this tremendous tension

00:09:24.720 | between transcendence and imminence.

00:09:27.960 | That is, in the Jewish tradition, God is exquisitely close, God is imminent.

00:09:33.920 | In the Talmud's words, God is as close as your mouth is to your ear.

00:09:38.600 | In other words, whatever you say, God hears it.

00:09:40.880 | And yet at the same time, God is unfathomably distant.

00:09:45.500 | Sometimes when I speak to high schoolers, I will say, in the Jewish tradition, think

00:09:50.420 | of it this way, when you were two years old, you had no idea what it was to be a 15-year-old.

00:09:56.500 | Not only did you not know, but you didn't know what you didn't know.

00:10:02.280 | We conceive of God as being more, the distance between God and human beings is far greater

00:10:07.120 | than the distance between a two-year-old and a 15-year-old.

00:10:10.080 | So when we speak about God, we have to acknowledge how limited we really are.

00:10:15.300 | So okay, you laid out a lot of fascinating things on the table.

00:10:18.240 | So one, the knowability of God.

00:10:20.560 | Then this idea of deep feeling, which again, can God be operating in the space of feelings

00:10:28.760 | too?

00:10:29.760 | It's the mouth and the ear of the senses.

00:10:32.120 | Can God be known?

00:10:35.480 | Can God be felt by this three-year-old in the analogy versus the teenager?

00:10:44.240 | So I will take refuge in a beautiful phrase from Martin Buber, another Jewish theologian.

00:10:49.200 | He said, "God cannot be expressed.

00:10:51.800 | God can only be addressed."

00:10:53.040 | In other words, you can speak to God.

00:10:56.300 | You can feel a sense of God, but can you begin to comprehend or know God?

00:11:01.360 | No.

00:11:02.360 | Yosef Caspi, I'm pulling in a couple of early Jewish philosophers.

00:11:06.560 | He said, "To know God, I would have to be God."

00:11:11.080 | But can we get close?

00:11:12.120 | Is it useful or is it a distraction to visualize things, to embody, to create, to attach to

00:11:20.640 | the stories some kind of visualizations in our mind?

00:11:24.800 | For example, gender, he versus she, things like this, or old man in the sky kind of feeling.

00:11:31.520 | So it's almost inevitable, but I think ultimately you try to transcend it.

00:11:37.320 | This was the great...

00:11:38.640 | We just read this actually in synagogue, the story of the golden calf.

00:11:43.160 | And the story is that human beings found it impossible to not have a visualization because

00:11:51.800 | they had just come from Egypt and in the world of pagan worship, everything is...

00:11:58.080 | It's not that pagans thought that idol was actually God, but it represented visually

00:12:02.700 | what God was.

00:12:04.560 | And along comes this idea that God is actually not capable of being visualized, which is

00:12:11.120 | very difficult and it stretches the bounds of human comprehension, maybe even breaks

00:12:17.320 | them.

00:12:18.320 | So would you say the proper way to operate as a human in relation to God is humility

00:12:26.120 | in that you're screwed, you're not able to basically know anything, almost anything?

00:12:32.360 | Well the reason that you're the salvation of this is that you can't...

00:12:39.280 | I was going to say the reason you're not screwed, but then I thought somebody might be upset

00:12:42.280 | at a rabbi saying that.

00:12:44.120 | So I didn't say it and have not said it.

00:12:47.680 | But the reason you're not is that you don't have to have a comprehension of God, you have

00:12:55.440 | to have a relationship to God, and those are not the same.

00:12:59.240 | I mean, to draw an analogy that is not far from perfect as most analogies are, but this

00:13:06.600 | one especially, you have relationships with people who are mysteries to you.

00:13:10.480 | You're a mystery to yourself.

00:13:13.500 | You can live and love somebody for 50 years and they can say something that surprises

00:13:17.620 | you, because ultimately we are trapped in here.

00:13:21.720 | And when a child first says, "I," we call that individuation.

00:13:25.680 | But what that really means is, "I now know that I am cut off from the minds of all other

00:13:33.120 | children and all other people."

00:13:36.000 | And so you have with God a more intimate relationship because you can believe that God is...

00:13:45.480 | You are known by God and you have a relationship to God despite the fact that you can't know

00:13:50.100 | God just as you can't know others.

00:13:52.740 | And some would say to have a good relationship, you want to be constantly surprised.

00:13:56.940 | Right.

00:13:57.940 | You don't want to know the thing...

00:13:58.940 | Well, the world, yes, the world that God created is constantly surprising.

00:14:02.460 | And by the way, the caveat to this, I had all these debates with Christopher Hitchens

00:14:06.980 | and he would always say that God is a greater tyrant than North Korea because it continues

00:14:11.340 | after your death.

00:14:13.020 | And the idea of being known by God is after all frightening if you think God knows what

00:14:17.580 | I think and so on, if your image of God is unloving.

00:14:22.380 | Can we jump to this?

00:14:23.900 | You had friendships and conversations with a lot of the fascinating figures of the past

00:14:28.820 | 20, 30 years of the great intellectuals, one of which perhaps one of the greats is Christopher

00:14:36.140 | Hitchens.

00:14:37.220 | What have you learned from your conversation, your friendship?

00:14:42.300 | So there are a lot of views he held that I really did not agree with, but he was a remarkable

00:14:47.180 | person.

00:14:48.180 | That was a good line about North Korea.

00:14:49.300 | He was full of incredibly good lines.

00:14:51.300 | Well, one of the things I learned was you can't win a debate with Christopher Hitchens.

00:14:54.420 | One of the reasons you can't win is because he has this British baritone and this ready

00:14:59.780 | wit that you can't triumph over laughter.

00:15:06.480 | It doesn't matter if your argument is better.

00:15:07.940 | If your quip is better, you win.

00:15:10.120 | And so I remember once we were arguing about free will and he said, "Well, I choose to

00:15:14.660 | believe in it."

00:15:15.660 | And everybody laughed and that was despite the fact that that's not really an argument.

00:15:20.060 | Or like, "I have free will because I don't have a choice."

00:15:23.780 | Right, exactly.

00:15:24.780 | And people should watch your conversation with him.

00:15:26.540 | It's great.

00:15:27.540 | I mean, it's a kind of David versus Goliath situation and you're quite masterful at using

00:15:35.140 | charisma and sweet-talking Christopher Hitchens.

00:15:37.620 | I also genuinely liked him.

00:15:39.620 | I mean, I spent a three-hour limousine ride with him from one debate to another, from

00:15:47.620 | LA to San Diego, and the entire time he said, "We just can't talk about religion."

00:15:53.580 | So we talked about literature and he gave me a long lecture about Scotch.

00:15:59.100 | He was inexhaustible.

00:16:01.980 | I mean, not only did he...

00:16:04.060 | I wrote a couple of obituaries about him and one I began with the historian Keith Thomas

00:16:10.140 | said there are two ways of achieving immortality, by doing things worth remembering or saying

00:16:15.140 | things worth remembering.

00:16:16.260 | And by that standard, he did both.

00:16:17.860 | I mean, he went all around the world to all sorts of danger zones.

00:16:21.500 | He knew the best bars everywhere from Kuala Lumpur to Beirut to LA.

00:16:28.260 | And he could drink all night and write a 2000 word essay on the poetry of Yeats and go to

00:16:35.380 | sleep.

00:16:36.380 | I remember before one of our debates in Boston, he was at the bar and he said, "Come have

00:16:41.260 | a drink."

00:16:42.260 | And I said, "I'm not going to have a drink before I go to debate with you.

00:16:44.860 | What are you crazy?"

00:16:45.860 | And he said, "Just have a beer, it's water."

00:16:49.480 | So he really was a constant inexhaustible fountain of intrigue and interest.

00:16:58.980 | What kind of things, if you can remember, if you can mention, if you can admit to have

00:17:04.140 | him enlightening you or helping you change your mind about something in this world?

00:17:09.980 | So I think...

00:17:12.860 | Unrelated to Scotch.

00:17:13.860 | Yeah, unrelated to Scotch.

00:17:15.220 | He convinced me that the idea...

00:17:21.440 | I mean, I had my doubts about it and have my doubts about it, but he convinced me through

00:17:24.800 | many debates, and not only he, that the idea that religion makes people better is not...

00:17:31.600 | It's not ipso facto wrong, but it's a much, much more complicated argument than I wished

00:17:38.160 | it to be.

00:17:39.760 | So he is, however you conceive of the term, beauty.

00:17:45.900 | He's one of the more beautiful humans this weird little earth produced.

00:17:53.340 | So how do you explain the atheism combined with such a beautiful mind?

00:18:00.460 | So from your perspective of a man of faith, how do you think about that?

00:18:07.900 | So of the atheists that I have debated, I think about all of them somewhat differently.

00:18:17.220 | So I think that in some deep way, for example, Sam Harris is a religious personality.

00:18:23.100 | I don't even think that he would...

00:18:24.260 | He wouldn't like the word religious, but I don't even think that he would take issue

00:18:27.720 | with that.

00:18:29.100 | I think that he would say his is a purely material-based spirituality, but I mean, his

00:18:35.660 | orientation towards meditation and appreciation of Buddhism, there's something deeply seeking

00:18:41.300 | spiritual about him.

00:18:44.340 | With Hitchens, I honestly...

00:18:47.500 | And I know that some of his fans will really not like this.

00:18:51.540 | It's not that he was any kind of closet believer, certainly not at all, but I almost feel as

00:18:57.300 | though he was less a passionate arguer against religion than he was, first of all, extremely

00:19:04.940 | upset by the forms that religion took in this world.

00:19:08.620 | And then once he trained his intellectual howitzers on a target, he had so much fun

00:19:15.140 | inventing new arguments and attacking it that I really believe he gets carried away sometimes

00:19:23.540 | by his own eloquence and intellectual range.

00:19:28.940 | So for example, the idea that you would call a book that religion poisons everything, I

00:19:34.140 | think he did that deliberately, provocatively, so that he could defend a proposition that

00:19:38.620 | obviously is indefensible, that it poisons everything.

00:19:42.580 | So I don't know.

00:19:44.700 | I think he had tremendous joie de vivre.

00:19:48.900 | That's what sums him up.

00:19:49.900 | This guy loved life in all of its manifestations, and arguing against something that someone

00:19:56.460 | else believed was one of his greatest joys.

00:19:58.940 | Yeah.

00:19:59.940 | And of course, the practical aspect of that, he just saw the powerful and he challenged

00:20:03.700 | them with humor and so on.

00:20:05.740 | And you could argue perhaps that humor is the highest form of what humanity can achieve.

00:20:12.180 | Sometimes maybe us little humans take things a little too seriously, then sometimes we

00:20:16.780 | need to just laugh at it all, laugh at ourselves, and that's probably the purest form of wisdom.

00:20:21.900 | You know, Auden, the poet, said, "Among the people that I like or admire, I can find no

00:20:26.620 | common quality, but among those I love, I can.

00:20:29.620 | All of them make me laugh."

00:20:31.540 | There you have it.

00:20:32.540 | Now, speaking of people that make you laugh, Sam Harris, because he actually has a really

00:20:38.260 | great sense of humor.

00:20:39.260 | He does.

00:20:40.260 | With a very cold and monotone delivery.

00:20:43.220 | He's another one that you had friends with, you have good conversations with.

00:20:51.100 | What's your fundamental disagreements and agreements with Sam?

00:20:54.300 | Sam believes that religion is intellectually indefensible.

00:20:58.500 | He really believes it deep in his soul.

00:21:03.260 | And he gets angry at the idea that a proposition should be unchallenged if it offends his sense

00:21:11.940 | of logic.

00:21:12.940 | Yeah.

00:21:13.940 | So he cannot move on until this is dealt with.

00:21:16.380 | Nope.

00:21:17.380 | In fact, I mean, I did a podcast with Eric Weinstein and then Sam did one.

00:21:23.540 | And Sam said, "When I heard your podcast with David Wolpe, I learned stuff about what he

00:21:28.580 | thinks that I never learned in my conversations with him because I can never let him make

00:21:32.540 | those unfounded assertions without challenging them and you just let them go."

00:21:36.540 | And I think that there was something to that.

00:21:37.860 | It was like he finds it hard to have a conversation about religion that doesn't arouse his real

00:21:48.340 | ire about the harm that he thinks religion does in the world.

00:21:52.580 | So it's more about the implementation of religion in the world as it is versus the really fundamental...

00:21:58.540 | I think he also thinks it's fundamentally intellectually shoddy and disreputable.

00:22:03.900 | Faith.

00:22:04.900 | Yeah, faith.

00:22:06.380 | I don't know how to put this.

00:22:07.380 | I mean, they're both capable of separating their contempt for religion from the people

00:22:13.320 | that they have sitting in front of them.

00:22:16.220 | You mean Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris?

00:22:18.020 | Yes, both of them.

00:22:19.460 | Okay, so you mentioned Eric Weinstein.

00:22:21.260 | People should listen to your conversation with Eric.

00:22:23.260 | It's a fascinating one.

00:22:24.260 | It's great.

00:22:25.260 | It's nonstandard.

00:22:26.260 | It just goes all over the place in this humor and wit.

00:22:30.020 | It's great.

00:22:31.020 | So one interesting aspect that I also learned, perhaps not about you, but about Eric, well,

00:22:36.540 | about both, but Eric has a similar thing as with Jordan Peterson, which is if you ask

00:22:44.340 | them, "Do they believe in God?" I think the answer, they're not comfortable answering

00:22:49.060 | that question, or they might say no, but they're usually just not comfortable answering that

00:22:53.780 | question.

00:22:54.780 | But there's a kind of sense that they would like to live life, a religious life, as if

00:23:01.180 | God exists.

00:23:02.460 | I think that's exactly right.

00:23:03.960 | I think, first of all, Eric has a really deep appreciation of the Jewish tradition.

00:23:08.260 | I don't know Peterson.

00:23:09.780 | I've read his stuff and I've reviewed his stuff and so on.

00:23:12.740 | But I think that Jungians are, in their very approach, they believe that myth is the way

00:23:22.180 | the world works.

00:23:23.500 | So it's not that big a leap to God, but there's still a distance there.

00:23:29.440 | Is it possible to have your cake and eat it too?

00:23:32.820 | Is it possible to have the depth of a religious life without believing in God?

00:23:39.540 | How do you make sense of Eric Weinstein's devout life within the tradition?

00:23:45.220 | I mean, I honestly think he believes in God, but doesn't believe in God.

00:23:49.620 | And it's oscillating like it's a quantum mechanical system of some sort.

00:23:54.220 | Schrodinger's God.

00:23:56.300 | So I think that he would probably agree with what Elie Wiesel said, that a Jew can be angry

00:24:02.380 | at God or be disbelieving of God, but is not allowed to be indifferent to God.

00:24:07.580 | And I think Eric's not indifferent to God.

00:24:11.900 | And it's different than Christianity.

00:24:13.780 | I've had this conversation many times because you can be very Jewish and have deep doubts

00:24:23.020 | about theological questions because Judaism isn't a religion.

00:24:27.860 | It's a religious family.

00:24:29.660 | And so you're born Jewish.

00:24:31.580 | Like if I said to you tomorrow, if I was Christian and I said, "Oh, I believe in Jesus today,"

00:24:36.580 | and then tomorrow I didn't, I'm not Christian anymore.

00:24:38.780 | But if tomorrow I said, "Oh, I don't believe all this stuff," I'm still Jewish.

00:24:42.700 | So it's a more complicated system.

00:24:46.780 | Having said that though, I think it's very hard to sustain over generations without some

00:24:54.420 | belief that the source of it is beyond ourselves.

00:24:58.180 | And in that sense, as in many others, Eric is unique.

00:25:01.380 | - Well, he was actually making that claim that we need faith to propagate this tradition

00:25:10.140 | through the generations.

00:25:12.300 | So without that, the traditions crumble.

00:25:14.900 | It's a very interesting idea and very interesting argument for devout faith, which is it's a

00:25:23.580 | glue that holds a tradition together.

00:25:25.620 | Otherwise, traditions fall apart.

00:25:27.940 | You can't have the intensity of that tradition.

00:25:31.620 | I mean, on the other hand, you do see traditions.

00:25:33.500 | I mean, Thanksgiving, one of my favorite.

00:25:36.660 | - So I would say traditions that are demanding fall apart.

00:25:40.940 | Traditions that require turkey might not fall apart, but traditions that make demands of

00:25:45.660 | you that are counter-cultural or are hard, they fall apart.

00:25:50.540 | - I think I need to introduce you to some Thanksgiving dinners that are quite demanding.

00:25:55.660 | Getting the family together.

00:25:57.340 | There's a, first of all, I'm a vegetarian, so I'm tough to have a Thanksgiving dinner,

00:26:02.020 | but there's a comedian named Kathy Lansman who, one year, I heard this on the radio and

00:26:07.180 | it stuck with me.

00:26:08.500 | She said that holidays are a chance to renew your resentments afresh.

00:26:13.540 | And that's basically what people do with their families.

00:26:15.620 | It's like, I'm gonna go home and fight with the uncle again this year.

00:26:20.060 | - I apologize to take a dark turn, but you mentioned Elie Wiesel.

00:26:25.380 | I recently saw a picture of Elie Wiesel when he was in the camp, when he was liberated.

00:26:32.260 | For some reason, that hit hard.

00:26:34.260 | Like, you know, I've seen pictures in concentration camps of people I don't know, or whose words

00:26:43.380 | I haven't really felt and gone through.

00:26:46.140 | But for some reason, like, here's just a normal person, like a normal body laying there.

00:26:54.260 | That was him.

00:26:55.260 | I've seen it.

00:26:57.180 | And you see, you can see his face, but at the same time, you see that this is an amazing...

00:27:03.100 | And I think what's so disturbing about it is exactly what you were saying, is I've seen

00:27:08.140 | a thousand people like this, and I know this one, and I know what he became.

00:27:12.900 | So what about all those other people who look exactly like him, who didn't make it out of

00:27:18.580 | the camp?

00:27:19.580 | I mean, it's projection, but it seemed like, and this perhaps is also just combining with

00:27:25.500 | Matt's search for meaning, is it seemed like it was a regular day for them in the picture.

00:27:32.740 | It didn't seem like...

00:27:33.740 | I mean, I'm not sure what I expect to see, what suffering looks like, but it's almost

00:27:40.020 | like there's no celebration.

00:27:41.380 | - I've never seen a picture of actually liberation be celebratory.

00:27:45.140 | It's true.

00:27:46.220 | It's really true.

00:27:47.500 | So what do you make sense, and I apologize to take a step into that moment in history.

00:27:53.460 | How do you make sense of the Holocaust, of Nazi Germany, that such things could be committed

00:28:04.460 | by human beings to each other?

00:28:07.700 | Is it religion?

00:28:09.820 | Is it the thirst for power?

00:28:13.440 | Is it the madness of crowds somehow carrying us forward?

00:28:18.340 | - I mean, for me, it's multi-causal.

00:28:21.180 | I don't think there's one reason.

00:28:23.160 | One of the things, especially there, has to do with the special nature of antisemitism,

00:28:27.380 | which is, let's put that to one side for the moment.

00:28:30.300 | The second is, I think human beings are fundamentally split.

00:28:34.320 | They are mostly good, except when put under certain pressures.

00:28:38.060 | My first explanation for hatred is as follows.

00:28:41.700 | Go to a playground.

00:28:43.500 | What happens when a new kid comes on the playground?

00:28:45.660 | Do the other kids say, "Oh, let's go share our toys with the new kid"?

00:28:49.420 | No.

00:28:50.420 | They say, "Oh, who's that stranger?

00:28:51.940 | And let's go get him."

00:28:54.060 | Because otherness is built into our genetic...

00:28:58.020 | I mean, we're tribal by nature.

00:29:01.380 | And we see people form tribes all the time of different kinds.

00:29:06.700 | I asked you before if you were a chess player.

00:29:10.380 | And when I was a kid, I'm playing in tournaments.

00:29:13.540 | And I didn't do it for that long, and I didn't do it that well.

00:29:16.220 | But when I was, it was like the whole world was divided into people who could play chess

00:29:19.940 | and people who couldn't play chess, which is ridiculous if you think about it, as though

00:29:24.380 | that's the way you divide the world.

00:29:26.040 | But we tend to do that.

00:29:28.340 | And the Jews were always the identifiable other.

00:29:31.580 | There were Frenchmen and Jews.

00:29:32.780 | There were Russians and Jews.

00:29:34.060 | There were Germans and Jews.

00:29:36.340 | The great blessing of America is that there's no identifiable other quite that way, is that

00:29:41.980 | there's all these minorities and no...

00:29:45.300 | There's not an American and a something.

00:29:49.420 | But once you have that identifiable other, and you have a long history of blaming that

00:29:55.240 | identifiable other for all the ills that befall you...

00:29:58.560 | Of course, people still do try to form...

00:30:00.500 | You said America, they still try to form other...

00:30:02.540 | I mean, immigrant versus been here for a generation.

00:30:07.500 | There's so many ways to slice it.

00:30:09.060 | We still try to find ways.

00:30:11.060 | It's just more difficult in America because there's so many sub-tribes, hierarchies of

00:30:15.460 | tribes upon tribes.

00:30:16.860 | You're absolutely right.

00:30:17.860 | And I was moving fast because I didn't want to get bogged down in all the very difficult...

00:30:23.300 | It's true, I tried...

00:30:24.700 | You're hoping I wouldn't mention that tribalism happens in America too.

00:30:28.180 | I was skating.

00:30:29.500 | When you're on thin ice, your safety is in your speed.

00:30:33.120 | So I was trying to move fast.

00:30:35.300 | But for most of history in Eastern Western Europe, not obviously in Asia, but in Eastern

00:30:41.840 | Western Europe, Jews were the ones who like, "They're not like us.

00:30:46.440 | They're clearly not like us."

00:30:49.060 | And in addition, there's a peculiar quality, and I don't know, I wonder what you'll think

00:30:54.940 | of this explanation.

00:30:55.940 | But there's a peculiar quality to antisemitism that is unlike any other hatred that I know

00:31:00.860 | of, which is Jews are both superhuman and subhuman.

00:31:05.460 | They're vermin, the Nazis thought of them as vermin, and yet they control the world.

00:31:10.700 | And there was an English scholar named Hyman Maccabee who said the reason that that's so

00:31:15.420 | is the myth that Jews killed God.

00:31:19.860 | They killed Jesus.

00:31:20.860 | And to kill a God, you have to be superhumanly evil.

00:31:24.260 | You can't just be bad, otherwise you can't kill a God.

00:31:27.500 | So there is some like supercharged evil sense that people got from that about Jews that

00:31:35.260 | still inheres.

00:31:36.620 | Yeah, that's true.

00:31:38.020 | A lot of the way we formulate the other in terms of tribes is often they're subhuman

00:31:43.980 | and they're here to steal our resources, like on the playground.

00:31:48.140 | But to be both is a fascinating construction.

00:31:54.020 | Do you agree with Solzhenitsyn that all of us have the capacity for evil?

00:31:58.740 | A hundred percent, runs through every human heart.

00:32:01.580 | I have no doubt about it.

00:32:03.900 | And I know, as you probably do, but I probably know more both because of what I do and because

00:32:09.980 | I have lived a lot longer than you, I know a lot of religious leaders who people thought

00:32:16.580 | or think are above the human, and they are emphatically not.

00:32:21.380 | They're not.

00:32:22.460 | Some of them have done horrible things and they've used their position to do horrible

00:32:26.580 | things.

00:32:27.980 | And it's because nobody, there is no perfect saint.

00:32:32.300 | There's no, you know, I mean, all through history you discover all these saintly characters

00:32:38.320 | that we worship, the people who actually knew them around them, some liked them and some

00:32:42.540 | didn't.

00:32:44.400 | People are complicated, all of us.

00:32:46.060 | And the tough thing is, the thing that's the toughest for me is it's not very always clear

00:32:51.500 | what is good and what is evil.

00:32:55.860 | Because certainly if you just look at history, and it's not always propaganda, I really believe

00:33:03.420 | that some part of Stalin thought he was doing good, legitimately.

00:33:12.100 | And it makes you ask a question of yourself.

00:33:16.740 | For those of us who want to do good in the world, am I actually doing good?

00:33:20.100 | And that's a really difficult question.

00:33:22.300 | So like in the technology sphere, for example, in this dream of creating technology that

00:33:26.700 | will do some good, am I actually doing good?

00:33:30.220 | - So I have a question about that myself.

00:33:32.620 | Not about Stalin, I'm sure that Stalin thought so.

00:33:35.660 | Stalin does not strike me from what I know of him as somebody given to a lot of self-doubt.

00:33:40.860 | But the question with AI to me is actually, it goes back to the God question, which is,

00:33:46.580 | if we have an appreciation of the limitations of our own intelligence, that we know that

00:33:53.940 | just like we can only hear certain things and see certain colors, how much of the world

00:33:59.980 | is inaccessible to us because of the way our brains are constructed?

00:34:05.200 | How can we possibly have any confidence that we can create things that in certain ways

00:34:11.060 | are far more intelligent than we are and control them the way we think is best?

00:34:16.260 | Seems to me a hubris that might end up being destructive.

00:34:21.940 | - Definitely.

00:34:22.940 | Well, any sentence with the word hubris in it is going to end badly when implemented

00:34:28.660 | at scale.

00:34:30.100 | But there is also beauty.

00:34:32.060 | So if you approach it with humility, there is a sense, I don't want to over romanticize

00:34:37.700 | it, but there is a legged robot right behind you, which is hilarious.

00:34:43.260 | So there's a magic, I don't have kids, I would love to have kids, but there's a magic to

00:34:53.180 | bringing robots to life that it feels like you are a mini-God.

00:34:59.560 | Because you just breathe life into an entity that operates in this world, especially when

00:35:04.860 | they have legs and they move in this way that's in the case of the four-legged robots, like

00:35:10.180 | a dog, that I think, I don't think I'm over romanticizing it.

00:35:15.220 | The feeling is like you would with a child.

00:35:17.860 | You just gave birth, like, holy crap, this is a living thing.

00:35:21.900 | I wonder what he or she are thinking about.

00:35:24.860 | - By the way, I'm not at all insensible to how remarkable it must feel to create that.

00:35:29.580 | I'm actually worried in part about how remarkable it feels to create that, because to maintain

00:35:35.780 | humility and perspective when it's such a fantastic thing is what's difficult.

00:35:42.860 | And I think also because creativity is both part of what it is to be human, and it's very

00:35:50.540 | much part of the legacy of Western civilization and the legacy of having a creator God.

00:35:56.380 | If you have a tradition where God is known primarily through what God creates, so the

00:36:02.020 | first debate I ever had, since we talked about humor and God and creating, let me give you

00:36:06.380 | my one God-creating joke.

00:36:09.420 | Because the first debate I ever had on religion and science was with Stephen Jay Gould.

00:36:14.340 | And it was wonderful, 'cause he had a deep interest in religion, and his interest was

00:36:18.640 | actually not to say religion is terrible, but I started with this joke, and I think

00:36:26.500 | it made the debate go a little bit easier.

00:36:28.500 | So the time has come when human beings can do everything that God can do.

00:36:32.900 | And a scientist looks up at heaven and says, "God, look, you were great in your day, and

00:36:36.500 | we thank you for everything you did, but now we don't need you."

00:36:39.420 | And God says, "Really, you don't need me?"

00:36:40.660 | He says, "No, we can do everything you did."

00:36:42.460 | God says, "Everything?"

00:36:44.140 | And the human being says, "Yeah, we can do everything."

00:36:46.340 | God says, "Okay, can you create a human being?"

00:36:49.780 | And the scientist goes, "Yeah."

00:36:51.780 | God says, "From dirt?"

00:36:52.780 | And the scientist goes, "Yeah."

00:36:53.780 | He says, "Okay, let me see."

00:36:54.780 | The scientist reaches down, scoops up some dirt, and God says, "Uh-uh, uh-uh, get your

00:36:58.300 | own dirt."

00:37:02.300 | But the idea is that a creator God impels us to create, too.

00:37:05.740 | But let me bring up Nietzsche, who proclaimed that God is dead.

00:37:10.860 | Is belief in God slowly disappearing from our world, do you think?

00:37:14.660 | And what kind of impact does that have on society?

00:37:18.380 | You wrote that religion is not our enemy.

00:37:21.860 | Before the Western faiths captured the heart of our world, there was cruelty, carnage,

00:37:25.860 | and destruction.

00:37:26.860 | In the 20th century, when religion ceased to be a force of international politics, the

00:37:31.340 | scale of human slaughter was far beyond anything human beings have ever known.

00:37:36.380 | What is the world like when we take religion out of it?

00:37:39.500 | I mean, I think Nietzsche was largely right.

00:37:42.720 | It wasn't a statement about God.

00:37:44.180 | It was a statement about God's presence in the world.

00:37:49.140 | And I think that that's largely true, that God is not a force in a lot of Western society.

00:37:57.100 | And I believe that if the force of nihilism has no clear counter without an idea that

00:38:06.780 | we're all here for a purpose, and that our lives are inherently meaningful, and that

00:38:12.900 | there's a God who wishes us to be better.

00:38:17.540 | So I worry a lot about it.

00:38:19.700 | And I think that the sort of optimism that things are just gonna get better and better

00:38:24.260 | is what one philosopher called cut flower ethics.

00:38:28.380 | That is, we're still living off the morals that religion gave us, but now that they're

00:38:32.780 | separate from the soil that gave birth to them, I see them wilting.

00:38:36.860 | So this kind of optimism for the future of human civilization, you think, is in part

00:38:41.460 | grounded in a religious society?

00:38:45.060 | I really do believe that.

00:38:46.260 | I mean, it was religion that, the Greeks looked back at the golden age of the past.

00:38:49.740 | It was the Jews who said, no, the golden age is in the future, right?

00:38:53.020 | It's the Messiah.

00:38:54.740 | And I think that that idea that we're moving towards something better, which I really believe

00:39:00.220 | humanity can do, and absent destroying ourselves will do.

00:39:05.660 | I mean, I'm very excited about the technology that I won't live to see.

00:39:10.820 | I think it's fantastic.

00:39:12.220 | And that excitement is a kind of religious excitement, 'cause there's a reason to preserve

00:39:16.140 | this whole thing.

00:39:17.140 | Absolutely, 'cause I really think, I know this sounds absurdly anthropomorphic, but

00:39:22.900 | I really think God is cheering us on.

00:39:25.220 | I feel like this is why we're here.

00:39:27.940 | We're here to grow in soul and to grow each other in soul.

00:39:34.900 | Yeah.

00:39:37.820 | So what do you think the world...

00:39:39.580 | So if we just think of this force of nihilism that's contending with the force of faith-based

00:39:47.300 | optimism, what do you make of the atrocities in the 20th century?

00:39:54.420 | Do you think at its core, it's part of human nature and has nothing to do with religion

00:40:02.140 | or not religion?

00:40:03.420 | Or do you think you can assign this kind of nihilistic view of the world?

00:40:07.420 | I think it has to do with a religion that doesn't make ethical demands.

00:40:12.700 | That is, for Stalin and for Hitler, they both had religions, in a sense, but they were religions

00:40:20.580 | that didn't make ethical demands for the other.

00:40:23.740 | I mean, 36 times the Torah talks about the stranger.

00:40:27.500 | The point is, it's trying to educate people away from their natural inclination towards

00:40:33.740 | distrusting and disliking the other.

00:40:36.420 | And it's a lot of work.

00:40:37.820 | That's really difficult to do.

00:40:40.020 | But if you have a tribal passion and not a universal ethic, then you're in trouble.

00:40:50.260 | Well, the Jewish tribe is a very strong tribe.

00:40:54.620 | So how do you make sense of this mention of the stranger versus the power of the tribe,

00:41:00.900 | which is the whole point, not the point, but the mechanism of tradition propagates the

00:41:05.140 | tribe?

00:41:06.140 | Well, both.

00:41:07.140 | I mean, the Torah does not start with Jews.

00:41:10.260 | It starts with Adam and Eve.

00:41:12.000 | That's a way of saying, "Yeah, this is going to be a story about a people, but understand

00:41:16.900 | that prior to a kind of people, there are people.

00:41:20.780 | I'm a human being before I'm a Jew."

00:41:24.340 | And in fact, the Jewish new year, the Muslim new year starts with Muhammad's journey, and

00:41:30.700 | the Christian new year starts with Jesus' birth.

00:41:33.100 | The Jewish new year starts with the creation of the world, because the idea is, yes, this

00:41:38.060 | is a particularist tradition, but it makes a universal statement, which is all of humanity

00:41:44.820 | is a child, are in the image of God, are children of God.

00:41:49.820 | I think that the idea of Judaism was to try to exemplify a certain way of making that

00:41:57.520 | statement over and over again.

00:41:59.300 | And I want to say one other thing about chosenness that's very name droppy, but when I tell you

00:42:04.580 | how I got there, it won't be as name droppy.

00:42:07.020 | So my brother is a professor at Emory, and so is the Dalai Lama actually teaches at Emory,

00:42:14.300 | although he no longer does because he's too old to go to Emory, but for many years taught

00:42:17.820 | at Emory.

00:42:18.820 | And so my brother brought us...

00:42:20.980 | He's the head of the ethics center at Emory.

00:42:23.340 | He's a bioethicist.

00:42:24.340 | So he brought a bunch of students to Dharamsala to meet with the Dalai Lama.

00:42:28.200 | So I went to India, I was on sabbatical then anyway, I met my brother there and we had

00:42:33.000 | a chance to meet with the Dalai Lama.

00:42:34.820 | Okay, that was the name drop.

00:42:36.660 | So we're sitting in the...

00:42:37.820 | Before he speaks to the students, he was speaking to us, but not because I just wanted to make

00:42:41.620 | it clear, not because he said, "Oh, I got to talk to that rabbi."

00:42:44.100 | We just happened to be...

00:42:45.260 | I happened to glom along with my brother.

00:42:48.540 | We sit down, the first thing he says is he points at me and says, "What's this about

00:42:52.260 | the chosen people anyway?"

00:42:55.060 | So, and he had...

00:42:56.060 | By the way, he had asked that I give a lecture, which I did later to his monks about how Jews

00:43:02.420 | survived in the diaspora.

00:43:03.900 | So it's not like he doesn't know about Jude, he knows a lot about it, but he says to me

00:43:07.420 | right away with...

00:43:08.420 | So I said, "Yes, Jews believe that they were chosen for a certain mission in this world,

00:43:12.980 | that doesn't mean other people weren't chosen for other sorts of things.

00:43:15.980 | They certainly...

00:43:16.980 | I mean, it seems to me that other people believe they're chosen for things too."

00:43:20.140 | He burst out laughing and said, "Yeah, we also think we're chosen."

00:43:24.620 | So I think it's universal.

00:43:25.620 | So the idea is that no tribe is better than...

00:43:28.660 | Better, no.

00:43:30.140 | From a Jewish perspective, you're chosen for a thing, but that doesn't make you better.

00:43:38.940 | No.

00:43:39.940 | The only place where the betters came in, honestly, historically, if I'm gonna be honest,

00:43:44.340 | was not with the idea that you...

00:43:46.660 | But it was when Jews were small, persecuted, the way that you take this sort of psychic

00:43:53.900 | revenge is by saying, "No, we're better than our persecutors even."

00:43:59.100 | But the idea is, yeah, different people have different missions, which is...

00:44:03.660 | I mean, there was a Jewish philosopher, Franz Rosenzweig, who used to say...

00:44:08.080 | He didn't know very much about Islam.

00:44:09.500 | He used to say, "Judaism is the sun and Christianity was the rays of the sun."

00:44:15.020 | Judaism introduced the idea of God and Christianity brought it to the world.

00:44:18.300 | Can you speak to this difference?

00:44:21.220 | What is the difference and similarities between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam?

00:44:28.220 | The religious family part is different.

00:44:30.620 | And the greatest difference, which I talked about in the Eric Weinstein podcast, is that

00:44:38.700 | Islam and Judaism are more similar in a lot of ways than Judaism and Christianity.

00:44:44.220 | The reason that that is so is Christianity in its core is not a religion of law.

00:44:52.340 | The reason it's not a religion of law is because it grew up in the Roman Empire, so law was

00:44:56.920 | taken care of.

00:44:57.920 | I mean, Jesus didn't have to create civil law 'cause you had Roman law.

00:45:02.420 | Muhammad and Moses created a religion in the desert where there was no law, so you have

00:45:06.780 | to create a religion of law, otherwise you have anarchy.

00:45:12.020 | And that's why in a lot of ways, like there was never a separation of church and state

00:45:16.900 | in Islam or Judaism.

00:45:18.180 | That was a gift that Christianity gave the world.

00:45:21.140 | And it could do it because of "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's."

00:45:24.540 | But when Moses came along, there was no Caesar.

00:45:26.700 | When Muhammad came along, there was no Caesar.

00:45:29.060 | So historically, the traditions shaped differently.

00:45:34.340 | But all three of them have this core, I think, the single most important statement and insight

00:45:42.940 | in all of human history, which is that every human being is in the image of God.

00:45:48.460 | And if you really believe that, that's a transformative belief.

00:45:54.080 | So that means you should love thy neighbor as yourself.

00:45:58.940 | As yourself, which comes from Leviticus, comes straight from the Torah.

00:46:02.620 | - So I don't know if you know, I've been chatting with Omar Suleiman.

00:46:06.860 | I don't know if you know who that is.

00:46:08.140 | He's an imam in Dallas, great guy.

00:46:10.940 | I enjoy his interfaith dialogues that he engages in.

00:46:16.060 | And do you ever do that kind of talk with Christians, with Muslims?

00:46:19.820 | - Yes, often, often.

00:46:21.620 | - I mean, I do whenever I at least listen to them in the context of these kinds of conversations.

00:46:26.780 | There's so much love and humor and empathy and appreciation.

00:46:32.540 | And also ability to make fun of the quirks of the little--

00:46:37.620 | - Of one's own.

00:46:38.620 | - Of one's own communities.

00:46:41.020 | So it's not necessarily the depths or the details of the traditions, but these are communities

00:46:46.540 | and they're full of people and they're full of weird people, 'cause we're all weird.

00:46:51.620 | And so there is very particular flavors of weirdness that emerge and they can make fun

00:46:57.580 | of them.

00:46:59.100 | And in that way, they can talk about some beautiful ideas.

00:47:03.540 | So I mean, I don't know, do you engage in these kinds of things?

00:47:07.220 | What do you learn from them?

00:47:09.060 | - So one of the things I learned is exactly what you said, that personalities that you

00:47:12.580 | think are unique to your own community, in fact, they exist in all sorts of communities.

00:47:18.100 | And religious communities in particular draw, I think, some interesting personalities.

00:47:23.340 | And also that the, especially as clergy, some of the pressures that you feel are shared.

00:47:33.620 | And it's weird, again, it has to do with that tribal association.

00:47:38.100 | There's almost like there's an understanding among clergy because they have similar straight,

00:47:44.220 | and it's a strange role in the following way.

00:47:49.260 | It's one that you never escape.

00:47:52.020 | That is, you're not my lawyer at the supermarket, but you are my rabbi at the supermarket.

00:47:58.100 | I mean, it doesn't matter why you're there.

00:48:01.820 | That's not an escapable role.

00:48:03.740 | And every religious leader is aware of that strange assumption of stepping into something

00:48:14.180 | that you can never step out of.

00:48:16.420 | - You're also the source where people go to think about the deepest question of our lives

00:48:25.500 | and our universe.

00:48:27.460 | And so that's some heavy, when people are suffering, they look to you for answers.

00:48:32.620 | - I mean, every privilege comes with a cost of one kind or another.

00:48:36.100 | The reason you get to be in that role is exactly because you get the privilege of being there

00:48:41.060 | at crucial moments in people's lives.

00:48:44.180 | I mean, the fact that I get to marry people and get to give eulogies for people and come

00:48:51.820 | to the hospital, it's inexpressible.

00:48:56.100 | I have this joke with people that I know that like, when I'm sitting on the couch and it's

00:49:00.740 | Saturday night, I don't wanna get up and go to a wedding.

00:49:03.180 | I really don't.

00:49:04.180 | I wanna sit there and watch Netflix like everybody else.

00:49:07.660 | But when I'm actually doing the wedding, I always love it.

00:49:11.380 | Always, always, always.

00:49:13.740 | And the reason is that I don't think, I mean, yes, people go to you for answers in calmer

00:49:21.020 | conversations.

00:49:22.020 | Like if you asked me now, like, what's my theory of why God allows evil, I could give

00:49:25.020 | you a conversation about it.

00:49:28.060 | But they really go for presence and comfort, not really for answers.

00:49:32.700 | When someone's suffering, an answer doesn't make them unsuffer.

00:49:37.380 | It's just, they wanna know they're not alone.

00:49:40.220 | To be heard and just to feel things in silence together.

00:49:45.820 | In terms of weddings and marriage, what's the role of that call?

00:49:51.820 | I need to take some notes here.

00:49:53.740 | What's the role of marriage in human existence?

00:49:59.340 | It is first of all, to teach you how to care for someone unlike you, which could be anyone

00:50:05.940 | you marry.

00:50:08.720 | And I think it's to create a home and a family.

00:50:12.940 | So there's a commitment to it, so care for a long time.

00:50:15.740 | Right, exactly.

00:50:16.860 | And also when couples come to me and they say, "We don't need to be married because

00:50:21.060 | it really won't change how we think about ourselves and our relationship."

00:50:23.740 | I say, "Then that's true.

00:50:24.740 | It might not, but it will change how everyone else looks at you."

00:50:28.500 | And because it changes how everyone else looks at you, it changes you.

00:50:32.260 | 'Cause it's one thing to say, "This is my partner."

00:50:34.340 | It's another thing to say, "This is my husband."

00:50:36.820 | You say, "This is my husband," that means we've made a real commitment to this.

00:50:42.820 | Yeah.

00:50:44.820 | What do you, do you worry that there's a dissolution of that as well in terms of how, you know,

00:50:52.820 | as religion dissipates, it loosens its hold on society, loosens its impact on society.

00:50:59.020 | Do you worry about that?

00:51:00.340 | I worry about it.

00:51:02.420 | I do think that it is possible that we're going, rather than a dissolution, we're going

00:51:07.820 | through a transition that is different kinds of families and different configurations of

00:51:13.180 | families.

00:51:14.180 | That is, I see some of that, but I also do see, it's less a dissolution of marriage than

00:51:20.260 | it is of the idea of commitment.

00:51:22.860 | And I'll give you like a simple example.

00:51:24.940 | When I was growing up, a player on a sports team was always on that team.

00:51:31.900 | And you rooted for the team because you knew the players for 20 years.

00:51:35.580 | Now there are very good reasons, starting with Curt Flood, why people got free agency

00:51:40.700 | and they can move around and it's better for the players.

00:51:42.900 | I understand all that.

00:51:44.220 | And I am not, I'm not saying, "Oh, they should continue."

00:51:48.340 | But just like people move jobs and they move sports teams and they change careers, they

00:51:56.460 | change partners.

00:51:58.620 | And there is a diminishment of the commitment to commitment that I actually think has serious

00:52:06.700 | societal consequences and that I am worried about.

00:52:09.860 | Yeah, there's a cost to that.

00:52:12.460 | I don't know what it is about commitment that's beautiful.

00:52:16.700 | Because some of the deepest friendships I have is when we've gone through some shit

00:52:20.340 | together.

00:52:21.340 | Yeah.

00:52:22.340 | And so like the hard times, going through hard times together, especially when the hard

00:52:26.400 | times are between the two of you, that, I mean, that's always a risk.

00:52:31.820 | But if you can find a way through, that can bond you stronger.

00:52:36.460 | That's the fascinating thing about human relations.

00:52:38.180 | There's no question.

00:52:39.180 | And even if it doesn't keep you forever, you still have a connection that doesn't, that

00:52:44.980 | exists.

00:52:46.580 | So I can give you one, you said, "What is it about commitment?"

00:52:48.860 | I'll give you one, I think, beautiful answer.

00:52:52.020 | Someone's asked Rabbi Soloveitchik, who is a great thinker and leader in the Orthodox

00:52:58.480 | community in the 20th century.

00:53:00.240 | They said, "You know, I go from religion to religion.

00:53:02.160 | I just take what I think is beautiful in it."

00:53:05.680 | And his answer was that you're treating religion like a nomad.

00:53:10.000 | He said, "Nomads go from place to place and they eat what they want and they move on."

00:53:14.440 | He says, "Farmers stay in one place.

00:53:16.280 | The difference is farmers make things grow."

00:53:19.840 | And I think that that's true also when you think about the relationships you have.

00:53:23.460 | Things have grown out of the relationships that you've invested in, that you farmed,

00:53:27.980 | basically, that can't exist in fly-by-night relationships.

00:53:35.300 | - Can you talk about, can we talk about the Torah?

00:53:38.700 | - Yes.

00:53:39.780 | - What is it?

00:53:40.780 | And is it the literal word of God?

00:53:46.020 | Easy questions today.

00:53:47.200 | - Well, the Torah is the five books of Moses written in Hebrew.

00:53:52.280 | I, like most, I think, modern rabbis, non-Orthodox or non-literalist rabbis will tell you that

00:53:57.920 | it's a product of human beings.

00:54:01.360 | And I believe that they are inspired by God, but it's clear to me that it's a human product.

00:54:08.440 | And I think that people who study modern biblical criticism, it's really hard to study modern,

00:54:15.920 | criticism gives a wrong impression.

00:54:17.980 | I would say modern scholarship on the Bible and not appreciate the fact that it even has

00:54:24.000 | levels of language.

00:54:25.680 | I mean, it's just like if you read today somebody writing like Shakespeare, you would say, "This

00:54:33.520 | isn't, it's like English has developed.

00:54:36.200 | It's different.

00:54:37.200 | It's not the English we speak today."

00:54:38.440 | And if you study the Bible and you know Hebrew well enough, you even see that this was written

00:54:42.360 | over hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years.

00:54:46.840 | It is a holy book.

00:54:48.380 | And I like the idea that it is, what you say in Hebrew is Torah min ha-shamayim and not

00:54:53.000 | Torah min sinai.

00:54:54.200 | That is the Torah is from heaven, but it's not from Sinai.

00:54:57.840 | So it has its origin beyond us, but it has things in it that I think, and this is one

00:55:03.600 | of the things that was a huge controversy at my congregation when I started to do same-sex

00:55:11.480 | marriages.

00:55:12.480 | There are some people who try to argue that the Torah does not forbid them.

00:55:19.040 | Whether it does or not, it seems to me we understand things that were not understood

00:55:24.160 | in the ancient world about gender and sexuality.

00:55:27.920 | And so-

00:55:28.920 | So you think that in the scripture, in the words, you can find the kind of spirit that

00:55:36.000 | supports the idea of gay marriage?

00:55:38.040 | Well, that's, yes.

00:55:39.040 | My argument is that you criticize the Torah by the Torah.

00:55:43.160 | That is, it gives you the understanding that you use to evaluate its own claims.

00:55:54.240 | And I think that Judaism, by the way, has always done that because it's clear that there

00:55:57.640 | are things in the Torah that the rabbis changed, altered, grew, expanded, diminished.

00:56:04.540 | I think that's what it is to be part of a living tradition.

00:56:08.120 | You wrote in your book, Why Faith Matters, "Walt Whitman wrote that in order for there

00:56:15.440 | to be great books, there must be great readers.

00:56:18.520 | For a book to remain powerful throughout generations, it cannot have a single meaning.

00:56:23.160 | Scripture like great poetry is not reducible to other words.

00:56:26.760 | That is, one cannot paraphrase it and capture the totality of its meaning."

00:56:33.480 | So how the heck do you capture the meaning of the words in scripture?

00:56:38.780 | Is it an ongoing process through the centuries?

00:56:41.160 | Is that essentially what it is?

00:56:42.160 | Yes, exactly so.

00:56:43.160 | It's a continual conversation of sages, scholars, readers, strugglers, seekers, mystics, visionaries,

00:56:53.960 | all of them making a contribution.

00:56:55.480 | I mean, I write a weekly Torah column for the Jerusalem Post.

00:57:00.000 | Now, what is there left to say?

00:57:03.400 | But every week what I do is I start opening books and seeing what people say and it starts

00:57:08.380 | to percolate and you realize that you're entering this conversation that's been going on for

00:57:14.240 | thousands of years with remarkable minds and it's constantly fertile in new insights.

00:57:23.960 | So yes, that's what it is to be part of a tradition.

00:57:27.160 | Why do people keep writing love poems?

00:57:29.280 | We should have figured out love by this point already.

00:57:33.120 | I use the analogy sometimes of diet books.

00:57:35.720 | If any diet worked, there would be one book.

00:57:38.240 | There'd be one book and you'd be done.

00:57:42.040 | You mentioned this fascinating story that you were part of.

00:57:45.720 | You were a part of several controversies in your life.

00:57:48.480 | I've had a few.

00:57:50.120 | So for someone who walks with grace through the fire, you sure have found yourself in

00:57:56.080 | a lot of fires.

00:57:57.640 | One of them, can you tell me the story of your views on gay marriage, the underlying

00:58:03.360 | principles that led you to fight this battle of defending gay marriage in the Jewish community?

00:58:10.660 | So I'm part of a congregation that is really politically split and split not only politically

00:58:19.500 | but split in terms of origin.

00:58:24.080 | We have a lot of Jews from the Middle East, from Iran, a lot of Persian Jews, a lot of

00:58:27.840 | Jews from Israel, some from Mexico, from other places and many that grew up in LA.

00:58:34.480 | Do you have any Russian Jews, the best kind?

00:58:37.560 | I have a few Russian Jews, not as many as I should, but we'll work on that.

00:58:43.380 | But what happened was increasingly I became uncomfortable with people who would come to

00:58:51.120 | me and say, "This is the only kind of person I can love."

00:58:58.200 | It's not the same question as an intermarriage, as a Jew marrying a non-Jew, because you could

00:59:02.780 | find a Jew to love.

00:59:03.780 | You may not have found, but you could.

00:59:08.080 | That's a whole separate question.

00:59:10.040 | But I would have men in my office primarily, a couple of women, they would say, "This is

00:59:15.400 | the only kind of person that I can enter into an intimate relationship with.

00:59:20.400 | How can it be that my religion has no room for me?"

00:59:26.400 | And that was very persuasive to me.

00:59:30.520 | But I knew that it was gonna be explosive in my community.

00:59:36.080 | When, by the way, it finally happened, it was literally on the front page of the New

00:59:40.120 | York and the LA Times, it was that explosive.

00:59:42.440 | So it was not a small controversy.

00:59:47.000 | And so what I did was I started to teach classes, not that many people came, about homosexuality

00:59:55.160 | and Jewish tradition and so on.

00:59:56.640 | It's funny, much, much less about lesbianism.

00:59:59.680 | I'm talking about in terms of the sources and so on.

01:00:02.120 | It's almost always about homosexuality.

01:00:07.920 | And then I got ready to send out a letter.

01:00:14.200 | And I said to my daughter, who at the time was maybe 10 or 11, now in her mid-20s, I

01:00:22.680 | said, "Look, honey, when you go to school tomorrow," or whatever it was, I said, "People

01:00:27.880 | might be saying bad things about your dad, and I just want you to be prepared for that."

01:00:31.680 | She said, "Why?"

01:00:32.880 | And I said, "Because I'm gonna start doing same-sex marriages."

01:00:38.600 | And she looked at me quizzically and said, "What took you so long?"

01:00:43.200 | And I thought, really her face was like I said to her, "I'm gonna start marrying blonde-haired

01:00:48.200 | people to brown-haired people."

01:00:49.720 | It's like she really did not understand why there was an issue.

01:00:53.380 | And I thought, "That's exactly why, because I know that this is, it's generational, people

01:00:59.840 | are raised with it, they have it deep in there, but it's not really right.

01:01:06.120 | It's just not right."

01:01:07.800 | But if you could just look back to that journey, how difficult is it to make these decisions

01:01:15.880 | a principle?

01:01:16.880 | So, because you have to think about that in order to think about such decisions you yet

01:01:23.240 | might still have to make in the future.

01:01:25.600 | And I will tell you one thing I did wrong with that, and one thing I did right.

01:01:29.600 | The thing I did right was I waited until in the communities where people objected to it,

01:01:36.800 | I had enough people whose kids had come out so that I had parents of kids who'd come out

01:01:45.120 | to refer later on other parents to, so that they wouldn't feel like they were the only

01:01:50.720 | ones.

01:01:51.720 | Because once I announced it, as I thought would happen, a bunch of kids came out and

01:01:55.120 | said, "Now that the rabbi said this, mom, dad, I want you to know I'm gay."

01:01:59.960 | And when the parents came to me, I could say, "Well, listen, you're not alone.

01:02:02.920 | This person also you can go to."

01:02:04.760 | That I did right.

01:02:05.760 | What I did wrong was I don't think the classes were enough, and I don't think enough people

01:02:11.000 | were prepared.

01:02:12.360 | And I think part of the explosion was shock.

01:02:15.720 | And I should have prepared even more.

01:02:18.560 | The words you used to talk about it, the way you thought about it, was it more scholarly

01:02:25.040 | in the Jewish tradition, or did you go to the feeling?

01:02:30.400 | No, I went to the feeling.

01:02:31.760 | I said, "Kvod ha-briot," which means respect or honor for God's creations, and caring for

01:02:39.680 | other human beings, and understanding.

01:02:44.900 | It wasn't scholarly, because I knew that the objections were not scholarly objections.

01:02:51.880 | And I had many beautiful and also painful stories as a result, some of which can be

01:02:59.200 | told and some of which really can't.

01:03:01.320 | But what I tried to impress also on people was how painful it is to not be able to tell

01:03:10.360 | the world, even your own parents, who you are.

01:03:13.720 | And your sexuality is not a trivial part of who you are.

01:03:16.320 | I mean, it's core to people.

01:03:19.280 | So it's one of the reasons why I'd evoke such reactions.

01:03:22.360 | But I would say to them, the same reason that you're reacting so strongly tells you how

01:03:28.040 | strongly...

01:03:29.520 | Anyway, it was a very powerful experience.

01:03:34.800 | And for that, I feel good about it.

01:03:41.800 | Afterwards, the other thing that I, again, said to my daughter afterwards, after it all

01:03:45.560 | died down, and after all the bad things were said, I told her the Churchill one said that

01:03:50.720 | it's exhilarating to be shot at without result.

01:03:53.280 | If you go into a battle and you make it through and you're still okay, that's good.

01:03:58.440 | - The problem is when you're in the battle, you don't know.

01:04:00.760 | - No, you don't know.

01:04:01.920 | - So how did it feel like, I mean, looking back, you've been, to use the word, canceled

01:04:10.000 | a couple of times.

01:04:11.560 | I guess when you're dealing with the most difficult of questions, just as a human being,

01:04:17.640 | for a community that you really deeply care about, some part of it saying that you have

01:04:22.480 | failed.

01:04:23.480 | - I wasn't canceled the way, like I didn't lose my job, didn't lose my home, but I hurt

01:04:30.200 | people that I cared about.

01:04:32.080 | And that was the hard, like I went into this to be someone who brings people together.

01:04:38.360 | And then I would sit there and do, even now, like as you're well aware with stuff that's

01:04:44.160 | going on now, I sit there and people are really upset at me who I either am or used to be

01:04:52.760 | close to.

01:04:54.400 | - Do those people in time come around?

01:05:00.400 | When you look now, 'cause those are real feelings in the moment, and we can learn that about

01:05:04.600 | social media, people, especially during COVID, there's this intensity of feeling about stuff.

01:05:11.160 | And have you learned something about the passing of feeling that turns into wisdom?

01:05:17.360 | - No question about it.

01:05:18.700 | This sermon I gave this Saturday was about how Moses came down the mountain, he saw the

01:05:24.860 | golden calf and he broke the tablets.

01:05:27.640 | If he'd sat with it for a little while, he probably wouldn't have broken the tablets.

01:05:31.120 | But the instant reaction is always anger.

01:05:34.420 | And in our age, unfortunately, the instant reaction gets put on social media forever

01:05:40.160 | and ever and ever.

01:05:42.400 | And by the way, once you've actually said that, it becomes harder to back down.

01:05:46.640 | If you keep quiet for a day or two, then you can back down because you haven't put yourself

01:05:52.240 | out there.

01:05:53.240 | But once you've said, "This is terrible what you did," it's harder to write and say, "I'm

01:05:57.520 | sorry, I shouldn't have said that."

01:05:59.400 | - Yeah, so it almost becomes...

01:06:01.240 | I mean, I actually, it's a really powerful statement that the downside of saying something

01:06:10.480 | on the internet is that it actually pulls you into this current.

01:06:18.120 | You both create the current and it pulls you into it to where it's actually very hard to

01:06:22.560 | escape.

01:06:23.600 | So when two days later you feel different, there's a momentum.

01:06:27.520 | There's now a tribe of people that feel this way and there's a momentum with it.

01:06:31.400 | - There's a momentum and also you don't wanna betray your own tribe 'cause then people will

01:06:34.840 | get upset at you.

01:06:36.400 | I really think that a lot of the antagonism is not so much that you don't wanna give ground

01:06:42.540 | to the people who oppose you, it's that you don't wanna break with the people who are

01:06:45.840 | behind you.

01:06:47.360 | And that's really hard.

01:06:48.680 | - Can you tell the story of this recent controversy?

01:06:52.560 | - Sure, why not?

01:06:53.560 | - The sermon you just gave, you went to the Superbowl.

01:06:56.960 | I think a lot of people would relate to this because to me personally, I apologize to anybody

01:07:01.800 | who was hurt by this, the absurdity of it is deeply intense.

01:07:06.600 | - So here's the story.

01:07:07.740 | The LA County mandates masking children in school and all of the kids in our school are

01:07:12.160 | masked and many of the parents are extremely upset about that.

01:07:15.640 | I will just leave that at that.

01:07:19.220 | I went to the Superbowl.

01:07:21.480 | There were 70,000 people, Frank Luntz, whom we know, wonderful guy, gave me a ticket.

01:07:29.640 | And so I was at the Superbowl.

01:07:32.240 | I maybe saw two masks among the 70,000 people.

01:07:35.080 | I didn't even think about it, which was foolish on my part, no question.

01:07:39.120 | I took a picture of myself unmasked at the Superbowl.

01:07:43.200 | And people were, I mean, many, many people thought, "Oh, great, wonderful, glad you're

01:07:49.720 | having a good time," so on and so forth.

01:07:50.880 | I don't want to diminish at all the many people who said that.

01:07:54.120 | A lot of people were livid.

01:07:55.880 | They were livid.

01:07:56.880 | And they weren't, what was instructive about it was they didn't say, nobody wrote me a

01:08:04.320 | private note and said, "I think that this was a bad idea.

01:08:07.880 | You should have thought about this."

01:08:09.320 | No, they were, "You're a hypocrite.

01:08:11.440 | You're a clown.

01:08:12.440 | You're an idiot.

01:08:13.440 | How could you do this?

01:08:14.440 | This is a disgrace.

01:08:15.440 | This is," that kind of thing.

01:08:16.440 | - They say that publicly.

01:08:17.440 | - Oh yeah.

01:08:18.440 | And I, on my Instagram, you can still see, I left the remarks up because I really thought

01:08:22.080 | it was important.

01:08:23.240 | If I started, I only deleted the really vile comments because I thought that shouldn't

01:08:28.180 | stay up.

01:08:29.180 | But I left them up because I thought people should see and I should remind myself what

01:08:33.760 | I did.

01:08:34.760 | And I didn't want to just delete the picture as though it didn't happen, because it did

01:08:37.760 | happen and I did do it.

01:08:39.880 | And I felt terrible about that.

01:08:41.760 | And I felt terrible that I had, not about, I mean, the comments from Malimi weren't pleasant.

01:08:47.280 | I didn't like it.

01:08:48.920 | Nobody likes it.

01:08:50.280 | But I felt worse that I had hurt all these people that I'm close to.

01:08:53.720 | And I defended all these people who were really upset that their kids were wearing masks.

01:08:56.880 | And now their kid says, "Why does the rabbi have to wear a mask?"

01:09:00.120 | - Well, first of all, it is tough to be a rabbi.

01:09:03.360 | I mean, the masks to me symbolize these kinds of discussions, symbolize not necessarily

01:09:11.080 | the issues at hand, but the intensity of feeling.

01:09:13.840 | And people are really struggling.

01:09:15.580 | People are in pain.

01:09:16.920 | They're lonely.

01:09:19.000 | The uncertainty of it, you don't know who to trust.

01:09:22.220 | Everything's under question, the institutions, even the scientific institutions.

01:09:25.880 | And there's all these conspiracy theories flying around.

01:09:29.000 | You don't know who to believe.

01:09:30.360 | And there's people just yelling at each other and politics is weaved into this whole thing

01:09:34.640 | in some messy way.

01:09:35.640 | And you just get, I mean, honestly, it's just like legit, simple, just frustration going

01:09:42.220 | back to marriage of just hanging out with the kids and your wife, husband, just the

01:09:50.440 | stress is building up over time, no release.

01:09:54.280 | And just people want to tell you when the rabbi is not wearing a mask, even though it's

01:09:58.600 | at the damn Superbowl, maybe you want to comment on the Superbowl part, which is awesome.

01:10:03.840 | But anyway.

01:10:04.840 | - But it released clearly a dam of all the kinds of feelings that you're talking about.

01:10:09.280 | - So how do you then write a sermon?

01:10:11.640 | - So what I did was I didn't answer on social media because I knew that I wouldn't be able

01:10:18.960 | to formulate it the way I wanted.

01:10:21.160 | And I was gonna wait and I was gonna be able to give a longer, I mean, the sermon is 15

01:10:25.360 | minutes, not that long, but I wanted to be able to give a longer answer as opposed to

01:10:30.240 | a tweet.

01:10:33.200 | And so I was really, I mean, I tried to make two points during the sermon and also I published

01:10:41.120 | the text of it, which I never do, 'cause I never speak from a text.

01:10:43.320 | I always speak from either notes or not even from notes, but this time I thought it was

01:10:47.120 | really important that I have a text out there too, so that people could actually look over

01:10:50.720 | it.

01:10:53.360 | And I just wanted to make two points, one of which was that I really feel terrible.

01:10:57.640 | And I did, that all these people were hurt and that there is this contradiction between

01:11:03.640 | the way I acted and the way they want me to act.

01:11:06.000 | And I also think, by the way, I didn't speak about this, but I also think that there are

01:11:10.280 | some people who just don't like the idea of a rabbi being at the Super Bowl.

01:11:14.120 | It's like, you're supposed to be doing rabbi stuff.

01:11:17.400 | So I understand that too.

01:11:19.840 | But then-

01:11:20.840 | - Yeah, but rabbi at the Super Bowl, I mean, you are also, I hate to say it, but there's

01:11:27.160 | a rockstar nature to you talking to Christopher Hitchens, contending with ideas, inspiring

01:11:32.240 | so many other minds.

01:11:33.840 | I mean, there's an educational aspect to this.

01:11:36.040 | - I appreciate that.

01:11:37.040 | - It's making ideas cool.

01:11:38.240 | I mean, that's a very powerful, I mean, that is also the job of a rabbi.

01:11:42.680 | You're not just supposed to do rabbi stuff, it's to educate your spot.

01:11:45.360 | - Yeah, but I didn't do so much of that at the game.

01:11:49.160 | So nonetheless, so, but the second part of it was I said that we have to be able to express

01:11:59.960 | our anger and disappointment better than this.

01:12:02.960 | You just have to.

01:12:04.800 | In part because it doesn't get you the result that you want.

01:12:09.000 | I mean, when you scream at someone, that's not gonna get them to realize what they did.

01:12:16.840 | And the most painful moment of it was this letter that I got from a Christian pastor

01:12:23.640 | who said, "I always admired the Jews so much, I can't believe they could be so cruel, and

01:12:28.520 | especially to a rabbi."

01:12:30.240 | And I thought, that's not how I want my congregation to be perceived in the world.

01:12:36.960 | And by the way, some of them were from my congregation, some were, many were not from

01:12:42.640 | my congregation.

01:12:46.240 | And I spoke about what you talked about, which is that, I mentioned before that Moses broke

01:12:51.680 | those tablets coming down the mountain.

01:12:54.280 | And the Torah doesn't say what happened to the tablets, but the rabbis do.

01:12:57.360 | They say that they were carried together in the ark with the second set that was intact.

01:13:01.520 | And that we all have brokenness, communities and individuals, we have brokenness, and especially

01:13:06.360 | now.

01:13:07.700 | And we have to learn how to give each other space to be mistaken and broken and hurt and

01:13:13.360 | all of that.

01:13:14.360 | - And the cool thing when you give people that space, you feel better.

01:13:18.000 | I mean, you for caring for the community, it feels better when you show empathy and

01:13:24.080 | compassion and kindness on the internet.

01:13:26.440 | You'll actually feel better a week from now.

01:13:29.080 | You'll feel much worse if you make some kind of a negative statement of principle on the

01:13:36.120 | internet.

01:13:37.120 | It's almost just exclusively true.

01:13:39.480 | So if you care about feeling good, just be kind first, be empathetic first.

01:13:45.140 | - Almost always the case, exactly so.

01:13:48.040 | So it's, I mean, it settled down a lot.

01:13:53.480 | The most, really the single best reaction, there are people, and you can, again, you

01:14:00.760 | can go on social media, you can see all the criticisms and so on and so forth.

01:14:04.740 | But the single best reaction I got was from a man who came up to me right after the sermon

01:14:10.320 | and said, "I have four words for you."

01:14:12.780 | And I thought, "Oh no."

01:14:13.780 | (laughing)

01:14:14.780 | I was, I gotta confess.

01:14:15.780 | - Nothing good comes in fourth.

01:14:17.280 | - I gotta confess.

01:14:18.280 | I said, "What?"

01:14:20.120 | He said, "You changed my mind."

01:14:23.920 | And I thought, "Wow."

01:14:25.160 | And I said to him, "You know, that's so, it's like, it takes so much courage to come up

01:14:30.160 | to somebody and say that in front of them."

01:14:32.080 | And I was so grateful.

01:14:34.120 | And the other thing that it tells me is, look, I've been the rabbi of that congregation for

01:14:37.800 | 25 years, and I taught 10 years before that.

01:14:40.280 | I've been a rabbi for a long time.

01:14:41.480 | I still have a lot to learn.

01:14:43.800 | - We talked a little bit about the difference between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

01:14:48.200 | Could you maybe talk about the difference between the Torah, the Bible, and the Quran?

01:14:56.120 | - So there's, the Hebrew Bible is actually what's called a step canon.

01:15:03.240 | That is, there are the five books of the Torah.

01:15:06.200 | Then there are books of history and the prophets.

01:15:09.040 | So books like Samuel, Kings, Judges, and then the prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Ezekiel,

01:15:18.240 | so on.

01:15:19.520 | And then there are what are called the writings.

01:15:21.880 | The writings are books like Psalms, Proverbs, Job, the Megilloth, which are Esther, Daniel,

01:15:29.120 | all of those books, Ecclesiastes.

01:15:34.360 | So in Hebrew, it's called the Tanakh, Torah, Nevim, Ketuvim.

01:15:37.320 | The Torah, the prophets, and the writings.

01:15:41.240 | And that is the Hebrew Bible.

01:15:43.680 | Sometimes that's also called the Torah, just to be confusing, but really the Torah generally

01:15:47.600 | refers to the five books.

01:15:49.920 | Then there is the New Testament, which the Jews don't recognize as a sacred book.

01:15:56.200 | They recognize it as the book of another religion.

01:15:59.680 | And I sometimes say to Christians, in order for them to really grasp this, Jesus has as

01:16:04.840 | much religious significance to Judaism as Muhammad has to Christianity.

01:16:09.860 | That is, Jesus, although Jewish, became the founder of another religion.

01:16:14.200 | And for Judaism, that's not only in as much as Christians and Jews have had a lot of interactions,

01:16:19.460 | but religiously, Jesus has no significance.

01:16:22.940 | Said many beautiful things, said some things I don't like so much.

01:16:25.640 | Like what?

01:16:27.080 | Leave your father and mother and follow me.

01:16:28.720 | I don't like that as a religious model.

01:16:32.480 | Now Christians will say-

01:16:33.480 | The whole love thing is pretty good.

01:16:34.480 | They will say that I don't understand that, but that's because Christians, like Jews,

01:16:39.480 | interpret their texts different ways at different times.

01:16:42.080 | So anyway, the Quran, which I know less well, I have read it, but I know it less well than

01:16:50.280 | I know the New Testament, and certainly less well, obviously, than I know the Hebrew Bible,

01:16:57.200 | is in some ways, parts of it are, I don't say this word, I say this word because I can't

01:17:04.240 | find a better descriptive word, but Muslims will not accept this, okay, is a takeoff on

01:17:09.920 | the Torah in some things.

01:17:11.320 | That is, it's the same stories as the Torah, but they're different.

01:17:14.520 | Now Jews will say, and I being a Jew will say this, that that's because Muhammad heard

01:17:19.300 | those stories from Jews and also heard Midrashim, which are rabbinic interpretations of those

01:17:24.240 | stories and he wrote those down.

01:17:26.680 | Muslims will say, no, the Jews got it wrong and Muhammad came along to correct the record

01:17:30.920 | and tell the real story.

01:17:32.480 | But they're all telling the story of the same thing.

01:17:37.640 | The Hebrew Bible part, the Abrahamic part, they all tell the story of the same characters,

01:17:43.340 | but tell them, obviously, Christians accept the Hebrew Bible as sacred scripture.

01:17:49.160 | The Muslims retell many of the stories in the Bible.

01:17:54.880 | What is common to all of them is that all of them are monotheistic faiths.

01:18:00.720 | Now in Christianity, that's more complicated because of the Trinity, but as Christianity

01:18:06.160 | has developed over time, it clearly presents itself and thinks of itself and is a monotheistic

01:18:12.040 | faith as well.

01:18:13.040 | What's the role of the word in each of these religions in the scriptures?

01:18:17.240 | In terms of, so first of all, the role of oral traditions, the power of the exactness

01:18:23.400 | of the words in the scripture, does it differ or is it really within the communities it

01:18:29.040 | differs?

01:18:30.040 | It differs because in Christianity, the words are not all the words of Jesus.

01:18:37.200 | They're the words of Jesus' disciples.

01:18:39.840 | None of the books of the New Testament were written by people who met Jesus in person.

01:18:43.920 | So they're different and therefore the, and also we don't even know sometimes the original

01:18:49.080 | language of some of the things in the New Testament.

01:18:54.880 | In the Bible, and I understand in the Koran, but I'll speak for the Hebrew Bible, the

01:18:59.560 | idea is that that's lashon ha-kodesh, that's sacred language, and Hebrew is in it.

01:19:05.640 | That's the language, according to the tradition, that God actually spoke to Moses, and therefore

01:19:09.800 | the exact words are infinitely interpretable and meaningful.

01:19:15.040 | But the words are spoken but written by Moses and the same with Muhammad, but from memory

01:19:22.360 | or no.

01:19:23.360 | There are different theories.

01:19:24.800 | I won't speak for Muhammad.

01:19:26.040 | You should ask.

01:19:27.400 | I don't want to get that wrong.

01:19:28.400 | I don't want to get another religious tradition wrong.

01:19:31.280 | In Judaism, the words are written by Moses at God's dictation, basically.

01:19:35.620 | That's the traditional view.

01:19:36.880 | There are other views that I'm happy to go into if you want to, but basically that's

01:19:40.160 | the traditional view.

01:19:41.160 | So it's pretty close.

01:19:43.320 | What makes it different?

01:19:44.640 | What makes Judaism and Christianity different is Christianity has an ideal life.

01:19:50.840 | Judaism doesn't have an ideal life.

01:19:53.520 | Judaism has an ideal book.

01:19:55.580 | So the holidays of Christianity are events in the life of God, God's birth, God's death

01:20:01.360 | and resurrection.

01:20:03.120 | In Judaism, the holidays are all events in the life of the people, like the liberation

01:20:08.520 | from slavery or in the people's relationship to God, like Yom Kippur, which is a day of

01:20:13.720 | atonement.

01:20:15.000 | But there are no holidays in Judaism that are events in the life of God because in Judaism,

01:20:19.200 | God doesn't have a biography.

01:20:21.440 | God is eternal and God never came to earth.

01:20:24.400 | And those events carry with them traditions and rules that you're to follow.

01:20:29.080 | Yes.

01:20:30.080 | You mentioned on one such event in scripture, yet another time you walked through the fire,

01:20:35.960 | which is with Exodus.

01:20:38.320 | That was the first.

01:20:41.080 | And you never forget the first.

01:20:44.120 | One of several controversies.

01:20:47.680 | You spoke 20 years ago, 21 years ago now at Passover and said that, "The way the Bible

01:20:53.720 | describes the Exodus is not the way it happened, if it happened at all."

01:20:59.240 | So first of all, what is Exodus?

01:21:01.920 | What really happened?

01:21:03.600 | Exodus is the liberation of the Jews from Egypt and it is the central story of the Jewish

01:21:07.120 | tradition.

01:21:08.800 | And as I've said numerous times in various places, I believe that it's based on a historical

01:21:16.360 | kernel.

01:21:17.360 | I think Richard Elliott Friedman may have gotten this right in his book Exodus.

01:21:20.320 | It may have been the Levites who left Israel, but the Bible is not a book of history.

01:21:30.360 | I don't believe that there were 10 plagues and a split sea and 600,000 men, which makes

01:21:37.400 | about 2 million people, who actually, if there were 2 million people, would stretch all the

01:21:42.200 | way from Israel to Egypt alone, were liberated from Egypt.

01:21:48.740 | And my point in that sermon was not actually to convince people that it didn't happen.

01:21:53.140 | My point in that sermon was to convince people that the historicity of the Exodus is not

01:21:59.520 | the basis of the faith of the Jewish people.

01:22:01.640 | Well, what does the word historicity mean?

01:22:03.720 | In other words, the factuality of it.

01:22:05.400 | It can be true without being factual.

01:22:06.880 | So you're not supposed to read it as facts?

01:22:10.480 | Well, I don't read it as fact.

01:22:12.680 | I don't read it as a history book.

01:22:13.840 | I said, "Look," I was talking, again, to a congregation that had many Iranians.

01:22:18.400 | I said, "You experienced the truth of the Exodus in your own life.

01:22:22.740 | There was a regime that wanted to destroy you, and you miraculously escaped before it

01:22:29.380 | did."

01:22:30.380 | And so a myth is something that may not have happened, but is always happening.

01:22:40.020 | And that's what I would say about the Exodus story.

01:22:42.400 | It's not about whether, in fact, there was a killing of the firstborn.

01:22:47.100 | It's about does God deliver?

01:22:49.260 | Did God deliver the Jews in ancient times?

01:22:51.140 | Does God deliver people in modern times?

01:22:52.980 | And that's what the issue is.

01:22:57.460 | And to me, the issue of faith is much deeper than the issue of fact.

01:23:02.940 | I wouldn't look to the Torah for my science either.

01:23:06.700 | What are the limits of science in terms of what can science not tell us that the Torah

01:23:15.500 | can in terms of wisdom?

01:23:17.460 | So the historicity, the facts of things, okay.

01:23:22.260 | If the Torah is much more than that, is it, like you said, myth.

01:23:28.180 | Myth is not something that happened, but something that is always happening.

01:23:32.020 | And so presumably, it's interacting with the environment of the day to generate wisdom.

01:23:39.700 | - So you can live a life by Torah.

01:23:42.080 | I don't think you can live a life by biology.

01:23:46.000 | You can live a life that is informed by the values of the tradition of Judaism.

01:23:53.100 | And those values, by the way, what science does is it contributes factuality to the conversation

01:24:01.520 | and also changes the reality around us.

01:24:04.740 | So when you study Talmud on your iPhone, you're still...

01:24:11.180 | I mean, it changes the atmosphere in which you do it, but the wisdom and the life guidance

01:24:18.180 | and the connection to transcendence is something that science doesn't give.

01:24:24.400 | - So if we now step into, returning to our friend Sam Harris, and step into this weird

01:24:30.660 | place of science, and you talked about this, where the kind of the current assumption of

01:24:34.900 | science is it's a materialistic one.

01:24:39.260 | So for me, obviously, AI person, this whole mind thing is fascinating.

01:24:44.380 | What the heck is going on up there?

01:24:47.020 | So how do you explain consciousness?

01:24:49.940 | How do you explain free will?

01:24:51.780 | Do you think, first of all, do you think we have a free will?

01:24:56.020 | And if so, what is it?

01:24:58.300 | - This is where we had the debate earlier that I mentioned with Hitchens, where I think

01:25:04.780 | actually neither he nor the moderator understood what I was saying, which is, I'm sure, my

01:25:10.860 | inability to express it.

01:25:12.340 | - But he was very focused and delivered on the humor and the wit.

01:25:17.340 | - Yes, but what I was trying to say is, if we're entirely biological creatures, if we

01:25:25.540 | didn't choose our genetics and we didn't choose our environment, then there is no space for

01:25:31.020 | free choice.

01:25:32.020 | I don't understand where it comes in.

01:25:33.260 | And I kept asking them that question, but didn't get an answer, 'cause I don't think

01:25:37.100 | there is an answer.

01:25:38.100 | I think if you're a thoroughgoing materialist, free will is impossible.

01:25:43.520 | There could be randomness, but randomness is not free will.

01:25:46.660 | It's randomness.

01:25:48.700 | I think you need a spiritual, non-material belief in order to get free will, and that's

01:25:56.580 | why I believe in free will.

01:25:57.900 | - Yeah, you were talking about, and actually the moderator totally missed your point, about

01:26:02.380 | the glass of water and basically what's the difference.

01:26:04.980 | So do you, free will, 'cause you could also, if it fits into the materialistic picture,

01:26:10.660 | it could be just a convenient, useful quirk.

01:26:13.900 | - You would understand this better than I would.

01:26:15.300 | I don't understand how it could be a convenient quirk, materialistically.

01:26:19.700 | I don't understand how to explain it.

01:26:21.220 | - Well, no, if you study perception, there's all these kinds of illusions.

01:26:27.460 | Our mind plays tricks on us to make our life easier, more efficient, and survive better,

01:26:32.580 | and all those kinds of things.

01:26:34.020 | And so the feeling like we have a choice-

01:26:37.220 | - Oh, that could be an illusion.

01:26:38.220 | - Could be an illusion.

01:26:39.220 | - Yeah, that I understand.

01:26:40.580 | But actual free choice, free will, I don't see where you get it if you're a materialist.

01:26:45.580 | I think you have to have a spiritual component.

01:26:49.060 | By the way, I think Sam would agree with this.

01:26:53.100 | I think he wrote about not having free will.

01:26:58.380 | And I think if you don't have a God, and you don't have a soul, that free will is a logical

01:27:05.420 | impossibility.

01:27:06.420 | - For Sam, which is fascinating, it's not just that free will is an illusion, but the

01:27:13.740 | illusion of free will is an illusion, meaning we don't even experience anything like it.

01:27:19.780 | There's no illusion.

01:27:22.620 | It's not even on us to be talking about it.

01:27:25.300 | We are like the current in the river or something.

01:27:29.420 | You were comparing it to the glass.

01:27:30.740 | We are just like that glass.

01:27:31.740 | So I don't know what we're going on about with this whole free will thing.

01:27:35.900 | I mean, to you, is the free will, the I that the young person is born with, is that somehow

01:27:42.020 | fundamental to religion?

01:27:44.900 | - It's fundamental to Judaism.

01:27:46.340 | I think that the idea is that you are the custodian of your soul.

01:27:55.180 | And even though I grant that there's a certain overemphasis in modern society on the individuality

01:28:04.500 | of the soul, that is, we are more interconnected than I think we believe, still, yeah, the

01:28:15.620 | I, the idea that every human being is an image of God, that the human being in the Torah

01:28:21.180 | is created singly.

01:28:22.980 | And again, do I really believe there was an Adam and an Eve in a Garden of Eden?

01:28:26.820 | No, not literally, but I think that it expresses a deep truth about human life.

01:28:33.380 | - And tied into this is the subjective experience of things, which we call consciousness.

01:28:37.660 | - I mean, this is the most fascinating and inexplicable discussion.

01:28:45.940 | And again, this is a discussion I've had, I privileged to have with Daniel Dennett and

01:28:50.940 | could not make any, as you can imagine, any headway on my, but he was delightful and brilliant

01:28:58.100 | to talk to.

01:29:01.660 | For me, consciousness is a real thing.

01:29:05.860 | I don't know if it is, I mean, I kind of like the panpsychist's view that there's an element

01:29:12.460 | of consciousness in everything, that that's constitutive of reality, but I'm not wedded

01:29:19.540 | to it.

01:29:20.540 | But I think that it exists in different degrees in all sentient creatures.

01:29:26.460 | I think that anybody who has a pet knows that they have some kind of consciousness.

01:29:31.740 | - Except cats.

01:29:32.740 | - Except cats, I'm not gonna, since I don't have cats or dogs, I'm not going to.

01:29:37.940 | - Another reason people would be outraged, I said it.

01:29:39.980 | - Well, I happen to be allergic to both, but I'm very fond of animals.

01:29:44.220 | The thing that so perplexes me about this is the denial of the reality of consciousness

01:29:52.860 | from people who are fully aware that they're conscious.

01:29:57.420 | I don't know how you divest yourself of the most present quality of being a person in

01:30:02.860 | your discussions about what it is to be a person.

01:30:07.460 | - We just don't really have a good sense of the alternative, and so you can kind of divest

01:30:12.060 | yourself in that way.

01:30:13.060 | Well, maybe everything is like this, maybe we're over-dramatizing this whole thing.

01:30:20.940 | It seems like every living thing, perhaps everything, period, thinks that it's the center

01:30:26.860 | of the universe.

01:30:27.860 | - Right.

01:30:28.860 | - And so here we are telling ourselves these dramatic big stories about us being special

01:30:32.180 | and so on, and maybe we need to have a little bit more humility, both about the uncertainty

01:30:37.980 | and about our place in the whole.

01:30:39.980 | - Any statement you make about something like consciousness has, I think, a sort of equal

01:30:44.620 | level of humility.

01:30:46.580 | You are saying that you know we don't have it is as, not you, Lex, but you, person saying

01:30:51.740 | we don't have it, is as intellectually arrogant as my saying we do.

01:30:55.380 | So I think for me, humility comes in in admitting that we really, really have just the tiniest

01:31:03.300 | part of the puzzle.

01:31:06.900 | And as you get older, at least my experience has been not that you get more answers, but

01:31:11.620 | that you just see a bigger puzzle.

01:31:14.180 | - So to me, there is less, so the questions are fascinating, but there's also an engineering

01:31:19.700 | practical question.

01:31:21.340 | And perhaps I'll ask you a religious one too on this point, to return back to robots.

01:31:29.380 | So how to engineer consciousness, or I'll just even ask you a very simple question,

01:31:35.340 | which is when you have robots that exhibit the capacity to suffer, I found in myself

01:31:44.940 | as a human, when I see that, I feel something.

01:31:49.480 | Exhibit the capacity to suffer, or they exhibit behaviors that evoke in you a sense that they

01:31:54.620 | are suffering?

01:31:55.620 | Those aren't the same things.

01:31:58.420 | - From an observation perspective, they sure as heck seem similar.

01:32:01.860 | - You think they're feeling pain?

01:32:03.400 | - I don't know what the, I'm observing pain.

01:32:08.180 | - Okay.

01:32:09.180 | - It's like when I watch a movie and there's people on screen, some of them are dressed

01:32:14.980 | like Batman.

01:32:18.140 | But you can make the distinction, like if I have a doll and I bend the doll over and

01:32:23.540 | it makes a sad face, I know that that doll is not actually in pain, even though I am

01:32:30.300 | observing pain.

01:32:31.680 | So the question, what's that?

01:32:33.660 | - The question is when the doll becomes able to remember things about you, David, about

01:32:42.220 | the experiences you shared, it is able to speak and make you feel like there's an actual

01:32:51.020 | relationship there.

01:32:52.020 | - So that's what I'm asking, is at what point do you believe that the, and I know that this

01:32:57.900 | is an impossible question, but at what point do you believe that there is a consciousness

01:33:01.340 | in there as opposed to just an extraordinary, I mean like when I play chess against a computer

01:33:09.340 | and it beats me, I'm embarrassed even though the computer doesn't, I don't think the computer

01:33:16.860 | is going, "Ah, you idiot," but it feels that way.

01:33:20.660 | But there is some part of me that says, "Okay, I know that this computer doesn't actually

01:33:24.860 | know who I am or care who I am, it just knows how to move the pieces."

01:33:28.980 | So at what point do you, I mean, you're giving me instances, it speaks, it does this, it

01:33:34.220 | does this, but at what point does that for you cross the threshold into it's actually

01:33:38.500 | a sentient being?

01:33:39.780 | - I think the question is whether there is a threshold that could be crossed.

01:33:43.340 | That's one question.

01:33:44.340 | And I can answer this because I think it's different from person to person, but the chess

01:33:48.260 | engine is not at all trying to cross that threshold.

01:33:54.900 | Let's just start there.

01:33:56.700 | And to me, the personalization, which is what's the difference, like a friend that you meet,

01:34:06.020 | you've shared all these memories, and the way they look at you will convey, and the

01:34:11.980 | things they say will convey that they've shared those memories with you.

01:34:17.220 | They'll be able to speak in a shared humor and the language, but really the memories

01:34:22.580 | is the big one of having gone through things together.

01:34:25.940 | I think I would have more and more trouble, for example, turning off a system that I've

01:34:33.900 | been through things with.

01:34:37.500 | And by turning off, I mean delete all of its memory.

01:34:40.860 | If me and the toaster have gone through a bunch of dramatic events and that toaster

01:34:46.940 | remembers, there's a certain level to where it's just me and the toaster and this together

01:34:52.700 | at this point.

01:34:54.180 | And just to talk about sentience, I don't know, but you know.

01:34:58.260 | - I don't know.

01:34:59.260 | It's according to the scripture, can't live by bread alone.

01:35:03.380 | But I would, I mean, I know that there's no way to determine this, but it's still about

01:35:09.660 | what you feel.

01:35:11.260 | - Yes.

01:35:12.260 | But isn't that what human relations are also though?

01:35:15.220 | - Yes, but- - We make each other feel.

01:35:18.100 | - But it's true that I have the assumption that you feel somewhat like I do.

01:35:23.180 | I mean, obviously I don't, and that could be illusion and I don't know.

01:35:28.100 | And I know that you don't feel exactly as I do.

01:35:31.500 | But I think we have a long, at least to me, we have a long way to go before the detached

01:35:39.540 | part of our brains, that is the objective evaluating part as opposed to the emotive

01:35:44.740 | it feels this way part, believe that that machine has consciousness.

01:35:49.860 | - I think it's at least, without arriving at conclusions, it's at least possible that

01:35:54.500 | one day we'll look back and realize that we have yet once again formed another tribe and

01:36:03.100 | that scripture all along had in it the ability for humans and robots to have a deep, meaningful

01:36:11.100 | connection and that through the robot, the life that enters the body of another robot,

01:36:17.340 | what's the difference between a biological body and a mechanical one?

01:36:21.100 | And then we will see that the fundamental thing is about the, whatever you wanna call

01:36:27.060 | it, sentience, whatever can permeate an object, that was the thing all along.

01:36:34.620 | - So I mean- - And then you'll get canceled one more time

01:36:38.700 | because you will- - I'll get canceled again 'cause I denied

01:36:40.060 | it.

01:36:41.060 | I was gonna say- - You'll eventually, I will eventually

01:36:42.060 | convince you.

01:36:43.060 | - Oh, I see, 'cause I'll preach to the robots.

01:36:45.500 | - I'm hoping.

01:36:46.500 | I'm hoping.

01:36:47.500 | - First of all, depends how quickly you do it and how much longer I have to live.

01:36:55.380 | I resisted tremendously, but I am also enough of a student of history to know that my instinctive

01:37:04.860 | resistance has nothing to do with whether it will come about.

01:37:11.060 | I have a hard time believing it.

01:37:13.460 | We'll see.

01:37:14.460 | - Can I ask you about this?

01:37:18.260 | Maybe you can educate me.

01:37:19.260 | I tend to believe that, you mentioned suffering, that there is a connection between consciousness

01:37:24.020 | and suffering, that suffering is a fundamental part, the capacity to suffer is the fundamental

01:37:30.320 | part of being human.

01:37:31.700 | - I mean, look, when you're not conscious, you don't suffer.

01:37:34.820 | We've had operations where we've been put under anesthetic, we're not conscious, and

01:37:38.540 | we don't suffer during the operation.

01:37:39.940 | If we were conscious, we would.

01:37:43.600 | But there's also, I mean, there's a non-physical suffering that is very much tied to consciousness.

01:37:48.860 | I can think of things right now that will cause me suffering, like pain that I've caused

01:37:55.820 | or pain that other people I care about have felt or so on.

01:37:59.740 | So I don't see how, I think it's equally true of joy.

01:38:05.940 | Joy is also a product of consciousness.

01:38:09.140 | - All tied in in some beautiful, messy way with memory and so on, that we can re-experience

01:38:14.760 | it when we recall the memories.

01:38:17.840 | But why is there suffering?

01:38:19.480 | You mentioned evil.

01:38:20.480 | Why is there evil in the world?

01:38:21.560 | You can tell stories about this.

01:38:24.720 | Why is there suffering?

01:38:25.720 | Why is there evil in the world if there's a God that cares for us?

01:38:29.920 | - So let's assume for a minute that everything was a primitive robot.

01:38:35.940 | There would be no suffering, but there would also be no growth.

01:38:41.200 | And that implies choices.

01:38:44.800 | One of the things that I've said that I know why it hurts people, and I don't mean it quite

01:38:51.520 | the way that, but I will say it nonetheless, is the Holocaust presents the exact same theological

01:38:59.880 | question as somebody who gets shot on the streets of a city in Los Angeles, which is,

01:39:06.160 | "God, why do you allow some people to do bad things to other people?"

01:39:10.660 | It's on an unimaginable scale, but it's the same question.

01:39:14.120 | And the answer has to be, you either allow people to have free will or you don't.

01:39:18.540 | You can't say as God, "I'm gonna let everybody have free will, but not Nazis."

01:39:24.240 | Nazis don't get free will.

01:39:26.680 | Because Cambodians, they can kill each other.

01:39:29.480 | Rwandans kill each other, but the Nazis don't get to do that.

01:39:33.440 | So that's one piece of the puzzle.

01:39:39.160 | And what makes it unfathomable is when you're actually faced with suffering, these kinds

01:39:43.760 | of explanations are obscene.

01:39:45.460 | They just are.

01:39:46.460 | You can't...

01:39:47.460 | I mean, when somebody is actually suffering, "Oh, the rabbi said God gave people free will,"

01:39:51.280 | that's just awful.

01:39:53.280 | But there is a second piece to this also, which is that there is natural suffering,

01:39:59.520 | like children born with diseases or earthquakes or volcanoes or whatever.

01:40:06.480 | And here my argument is that in some ways, suffering has to be random in the world.

01:40:11.280 | Because when people say, "Why do bad things happen to good people?"

01:40:15.280 | Well, if only good things happen to good people, everybody would be good.

01:40:19.080 | But it would have no moral content.

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

01:40:25.760 | really good life and have really terrible things happen to me nonetheless."

01:40:30.280 | So it feels to me like it has to be a randomly.

01:40:34.240 | Now that means, by the way, that I've been incredibly lucky.

01:40:40.460 | I don't have a good life because I was good.

01:40:43.080 | I have a good life because I was lucky.

01:40:45.920 | And that implies not that I should feel guilty about it, but that I have a tremendous responsibility

01:40:50.720 | as a result to other people who aren't so lucky.

01:40:54.040 | Tremendous responsibility to study the lessons of history, to tell the stories of those who

01:40:58.280 | are less lucky, and to draw enough wisdom from them so that we have less cruelty and

01:41:05.040 | suffering in the world, or have new kinds that get us to improve even more.

01:41:09.760 | That's right, exactly.

01:41:10.960 | That we suffer better.

01:41:12.760 | Suffer better.

01:41:14.200 | For a lot of people, mortality is one of the very unfortunate versions of suffering, which

01:41:22.000 | is that the ride ends in this realm, whatever it is.

01:41:27.840 | What do you think of mortality?

01:41:29.120 | Is it something you think about?

01:41:31.320 | Is it something you fear?

01:41:34.040 | What do you think happens after we die?

01:41:37.400 | I don't fear it.

01:41:40.560 | First of all, I would say when I was in high school, I think my father actually encouraged

01:41:45.660 | me to read this book.

01:41:47.120 | I read Ernest Becker's Denial of Death, which I found, and still find, to be one of the

01:41:52.440 | most profound works I've ever come across.

01:41:56.360 | And he convinced me that a lot of what our society is about are ways that we avoid encountering

01:42:04.880 | our own mortality.

01:42:07.480 | Our physicality, I mean, among the points he makes, and I'm not quoting him at all

01:42:12.000 | directly, is like, "Why does everything about our physical body make us so uncomfortable?

01:42:15.900 | Everything that comes out of you, other than tears, is either mildly or very disgusting.

01:42:20.640 | Why?

01:42:21.640 | Why does that have to be?

01:42:23.140 | Why are sex and eating and all the things that are physical surrounded with so much

01:42:28.480 | symbolism?"

01:42:29.480 | I mean, what are table manners, really?

01:42:30.840 | They're like, "We're not eating like animals because we're not eating like animals."

01:42:35.200 | And sex, obviously, has more symbolism around it than anything.

01:42:38.460 | And his answer is, "Anything that reminds you that you're a physical body, because that's

01:42:42.180 | what dies.

01:42:43.180 | Your body dies.

01:42:44.180 | It decays.

01:42:45.180 | It dies.

01:42:46.180 | It gets eaten by worms.

01:42:47.180 | That you don't want to think about, so you deny it."

01:42:50.020 | I think that part of religion is a confrontation with your own mortality, but also a certain

01:42:56.520 | transcendence of it, because the idea is something about you is eternal.

01:43:01.360 | What exactly?

01:43:02.360 | I don't know.

01:43:04.480 | And you asked, "What do I think happens after we die?"

01:43:07.040 | So I don't know any better than anyone else does, but I'll say two things about it.

01:43:14.960 | One is that every image of what it's like is foolish.

01:43:21.680 | Mark Twain has, I think in Letters from Earth, he says, "We're going to lie on green fields

01:43:24.980 | and listen to harp music," which you wouldn't want to do for five minutes while you're alive,

01:43:28.700 | but you think you'll be happy for the rest of eternity doing it after you die.

01:43:32.280 | So I don't know.

01:43:33.280 | This world was a surprise.

01:43:34.380 | So why shouldn't the next world be a surprise?

01:43:36.200 | I have no idea.

01:43:37.920 | But I really like this parable that's told by a guy in a book on death and mourning,

01:43:45.200 | by a rabbi in a book on death and mourning about twins in a womb.

01:43:49.120 | He says, "One of them believes that there's a life outside and the other one doesn't."

01:43:54.840 | He says, "The one who doesn't says, 'Look, this is the only world we've ever seen, the

01:43:58.680 | only world we've ever known.

01:43:59.680 | Why do you think there's something out there?'"

01:44:01.400 | He says, "Now imagine the one who believes is born."

01:44:05.700 | Back in the womb, his brother is mourning a death, but outside, everybody's celebrating

01:44:09.820 | a birth.

01:44:10.820 | He said, "And that's what it's like when you die."

01:44:13.200 | And I love that image.

01:44:14.460 | - Yeah, the grass is always greener.

01:44:16.620 | It's the new step.

01:44:18.140 | But the eternity thing is an interesting one.

01:44:20.780 | It's yet another concept that I feel humans are fully inequipped to comprehend.

01:44:27.020 | Is eternity fundamental somehow to all of these discussions?

01:44:30.500 | - I think it is, well, partly because God is supposed to be eternal, and therefore,

01:44:35.660 | it moves the mind in that direction, even though it is completely unfathomable.

01:44:41.540 | - 'Cause sometimes I would say eternity, you said on a green field, sometimes a moment,

01:44:46.860 | like a truly joyful moment, feels like an eternity, the intensity of it.

01:44:52.860 | Maybe eternity is more about stopping time versus extending time indefinitely.

01:44:58.420 | That's something that we just totally can't comprehend, us silly humans.

01:45:03.300 | - All I would say is the older you get, the more you're struck by the fact that time does

01:45:09.820 | not freeze.

01:45:13.380 | People will sometimes say to me, "You haven't aged a day."

01:45:16.980 | And then I'll look at an old picture of myself, and I'll say, "That was very kind of you."

01:45:22.340 | But that's not true.

01:45:23.340 | It's not true.

01:45:25.660 | So yeah, I mean, I love the idea of seeing eternity in a grain of sand, was how Blake

01:45:31.180 | put it.

01:45:32.180 | I love that notion.

01:45:33.180 | But when you talk about life after death, I think that in some ways, my fundamental

01:45:40.140 | faith is in human beings, that this doesn't all disappear, that there's something about

01:45:47.020 | people that transcends this world.

01:45:51.220 | - You mentioned Ernest Becker in high school, and the Battle of Death.

01:45:54.540 | Maybe you can mention if you still see truth and wisdom in some of this idea.

01:46:00.740 | But in general, can you go all the way back and tell some of the fascinating story of

01:46:06.460 | how you found faith?

01:46:08.900 | - When I was in high school, I was a really pretty ardent atheist.

01:46:14.700 | And I loved Bertrand Russell, who was, for my money, with all due respect to all the

01:46:20.700 | very, very capable people that we've talked about earlier, he's the best atheist pound

01:46:26.340 | for pound that there was, and a remarkably witty and lucid writer.

01:46:32.260 | And I was totally in his thrall.

01:46:34.060 | And I would read every book by Russell I could get my hands on.

01:46:37.960 | And the reason that I did, I have this theory that why do adolescent boys like Mr. Spock

01:46:47.100 | and like Sherlock Holmes?

01:46:51.100 | I think it's because when you hit puberty, for a lot of us, there's so much discomfort

01:46:55.900 | with our bodies that we like the idea that we're just brains.

01:46:59.220 | I really think so.

01:47:00.820 | I had that experience.

01:47:02.220 | It's like, I want to just be a thinking machine.

01:47:05.260 | I don't want to be a body, because my body was making me so uncomfortable.

01:47:08.100 | I had all these urges and inclinations that I couldn't control.

01:47:12.400 | So Russell was perfect.

01:47:14.580 | And my father, who was a rabbi, did the very wise thing of buying me some of Bertrand Russell's

01:47:20.780 | books, which was his way of saying, "I'm not afraid of him."

01:47:25.340 | And actually, there was another rabbi.

01:47:27.380 | I was at summer camp, and I was sitting on the porch of the...

01:47:30.860 | I remember exactly, and I was reading Bertrand Russell, and this guy came up to me and said,

01:47:35.140 | "What are you reading?"

01:47:36.140 | I was maybe 16 or 17, and I said, "Bertrand Russell."

01:47:38.660 | I was spoiling for a fight.

01:47:40.780 | And he said, "I'm glad you're reading him."

01:47:42.620 | I said, "Really?

01:47:43.620 | Because how old are you, David?"

01:47:44.860 | I said, "Whatever I was, 16, 17."

01:47:47.620 | He said, "Well, I'd rather you grow out of him than grow into him."

01:47:53.140 | And you know what?

01:47:54.140 | He was actually right, because when I started to read about Russell's life, I realized that

01:48:01.220 | all of that rationality didn't shield him.

01:48:04.660 | He had an incredibly messy life, multiple marriages, endless infidelities, family members

01:48:11.260 | he didn't speak to, didn't speak to him.

01:48:12.900 | His father was raised by his grandparents, because his parents had died, and really not

01:48:18.260 | a happy or...

01:48:19.820 | I mean, a remarkable life, but not a happy one.

01:48:23.380 | And so I started to believe that maybe it was possible that people who had faith were

01:48:29.100 | not just stupid and needed crutches, but saw something deeper than Russell did.

01:48:38.340 | And the more people that I met that were like that...

01:48:43.460 | It's funny, because I always thought, "Okay, my father is a rabbi, that's great, but nobody

01:48:46.500 | else."

01:48:49.260 | And I think what happened to me was it was not a logical decision to come to faith.

01:48:54.380 | It was a sort of opening of my heart.

01:48:56.020 | It's like, "This world is way much more than my mind can capture."

01:49:02.060 | And I kind of felt my way to God.

01:49:04.460 | And in the moments, my faith...

01:49:08.020 | There was a rabbi named Rabbi Nachman of Bratislava, he said he was a moon man, his faith waxed

01:49:12.660 | and waned.

01:49:13.820 | So sometimes I have more, sometimes less.

01:49:16.700 | But in my feeling-er moments is when I have more.

01:49:20.940 | So with your heart open, what would you say in your feeling-er moments is the most beautiful

01:49:29.580 | part about Judaism, in your faith?

01:49:33.980 | I think the most beautiful part about Judaism is that even though it is filled with humor

01:49:41.540 | and wit, it takes life and it takes the soul seriously.

01:49:47.180 | It really believes that this matters, and that we matter, and what we do matters.

01:49:53.220 | And I think that that's incredibly important.

01:49:55.820 | And especially in a world in which young people feel so much like they don't matter, that's

01:50:01.660 | an unbelievably powerful message.

01:50:05.180 | I mean, I wanna say almost to every young woman under 30 on TikTok, you don't matter

01:50:17.140 | because you're beautiful.

01:50:18.540 | That's not why you matter.

01:50:19.860 | I hope you know that.

01:50:21.420 | You matter 'cause you have a soul.

01:50:23.860 | And to every young man who's like nihilistic and doesn't think, and just thinks that if

01:50:28.060 | they make enough money, their life will be fine, I wanna say the same thing.

01:50:31.300 | Which is really, that's not...

01:50:33.260 | Ultimately, you matter because you're in the image of God.

01:50:38.100 | And Judaism really deeply, deeply believes and preaches that.

01:50:42.020 | And I think that that's a message that has so much to say to the world.

01:50:48.380 | It's like you have to take people's souls seriously.

01:50:51.820 | And for all of the difficulty in figuring out all these social questions and what they

01:50:56.300 | mean, I just don't wanna dismiss people because I disagree with them politically or socially

01:51:03.060 | or culturally, 'cause I think they matter.

01:51:07.060 | So ultimately, Judaism has a wealth of meaning for human mind.

01:51:16.700 | I really believe that it does.

01:51:18.380 | I really do.

01:51:21.060 | And its meaning, and I wanna emphasize this, is not political.

01:51:27.380 | The deepest meaning of Judaism is not political.

01:51:30.300 | Well, there's, we put politics on top of everything.

01:51:33.860 | Exactly.

01:51:34.860 | But that's why I wanna emphasize it.

01:51:36.180 | The deepest meaning is on a soul level.

01:51:38.380 | It's not on a voting level.

01:51:40.300 | Well, that combined with the humor, it's clear to me that Christopher Hitchens should have

01:51:44.260 | been a Jew.

01:51:45.260 | He was.

01:51:46.260 | He actually was.

01:51:47.320 | He discovered that in his 30s, that his mother was Jewish.

01:51:50.940 | That's fascinating.

01:51:51.940 | Yup.

01:51:52.940 | He actually, he has a beautiful essay about it, "Discovering in His 30s That His Mother

01:51:55.500 | Was Jewish."

01:51:56.500 | Yup.

01:51:57.500 | So remarkably enough, he actually was Jewish.

01:52:03.100 | His autobiography, Hitch 22, is a great read.

01:52:06.380 | And I just wanna say, what you discover there, I don't know if I'm giving too much away by

01:52:10.760 | telling the story of his life.

01:52:11.760 | Spoiler alert.

01:52:12.760 | What you discover there is that his mother ran away with a minister or a priest and they

01:52:17.320 | died in what seemed like was a suicide pact.

01:52:20.260 | And so I read it, unfortunately, after he passed away, but I would have wanted to ask

01:52:25.380 | him, do you think that has anything to do maybe with the hostility towards religion?

01:52:30.460 | We are only human.

01:52:31.740 | My father, I mean, both my parents, but my father who was a rabbi was such a wonderful,

01:52:35.580 | warm, and loving man.

01:52:36.960 | So I associate a religious figure with real goodness.

01:52:42.340 | And I'm sorry to return to a darker topic, but I really wanted to ask you this for the

01:52:49.340 | current events, for a recent event.

01:52:52.260 | I mentioned Dallas.

01:52:54.660 | What lessons do you draw from the Dallas Synagogue hostage incident?

01:52:59.260 | Well, the week after that, we had active shooter training in my synagogues.

01:53:03.540 | And one of the things I drew was that security for synagogues is important.

01:53:09.100 | And the second is that the reality of antisemitism, which I had thought had waned when I first

01:53:17.660 | began my rabbinate, I thought it's not going to be such a big issue.

01:53:21.500 | It is like an evergreen issue.

01:53:23.660 | And Jews and all people of goodwill have to take this really seriously because it has

01:53:30.100 | devastating consequences.

01:53:31.700 | And if the world doesn't know that, then it just hasn't been paying attention.

01:53:35.360 | So there's antisemitism at a scale of human to human, but there's also, like you mentioned,

01:53:41.420 | politics get mixed up into things, nations get mixed into things, impossible to answer.

01:53:48.780 | But I have to ask, what do you think about the long running saga of Israel and Palestine?

01:53:56.940 | Will we ever see peace in that part of the Middle East?

01:54:00.220 | Well, since I'm an optimist about human...

01:54:03.620 | Look, I mean, I have many, many thoughts about it.

01:54:07.380 | I'm a very, very strong supporter of Israel.

01:54:11.780 | And I also feel really for the plight of the Palestinians.

01:54:16.340 | I think that this is a clash of legitimate narratives that is impossible to exactly split

01:54:26.480 | the difference of.

01:54:29.140 | However, I know that Israel has made peace with Egypt, has made peace with Jordan, has

01:54:36.580 | made peace now with other Arab nations.

01:54:39.900 | I don't believe that Israel is unwilling to make peace.

01:54:44.160 | And so I think that as difficult as it will be for the Palestinians to come to grips with

01:54:51.220 | the fact that the Jewish state is not leaving and is legitimately here, as opposed to, "We

01:54:56.300 | can't get rid of it now, but we will get rid of it one day."

01:55:00.260 | If that comes to be, and I believe that it will, I think not only that there would be

01:55:06.820 | peace, but I think that those two peoples together could probably do remarkable things

01:55:10.620 | in the world.

01:55:12.140 | Do you think the source of it is politics?

01:55:16.120 | Is it religious ideas?

01:55:19.460 | And to flip it, what is the way out?

01:55:23.540 | Is it geopolitics?

01:55:26.220 | Is it interfaith discourse and collaboration?

01:55:32.700 | Or is it simply the human love?

01:55:37.580 | So I think that I'm not sure that I could give one answer to that, but I will give a

01:55:41.980 | piece of an answer.

01:55:43.960 | Why did the Abraham Accords happen?

01:55:46.700 | The main reason that they happened was because economics overrode ideology.

01:55:52.840 | And I actually am hopeful that that's in the end what will happen, that people will say,

01:55:58.060 | "You know what?

01:55:59.060 | We could have such a better life if we put aside the ideological animosities and just

01:56:07.560 | created this different kind of Middle East together."

01:56:11.500 | I went to Dubai to watch the World Chess Championship because I really wanted to see Magnus Carlsen

01:56:18.200 | play.

01:56:19.200 | He's still alive when you have such a remarkable world champion go see him play.

01:56:23.440 | So I actually took myself to Dubai for the last couple of games and I watched.

01:56:28.880 | And so I wasn't so much...

01:56:30.640 | I mean, it's not that I'm uninterested in Dubai, but I went there for the chess thing.

01:56:34.480 | The Expo was also on at the same time and I saw, "Here's this amazing place."

01:56:38.000 | I came back.

01:56:39.200 | This guy I know who lived in Dubai for several years and works in the Middle East said to

01:56:42.200 | me, "What did you think of it?"

01:56:43.200 | And I said, "It's nice.

01:56:45.200 | It's Dubai."

01:56:46.200 | And he said, "It's very polished, very sophisticated, very clean, no crime and so on, but it was

01:56:53.200 | like Las Vegas in the Middle East without the gambling or something like that."

01:56:56.240 | He said, "You know..."

01:56:57.240 | And he totally changed my perspective in a couple of sentences.

01:57:00.920 | He said, "I know it seems like that when you come from Los Angeles."

01:57:04.120 | He said, "But fly there from Yemen or from Riyadh and it is a miracle."

01:57:10.080 | And I thought, "Oh my God, you're right."

01:57:12.200 | It's like what human beings can do if they just put aside their ideological shackles

01:57:19.120 | is remarkable.

01:57:20.880 | And I'm hopeful that one day that'll happen.

01:57:23.680 | - Economics allows for a higher quality of life.

01:57:26.240 | You no longer...

01:57:27.240 | It's the playground analogy you said earlier.

01:57:30.560 | If there's more resources to play with, unfortunately us humans are more willing to play with others.

01:57:38.280 | And maybe that is the solution.

01:57:39.560 | Maybe, I mean, for me from a technology perspective, innovation, engineering helps make everybody's

01:57:48.040 | life better.

01:57:49.760 | And over that, once people's lives become better, they start to have more time to be

01:57:56.840 | empathetic and hear people out.

01:57:58.400 | - And they have more to lose.

01:58:00.520 | When you have more to lose, it actually makes you...

01:58:03.000 | I think countries are less willing to go to war when they have more to lose.

01:58:08.840 | And families want peace when it's good at home.

01:58:12.200 | So I think there's an element of that as well.

01:58:14.920 | - And some of it, again, taking us back to the other aspect of our conversation is how

01:58:19.120 | we're conducting ourselves in conversation online and so on.

01:58:23.120 | 'Cause I think actually I'm a big fan of the idea of social media that is a way for us

01:58:30.320 | to connect together.

01:58:32.440 | I think there's a lot of really strong ideas how to do that well.

01:58:36.800 | And clearly the initial attempts that kind of just open it up wide, some of the lesser

01:58:44.260 | aspects of human nature can take over when combined with different forces like advertisements

01:58:50.140 | and virality and all those kinds of things.

01:58:52.360 | But overall, I love the honesty of the mess of it being presented before us on social

01:58:58.560 | media.

01:58:59.560 | It's part of me, maybe because I don't participate it.

01:59:03.840 | Like if somebody is being mean to me or being aggressive and these kinds of things, I enjoy

01:59:10.000 | it because it's human nature.

01:59:13.400 | But I enjoy it because I don't respond.

01:59:15.040 | I think if I responded, I would get pulled into this human nature and then it's not fun.

01:59:19.560 | But I love the...

01:59:21.120 | I'll talk to people.

01:59:22.600 | In fact, I still visit Clubhouse.

01:59:24.400 | I don't know if you know what that is.

01:59:25.920 | - Sure.

01:59:26.920 | - Oh, right.

01:59:27.920 | That's right.

01:59:28.920 | Actually when I...

01:59:29.920 | - I think that's how we first met.

01:59:30.920 | - Well, yeah.

01:59:31.920 | Well, I was such a fan boy.

01:59:32.920 | I was like, "I can't believe I get to talk to David Welby."

01:59:37.200 | But the Israel-Palestine topic was something that was very deeply in a heated way discussed

01:59:47.560 | on Clubhouse.

01:59:48.560 | Race relations is a thing that was really heatedly discussed.

01:59:52.360 | And I now go to Clubhouse to practice Russian.

01:59:55.440 | And there in Russian, the heated discussion is on basically any topic as meaningless or

02:00:03.400 | meaningful as you want and the heat of it.

02:00:06.760 | Just people just screaming and then calming down and going through the full process.

02:00:12.360 | That too is beautiful because that emotion is there.

02:00:15.080 | And if it is allowed to have a voice, I think ultimately it leads to healing.

02:00:21.700 | So that felt really healthy.

02:00:23.200 | If you learn how to do that at scale.

02:00:26.680 | - Social media, I wish that it were not as algorithmically biased towards conflict.

02:00:32.040 | I don't think that that's healthy, but I do...

02:00:35.360 | I think it brings a lot of blessings into people's lives if they use it wisely.

02:00:41.480 | Like anything else, it can be awful, but it can...

02:00:47.160 | I've connected to all sorts of people that I never would have known.

02:00:51.000 | And that's been wonderful.

02:00:52.320 | So...

02:00:53.320 | - Let me ask you the big question of advice.

02:00:57.440 | What advice would you give to young people today that are maybe high school, college,

02:01:04.240 | thinking about career, thinking about life, that can be proud of?

02:01:08.080 | - So the first thing that I would say is that life is longer than you think it is.

02:01:13.200 | Even though I understand the impulse to be in a rush, you will have many unfoldings.

02:01:22.080 | Or even the people of my generation did.

02:01:24.360 | - Unfoldings, that's such a funny word.

02:01:26.280 | It's a beautiful word.

02:01:27.280 | - I'd suggest...

02:01:28.280 | - Unfolding.

02:01:29.280 | - But it feels that way.

02:01:30.280 | It's like different aspects of your life will come...

02:01:33.520 | Will show you different possibilities that you don't imagine at the moment.

02:01:40.640 | And I think the second thing that I would say is...

02:01:46.680 | I know that this is a very old-fashioned, but I would say don't...

02:01:52.520 | To the extent that you can read, don't just...

02:01:55.800 | And not just on social media, read books.

02:01:58.960 | Learn things that will give you a broader context for your life than just today or yesterday

02:02:05.480 | or the day before.

02:02:09.720 | And I suppose the other thing that I would say is that to the extent that you can try

02:02:22.560 | to develop your own internal metric of both what matters and what is good, because you

02:02:29.760 | will be exposed to more voices than any generation in history telling you that that's good or

02:02:36.440 | this is good.

02:02:37.440 | They're not called influencers, but what they are is voices telling you what you should

02:02:41.960 | think and what you should believe.

02:02:44.040 | And so have some internal space where you'll be able to say, for example, "I know this

02:02:51.280 | person is doing that and it looks great, but that's not me."

02:02:54.800 | - You have a community of people that speak to you with a lot of passion.

02:03:02.320 | Do you still have that voice in your own, in the privacy of your own mind that you're

02:03:09.000 | able to ignore, like for a moment, just be with yourself and think what is right?

02:03:15.880 | - Absolutely.

02:03:16.880 | And I think it's partly because I grew up without that.

02:03:19.200 | I mean, I grew up with a lot of space in my life, and so I had a chance to develop that

02:03:24.400 | voice.

02:03:25.400 | That's why I think it's harder for kids today than it was for me.

02:03:28.360 | I mean, I grew up when there were three channels.

02:03:30.400 | There was three, six, and 10.

02:03:31.600 | There was ABC, CBS, and NBC, and that was it.

02:03:35.120 | And you spent your evening playing board games or reading or whatever, and there was a lot

02:03:38.800 | of space.

02:03:40.200 | And we played football on the street, and you went on your bike in the morning, and

02:03:43.800 | nobody worried about you, and you came home at night and everybody assumed you were fine.

02:03:49.160 | And also, I went into a religious tradition where I feel like I have the opportunity to

02:03:57.320 | judge myself by bigger metrics.

02:04:01.140 | And it's still hard.

02:04:02.140 | I don't want to, it's not like, oh, it's, I wear impenetrable armor.

02:04:06.860 | It's still hard.

02:04:07.860 | So how much harder for kids today when they don't have that?

02:04:13.880 | - You mentioned books.

02:04:15.600 | Is there Bertrand Russell and Denial of Death by Ernest Becker?

02:04:20.200 | Is there books that pop into mind that had an impact on you?

02:04:25.200 | - My favorite novel is Middlemarch.

02:04:27.640 | - Middlemarch?

02:04:28.640 | - Middlemarch.

02:04:29.640 | I remember, I was listening to a podcast, I was listening to one of your podcasts where

02:04:34.040 | your guest said the two greatest novels of the 19th century were Brothers Karamazov and

02:04:41.880 | what was the other one he mentioned?

02:04:43.000 | I don't remember.

02:04:44.000 | - Dostoevsky as well or no?

02:04:45.000 | - I think.

02:04:46.000 | - Was it both Dostoevsky?

02:04:47.000 | - It might have been.

02:04:48.000 | I don't remember.

02:04:49.000 | Maybe the, but anyway, but I would say Middlemarch is up there.

02:04:51.880 | Middlemarch presents an entire world, and it's written by a woman, Mary Ann Evans, who

02:04:57.720 | took the pen name George Eliot, who you feel, Virginia Woolf said it's the only English

02:05:04.480 | novel written for grownups.

02:05:07.340 | You feel the genius in her sentences, like the pressure of her intellect in her sentences.

02:05:12.000 | It's a beautiful, it's a wonderful, wonderful book.

02:05:14.280 | I love it.

02:05:15.280 | - Pressure of her intellect.

02:05:16.760 | - Yeah, you really do.

02:05:20.040 | I also love, I love Saul Bellow, especially Herzog, but it's a very different kind of

02:05:26.720 | thinking person's novel.

02:05:27.840 | I read a lot of mysteries and a lot of other kinds of fiction and literature, but in terms

02:05:34.520 | of the books that most, you mentioned one of them, which is Viktor Frankl's Man's Search

02:05:40.920 | for Meaning, and I also really, really love Heschel's The Sabbath.

02:05:46.040 | I think it's a beautiful book.

02:05:48.480 | It's a very short book, just as Frankl's book is.

02:05:51.720 | - What do you take from Man's Search for Meaning?

02:05:54.880 | What do you take of a human being in the worst conditions being able to non-dramatically

02:06:05.120 | find little joys, find beauty?

02:06:10.400 | - It's what I said before about Judaism's advice to younger people, is that it mattered.

02:06:15.280 | If you believe that something matters, you have enormous resilience.

02:06:20.320 | It's meaninglessness that is the greatest threat to a decent life.

02:06:24.400 | When people are deeply depressed, whether it is chemical depression or what they feel

02:06:30.240 | like is this is all meaningless, and meaning...

02:06:35.400 | Now obviously chemical depression calls in part for chemical means, but meaning is the

02:06:44.640 | great antidote.

02:06:47.700 | We can talk about what kind of meaning.

02:06:49.720 | There are kinds of meanings that are awful, but meaning is the great antidote to a sense

02:06:55.480 | that life is just nihilistic and purposeless and to that destructiveness that I think is

02:07:03.920 | too common.

02:07:04.920 | - Yeah, so maybe the heroic action in Nazi Germany, in the Holocaust, in the camps is

02:07:12.800 | the even not the action, but just the realization that every life matters.

02:07:18.240 | So here's this really wonderful story that Hugo Grin, who was a rabbi in England, died,

02:07:25.280 | I don't know, like 15, 20 years ago, used to tell.

02:07:27.920 | He grew up in Auschwitz.

02:07:29.480 | He was a child there and he was with his father and it was Hanukkah and you're supposed to

02:07:34.320 | light the candles.

02:07:35.440 | And his father took the margarine ration and used it as the oil to light the Hanukkah candles.

02:07:39.840 | And Hugo was scandalized and he said, "That's our food."

02:07:43.540 | And his father said, "What we have learned, my son, is you can live for three weeks without

02:07:49.140 | food.

02:07:50.140 | You can live for three days without water, but you can't live for three minutes without

02:07:54.140 | hope."

02:07:55.140 | - Well, hope, let me ask you, you said meaning.

02:08:04.060 | What's the meaning of this whole thing?

02:08:06.060 | What's the meaning of life?

02:08:07.620 | You're the perfect person to ask this question.

02:08:10.620 | - Rabbi David Wolfe.

02:08:11.620 | - I believe the meaning of life is for human beings to grow in soul.

02:08:16.160 | That's why we're here.

02:08:17.160 | And you can do that in infinite numbers of ways, but you're supposed to return your soul

02:08:21.300 | like more burnished and beautiful, then you got it.

02:08:25.020 | I mean, it's gonna have some nicks and cuts, but that's what it means to deepen and grow

02:08:32.740 | it.

02:08:33.740 | And you do that more than anything else.

02:08:38.280 | You do that by learning how to love.

02:08:40.100 | I mean, that's the principle way I think that you do it.

02:08:43.140 | - You know, it's interesting 'cause for a human, the relationship, if you're a man of

02:08:49.140 | faith is with God, but it feels like love is so richly part of human society that it's

02:08:58.220 | not just love of God, it's love of each other.

02:09:01.460 | - Right, yep.

02:09:02.460 | There's no question about the idea.

02:09:03.980 | I mean, in Judaism, that was actually the great innovation of the monotheistic idea.

02:09:10.000 | In pagan societies, it was all about how you treated the gods.

02:09:14.740 | Monotheism said, no, God cares how you treat each other.

02:09:17.340 | So it's, in fact, the mystics use the same kind of word in Hebrew, d'vaikut, which means

02:09:25.900 | clinging, that is used about Adam and Eve.

02:09:30.100 | It says, "Therefore a man will leave his father and mother and davach with his wife."

02:09:35.300 | And davach means cling.

02:09:36.580 | So there is an analogy there, absolutely.

02:09:39.420 | - Yeah, I kind of think of human civilization is that, there's that movie "March of the

02:09:44.500 | Penguins" and they're all huddling together in the cold.

02:09:48.140 | This is fundamentally human.

02:09:49.820 | There's this darkness all around us of uncertainty, of cruelty, of just, it seems like everything

02:10:00.060 | is so fragile and we're just kind of all huddling together for warmth.

02:10:05.980 | And that's all we got is each other.

02:10:08.980 | So we started with the big question of what is God, ended with what is meaning.

02:10:16.700 | Rabbi Wolpe, I've been a huge, as I've told you, huge, huge fan of you for a long time.

02:10:20.460 | It's such an honor that you talked to me today.

02:10:21.660 | - I am really so happy to be here and thank you so much for the conversation.

02:10:27.660 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation with David Wolpe.

02:10:29.900 | To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.

02:10:34.060 | And now let me leave you with some words from David himself.

02:10:38.460 | The only whole heart is a broken one because it lets the light in.

02:10:43.980 | Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

02:10:46.700 | - Bye.

02:10:47.700 | - Bye.

02:10:48.700 | - Bye.

02:10:48.780 | - Bye.

02:10:49.280 | - Bye.

02:10:50.280 | - Bye.

02:10:51.280 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

David Wolpe: Judaism | Lex Fridman Podcast #270

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