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