Gavriel Martindale traces his journey from English moderate Judaism to ultra-Orthodox Stamford Hill and finally Israel, critiquing the nation's "Jewish Groyperism" aesthetic and religious right extremism. He clarifies Talmudic laws regarding Gentiles and Noahide codes as theoretical rather than prescriptive for modern violence, while condemning Kabbalah as necromancy and the Lubavitch movement as heretical messianism. Ultimately, Martindale argues that fusing faith with militarism and racial hatred damages Judaism's core Talmudic identity, urging a return to honest engagement with ancient texts rather than political opportunism. [Automatically generated summary]
And I know I always say I'm excited about this special guest, but before we meet him, let's have a word from one of our sponsors.
If you're down the rabbit hole, which you probably are, otherwise you wouldn't be listening to this podcast, you've probably gone through your medicine cabinets and your bathroom cabinets and chucked out all the big pharma evil products and you've replaced them with natural products like the stuff that I've got in my cabinets, which is from Brand Zero.
If you've been to any of my live events, you may even have seen the Brand Zero stool run by the lovely Sasha and it sells all manner of stuff that you actually want in your home and to put on your skin.
Pain balm, Arnica gel, Dagmous honey from Morocco.
Well actually that's more for eating than putting your skin.
There's a good story about how the company started.
It was during the pandemic and all the people who were having to put on these horrible hand sanitizers were getting their skin all cracked and dry and horrible.
And Sasha had this great idea of having a sort of fundraiser to provide local nurses near Stroud where she lives with soothing beeswax balms.
So it was just a kind of altruistic gesture.
And over 1,000 nurses and carers across the Stroud area ended up getting these soothing beeswax balms and this developed into a business of massage oils, bath oils, shampoo bars, aromatherapy oils, organic handmade soaps and so on.
All of it made with natural ingredients, no nasties, no cruelty to animals.
And now Brand Zero Naturals is going great guns.
So you can find them at brandzeronaturals.co.uk.
That's brandzeronaturals.co.uk.
I love their stuff and they're really popular as well.
Loads of people buy their stuff.
I think you'll like them if you don't use their stuff already.
Brandzeronaturals.co.uk.
Brand Zero Naturals Success00:15:00
Welcome to the Dellingpod.
Gavriel, what's your surname?
Martindale.
Gavriel Martin.
I like Gavriel.
I mean, it's obviously like, it's like Gabriel, yeah?
Yeah, yeah.
So English people usually name me as Gabriel.
My English birth certificate says Gabriel.
I want to explain to everyone how this podcast came about.
I think in the early days of my Telegram channel, when I was just starting to go down the rabbit hole and realizing that the world was just way crazier than I thought, one of the people who hung out on the channel was a rabbi in New York.
And I liked having him there because he could answer questions that one wanted to know about Jews and Judaism and what they believe.
I mean, it was only one man, but and then he left.
And he was always quite secretive because he likes to fly under the radar.
And you've told, I mean, you know his name, but you've also told me there's no point telling his name because he obviously wants to keep it a secret.
I mean, I think he was, I've written, I've read some articles that he's written on things like how the schools in New York have been in Jewish schools are incredibly Israelified.
They're basically pushing Israeli propaganda.
They're no longer about Judaism per se.
They're about pushing Zionism.
But that's all I know about him.
Anyway, he said, you should get my friend Gabriel to talk about stuff.
He'd be happy to do it.
And all I know about you is you're a friend of the mystery rabbi and you're called Gabriel and that you've got a substack called non-Zionism.
So that's kind of your position, isn't it?
You're kind of not pro or anti.
You're just kind of, you want to be out of that particular loop.
Yeah, that's the idea.
The idea is to see if it's possible, really.
Basically, events conspire to make it.
So you feel as if you have to have an opinion.
And I, well, I have opinions, but should we say a side?
And the blog is, you know, a stab at what it might look like to not have a side in that dispute.
And before we go on, what's your story?
You've got a very English accent, so I'm presuming you were brought up in...
Because you're now in the Golden Heights, aren't you?
Right.
So I was born on the south coast of England, near Brighton.
I went to a normal English school.
I went to a normal English university where I met our mystery rabbi friend.
And I was brought up moderately religious, you might say.
I became more religious at university.
And then I lived for a few years in an ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionist community.
And then through various media, I went to the other end of things.
I became a religious Zionist.
And based on my religious Zionist opinions, I moved to Israel.
I lived for six years in Jerusalem, during which time my religious Zionist opinions crumbled.
And I moved to the Golan Heights for a quiet life, basically.
Golan Heights is a nice place.
It's the safest place in Israel for various reasons.
It's a bit like living in Dorset or something.
The nature is as pretty as Dorset, but the houses aren't as pretty as Dorset.
And that's why I live here.
It's not a political statement.
It's the opposite of a political statement.
I probably never get to see the Golan Heights, but I sort of, in my imagination, I imagined the name sounds like, it sounds very forbidding.
And I know that the Golan Heights were strategically important because if you control the Golan Heights, you can, well, you can shell Israel, can't you, from the Golan Heights, which is why they wanted to capture it in either what, the Yom Kippur or the Six-Day War, I forget which.
Well, both.
Both.
Right.
Okay.
So you've covered both extremes.
You must have done time with the IDF.
No, when we moved to Israel, I was 29.
I think that's right.
Something like that.
And as a result, at the time, the general tendency of the IDF was to move to a smaller army, what they call a quasi-professional army, as opposed to a conscript army, because they thought that the days of large-scale warfare were largely over.
And they actually never even, they never asked me.
They just said, oh, you're older than the normal age of conscription.
You're already married.
You already have a child.
And it never came up.
Some people who immigrate do have to join the army.
Some people do a kind of token bit of army.
Some people have to seek an exemption.
But for me, it literally just never came up.
They never asked me and I never asked them.
So you've really whetted my appetite now because I'm really interested in hearing both what it was like in the ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionist community and your phase when you became massively pro-Zionist.
So, well, yeah, tell me about the anti-Zionist ones first.
Because I mean, I've heard about this, that there are ultra-Orthodox Jews who don't believe in the state of Israel.
They think it's a bad thing.
I mean, what's their line?
Okay, so the traditional view of Orthodox Judaism is against Zionism.
When Zionism started as a movement in the 1880s, originally there was at the very early stage, there was some Orthodox interest.
But by the time of Herzl, the overwhelming majority of European rabbis, who at the time were the overwhelming majority of rabbis before World War II, were very, very much against.
And it wasn't really an ultra-Orthodox or Orthodox issue.
It was just Orthodox Judaism was against Zionism.
And the Agudas Israel, which was the umbrella group for Orthodox Judaism in Europe. at the time until various splinter groups to their right or more ultra-Orthodox groups were split off their definite definition that they were defined by their opposition to Zionism.
So that's the traditional view.
And the traditional view is very, it has three, there are three ways of putting it and they can go together or you can emphasize one more than the other.
One is that the Zionist movement is secular.
It was always led by secular Jews, or at the very most, kind of somewhat religious Jews.
But that was earlier on.
By the time of Herzl, it was really a secular movement.
And who are you to say that you are now the leaders of the Jews?
We've had our religion for 3,500 years or whatever you want to say, but certainly a long time.
It's been this way.
We want to continue with the Judaism we know.
We're not interested in your new Zionist solution to the Jewish problem.
That's one form of Orthodox anti-Zionism.
Another one is the idea that it's forbidden for Jews to have a state.
Even if hypothetically the Zionist movement was religious or pro-religious, it would still be forbidden for the Jews to have a state because we're in exile for our various sins.
We'll know when the exile is over prophetically or through miracles or whatever.
This has not happened.
And therefore, it's forbidden for us to have a state.
And there's a concept which is Googleable called the Three Oaths, which is based upon a midrashic exegesis of some parts of the Song of Songs, which basically says there are three oaths and the Gentiles have an oath not to oppress us too much.
And we have an oath not to rebel against the Gentiles.
We're supposed to be subject to their rule for the time being, until the time of the Messiah, and then we won't be.
So that's another form of anti-Zionism that it's the idea that it represents a rebellion against divinely imposed exile.
And the third form of Orthodox anti-Zionism, which doesn't necessarily have to be Orthodox, but it can be Orthodox, is that it's just a bad idea.
I.e., what do you mean?
You're going to go travel all the way to Ottoman Palestine and fight the nasis and what are you going to do?
You're going to rebel against the Ottoman Empire?
What are you talking about?
Like, where are your armies?
Where are your enemies?
That was also a mainstream anti-Zionist argument originally.
And Orthodox people participated in that just as non-Orthodox Jews participated in that.
So that's the basis of Orthodox anti-Zionism.
And then what happened is that the success of the state of Israel in existing and winning wars against its enemies, it meant that the last of those arguments was no longer considered valid.
Okay, at the time, and Zionism might have seemed a bit of a wacky idea, but it worked.
So there's no real, or at least it was fought, there was no real reason to oppose Zionism on those grounds.
The idea that it's a rebellion against God is difficult to maintain for many people because if it's a rebellion against God, why did it work?
As in, if you believe that God runs the world and you don't want to go in for some kind of dualist theology in which the devil has, or whatever evil entity has the ability to run Rampage, you would have to say that, okay, there's Zionism, it's a rebellion against God.
Well, we know what happens when people rebel against God.
They fail.
They will be crushed.
And that will be that.
And the fact is they were crushed.
They were very successful.
So therefore, maybe it wasn't a rebellion against God.
And the first form of anti-Zionism, the fact that it's not religious or anti-religious, has ebbed because the State of Israel is a lot less secular than it used to be.
I don't think any reasonable person would say the State of Israel today is anti-religious or persecutes religious people.
There are people who say that, but it's not a reasonable thing to say.
And therefore, most religious Jews have come around to one of two positions.
One is religious Zionism, which we can get to.
And one is something you might call quasi-non-Zionism, not my personal form of non-Zionism, but ultra-Orthodox non-Zionism, which is just, look, we don't really understand.
We're against this.
But it seems to have worked.
It offers us certain concrete benefits, like the ability to live in a land of Israel, which for most Orthodox Jews is considered at least desirable, shall we say.
And this just kind of worked with this thing.
And that is the mainstream Orthodox position today, among non-religious Zionists, I mean.
The idea that basically, okay, it seems to have got some kind of divine validation.
Also, the Holocaust happened.
So that kind of seems in some sense a divine invalidation of just kind of being in exile and hoping the Gentiles aren't too persecuting of you.
So we'll work with this thing.
And because there's this constant tension and worsen tension with the Arabs around, and there's terrorist attacks, etc., that tends to lead to more of a Just to instinctively see the state of Israel and the Israeli army as kind of defending you as a Jew, which tends to make you more positively disposed towards it.
And so the mainstream Orthodox non-religious Zionist position has become de facto very, very pro-Israel.
So it's non-Zionist.
They won't say they're Zionists.
And they don't idolize Herzl or have any particularly, they don't think about Zionist history or care about it, but they just like Israel.
They think Israel is good.
The IDF protects us.
They like to go to the Western Wall in Jerusalem, etc.
So that would be the mainstream Orthodox position among non-religious Zionists.
There is a smaller group who adhere to, who maintain the strict anti-Zionist position that used to be the overwhelming majority of Orthodox Judaism.
And the largest group that do that are called Satma Hasidim, who are descendants of a Hungarian group who set themselves up in New York after World War II, after World War II.
And there's a large Satma community in London, in North London.
And basically what they say is it's all a test.
That's what they say.
So it looks like the State of Israel has been very successful.
It looks like they've received some kind of divine validation, but really it's just a test.
And you just wait and see because everything's going to turn out a big disaster.
But it's very hard to straddle that line without falling into kind of Naturi Karta.
And I'm sure probably a lot of your viewers have heard of Naturi Karta because they make a big song and dance about themselves.
They have social media, they have a YouTube account, they go to demonstrations, and they're the ones who you see who they walk around with Palestinian flags and they denounce the state of Israel every time they can on the world media, etc.
So they are a very small group.
And they consider themselves to be really the only authentic Jews today.
And they consider even mainstream Satma Hasidim to be some kind of sellout.
The Satma Hasidic position is we oppose Zionism as a rebellion against our divinely mandated exile, but that doesn't mean that we support Palestinian nationalism.
We have no position on who should rule the Holy Land.
It could be the Ottoman Empire, it could be the British Mandate, it could be whoever.
But we have no interest in seeing the Palestinian Liberation Organization take over Palestine.
It's not our concern.
And basically, they keep it up with a certain amount of stress by being very, very insular.
They've built this town in upstate New York called Kirius Yol, which is a kind of Hasidic only, they call it a village, but it's 60,000 people now, something like that.
And they just don't really think about the outside world very much.
And basically, they're just waiting patiently until what they believe will happen, which is that the state of Israel will collapse and they'll be vindicated all along.
That's anti-Zionism, religious anti-Zionism today.
Right.
Okay.
And this was the.
Ultra-Orthodox Draft Mobilization00:02:21
That was the the the, the sect that you were part of in the early days.
No no no so, yes and no.
So in Stamford Hill in north London there's every single type of orthodox Jewish group, is is, is represented, is it Satma?
Are that?
They're not a majority, but they are the largest group there may be 20 of the community in Stamp Hill, something like that and they exert a lot of dominance there.
Um, so i'll give an example of something that happened when I was living there, um, the Israeli there's um, there's a Jewish ambulance service called um HAT Solar.
Uh they uh, they raise money, they have their own ambulance uh, and they serve the local community and they work with NHS etc and they're, you know, respectable charity.
And they invited the Israeli ambassador uh, what's her name?
That woman I, I don't, I don't recall um to just do a like a normal photoshop whatever, and then they had to apologize to the community because Satma got very, um upset.
They made a big stand on the dance about it, so they had to take out an ad in all the local newspapers.
We're very sorry for offending you.
We, of course, we don't adore Zionism whatever, so that's how it goes in that community.
I, the strict Anti-Zionists, are not a majority, but they kind of throw their weight around enough to maintain some kind of distancing from any kind of Pro-Israel viewpoint.
And at times of stress which usually the main thing is the the draft issue, the idea of the Ultra-Orthodox draft question Israel, they're able to kind of mobilize larger parts of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community get to be more assertively Anti-Zionist because they're able to portray it as a threat.
So the ultra-Orthodox community as a whole kind of they kind of waver.
So around about the time of October the 7th they were feeling a lot more Pro-Israel because there was this natural kind of solidarity with other Jews, the idea they're all under threat, we're all in this together.
When the draft issue comes comes up, they switch switch to being in a more Anti-Israel position because they see it as more of a threat to their community.
I wasn't in Satma itself but I was part of this broader community which was heavily influenced by Satma.
Right I, I had a girlfriend um, who used to live in Stamford Hill.
I bet you'd know it um, Ravens.
I hope she wasn't a Sahma Chasid, she wasn't.
No, Ravensdale Road, of course.
Wigs, Hats, and Frummers00:06:03
Yes yeah, okay.
So obviously I used to see.
She used to call them Frummers.
Is that right?
Is that the name for the Frummers?
Yeah yeah, that's a, that's a.
That's, a, an old one right from us.
So she was a Jewish girl?
No, she wasn't but, but she knew.
I suppose you can't, you can't, live in Ravensdale Road without becoming familiar with the, with the culture.
Um, I mean, it was quite interesting that I used to like looking at the different hats um, and there were sort of broad-brimmed, sort of fedora type hats, and then there were the kind of like woolly, Like, like more Russian-looking.
Tell me about the different hats.
Okay, so there are people who wear normal fedora hats who are called Lithuanian.
That's how they're known.
Lithuanian, non-Hasidic.
Another term is Yeshivish, which is one of the two main branches of Old Orthodox Judaism.
And they basically dress, they wear like a normal suit, always black, usually without a tie, and a normal hat, except it's not normal anymore because people don't wear hats.
But their clothing is basically what it was normal to wear in Lithuania 100 years ago, if you were a smart person.
That's them.
And there are then the Hasidim, which there are lots of different Hasidic sects, who wear weirder clothes.
It's part of the.
They're much more separatist in terms of their lifestyle.
So they speak Yiddish as a first language, as a rule, whereas Lithuanians don't.
They tend to speak English, or if they live in Israel, Hebrew is their first language.
So Hasina speak Yiddish.
They obviously have this weird clothing.
And they're much more segregated from wider society, whether it's in Israel or whether it's in a Gentile country, as a matter of policy.
And so, yeah, they're the ones with weird hats.
So they have what's called a furry hat on the Sabbath or on festivals.
They have a furry hat, which is called a strimel, which is what the Polish lower nobility used to wear hundreds of years ago.
And on other days, they have other types of hats that are kind of weird, Jew-only hats, which it's very complicated.
You probably don't want to know all the details.
It might not be worth it.
But basically, which hat you wear depends on which Hasidic sect you are, but also which wing of that Hasidic sect you are.
So some of them indicate if you're like more of a business-minded person, you wear a particular type of hat.
But if you're a very pious person who devotes more of your life to piety, then there's a particular type of hat.
And it all kind of symbolizes things, and it's also a family thing, and blah, blah, blah.
And it's extremely, extremely complicated.
I only understand.
The cat in this ghost is meowing too much.
No problem.
Yeah, come on.
No, I like the idea that there are different hats depending on how religious you are, what rank you are.
It seems to me that the men get a much better deal than the women.
The women seem to have to wear slightly horrible blue, unnatural dresses made of what look like unnatural fibers to me.
They don't look like cotton or silk or and they wear wigs.
Okay, so in Orthodox Jewish law, a woman has to cover her hair when she's outside.
So they're different ways.
You can wear a hat, you can wear a scarf.
Wigs is considered the more moderate thing to do.
Because women, sorry to offend 50% of your audience, but women tend to be vain.
And many of them find it a burden to have to cover their hair outside.
And most ultra-Orthodox students would say also inside the house.
And so therefore the idea of wearing a wig came up, which is obviously a loophole.
And among certain groups, Stanford Hill would be much less this way, but other in northwest London, Hendon, Golders Green, et cetera, women often wear very, very glamorous wigs that make them look much more eye-catching, we might say, than your average woman who's not wearing a wig.
And then there are different ones.
There are more extreme ones.
Stanford Hill is a very extreme place in general.
How long ago was it you were there?
This would have been in the 847.
This would have been in the 90s.
Okay, so if you go back now, you might be surprised by how much, because the community is much larger than it was and also much wealthier than it used to be.
You'll be surprised about this whole Hasidic fashion industry among women has grown up.
And they're very, one of the things my wife didn't like so much about living there is actually there's a very, there's a lot of pressure to dress smart.
That um, from the women internally among themselves.
They don't like uh, uh to, you know, to dull yourself up to always make sure you're whatever um, uh.
So there's this again.
There are women who are more pious and therefore they'll just wear a cloth on their head and and and kind of black clothes and and not make up.
But I mean a lot of a lot of ultra-orthodox women put a lot of time into their appearance um um, at least as much, if not more, than outside.
I was thinking probably um certainly, when I was there, the women in their wigs and dresses probably didn't have much of a budget.
So they, they were probably buying not very good wigs and not very quality clothes, do you think okay?
So again, I i'd actually recommend going back and having a little stroll around.
Uh, you know, don't worry, they won't bite.
You'd be surprised about how how nice some of the wigs are, the wigs that go down for five thousand pounds or more.
It would be.
It certainly would be a trip down memory lane um, and I would quite like to see the uh, the hats.
Did you did?
Did you wear a hat?
I wore a, uh like a normal fedora type of hat.
Do you not kind of covet those uh, those Russian ones?
No no, I I never.
I was never like I was never.
You said this is an.
This is a kind of internal thing about uh, philosophy and and and observance of this.
I was never Hasidically inclined myself.
I don't.
Orthodox Synagogue vs. Secular Education00:09:15
I'm not Pro-Hasidic, right?
Yeah well okay, so this is.
This brings us to a much bigger question, which is like I certainly when I was at university, in the years afterwards, when I lived in London, basically I would say a very high proportion of my friends, higher than is represented in the population as a percentage of the population, were Jewish, But they were generally very secular.
I mean, one knew they were Jewish because, well, you just do, you know, which of your friends are Jewish and which are not.
And you'd occasionally get nods to it.
But I think if you'd quizzed them on what are the tenets of their religious belief, they would not have had a clue.
Does that make sense to you?
I mean, there are certainly many Jews who are not very religious.
But the majority, probably.
Where?
Globally, worldwide?
Well, I mean, I suppose we're talking about in Britain, which is what I know, but I would imagine America is similar.
I don't know.
But you tell me.
I'm asking, actually, I'm curious.
Okay.
So traditionally, Britain is a bit unusual.
Britain had a model which is quite similar to Anglican Christianity in that the majority of Jews in 1990, but even more so in 1970, were members of an Orthodox synagogue.
And they would go maybe once a month, maybe once a week if they were more into it, maybe twice a year if they were less into it.
But in their everyday lives, they were not very observant, which is not the case in America, sorry.
In America, the vast majority of Jews until very recently were members of either the Reform or what's called the Conservative movement, which is a bit of a misnomer because they're very, very liberal.
But in Britain, traditionally, most Jews, you know, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin once put it, and something that is a very recognizable concept in English Judaism, he said, the synagogue I don't go to is Orthodox.
And that was the Judaism of most people.
For example, I remember once, you know, we grew up probably more religious than the average English Jew, but certainly not very religious.
And I remember once I was at school and there was this other girl and I had no idea she was Jewish.
And then I found out and she mentioned she'd had a bat mitzvah.
And she mentioned that her bat mitzvah, she'd been called up and she'd read from the Torah, which is something you can't, in an Orthodox synagogue, there's no such thing as a woman getting up to read from the Torah.
They sit in a separate part of the room behind some sort of small barrier, et cetera, like Muslims.
And I remember at the time, I was just like disgusted.
What are you talking about?
You're a girl.
You can't go out to read from the Torah.
But I wasn't, I wasn't, you know, there were huge areas of Jewish law that I didn't observe myself.
But in terms of the synagogue and the ritual side of it, to the extent that we kept it, we kept it very much on a Orthodox Jewish model.
So back in 1990, I would imagine these guys you knew, if they ever went to a synagogue, most likely the synagogue they went to was an Orthodox synagogue where they would pray in Hebrew.
In a reform synagogue, often they pray in the vernacular language, and where you know Orthodox Jew, Orthodox Jewish law is followed for the duration that you're in the synagogue and then outside it's not.
A very common thing that English Jews do is that they kind of keep kosher a bit.
So the norm that I knew of really growing up was, you know, you eat wherever you want, but you eat vegetarians.
So you don't eat non-kosher meat, but you're not worried that you have no idea what's going on in the kitchen, what got mixed up with what.
So probably you're eating non-kosher, but you know, you do the minimum, you don't order a steak, you know, or the next level down is you would order a steak, but you wouldn't order a pork shop.
These are the kind of that's what English Jewry used to be.
Nowadays, English Jewry is very different because basically what happened is that kind of quasi-Anglican model collapsed.
A lot of people went one of different ways.
Either they just blended into the general population and dropped Jewish observance altogether, or they moved to Israel, which is something that has happened.
It is quite common and it's becoming more common.
Or they joined the growing ultra-Orthodox movement, which even when I was a boy, ultra-Orthodoxy was considered like a very, very fringe thing.
I remember also, I remember the first time I ever saw a Hasidic Jew.
We were in London.
I looked at my mom.
I was like, what on earth is that?
What have I just seen?
But nowadays, the community is massively expanded to some extent because of people joining, but also because of they had a very high birth rate.
And something close to half of Jewish children today under the age of 10 are now ultra-Orthodox.
So the Jewish community of the future is going to look totally every Jewish stereotype that you know, like very interested in secular, you know, very interested in education.
That's the big Jewish stereotype, right?
Or, you know, vote, you know, vote Labor Party as a matter of course.
That used to be a Jewish stereotype until about 50 years.
Or become become lawyers or doctors or yeah, all that, all of those things is the exact opposite of what the stereotype of a Jew in England will be in 50 years' time.
So Hasidim also are quite, they're quite money-minded.
All Jews, that's something that's common to a lot of Jews.
But they don't go for the professions.
They don't become doctors and lawyers.
They're really into real estate.
The dream of every Hasidic Jew, except the really pious ones who just want to learn Torah Day, but the dream of your average Hasidic Jew is to own a row of properties and flip them and stuff.
And I mean, for example, people don't know this.
Like Canary Wharf for a long time was owned by a Hasidic Jew in Stanford Hill.
I think I did know that.
I can't remember why.
Yeah.
Okay.
So it's changing quite dramatically.
So sorry, you said ultra-Orthodox for the Orthodox.
Is there an accepted definition of the two?
Okay, so one is just by dress.
As in, if you wear all black as a man, you're probably ultra-Orthodox.
That's one category, one difference.
One difference, it used to be a difference, but it's kind of fading a little bit, used to be the attitude to Zionism.
As in, after the State of Israel was formed, the ones who maintained an anti-Zionist or non-Zionist position, who, for example, they don't mark Israel independent state, that would be a key test.
There's no marking of Israel independent state.
That would mark you as ultra-Orthodox, whereas a normal Orthodox synagogue would in some way mark Israel independent state.
That was one difference.
And the other difference is just it's a gradient of how strict you are about fulfilling Jewish law.
And in that one, it's quite hard to pick a it's quite hard to pick the boundary.
Where does Orthodox end or where does ultra-Orthodox begin?
But you know, you know where the extremes are, so to speak.
Right, right.
Okay.
Oh, another one.
Sorry, and actually a very, very big one is attitude to secular education.
So in Orthodox Judaism, non-ultra-Orthodox Judaism, secular education is considered good.
You know, it's not the main thing in life, maybe, but it's fine.
It's good.
It's whatever.
Ultra-Orthodox Jews are to some extent, it depends which group, they're to some extent anti-secular education.
They might say it's allowed because you need to get a job, you need to get on in life, or it's allowed because of government, but they're in principle opposed to the concept of secular education.
That's part of the definition of being ultra-Orthodox.
Right.
So do you think we should do your Zionist phase of your life next?
I want to ask you some tricksy questions about what it is that Jews actually believe.
And I know it's not that simple, but we're going to talk about that.
But should we do okay, you felt the lure, you felt the call of Zion.
By the way, are you sort of, you mentioned the Torah.
The Torah is what?
Is that the same as the Pentateuch?
Is it the first two?
Basically, the Torah can mean one of two things.
It can mean the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, or it can mean all of Jewish law.
Those are kind of those are if I say the word Torah in speech, I might be referring to the first or I might be referring to the second.
Right.
Okay, that's complicated.
It's a bit like Europe and Europe.
You could be talking about the continent or you could be talking about the political entity.
Yeah.
Okay.
So we'll come back to the one.
So you felt the lure.
What was it that?
Torah: Pentateuch or Law?00:03:12
Okay.
So basically, for me, it was like this.
So I grew up in the traditional English sub-Orthodox environment.
So the synagogue we went to was Orthodox.
The rabbi was Orthodox.
And I was aware that the rabbi kept Jewish law much more strictly than we did.
But I guess in the same sense that maybe a typical Roman Catholic looks at his priest and he doesn't feel any need to be celibate just because his priest is celibate.
I didn't feel any need to be strictly observant of the Sabbath just because my rabbi was.
And then during and after university, I became, first of all, orthodox and then ultra-orthodox.
And basically, for me, as a personal experience, it was the idea that you could keep, well, basically that was all wrong.
Basically, you keep Judaism 100%.
Whatever Judaism tells you to do, whatever the Torah tells you to do, that's what you do.
no compromises.
And where I was, the community that I was, the optional physical community, there's a very strong...
Global warming is a massive con.
There was no evidence whatsoever that man-made climate change is a problem, that it's going to kill us, that we need to amend our lifestyle in order to deal with it.
It's a non-existent problem.
But how do you explain this stuff to your normie friends?
Well, I've just brought out the revised edition of my 2012 classic book, Watermelons, which captures the story of how some really nasty people decided to invent the global warming scare in order to fleece you, to take away your freedoms, to take away your land.
It's a shocking story.
I wrote it, as I say, in 2011, actually, the first edition came out.
And it's a snapshot of a particular era.
The era when the people behind the climate change scam got caught red-handed, tinkering with the data, torturing till it screamed in a scandal that I helped christen ClimateGate.
So I give you the background to the skullduggery that went on in these seats of learning where these supposed experts were informing us.
We've got to act now.
I rumbled their scam.
I then asked the question, okay, if it is a scam, who's doing this and why?
It's a good story.
I've kept the original book pretty much as is, but I've written two new chapters, one at the beginning and one at the end, explaining how it's even worse than we thought.
I think it still stands out.
I think it's a good read.
Obviously, I'm biased, but I'd recommend it.
You can buy it from jamesdellingpole.co.uk forward slash shop.
You'll probably find that microphone just go to my website and look for it, jamesdellingpole.co.uk.
And I hope it helps keep you informed and gives you the material you need to bring around all those people who are still persuaded that, oh, it's a disaster.
Israel Built Before 194500:06:08
We must amend our ways and appease the gods, appease Mother Diet.
There we go.
It's a scam.
Judaism tells you to do whatever the Torah tells you to do, that's what you do.
No compromises.
And where I was, the community that I was, the Oxford Orthodox community, there's a very strong ideology of we don't compromise with anything.
But then I started asking myself kind of questions like, well, wait a second, there's a whole aspect of the Torah we're not keeping, right?
There's the temple.
Where's our temple?
There's the concept of just living in Israel, which, according to many people, is itself a commandment.
And basically, for me, becoming a religious Zionism was Zionists was the next step.
It was keeping Judaism with no compromises means going to Israel and helping to form a state that will have a temple, that will be a religious theocracy, where Judaism will be the law of the country and it will be like it says it's supposed to be in the Torah, in the Bible.
That was the ideology that brought me to Israel.
Right.
Okay.
And I mean, I can see that.
I can see in the same way, my brother's just, he's converting to Orthodoxy.
Oh, yeah.
Which one?
Well, a Greek.
And I could totally see why.
They observe their fasting more strictly.
Every other day is a fast day.
You have to stand up through their very, very long services and stuff.
It's more committed.
You feel like you're doing it right.
So I totally get the siren lure of that.
And you went out to Israel.
Did it sort of, well, you're still living there, so you kind of hated it.
What were your expectations?
And how did Israel match them or fail to match them?
So it wasn't so much the failing to match.
I knew that Israel wasn't the country I wanted it to be.
I was coming here to build a temple.
I wasn't under the impression that there was already a temple or something.
I was involved in certain religious movements that were trying to make certain changes to the way things are done.
And I was not very successful in any of these endeavors.
And Over and I became demoralized with the whole thing.
And first of all, once I came to the conclusion that my dreams were never going to happen, then you open yourself up to see, well, wait a second, this country is kind of a dump.
Obviously, the nature here, what's left of it, is very beautiful.
And there are beautiful places.
But when you look around, much like Britain, everything that's nice was built before 1945, right?
But the difference is in Britain, there's still quite a lot of stuff that was built before 1945.
That's A, whereas here there wasn't.
I don't want to, I don't want to kind of come off as some silly Zionist who says this country was completely empty and we came and there was no one here.
But it was a very undeveloped backwater.
There's not a lot, there's some, but there's not a lot of stuff here from before from before.
It doesn't have a rich architectural heritage.
But the main point is everything we, the state of Israel, built, it is bad.
Like it is a really ugly country.
There's actually the early Zionists in the 1920s, there are some old parts of Tel Aviv that they built that are really quite nice.
And theoretically, they could have continued on that vein and built a nice country.
But they didn't.
So for me, just, you know, separate from everything else, I'm very, you know, I'm a kind of, I was very into Roger Scruton and that kind of stuff and the importance of urbanism.
And I realized that Israelis don't care about that stuff at all.
But it's more than that.
It's specifically the right wing of Israel, the group that I identified with.
They're the group who cares least of all.
As in the ones who were most in theory about, well, this is the most beautiful, this is God's home on earth.
When you say, okay, so it's God's home on earth, so maybe don't litter everywhere.
Or, or, you know, we might get to it.
The issue with the Arabs, you want to kick out all the Arabs because it's so important, right?
Well, maybe don't just build some like concrete monstrosity all over it once you kick them out.
And I just, I just got sick of kind of bumping my head into a brick wall.
And I just came to reject the whole thing.
And once I did, I can see, then I started reading more about the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
And in a way, that's kind of a bit, it's silly to say it, but it's just true.
Obviously, it turns out when I read into it, it's a bit more complicated than I thought at first, having only heard one side of the story.
I would say that when I first started, my opinion of the Israeli side was like a 10, 10 out of 10, whereas my opinion of the Palestinians was like three out of 10.
After reading about the conflict, my opinion of the Israelis went down to like a four, and my opinion of the Palestinians went down to a zero.
So I didn't become more pro-Palestinian as a result.
But I did realize that it was a lot more complicated than that.
And, you know, I live here because my, you know, since one of our children was born in England, but the other one, he grew up here, basically, and our other children were born here.
We live in the Golan Heights and life is fine as far as it goes.
Also, England is like, you know, England is falling apart.
It's probably like the worst.
It's not the worst country in Europe, but it's the most hopeless.
Would you agree with that?
What's England?
Israeli Architecture and Militarism00:15:21
Yeah.
It's hard to say, but I would because I don't travel everywhere as I'd like to.
But I would say certainly if you were to judge, for example, by if you use the state of our roads as a metric, when I went overland through Africa in 1984, I encountered roads like this and never imagined that this would become the norm in England in the future.
The roads are so bad.
Even A-roads now have huge potholes in them, which don't get fixed.
And if it's night or if it's raining, you don't see them.
So the amount of damage that is being done to everyone's cars and nothing's being done about it.
And nobody's really complaining enough about it.
So that, yeah, that kind of thing.
I think so.
My other option is to move back to England.
That would be the obvious.
And I'm not going to, I've got no real incentive to do that.
It's not here.
So what do I want for this country?
Well, I would like it to be as good as a country as possible.
I would like for it not to be always at war with its neighbors, if possible.
And look, the blog, I mean, the blog is only part of my life.
You know, most of my life is either working or, you know, holding the baby or whatever.
You know, I run this blog.
I devote maybe a day, half a day, depending on the week to it.
And I just try and promote the idea that, look, we are where we are.
We got to where we are in most cases by having some rather unrealistic ideas.
One of those unrealistic ideas is really designism, but there's a whole lot of other unrealistic ideas.
It could be a lot better.
It could be a lot worse.
Let's try and make it as good as possible.
And let's, my message to Jews is: you know, try and like chill out a bit.
Try and be a bit less intense.
You're putting a lot of people off.
Yeah.
To some degree, some of that's justified, some of it's not justified, but even in a sense, it's not justified.
The way you're handling it is not working.
So I write an article.
I write articles.
Most of my articles are whatever.
It's just really what's on my mind.
But the theme is basically that Jews should manage their affairs better for our benefit and everyone else's benefit.
I was really interested in what you were saying about the architectural ugliness.
And I was thinking that that presumably was a kind of ideological decision that was made.
like yeah we're about the future and we're militaristic we don't care about about poncy aesthetics we're gonna we're gonna build a country for the was it was that a sort of tied in with the sort of the brutalism in in architecture generally and sort of the modern that the so there definitely was
In the first few decades of the state of Israel this, it was dominated by socialists and they had typical socialist ideas about everything and they definitely one of those ideas was this idea that you know, ornament is is unnecessary, maybe it's even harmful in some way, and they build a lot of bad stuff.
And when I came over, I knew a lot, a lot of problems of Israel and my.
What I was thinking at the time, and what a lot of people I know and still think, is, yes fine, there's a lot of problems Israel, but that those problems come from the old Israel that was run by the socialists, that Israel is collapsing.
There is a new Israel that's much more religious, much more traditional and therefore things are going to get better, which would be amazing if it was true.
The problem is it's getting worse, as in the.
The left the left are not in power in this country.
It's not a thing.
Um, they haven't.
They haven't run a government since certain the 1990s.
Um, you know, there's some kind of deep state, like there is everywhere, which is a bit more leftist maybe than the elected government, but not really.
The fact is, the right in this country um, is very chuddy, to use a word that your um your your, your younger viewers might know.
It's a chud right.
And they, they care even less about aesthetics than than the old left did because, because they're driven by the most kind of pro aspects of society and some people just have kind of ugly spirits and so they manifest ugliness.
And what's really bad about this country is it's not just that when they build something cheap and it looks chabby, it's when they actually have some money to throw at a project it's even worse.
Well, you mean, it's all sort of tacky and bling or what.
No yes, one thing that is yes.
So there's this, we have this kind of Middle East, quasi Middle Eastern aesthetic, which was introduced by the um um uh, by the Middle Eastern Jews who came here, which is very much like a kind of Pakistani vape shop, kind of vibe uh, to put it in English terms.
So that's one thing.
And then there's this, and then on top of that, there's this kind of more religious Zionist vibe, which is it's based upon this view that kind of we have to have our own Jewish style of architecture.
So anything that looks like anything that like French architecture or Islamic architecture, that would be the worst thing in the world for these people.
That's bad.
So they have to come up with some new style of architecture.
It's just the problem is that all the good styles of architecture have already been taken.
They're just, there aren't, human beings have been around for a while.
There isn't anything.
So, and the synagogues that these people build are so bizarrely and preposterously bad that it's almost like they're trying to make it ugly.
And so for me, this is, I know, I just, not everyone has to have the same, not everyone has to be, has to have architecture as their pet issue.
But for me, architecture is my pet issue.
And so for me, it was personally a thing that really turned me against Israel and said, yes, Israel is moving to the right.
In some ways, I'm on board with that.
You know, family values-wise, et cetera, whatever.
But it's not leading to a kind of Roger Scruton-esque future at all.
It's a kind of, it's a very chuddy thing.
And it's based upon this crude militarism, which I can understand where the militarism comes from, given our situation.
But what I really object to is the fusing of militarism with Judaism.
What I like Israelis to do, you want to be militarists, that's fine.
You can be militarists.
But just like, don't bring Hanukkah into it.
Like, you know, you want to go and blow up Gaza because you think you've got no choice.
Okay.
Maybe you don't have a choice.
I don't know.
But don't bring a big menorah and like light it and sing Jewish songs while you're doing it because it's gross.
It looks really bad to the outside world, that's for sure.
And so for me, one of the things I write about on my blog is that what's going on with the rise of the right in Israel is a big disaster for Judaism because it's associating it with Groyperism, basically.
Like, look, if I was a Catholic, I would look at Grouperism and I would say, okay, in some senses, this is a good thing.
It's good to persuade young men not to look at e-girls, okay?
It's good to persuade people to get married, whatever.
But it's not good to associate my religion with just kind of, you know, crude racial hatred and trolling and misogyny.
Okay.
So I look at the Israeli right in the same way.
Fine, some of the things are good, but it's, I think that's actually a good comparison.
The ascendant trend in Israel is a kind of Jewish Groyperism.
And for the same reason, I don't like non-Jewish Groyperism, I don't like Jewish Groyperism.
Yeah.
I think you're unfortunate in having the legacy of of king david who who who for better or worse was a warrior blessed be the lord my strength strength which teacheth my hands to war and my fingers to fight you know i'm sure i'm sure you know your psalms um psalm 144.
So there's that kind of yeah, we can be like, we can be like we were in David's day when, when Israel was truly great so look, that's definitely a big, that's definitely a big part of it.
There's a big part of ascendant Israeli rivaling ideology.
Is this idea?
Okay, we were in exile and we were just, we were scholars, we were moneylenders, we were whatever uh, and now that's all over, thank god, and now we can go back to the true Judaism, which is uh, fighting as stuff um look, i'm not immune to the argument, but look for a, it was 3500 years ago.
Okay, you know some, some things have changed, all right, um.
But b look, if you want to be a Jewish warrior and you want to go out and with your sword and you want to fight a Palestinian with a sword okay, go for it.
But you don't get to kind of be this like oh, i'm a bronze age warrior in an F-15 blowing up a tower block yeah yeah, if you want to fight, if you want to, if you want to fight with modern weapons, you have to fight modern war, like a like, like um, in a modern way.
Uh, in this sense, I guess i'm just a bit of a Lib um, as in.
It's true that international law probably goes a bit too far in kind of tying the hands of militaries and it's it's open to abuse by kind of bad paramilitary actors who hide themselves among civilians.
All that is true.
But it's also true that you know things I hear on the Israeli right and it's not rare, I hear it almost every day which is just, you can just blow up anyone you want, it's fine.
There's no such thing as international law.
That's wrong, it's like it's wrong.
I understand, I understand that's how people feel when they've been in a conflict for 70 years.
I do get it.
But I also think that responsible people in a society should resist that.
And I also think you, the most important thing for me maybe it's a bit a feat, I think this, but the most important thing for me is to not mix Judaism as a religion in with that.
So let's say, for example England, Dresden.
I don't know where you stand on the Dresden Question.
I think it was a terrible war crime.
I think Churchill was committed, a terrible, Terrible Satanic blood sacrificed that day.
I think Churchill was basically a wrong.
I think it's really evil.
Evil.
Okay.
But one thing that is good is that the Archbishop of Canterbury condemned it at the time.
As in, I can understand where England was coming from under the situation.
But even if you, even if you kind of, even if you can come up with a defense address, and I think I'm more moderate on the issue myself, it's good that the church as an institution was the one saying, whoa, put it back, you know, dial it down a notch.
Okay.
I think that's the proper role of religion in a society.
It shouldn't, the religion shouldn't be there, it shouldn't be the religious part of society saying, kill them all, right?
As you know, there was a particularly egregious example of what you describe in the First World War when the Bishop of London, I think he was called Winnington Ingram.
And he was a fanatical warmonger.
He was like, you know, kill more Germans, beneath them.
And you're right.
This is not where, this is not where men of the cloth of any variety should be.
It's just no.
So the traditional Jewish perspective is that cruelty war is bad.
Okay.
And we want peace.
And if you look in the early Zionist movement, the religious Zionist movement, which was a distinct minority of the movement, there was a small minority both within Zionism and also a small minority within Orthodox Judaism.
But it did exist.
So people like Rabbi Abraham Cook or Rabbi Jacob Amiel, if you read their writings, they're very clear on this, that we may or may not need to have a military to establish the state we want to establish, but that the spirit of militarism is completely alien to us as Jews.
They write this at great length.
And what's kind of it, so this is not the old, this is not the anti-Zionist religious Jews who, of course, were kind of, in a sense, kind of principled pacifists.
Their whole point was we're not supposed to have a state.
So of course we're not supposed to have Arnold because we're not supposed to state the first.
Even though Anti-Thisi thought we should have a state, they were very utopian in that, you know, with our state, we're going to show the world what it is to kind of be the most moral state in the world.
And what's happened over the last 70 years, what's scary is how quickly it's happened, is that religious Zionism has become this super crazed militarist thing.
And again, you can understand why it's happened because the errors have been very unreasonable in many ways.
But also the whole Palestinian tactic of terrorist attacks, it doesn't really achieve any strategic goals for Palestinians.
But one thing it does really just do is it just really makes Israelis hate Palestinians.
And I've never been in a terrorist attack.
I never had a friend die in a terrorist attack.
And I never had a family member die in a terrorist attack.
I do know people who have had friends who've died in terrorist attacks.
And I think, yeah, I guess you know one person, at least, who's had a family member die in a terrorist attack.
So I don't personally judge people who've been through that, and it produces these feelings of bitterness in them.
By the way, I also don't judge a Palestinian who his family was killed in an Israeli airstrike, and he also has those feelings of bitterness.
All I want to say is, yes, but A, the fact that you have these feelings of bitterness and they're legitimate in a sense, as feelings, doesn't mean that they get to determine government policy.
That's me.
But also, B, the role of religious people is not to kind of fire you up and tell you that because you feel this way, it's legitimate for you to do the same to the other side or worse or 100 times worse.
Yeah.
And religious Zionism has just become this crazy militarist extremist thing.
And Jews have, I think Jews have a responsibility to try and turn this crazy machine off, whatever way they can.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think, well, loads of people are going to be watching this and agreeing with you.
So I want to cut to the chase here now and ask you the tough questions, which is what do Jews actually believe?
I mean, it's hard to generalize because we've got the completely secular ones who haven't a clue, and you've got the older Orthodox and you've got every shade in between.
The Disparaging Undertone of Goy00:15:16
But for example, to a Jew, I'm a Goy, right?
I'm Goyim.
I'm one of the Goyim.
What does that mean?
It means you're not Jewish.
Yeah, but doesn't it mean?
But literally, what do Goym means cattle?
What?
I think Goyim is also a word used for cattle, isn't it?
No.
Okay.
But Goim is not a word used for cattle.
No.
Right.
But there's a disparaging undertone.
If I say the word goi, can it have a disparaging undertone?
Yes.
Does it always have a disparaging undertone?
No.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm not holding you responsible.
It's not.
First of all, first of all, you're holding me responsible.
Gabriel, struggle session.
No, first of all, you can hold me responsible.
Look.
But I don't get many people who know about Judaism on this podcast.
And I'm just interested because I remember going back, You know how when you're at school and you and you have these, you must have done the scripture classes or divinity classes, whatever, and there will come a time in about the second year at your secondary school where your class will be given a project and you'll all have to choose a religion and do a sort of poster about it and do a or do a specialist study.
And people, some people chose Islam because it's not Christianity, which is which was their religion.
It was probably quite boring.
And some people chose the Eastern religions.
Very few, I think I may have chosen Judaism, looked into it and just thought, oh, so this, this is just too, too difficult.
There are very few resources on what Jews believe.
And I think it's partly to do with a kind of secrecy among Jews, jealously guarding the terms of their religion and really not saying what they actually believe.
So if you ask the 70 million countum Zionist Christians in America who've been schooled in the Schofield Bible and they've imbibed all this kind of Zionist propaganda, if you ask them what Jews believe, it's basically they're the Old Testament, but not the New Testament.
They're basically God's chosen people.
This land is theirs, yada, yada, yada.
And Moses and Ten Commandments and Joseph and his maze of technical dream coat and they're great, they're lovely, and they gave us our religion because they provided us with Jesus.
But when you look into completely broad, open-minded and think, well, hang on a second, what's all this about?
Anyone who's done even a modicum of research into Judaism realizes it's not just the Old Testament.
In fact, it's not even the Old Testament in a lot of cases.
mainly about talmudic um traditions which seem to date back to the to the middle ages i mean a lot a lot of this i correct me if i'm wrong but is the the religion of israel is talmudic judaism The religion of the state of Israel?
Judaism is Talmudic Judaism.
There were non-Talmudic forms of Judaism.
And there are still Karaite Judaism.
There's maybe 10,000 of them today.
But all Judaism today is Talmudic Judaism.
It just more or less, where does it all come from?
Okay, so it isn't just the Old Testament, is it?
Okay, so fundamental to Judaism is the idea that there's the written law and the oral law.
So the written law is specifically the five books of Moses.
The rest of the Old Testament is less important in Judaism.
Psalms is extremely important.
If you're in Israel, especially if you go into Jerusalem and you just ride around on a bus, if you do it for 20 minutes, you're probably seeing four or five women with a little book just going.
And what they're doing is they're saying psalms.
So that kind of psalmic devotion is very, very common.
As part of the prayer service, I every single day say 15 Psalms, something like that, on the Sabbath more.
So Psalms are big.
But then Psalms aren't a source of authority.
They're just prayers, right?
They're not.
Well, they're sort of like, up to a point, I'd say they're quite, they're condensed versions of lots of bits of the Old Testament.
Okay, but I mean.
But I agree.
They're not like Leviticus.
They inspire you, but they don't give you a map.
They don't tell you what your country is supposed to look like.
They didn't tell you, you know.
So Psalms are very big.
I mean, other parts of the Bible, they're kind of, I won't lie.
In religious Zionism, they're quite big into studying historical books, Judges, Samuel, Kings, etc., because they're all about kind of reconnecting with this history and stuff.
But the other prophets, I personally think they should be more studied.
The objective truth is they're not very extensively studied.
When people say the written law, what they mean is the first five books, which they call the Torah, which Orthodox Judaism believes was given by God to Moses on Mount Sinai.
Now, what exactly that means?
You mean every single word?
That would be the strict Orthodox position.
Yes, every single word.
Obviously, you might ask some obvious questions on that.
Well, what about the bit that happens after Moses dies, etc.?
But that's simple down.
The idea is the first five books of Moses, that's the source of all authority.
And that's the written law.
But the oral law, which is what the Talmud contains, starts with a basic question.
So, for example, the written law says that I have to, in the Feast of Tabernacles, I have to live in a tabernacle for seven days.
Okay.
Well, what's a tabernacle?
So the oral law provides me with lots of definitions of what a tabernacle is.
It has to be at least 10 hand widths high.
It can be a maximum of 20 cubits high.
It has to be covered with stuff that grew out of the ground that hasn't been worked into like a vessel.
So basically bits of branches of old tree, leaves, whatever.
And then there's weed mats.
And then there's lots of definitions about what kind of readmat you can use.
What can the walls be made of?
What has to be holding it up?
It can't be underneath a tree.
It can't be inside the house.
Also, what does it mean to live in?
What does it mean to live?
Do I have to sleep in it?
Do I have to eat in it?
Does that mean I have to, if I have a glass of, if I have to eat in it, does it mean I have to have a glass of water?
Do I have to can I eat a glass of water?
There are, I mean, literally, I'm not exaggerating.
There are literally thousands of rules about what it means to live in a tabernacle for seven days.
So the Torah, sorry, the written law, the Torah, we call the Torah, has five verses maybe that tell you you have to live in a sukkah for seven days.
And the Talmud contains thousands of laws on what it means to live in the sukah for seven days.
Now, let's say, Hi, Vessel, you reject the Talmud.
You say, all of this stuff is made up.
It's just rabbis saying it.
You'd still have to have some kind of alternative version of the Talmud.
If I say, okay, I reject the whole Talmud, the Talmud tells me what a tabernacle looks like, what size it has to be, what shape it has to be, et cetera.
I reject all that.
I'm now going to follow just the written law and I'm going to live in my tabernacle for seven days.
Okay, well, what does your tabernacle look like?
You know, so there were groups that tried, that have rejected this.
So the largest group is called Karaites.
And like I say, there's still about 10,000 of them, something like that today.
They used to live a lot of them in Crimea.
I think now most of them are either in America or in Israel.
And they reject the Talmud, but they have their, they still have a source of version of the oral law because in practice, even better example actually would be the Torah says, and the written law says on many occasions, you have to keep Sabbath.
You can't work on Sabbath.
Well, what's work?
Okay, can I cook on the Sabbath?
Can I grind flour on the Sabbath?
Can I weave on Sabbath?
I don't know.
The written law literally doesn't tell me.
So again, the Talmud is divided up.
Well, the Mishnah, and we can get into the difference.
The Mishnah is divided up into 63 tractates, as they're called, sections.
One of those sections is on the first thing I talked about, the tabernacle.
What do you do on this feast of tabbys?
Another section, which is one of the largest ones, is called Sabbath.
What do you do on the Sabbath?
What is allowed?
What is not allowed?
What rituals are you supposed to do on the Sabbath to make it holy, etc.?
And again, you've got five or no, it's more.
In the case of the Sabbath, I don't know, 20 verses in the Torah, and also a little bit of stuff in the prophets.
And you know, a few things here and there.
So, you know, there was a person who was stoned to death for picking up sticks on the Sabbath.
So you know, you're not allowed to pick up sticks.
It also says you're not allowed to light a fire on the Sabbath.
So you know you're not allowed to light a fire.
In the book of Jeremiah, it says you're not allowed to carry a load on a Sabbath.
So you also know that.
So you could piece together something very, very, very basic from the written law and the prophets, but it wouldn't really tell you what to do.
So the oral law is telling you in practice what you're supposed to do.
So among Christians, there's enormous spectrum of practice of what you're supposed to do on the Sunday.
You know, there are Christians who keep this on Saturdays, but for most Christians, it's Sunday.
So, you know, for a traditional, you know, an Anglican, it's you go to church in the morning and you go to the pub, right?
And you have a Sunday dinner.
But there are Presbyterians.
You know, you hear some really crazy stories.
There was a Presbyterian who he would walk because he lived on some hill and he would walk all the way to the pension office to collect his pension, but he wouldn't do the walking on the Sabbath because that would be work on the Sabbath.
So he'd have to set out, you know, you know, so there the spectrum of opinion among Christians of how he's supposed to keep the Sabbath is very, very wide.
The spectrum of opinion among Jews is very, very small.
Why?
Because it's all based on the Talmud.
There are Jews who are more religious and Jews are less religious, but Jewish law, how you're supposed to keep the Sabbath, is actually very, very specific.
And the only way to make it specific is to have what we call the oral law.
The oral tradition.
I get that.
I don't think anyone's particularly bothered by what the regulatory requirements are on the erection of a tabernacle and the usage thereof.
But I think, okay, so we know that there are some very difficult bits of the Talmud.
For example, the scene that describes Jesus being born either in excrement or semen, I forget which, or maybe it's a, it depends on the translation.
No, it's the letter.
Okay.
By the way, like, it doesn't say Jesus.
I'm not going to lie.
I think it probably does mean Jesus, but it doesn't actually say Jesus.
Okay.
And that was with that was a line inserted by a rabbi, one of the more notorious ones, but quite an influential one in the Middle Ages, wasn't it?
I mean, we're not talking, we're not talking ancient tradition.
We're talking, well, well, it depends what you mean by the Middle Ages.
When people say the Talmud, they don't mean the Babylonian.
Well, obviously, post-Jesus.
The Talmud, people mean this is the Babylonian Talmud.
That's what most Jews study as the Babylonian Talmud.
That was, well, it's an ongoing academic debate as actually when it was collated, but it's sometime between 450 AD and 700 AD.
So, okay, you can call that the Middle Ages if you want.
I don't want to get caught up.
Yeah, okay.
Well, yeah, then.
So you've got that.
And you've got, I mean, I have to say, I read Maimonides' Wikipedia entry the other day, and to read it, you think, yeah, this is a great guy.
He's a scholar and he's wonderful.
You read some of this.
Maimonides was if certainly, if you're not Jewish, not a good person to listen to.
I mean, why do you mean?
Well, it seems to me to be a kind of a supremacist religious approach, which looks down on people of other religions.
And he looks down on Jews who are not religious.
I mean, Maimonides is a very good idea.
Well, that's very Jews who were religious, who had the wrong kind of philosophical beliefs about God.
I suppose what I'm saying here is that you've sensibly made the point that the Talmud is a way of interpreting the Torah and it's necessary for the reasons you've given.
But how is the average Jew to distinguish between which bits they should take seriously and which bits they should reject?
I mean, I imagine there's quite a lot of Jews who think that Jesus is boiling in semen and this is a jolly good thing.
And the stuff about when there are definitely passages which say that you can have sex with a goi under any sort of circumstances, you know, even when they're three years old, because they're just goi and they're just like, they're trash, they're not like us.
There are some, you know, you know of these passages.
Well, I know the one you're referring to.
The cattle thing, I have no idea what you're talking about, but I know the one you're referring to, and I'll get to in a second.
So look, first thing I just want to make a point about the Talmud.
And this is just, it isn't quite unsank.
Like, if I sit down and I read the Talmud all day, I probably won't see the word goi.
As in, I really think that some people got the idea from the internet that the Talmud is fundamentally a book about Jews.
Like, I just hate Goyim.
I hate Goyem so much.
I would say probably the attitude, the attitude, which you might find offensive for a different reason, but the attitude towards Goyem in the Talmud is really one of very unconcern.
As in, Talmudic Judaism is very inward-centered.
Talmudic Attitudes Toward Gentiles00:14:46
Basically, it's a kind of scholar religion for people in, it's not really that even concerned about the lives of ordinary Jews.
They're obsessing about very minute details of law.
Sometimes Gentiles might come into this.
So, like, most of the time, if the word goi does come up in it, it's to do with, you know, let's say I'm not allowed to sow my field with two different types with wheat and barley.
That's an offense according to the written law.
Again, a classic example: one verse: don't sow your field with mixed things.
Okay, again, thousands of laws Telling me what's mixed, what is it?
Okay, if my field is so to mix things, I have to pull it out.
Well, what if a Gentile came along and so my field for me?
Do then I can I pay a Gentile to do it for me most of the times that a gentle comes up in the Talmud, it's to do with questions like this: you know, I'm not allowed to do this, but can I pay a Gentile to do it?
I'm not allowed to do this, but a Gentile did it.
Can I benefit from it?
These are the kind of things.
The Talmud is like it's really, really big.
And these lists of offensive quotes is what is it?
It's 20 quotes.
It's not like it's not like are they being denounced and rejected?
I mean, why weren't they being prescribed, anathematized?
Because having sex with a kind of three-year-old.
No, no, no, no.
Okay, I need to correct this.
This is just not true, okay?
Like, okay, there's first of all, the thing about the three-year-old is not talking about Gentiles or not Gentiles.
It's actually talking, it's a general thing: is this: if I have sex with my sister, for example, according to the Torah, I have to be this.
This is one thing the Torah is clear, the original law is clear about.
I have to be executed, okay?
So, again, what kind of questions do the Talmud ask?
What is sex?
It has to ask these questions: what is sex?
What if, God forbid, my sister, I don't know, whatever, perform some non-vaginal sex act on me or her, whatever.
Like, do I have to be executed for that?
So, it has to define all these things.
So, one of the things is sex with a girl under three is not considered sex.
So, therefore, if I do it with my two-year-old sister, God forbid, I can't be executed for it.
That doesn't mean it's permitted to do it.
It means that the capital offense in the Torah of sex doesn't apply to someone below the age of three.
It's not sex.
Okay, now you might say the opposite.
Well, why is it sex to a four-year-old?
Aren't you a bunch of maybe a bunch of pedophiles for the opposite reason now?
The law says, the oral law tells you, this is all basically theoretical because we don't have Jewish courts to impose any of this stuff.
If someone's brought to court, you have sex with your sister.
Okay, you're going to be executed now.
Okay, how old was she?
She was two.
Okay, well, we can't execute you for it.
You're not going to be executed.
You'll go to prison because you're a disgusting person, but we're not going to execute you for it, or at least we're not going to execute you according to the Torah's law because you didn't violate the Torah's law.
That's what it says.
It's not talking about, it's got nothing to do with Gentiles.
It's got a general what is sex, right?
Wait a second.
Wait, wait, wait.
You said we're allowed to have sex with Gentiles.
The opposite.
It's completely forbidden to have sex with a Gentile.
It's a banking prohibition in Jewish law.
Well, that's more.
Okay, so now I used to be offended because he told me it was okay.
Now I'm offended because he told me it's not okay.
Okay, I mean, but at least be offended for the right thing.
It's completely forbidden in Jewish law to have sex with a Gentiles.
Yeah, okay.
So I think certainly where I am now, I think if I were to suddenly discover that I was Jewish and this were my religion, I'd be having qualms about this stuff.
And while we're on this Trixie territory, I mentioned to you that I was going to talk to you about the Noahide laws.
What would you have qualms about?
The Noahide laws.
Well, the fact that go off the Noahide laws.
You find out you're Jewish, okay?
You've got qualms about what?
Which bit do you have a qualm?
Well, if I consulted my holy books, sorry, the yeah, yeah, the Talmudic teachings, and I discovered that actually having sex with a child below the age of three is considered insufficient for capital punishment, but is okay for being for imprisonment.
I'd be thinking, well, this is just weird.
Wait, wait a second.
Wait a second.
Embarrassing.
Wait a second.
Okay.
What did I say?
I said, the law prescribes that there's capital punishment for having sex with your sister, having sex with another man's wife, having sex with your mother, having sex with your aunt, etc., etc.
There's a list.
It's there in the book of Leviticus.
The question is, what meets the legal definitions of these things?
If a government wants to make it a crime to commit pedophilia, the Talmud doesn't say you're not allowed to do that.
It's defining what the boundaries of Jewish law are.
It's just telling you what sex is.
It's not telling you what a government policy should be.
It's not.
No, but that in itself is, I find it weird, just de facto that there's a distinction is made between a three-year-old and a pre-three-year-old.
It seems to me symptomatic of a kind of a very odd mindset, which I do not find to be.
The only mindset it's symptomatic of is legalism.
So if you're a Christian, then I would presume you agree with Paul that legalism is bad, that it kind of leads to deadness of the spirit.
And that's fine.
I think Paul was wrong, but I'm not going to come and tell you you have to think Paul was wrong.
Okay, so you think Paul was right.
But my point is, if you think legalism is bad, okay, fine.
You think legalism is bad, but don't kind of pick out specific bits of legalism and say, oh, try and make some sort of big song and dance about it.
Like the thing about the three-year-old has no relevance to any kind of aspect of Jewish life.
Like, let's say, you know, a rabbi was discovered to be a paedophile tomorrow.
Okay.
Now, as in any other kind of Jewish community, people may react well to that.
They may react badly.
They may say, oh, he must be innocent because he's such a holy rabbi.
Or people might try to cover it up.
All sorts of bad things might happen as, you know, I don't need to go into detail about the Catholic Church, whatever.
But no one's going to say, wait a second, was she free or was she for?
That's just not a conversation that's going to come up.
It's not like it just has no, the specific laws that you're finding very offensive have no relevance to kind of Jewish life.
You might say that the general mentality of legalism leads to this kind of loophole mentality.
Now, I will tell you, that's kind of obviously true in a sense.
And every religion has a failure mode, or probably multiple failure modes.
I will say a classic failure mode of Judaism is missing the forest for the trees.
I'll admit.
Openly, because what would be the point in not admitting it?
Many Jews, they get caught up in this kind of legalistic mindset and they kind of miss big overarching ethical principles.
And this is a point that's been made by many Jews many times and there's a whole Jewish ethical literature trying to make you not think that.
But it happens because that's a failure mode of of legalism.
But my point is that okay, you don't, you can.
You can be pro-legalism, you can be anti-legalism.
That's kind of what the fundamental debate between Judaism and Christianity.
Okay, but like, kind of focus on the.
You know, focus on that that.
That is an issue you know.
Fine okay, you think it's weird to kind of argue about these things.
Okay, maybe it's weird to argue about these things, but it doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't have any relevance to to life.
It just, you see, it sort of does, because I think it's, I think it's symptomatic of a, of a mindset.
That's the problem.
It's i'm, it's not, it's not the, the legalism per se, but what it says about the, about the mindset that that values legalism as a, as a bow opposed to anything else, it seems to me almost, almost amoral.
Uh yeah, okay.
So look, there are um, I mean, there is a kind of there's one school of kind of Jewish philosophy that actually is kind of explicitly amoral.
Basically, it says morality is what god dictates and reason doesn't come into it.
Okay now, by the way, there are also schools of Christianity that are like that.
Um I, I would disagree with such an interpretation.
Um, I can see how you might.
For Jews, this is how we look at it.
You know, i'm not going to say every single Jew looks at it this way.
I'm going to say this is I, this is how I look at it and this is how I think.
This is what I honestly believe to be the authentic Jewish tradition.
Um, God has never spoken to me.
I probably god will never speak to me.
So the only thing I have from god is the Tora that he gave the, the law that he gave to the Jewish people, and the way that I submit myself to go is by fulfilling the details of that, but also by learning the details of that.
So um, most of the Torah is never going, is never going to be relevant in my life, and that's not only the bits like the temple and stuff, because we can't do it.
We want to do it.
We can't.
But, like you know, the THE Torch has all sorts of details about, you know, implementing capital punishment.
Well, I hope I never have to execute someone okay um, But the point is, what we believe is that by delving into the details of this law, we're kind of connected with that covenant that we have, which is the only connection that we really have to God.
Now, I understand.
I'm not offended that a Christian would say, no, that's wrong.
You've got it all wrong.
You got mixed up.
That's fine.
But, okay, that's what we think.
And it's true that someone who only studies Talmud and never thinks about ethics, et cetera, probably will get a bit of a walked mindset.
And that's a criticism that I'm happy to make within kind of Jewish debates.
And to be fair, you would not be the only Jew that's made this point.
I wish I could remember the problem is I read so much that I forget the names of the.
There was a Jewish writer who wrote a book explaining his problems with Israel.
And I think he said he wrote in the introductory chapter about how, for example, on a Sabbath day, on the Sabbath, if a Goy tourist has a heart attack in the street, it is religiously permissible for an observant Jew to just kind of walk past him because he's not, you know, it's the Sabbath and it's not their problem.
That kind of thing.
Okay, so yeah.
So this is actually, okay, he's called Israel Shahak.
So look, Israel Shahak, I haven't actually, one of the things I want to do to my dog is properly sit down and read his book and write a review of it.
So I haven't.
I haven't done that.
I have flicked through it.
Look, he's kind of like a Reddit atheist.
He's like Dawkins or Sam Harris.
Now, you know, I can, no, that's what it is.
Like, that's fine.
You can, you know, I can be antagonistic and I can go through the church fathers and I can find crazy stuff and I can put it.
You know what?
I'll do it for you.
So Tertullian says that one of the pleasures of the Christians in the afterlife is they'll be able to see the damned.
So they'll be in heaven enjoying eternal bliss.
The part of the eternal bliss, okay, is that they'll be able to look down and they'll be able to see people suffering in hellfire forever.
Okay.
Augustine says that the damned are predestined to damn to be damned.
It's predestined from the beginning of time.
It's not your choice.
Some people are predestined.
Now, there's double predestination or single predestination and different people have what exactly means.
But definitely he believes that the damned are destined to be damned.
Okay.
And Origen castrated himself because to be a now, I could say, now, a rough comparison of the Talmud is that the Talmud is like the church fathers.
It's not how Protestants look at the church fathers, but it's like how Greek Orthodox people look at the church fathers.
So I could turn to a Greek Orthodox like your brother and I say, look, you believe in a religion where you think that when you die, you're going to be sitting there laughing at people, enjoying the fact that people are burning for eternity because they were predestined to burn for eternity because they refused to castrate themselves like Origin.
What a sicko.
That's in the Psalms, isn't it?
Now, here's the thing.
It's like it's productive.
I know enough to know that if you read Augustine in full context, the doctrine of predestination makes a lot more sense than I just did it.
And the same with Tertullian and the same with Origin.
Well, to be honest, I'm not sure you can justify Origin and castrate yourself.
Maybe that one is a bit off.
But the point is, is that you can do the same.
There are anti-Christian writers who've done this with Christianity, and Israel's Shaqak is like them with Judaism.
You can definitely take a bunch of stuff in Judaism and make it look really bad.
That's for sure.
You can take a bunch of stuff in Judaism and make it look really good.
The correct thing to do, which is much harder than I've read these things, is to actually look at it in the round and say, what is it really?
Israel Shahak, again, it's a book I haven't read.
I do know.
I have read enough to know he does make some just flat mistakes.
But I think that he's describing, what he's describing is a failure mode in Judaism, which is that basically this kind of amoral, ethnic narcissist legalism.
I think that's a failure mode of Judaism.
Real Jews who actually exist now in the past, no doubt in the future, have entered that failure mode.
I think that Jews should not enter that failure mode.
I also think Christianity has failure modes.
I think Islam has failure modes.
A lot of these, a lot of them are very prominent.
So what I would, look.
Saving Gentile Lives on Sabbath00:15:32
The thing about not saving a Gentile on the Sabbath.
there's kind of two ways of dealing with this.
I understand that this is, look, I understand that's offensive.
So to make clear what we're talking about, the idea is this.
If I can save, the specific case given here is someone is trapped under a pile of rocks and you're lifting up the rocks to try and get them out.
They're underneath the food.
If you know for certain that they're a Gentile, you can't do it.
Okay?
Why?
Because as follows.
You're not allowed to pick up rocks on the Sabbath.
It's work.
Oh, you are allowed to save a life, but you're only allowed to do it to save a Gentile's, a Jew's life, not a Gentiles' life.
Why?
The Talmud says, Because the only reason you're allowed to save the Jew's life is because he will go on to keep the Sabbath in the future.
So you're breaking the Sabbath for the purpose of saving yourself.
So, first of all, there are a few things here.
It's not just a Gentile, a non-religious Jew.
I'm equally, the law applies equally to him.
If I know for sure he's a non-religious Jew, I'm sorry, there's nothing I can do to help you.
That's one thing.
On a practical level, the normative Orthodox Jewish teaching is as follows: if you don't save him, if you don't save the Gentile, then someone might find out about it, and then they might get very angry, justifiably, from their perspective, certainly, and they might do a pogrom or whatever.
So, therefore, you should save.
That normative, like, Jewish law that you'll be instructed to do, not what's written in the Talmud, but normative Jewish law that you're instructed to do, is that you should save the Gentiles' life.
Now, you might say you're kind of using legalism to get around the legalism.
So, you came up with this weird legalism that tells you you're not allowed to save the Gentiles' life on the Sabbath.
Yeah, and then you come up with some other legalism to say to get you to do the right thing.
And really, what you should just do is go back and challenge the assumption from off.
Okay, maybe you're right.
And, you know, there is a kind of there is a there is a inherent there is an inherent problem in moral standards change over time.
Um, it's the Talmud was written when it was written for various reasons.
Uh, and it was written at a time of, at least in the early period of the Talmud, of quite quite extreme uh animosity between Gentile and Jewish populations following the Jewish revolt against Rome.
By the way, Jesus expresses the same views, you know, that's what he says, pearls before swine, right?
He refers to Gentiles as swine.
Okay, um, it was there's a case to be made that to some extent the Talmud should be revisited in the light of evolving moral standards.
The problem with that is what is a general generic problem, which is that within any religion, things get canonized and it's very hard to go back and change something.
And the specific problem is, okay, so I go back and change the Talmud to take out all the things that are kind of they're not nice about Gentiles, okay?
But then someone else comes along and says, Well, I want you to take out all the things that are not nice about homosexuals, and then someone else comes and says, I want you to take out the things that are not nice about trans.
As in, it's very, very hard for it's very, very hard in practice to kind of fix a religious text without it all spiraling out of control and just becoming like liberal Protestant Unitarians.
Yeah, okay.
I think that, look, what does this practically mean?
Okay, you're not thinking about converting Judaism, so it's not a relevant issue.
You haven't discovered you're Jewish, so it's not a relevant issue.
How should this affect Jewish-Gentile relations?
I think Jews should appreciate that Gentiles legitimately feel offended by this stuff.
And I also think the Gentiles shouldn't kind of get too worked up about like 10 lines out of a book of 20.
Gabriel, I just want to say to you, I'm really grateful to you for putting yourself through this because I'm feeling I'm very happy that you came on this on this pod.
And I feel it's really unfair of me to hold you to account for your entire religion, which is not fair.
It's a bit like I've been out with a net.
with my my special dew catching net and i've i've pulled you in and i'm i'm forcing you to go through this all deal so i hope you're not feeling i hope you're not feeling too got at because it's not my first one look there's a reason why our mutual friend suggested me like First, I've thought about these issues a lot, probably more than most people, for various reasons.
And also on the big five, personality traits, I'm high in openness and also high in disagreeableness.
So it's fine.
I don't mind.
Oh, which one are you?
Because I think I'm definitely the high in openness one.
And I'm the one.
You're pretty similar.
I think I'm the one that likes an argument and we'll carry on, but there's no kind of rancor.
Right.
That's what I try to be mostly.
Yeah, maybe we are the same ent jet or whatever, anyway.
Yeah, anyways, so I just want to make that clear.
I totally agree with your point about you don't want to go mucking about with canonical texts.
And I totally agree with you that Christianity, or at least the Church Fathers, are not beyond criticism.
I get all that.
I suppose the difference is that Christianity does not have a Christian state and it does not have an organization, which I doubt you have much sympathy with, but it doesn't have an organization like the Anti-Defamation League, the ADL, pushing this very, very hardcore agenda.
And I'm thinking, I mentioned them earlier on, the Noahide laws, the Noahide laws, which cannot be enforced at the moment because the world is not kind of run by rabbinical courts.
But should that time ever come, and nobody I've heard of in Israel is repudiating this.
Under the Noahide laws, and I did a podcast with this with a Jewish couple who were so appalled they kind of they ceased to be Zionists.
Under the Noahide laws, as a Christian, I am eligible to for execution because by worshiping Jesus according to the Noahide, according to the rabbinical definition of idolatry, I am an idolater and therefore liable for the chop.
And I'd be fine with that if this was just some bollocks from the middle ages which had long since been repudiated, repudiated by all Jews.
But it ain't.
You've got.
You've got Noahide training schools in Israel.
You've got it being pushed by by benign breath.
These, these are not negligible organizations and and and I'm thinking well, I don't like this, I really I think it's really offensive.
I don't know actually, I don't care, it's not the offensive part, I find it threatening, okay.
So oh look, you know remember, we were saying before you know that you're, you're offended by the implication that Judaism permits sex with someone who's less than free.
And I say well, it's not saying that at all.
What it's saying it's not sex, it's only sex after free.
I said well, now you're offended.
The implication that sex of a four-year-old is sex.
So this is kind of similar.
People are often offended by this idea that Jews kind of it's just an ethnic religion and we're not really interested in what anyone else does and we don't care if you're saved or not, and and we're just very inward and stuff.
And so some Jews said okay fine, we've got a message for humanity.
Our message for humanity is as follows, you're not allowed to worship idols, you're not allowed to steal, you're not allowed to murder um, what the the weird one is always, you know, you're not allowed to um, eat the limb off a living animal, which probably most people would agree.
You shouldn't eat the limb off a living animal right, but it's a bit weird to have that in your seven fundamental thing the Maasai do well, they don't eat the limbs off, but they they do drink the, the blood of a living animal, which may disqualify them.
So the point is, is the the talmud, one of the things the talmud discusses?
Because it discusses everything really is it's.
I said well, what laws are incumbent on a gentile?
So it scours through the Tora, the written law, and it finds that we find a hint at the idea that that gentiles are forbidden from forbidden sexual relations.
We find that they're forbidden to steal, we find they're They're forbidden to kill.
We find because it's in the book, the story of well, it's how we interpret the story of Noah, I should say, that they're forbidden to tear the limb off a living animal, and they have to set up a court system, etc.
So, some Jews say, Okay, look, you've criticized us, we're too ethnocentric, we're not, uh, we're not offering anything to anyone else.
Here's our message to mankind: keep the Noahide laws.
Um, and then you say, What do you this is a Jewish supremacist?
Cool, you want to now, you're saying the reason why is it's because the punishment for the this is what the Talmud says: What's the punishment for the Noah?
In Jewish law, there's a range of punishments.
There's um, there's well, there's lashes and there's various types, fine, types of execution.
They didn't have prison back in those days, it wasn't like a normal form of punishment.
Now, obviously, these are quite brutal punishments, and any reasonable person will ask: wait a second, you're not seriously suggesting having a legal code in the year 2025 in which your only punishments are lashes and stoning and strangulation, whatever.
Um, and I would agree that that's an that's an issue for anyone who seriously wants to set up a Jewish bureaucracy.
Now, I would consider myself tough on crime compared to the average liberal, but I'm not that tough on crime.
Fine.
Now, the Noahide laws, what the Talmud says is the punishment for all of them is exactly the same.
It's execution.
If a Gentile steals, execute.
If a Gentile commits adultery, he's executed.
If a Gentile does idolatry, he's executed.
Now, that doesn't sound like a very practical way of setting up a justice system.
I'll agree with that.
And the truth is, it's not the Talmud just says, and then it moves on.
Again, the Talmud is not very interested in Gentiles.
It just is interested in very minute details about how your tabernacle should look.
It's just not very interesting in Gentiles.
I don't find him interesting.
And then it moves on.
In the modern age, some people have come up with this idea that we should be more ecumenical and we should tell, okay, well, Gentiles, here's our message, keep the Noahide laws.
People who say that, they're not saying you should set up a court and just start executing everyone who steals like a Mars bar from a shop.
That's not a thing.
What we're saying, well, I'm not involved in pro-Noahide activities.
What they're saying is, okay, this is what we think you should do.
You don't have to convert to Judaism.
You want to convert to Judaism, that's fine.
You don't want to convert to Judaism.
Here's what we think you should do.
You should be a Noahide.
Here's the laws you should keep.
Don't steal.
Don't do idols.
Don't worship Jesus.
Wait a second.
You agree that Gentiles shouldn't worship idols, correct?
You just don't think Jesus is an idol, yes?
Well, he's not.
No, no, fine.
But you do agree.
You agree with the principle.
You just don't agree with the specific application of the principle.
I wouldn't be, I wouldn't, I wouldn't be executing people for idol worship.
Well, again, no one's executing.
It's not.
Yet.
Look, it's kind of hard to explain.
Like, when I read, look, if, if It comes up a lot in Jewish legal discussion.
You know, like, I don't know, if I drive a car on the Sabbath, I'm supposed to be executed according to Jewish law, but it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not a thing that happens.
We don't have Jewish courts that are, we don't, as a, as a matter of fact, we don't have Jewish courts that have the legal authority to execute them.
We don't really have a execute anyone.
We don't really have a mechanism to create such a court.
It's all very abstract.
We don't, when it we don't think about it as a kind of thing that could actually happen.
It just, when we say something is a death penalty offense or something is a lashing offense, what we're talking about is the severity of the offence.
We're just saying this is a less severe offense.
You would only get lashes for it, hypothetically.
This is a more severe offense.
You would be executed for hypothetically.
We're not talking about what you would actually do.
And when we tell someone to become a Noahide, we're not saying ideally we set up a court system.
We're just saying these are the things you can't do.
But just back to the thing, because I think this is important.
It's important for Jewish-Christian relations, such as they are.
Jews and Christians agree that idolatry is bad and not just bad, it's the worst thing you can do because God created the universe and you're bowing down to a statue.
How dare you?
Okay.
What we disagree about is a specific application of is worshiping Jesus idolatry.
Now, you also agree, if Jesus wasn't the Son of God, you agree it would be idolatry to worship him, correct?
If I worshipped you because I thought you were the son of God, that would be idolatry.
Even if I was very sincere.
This is the legalistic mindset which you'll be.
No, no, it's only a kind of legal procedure, which I would approach it another way.
I mean, you're in a way saying, yeah, but come on, it's kind of like it makes sense because I'm saying, and by the way, we're talking about the Noahide is now embedded in the US legal system.
George H.W. Bush actually introduced it into under the umbrella of some kind of Children's Education Act or something like that.
Noahide is now part of the US legal, I mean, it's not legally enforceable because there are no Noahide courts, but it's there on the books.
It's a bit like saying, oh, if you haven't committed a crime, you've got nothing to fear, which is why it's perfectly okay to have closed-circuit television everywhere and this and that, the surveillance state.
It's there for your Fu'ir Zishaheid, as they say.
The problem is that when you get these, you've got Noahide being pushed and indeed sold to evangelical Christians by organizations like the ADL, by Bnai Brith.
You have Noahide training schools in Israel.
If all this is just purely ceremonial, of course, it's never going to mean anything.
These people are just wasting their time, aren't they?
Do you think they think they're wasting their time?
No, they do.
It's not ceremonial.
It's not ceremonial.
We're saying, what should your religion be?
Your religion should be Noahism, i.e., you should pray to God.
You should believe there's one God who created the universe.
You should have ethics.
That's what we believe Gentiles to do.
Look, forget this.
Imagine I'm talking to a Hindu.
What do I tell a Hindu?
I say, you need, this is an urgent thing.
You've got your little statue of your elephant with your six hands.
You need to break it and you need to worship the one God.
If you want me to say what I think a Christian should do, sorry, you believe Chris Christ was the son of God.
I understand you're sincere.
What Noahism Actually Means00:08:06
I sincerely believe he was not the son of God.
Therefore, I sincerely believe you're committing an offense by doing.
It's not, we're not, our goal is not to set up a legal system.
Our goal is to say, what should you do?
My view is, all Jews you is, every single human being on earth should be a monotheist.
You should be Dutch.
You should be proud of your culture, your country, your cuisine, your whatever, blah.
But you should be a monotheist.
And I'm afraid to say Christianity is not monotheistic from my perspective.
I understand that you sincerely believe it's monotheistic.
I don't think you're lying by saying that, but I'm not lying by saying I don't.
Now, here's the point.
I think that from a right-wing perspective, you can quite easily look at Noahidism as actually something much more positive because we're not saying you have to give up your national culture.
It's not a globalizing faith.
It's not like, say, Islam, which says you have to start reading the Quran in Arabic or something, and you have to start wearing our dress.
The message of Noahism is this.
You are French.
Be French.
Be proud to be French.
Preserve your traditions.
Preserve your way of life, etc.
But you should be monotheists.
That's it.
I do respect you, Gabriel.
there's a quite a ballsy position to be to be saying yeah there are no hide laws but but they're okay and i and i totally no i just i just no i really like sorry i look i i'm not i'm not trying to move but i really think you've just got your kind of knickers in a twist about like a literal non-issue Okay.
First of all, Noahism is not a big thing.
I know some Noahides.
Actually, look, not really.
I know some people whose parents are Noahides and they converted to Judaism.
And that's what Noahism in practice really is.
It's kind of like a kind of stepping stone to it's people who they decide they want to be Jewish, but for whatever reason, it's not going to work because it's too much of a life-changing thing.
So they become Noahides.
And then in practice, and their children usually become Jews.
Now, that's not the idea behind the project.
And it tends to be something like very, very cringe.
Noahism is very cringe.
It's for people who are not very socially well adapted, people who have problems with their parents, et cetera.
It's not a successful movement.
I like it to be more successful movement because I think everyone should be a monotheist.
But it's not a very successful movement.
It's not about executing people.
It's just that's not what anyone involved is thinking.
Oh, when can we finally execute people?
It's just saying we think everyone should be a monotheist.
On that point, on monotheism, because you're right.
I do think of myself as a monotheist, and I think because of the nature of the Trinity and stuff, I don't think that I'm worshiping idols.
I think that's unfair.
But wait a second.
What are you?
You're a Church of England?
Yeah.
Okay.
I don't know what you think personally.
The opinion of the Church of England until recently was that Catholics worship idols.
They are idol worshippers.
That what they do at the, you know, nowadays, everybody.
I don't want to burn them.
I don't want to burn anyone.
You're just going to be.
Yeah, but it wouldn't be.
Gabriel, it wouldn't be you doing it.
It'd be the rabbinical.
It wouldn't be a nice guy like you.
I honestly, I promise.
I promise.
Okay.
I'm not here to defend everything in Judaism.
promise you the guys who are promoting noahidism they're not thinking about executing people that's not what it's not on their mind Because nowadays we don't have courts execute people.
And then in the messianic days, you won't need to execute everyone because everything will be fine.
It's a legal category.
It's something that comes from legalism.
But you're the one obsessing about it.
They just read it.
It says on a page, oh, death penalty.
And then they move on.
They don't think about it because it doesn't have any relevance to life.
One is going to be slightly.
I think obsessed is too strong a word for it.
One is going to be lightly rumpled, let's say, when one discovers that there is this kind of legal code which enjoins one to be executed for the crime of being a Christian.
It's a pretty big deal.
Okay, so look.
I'd love Netanyahu to be crawling through the snow on his knees to beg forgiveness for this appalling, appalling thing, which of course has a legacy of the medieval period, which has no relevance to modern times.
But I don't see it happening anytime soon.
Because what I'm seeing is Noahide schools in Israel.
Because the point of a Noahide school is not to train people to execute someone.
The point of a Noah's school is to say, this is, in our opinion, how we have an idea that our role is to promote monotheism among the nations.
The truth is we haven't really done very much about it because we mostly just keep to ourselves.
Okay, so we're trying to do our role of promoting monotheismizations.
This is how you're supposed to be monotheistic.
We give Bible lessons and stuff.
Like, it's just the idea of killing people doesn't come into it.
We're just trying to tell you, be monotheists.
Okay, it's hard because we don't have a lot for you.
The truth is, Noahism is a big flop because it doesn't really give you a life structure.
It doesn't give you a community.
It doesn't give you a liturgy.
It doesn't give you any of the things that people want from religion.
So actually, it's just a big flop.
Maybe we should put a lot more effort into it.
We don't because we're actually very self-obsessed.
But the fact that we're trying to at least be a bit less self-obsessed, oh, even that's bad.
Okay.
You know, like, you know, a Christian, I don't know what you believe.
Traditional Christianity, both Protestant and Catholic and Orthodox and everything, believes that anyone, including myself, who doesn't accept Jesus Christ as the personal savior is going and also in most of the branches, is inducted into church through baptism, et cetera, is going to spend eternity in hell.
Okay, I could get very offended.
No, okay, you're not going to do anything to me personally, but you do think I'm going to go to hell for life.
I can get very offended by that.
Okay, but I'm not going to get offended by that because it's not productive.
it doesn't need anybody you're saying you're going to get offended because in theory I don't I don't, I personally, I don't get offended by stuff.
I get.
I suppose the difference is that if you're going to go burning in hell, Gabriel, that's going to be God's decision.
It's nothing to do with me.
I mean, it really isn't.
God can judge you.
And he may find you're fantastic.
And there are all sorts of get out clauses for you.
There wouldn't be any get out clauses for me in a rabbinical court.
Do you see?
This is.
But there's no court.
it's not happening there's no no no but were these courts to exist which which which that clearly no i mean this stuff is meaningless unless unless potentially it can be it has legal weight Otherwise, these people are just cosplaying, aren't they?
Are they cosplaying?
That's where you're completely wrong.
Because again, in Jewish law, we have, you know, there's only seven Noahide laws.
There's 613 Jewish laws, Torah laws.
All of them, none of the punishments apply.
None of them have been implemented for 2,000 years.
And yet we devote our lives to keeping the Sabbath in the right way, to building a tabernacle in the right way, all of these things, complying with this law.
Even though no one has been punished and no one can be punished, as far as we know, indefinitely.
So for us, it's not.
I don't keep the Sabbath because I'm like, one day I might be punished.
It's got nothing to do with why I keep the Sabbath.
It's nothing to do with why I educate my children to keep the Sabbath.
It's nothing with, it's just, it's so completely irrelevant to why I keep the Sabbath.
It's the fact that breaking the Sabbath, certain violations would incur inferior death and certain violations would incur inferior lashes kind of tells me about the importance of it.
But I don't keep the Sabbath because I'm awaiting some time where people get that.
So we're not, when people say keep the Noahide laws, we're saying keep the Noahide laws because we think that's what you should do.
Not because one day you'll be executed, we're just kind of practicing for when you're going, no, we just think you should keep $9.
Orthopraxy Over Doctrine00:07:59
Well, you'll see that anyway.
Presumably, all the six, apart from that one, you think are fine, right?
If I go out to you and say, you shouldn't kill people, you're okay with that, right?
No, I think it's weird.
I say I feel sorry for the Maasai.
I think they have a very healthy lifestyle, drinking the blood of their cattle, and I wouldn't want them to be troubled by it.
Okay, I mean, you could say the same thing, that Hinduism have a very beautiful religion.
Okay, Judaism makes certain offensive claims that worshiping idols is wrong.
Most human civilizations have worshipped idols.
So I guess, you know, in that sense, what we're saying is offensive.
But we believe that there's one God, and he's, you know, only he is to be worshipped.
Can I ask you about the Kabbalah, which from where I'm sitting seems not to put too fine a point on it, dodgy as.
I mean, you've got people like Madonna going to wearing their funny little bracelet, the red bracelet thing.
This seems to me to be sort of a mixture of, well, it's the occult, it's necromancy.
This is stuff that you lot have inherited from the Babylonian exile.
When you spent too long in Babylon and you were sort of mucking around with these, rubbing shoulders with these dark magicians, and you've incorporated a lot of this heavy-duty dark stuff into your religion.
Over to you.
Okay, so I'm not sure the history is correct.
So there's an ongoing debate in scholarship, not among Jews, I'm talking universities, but when Kabbalah starts, it seems to be in the 11th or 12th century AD, either in Provence or Spain.
It's more recent.
Now, Kabbalah, the Rusa Kabbalah is trying to answer certain kinds of questions that any monotheist has to deal with at some level.
So if God is completely transcendent, how does God interact with the universe?
Like, where's the connection?
If God is completely omnipotent and he's completely good, where does evil come from?
If God knows everything already, why do I bother praying?
Like, he knows I'm going to pray.
So what am I trying to change?
Well, like, oh, please, God who knows everything, change what your plans because I asked you to do.
Like, what am I even doing when I'm praying?
So Kabbalah asks, Kabbalah is based upon trying to answer a lot of these real questions that any monotheist has to face.
Okay.
These paradoxes.
You know, can God make a rock so big he can't list it?
There you go.
There's a paradox.
Okay.
Monotheism throws up a lot of paradoxes and Kabbalah tries to answer them.
Now, my personal opinion is as follows.
Kabbalah is the wrong answer to all of these paradoxes.
Kabbalah is against the Jewish religion.
Kabbalah should be excised from Jewish religion.
One reason I don't bother with Noahideism and stuff, even though I really don't think they're doing a bad thing.
I think they're doing a good thing as far as it goes.
But I don't bother with it because I don't think the Jewish people are in a position to promote monotheism to the nations at large when we're not promoting monotheism among ourselves.
I think that in trying to answer the paradoxes of monotheism, Kabbalah violates the basic tenets of monotheism.
And in so doing, what happens, just as happens in other mystical religions, it lets in things, you know, you could call them necromancy.
Now, every single bad thing about Kabbalah, you can explain it away in a way that's okay.
And I could do that.
It's just my view on it basically is that if it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it's a duck.
So I would say that some of the things that some Kabbalists do is tantamount to necromancy.
And therefore, our job as Jews is to get rid of Kabbalah.
Now, according to kind of a literal reading of the Torah, what I'm supposed to do, I'm supposed to go find a Kabbalist and kill him.
And I'm supposed to kill him.
Yes.
Now, wait.
Now, you could say, I'm not going to do that.
You say, oh, I'm just cosplaying.
I'm just, it's just a fake.
Okay.
Well, I'm not going to do that.
What I will do is I will tell a Kabbalist, you're wrong.
You know, you're violating our religion.
You're, I believe, bringing divine displeasure on our people.
Just in exactly the same way that if I think it's reasonable, I'm happy to tell a Hindu that you should stop worshiping idols.
And I'm happy to tell a Christian, in my opinion, you should get rid of the Jesus part of your religion.
Okay.
Yeah.
Now, for me, it's more important to deal with the Kabbalah side of things because, A, I live in Israel, don't really meet many Christians, etc.
B, I think we should get our own house in order before we try and put other people's house in order.
No, maybe there's no C.
Okay, A and D.
So that's my view.
I can't defend Kabbalah because I think that Kabbalah is bad.
But, you know, I can say that it does come from, it comes from an honest attempt.
In its earliest form, it comes from an honest attempt to answer what are real questions.
And there are earlier forms of Kabbalah that are, if not necessarily good, they are much less bad.
As in, one of the things, one of the problems with mysticism is that it kind of opens the door for a lot of nonsense to fall.
One moment you're just trying to say, okay, well, maybe, okay, so there's God up there and there's earth here.
So maybe there's a system of emanations.
And maybe I don't believe that either, but it's not crazy to believe such a thing.
It's not wicked to believe such a thing.
But after a few generations, once you've allowed yourself to just invent stuff, Invent these kind of things, and even worse, to invent stuff while you're having some kind of mystical trance that you induced in yourself by meditating for 24 hours while fasting.
A lot of nonsense seeks in.
So, Kabbalah has kind of degenerated as from its earliest form, which was much less bad.
With that said, there have been people who try to interpret Kabbalah in a way that is more good, that is less superstitious, that is less necromancish.
And I don't think that's a really right approach.
I think we should just abolish Kabbalah.
But again, they're not wicked, they're not evil because they're trying to do it, they're misled.
Like, I think people should be nice.
Well, I think we can agree on that.
How big is, I mean, how many, what percentage of Jews do practice Kabbalah?
What practice Kabbalah?
Well, or yeah, study it and it's interesting.
Okay, what, but what, what, what percentage of Jews practice Kabbalah in that they're they are Kabbalists, that they're, you know, they studied Kabbalistic literature in and they do Kabbalistic exercises and say Kabbalistic formulas and stuff, maybe half a percent, something like that, probably less.
What kind of Jew, what kind of proportion of Jews are to some extent influenced in their practice by Kabbalah?
Although among Orthodox Jews, probably about 80-90%.
What kind of proportion of Jews are heavily influenced by Kabbalah?
20%, 30%.
Again, quite a lot.
So, one of the things about Judaism, the way it works, is that it isn't really a religion that is doctrinally based, as in it's very much based upon practice.
It's an orthopraxic religion in many ways.
So, there is a kind of if someone is observant and he keeps the mitzvot and he prays when he's supposed to, and he builds a tabernacle when he's supposed to, and he keeps the Sabbath as he's supposed to, Jews tend to be very, very tolerant about what he believes.
They don't really care what he believes, yeah.
Why Lying Is Unethical00:03:44
Um, and in some ways, I think that's a good thing because it stops us having wars of religion, stops us having ISIS kind of groups saying, cutting off your head because you didn't say the Shahada in the right way.
But again, it has a failure mode, and the failure mode is just kind of basically tolerating any kind of insane, uh, crazy beliefs as long as people are precise in their ritual observance.
Um, so if we're criticized for that, then um, I'm not going to defend things that I think are wrong.
Um, I also think the Trinity is a violation of monotheism, so yeah.
Can I ask you, as under Jewish tradition, are you allowed to lie to me and trick me?
I mean, you don't have to tell me the truth, do you, in if it's in the interests of Judaism?
Um, am I allowed to lie to you or trick you?
There's no doctrine, if you want, like there's like Shia Muslims have a doctrine of taqfir.
Yeah, no, it's not called taqfir.
Is it called?
Yeah, that's what I was asking.
Is there not a similar thing in Judaism?
No, there's no organized doctrine of thing.
There's a principle which is I'm allowed to violate anything to save my life.
So if you're not going to kill you, Gabriel.
So points.
If you order me to eat pork or you'll kill me, I'm allowed to eat the pork.
Similarly, if you're going to kill me, but I'll be able to lie.
So you won't kill me, then I can lie.
So that's an established principle.
Apart from that, no, there's no.
But then there's not, I mean, there's not like a specific, there's not a specific Torah offense to lie.
Like, nowhere in the Torah does it say you can't lie.
Like, it's a kind of, it's unethical.
So there's a wider theory of the Talmud doesn't deal with kind of ethic questions so much.
So for example, one of the things that actually is a specific offense in the Torah is gossip.
You're not allowed to gossip about people.
So the question is, well, what does it mean to gossip?
Like, what if, you know, what if I think someone's a paedophile, right?
And maybe I should gossip, you know?
So in more recent times, there's been a large literature that's been written about the Jewish laws of what we call Lushan Hara about gossip.
And those kind of tend to fall into kind of this failure mode of legalism that you spend a whole week reading this thing, long book about when am I allowed to, when am I allowed to, when am I not allowed to, when am I allowed to?
And then when you actually get to a practical situation, you just end up gossiping because it's too much.
You can't, you know, and then so with lying, lying kind of falls into that kind of thing, you know.
Like it's kind of thing you just have to, it's not something you can really legalize.
You just have to kind of, because everyone agrees, okay, Kant didn't agree.
Kant said you're never allowed to lie.
But everyone else who's not Kant says there are occasions when you're not allowed to lie.
Okay, the Nazis come in, you've got some Jews under your staircase.
They say, where are the Jews?
They say, I don't know, no Jews.
Well, I didn't see the Jews.
Everyone agrees there are occasions when you're allowed to lie.
So it's not kind of a thing you can legalize.
Like it's the kind of thing you have to cultivate a character trait of honesty through moral exaltation.
But is there a law that says I'm allowed to lie to you because you're a Gentile and you'll feel better about me if I lie?
No, there's no such law.
I was thinking, well, I think maybe I was stretching it.
If I said law, I didn't mean that.
meant a kind of code tradition a kind of no there's no there's no there's no look she shiites have a specific doctrine of lying which they developed mostly not it's not It's not about non-Muslims.
It's mostly about Sunni Muslims persecuting them.
Right, right.
So they developed this specific thing and they have a specific code.
When are you allowed?
When are you not?
There's no such section of Jewish world that deals with it.
Right, right.
Judaism's Legalist Plus and Downsides00:02:37
I was very sorry to hear you say, by the way, that in your kind of religious practice, you've never had a sort of.
Do you not get intimations of God or anything like that?
No, when I say I haven't received prophecy, I mean I've never, I'm not a prophet.
No, I have.
What do you get?
What do you get?
Like, you mean, have you moments of kind of serenity?
I've had moments of serenity.
I've had moments of kind of being overwhelmed.
I've had moments of terror because of consciousness of my sins.
Yeah, I've had emotions of the Lord is a, well, it's the beginning of wisdom, of course, but yes.
No, I suppose, yeah, that's good to hear.
I suppose you get what I would call God treats, where occasionally he sends you these little signs that he's there with you and he's got your back.
And I'm presuming you get those as well.
So look, I will say that Judaism is a kind of organized religion connected to being legalist.
It's not built around cultivating those kind of religious emotions.
And one of the things that Kabbalists, one of the reasons why Kabbalah kind of developed and became more popular is because actually there are more into that.
Kabbalists are actually into meditation.
They're into kind of quasi-prophetical kind of things.
Look, in a sense, this kind of non-prophetic nature of legalistic Judaism, like all things, it has its plus sides and its downsides.
On the plus side is that, traditionally speaking, before Kabbalah, at least, we were much less likely to be led astray by kind of charismatic figures and stuff.
And also that, you know, the kind of Christianity and also Islam as well, they don't talk about it so much nowadays, but they have had these antinomian movements which kind of say, oh, you know, because we're above the law, because we're beyond the law, well, it turns out I can do whatever I want.
And what it turns out that I want to do is adultery, right?
Judaism until the 17th century and Sabbateanism didn't have a single antinomian movement, as far as we know, for 1,300 years, which I think is pretty good.
From the Talmudic period until Shabbati.
When Kabbalah came along, unfortunately, 200 years later, we did have an antinomian movement, which I think shows you why maybe Rabbinic Judaism had a good point about not kind of cultivating this kind of more meditative form of spirituality.
I can also accept if people want to say that Judaism seems a bit stale, seems a bit dry.
Why Judaism Seems Stale00:05:43
I can buy that.
That's fine.
I don't think there's a criticism that's being really leveled at it.
It's more, I think people get freaked out by things like the Rebbe.
Is it Schneerson?
What's that particular kind of look?
Lubavitch is here.
Exactly.
Lubavitch.
That's what I was.
That is the same as B'nai Bret, isn't it?
No, not at all.
Bene Bret is a B'nebrit.
I mean, what?
I don't know how much of it is this.
Bene Brit was like a Jewish kind of social Freemason.
It's a very good idea.
Like the Freemasons.
Sorry.
Okay.
Sorry, I'm when I yeah, I like they had the Leviticus no Lubavitch is not connected with Neighborhood at all, but Nebrask was was like um up like upscale um liberal American Jews who wanted to hang out with other upscale liberal American Jews and like discuss business and whatever Lubavitch is a religious movement.
Um, look, my view is: okay, there are as a movement, I think Lubovich goes against Judaism and they should be um suppressed.
Again, I don't believe in violence, but I haven't gone any tools to suppress them.
But Trump loves them.
Um, Putin seems in bed with them.
Um, what's his name?
Jared Kushner absolutely is they're right up him, or he's right up them.
I mean, and these are these are people not uninfluential.
So, look, Lubavitch are look, Lubovich is a messianic movement, they believe that their late leader was the Messiah, the vast majority of them, um, certainly.
Um, and um, that gives them a lot of motivation.
Um, one thing they're very smart about, they're kind of they're very, they're politically agnostic.
So, um, they're they're they're they're very big in, as you say, in Russia, they're closely associated with the Putin regime, but also in Ukraine, the Ukrainian uh branch of Lubavitch is very pro-Ukrainian nationalism.
They're not what they're interested in is promoting the messianic movement, and they're um, they're they're not they're not, they're just not fussed about you know what kind of political doctrines they have to espouse to do that.
Um, and look, they do a lot of stuff, they do a lot of they run a lot of soup kitchens, they they do a lot of charitable work, like there's probably so do so do the shriners.
Wait a second, I was gonna say, Jews of my persuasion, you might call broadly speaking rationalists or whatever you want to call Jews of my persuasion, probably could learn a lot from them how to grow their movement.
Um, but no, my view is that Lubovich is basically heretical and that they should be suppressed.
Like I say, I don't believe in violence, but in as much as you can suppress someone, they should be suppressed.
That's my view, yes, I yeah, again, it's it's a problem, isn't it?
I mean, I'm trying to think: is there an equivalent of Lubovich in the Christian world which has that influence and that geopolitical reach and that sheer menace?
I mean, how would it menace?
Like, I mean, the thing about okay, one advantage of Christianity is because you believe the Messiah has already come, that kind of means you're less vulnerable to fake messianic movements.
One weakness of Judaism, but sure he was quite cool, you've got to admit.
I mean, whatever you think about him, you think he wasn't the Messiah, but he had nice beard, long hair.
He said some cool things.
I'm looking at Rebec Schneerson.
I'm not thinking that's a cause of what I've reading Isaiah at the moment.
I think Isaiah is almost my favorite book of the Old Testament.
It's fantastic.
And nowhere am I coming up with passages which are called with Schneerson being the Messiah?
No, I mean, it's obviously absurd.
I mean, the man obviously had a certain charisma, and people say that he was very kind in his dealings with people.
He was very upright and stuff.
And I have no reason to doubt it.
I don't, you know, you know, certain people have this kind of, they don't get angry.
They have this kind of way of reading people's souls and giving.
He was very known for giving people good advice.
A lot of people credit him for, you know, people who were drug addicts.
They credit him for getting them out of their hole, people who had problems with their marriage.
He fixed their marriage.
All of that kind of stuff.
I don't, you know, in that set, obviously, I think he was bad because he was a fake Messiah, but he had certain good things, as I imagine Jesus did.
I mean, you know, he did.
you know jesus was was it was good well look i don't look i mean i i i i tend towards the view that the gospel no i tend towards the view that the the gospels are are somewhat unreliable Look, again, I'm not a believing Christian.
I know that.
Sorry, I'm putting you on the spot.
I'm teasing you.
No, no, I tend towards the view that the gospel.
The truth is, I tend towards the view that the Gospels are relatively unreliable, and therefore, I don't think we really know a lot about Jesus.
So I can't say Jesus was bad or good because I don't personally believe that we don't know about Jesus.
There's been lots of academic discussion about who Jesus was.
As you know, there's a fringe theory that Jesus didn't even exist.
I don't believe that.
But my point is, there's a big academic debate about what did Jesus really believe, et cetera.
I don't have strong opinions about Jesus.
I can accept that things like the Sermons at the Mount has a great kind of rhetorical and moral power to it.
Fine.
But I also think that there's things in the Bavich that have a certain power.
I also think there's things in the Babavitch that are gross and disgusting.
It's a complicated world.
I mean, in menace, but there's no real menace to Lubavitch because what they're trying to achieve.
The Unreliable Gospels00:03:54
They have the European United States.
I mean, the most powerful country in the world.
What they're trying to achieve fundamentally is to get all Jews to recognize their Messiah.
Now, I think that is a disastrous thing because we're not allowed.
It's against our religion.
But let's say every Jew in the world said, we believe Menachemendol Schneerson is the Messiah.
Now, they believe at that point, everything will kick off metaphysically.
But in fact, nothing would happen, correct?
Nothing would happen.
So that's what they're actually fundamentally trying to achieve.
Now, are they involved in corruption to get there in Putin's Russia?
Certainly.
In Ukraine, also, I would imagine that there has to be things.
In Israel, Their influence on a political process is also very negative.
They're not above, it's not like in America, we kind of exploit the political system because they're Gentiles, but in Israel, our hands are clean.
No, they act exactly the same way here as they are there.
Actually, they get away with a lot more here because they're able to more exploit certain weaknesses in the system.
Yeah, look, they behave badly in some ways.
I think they're bad.
Gabriel, this is we've gone on.
This is one of my longer podcasts.
I don't normally do longer than an hour and 30.
So it shows how much I've enjoyed talking to you and it shows what heroic stamina you've got.
So, so thank you very much.
I'm still, just one last thing.
I'm intrigued by the Golan Heights being like Dorset.
Can you sort of wander around any bits and not see horrid concrete houses?
I mean, is there anywhere I'm spoiled?
Yeah, yeah.
So, yes.
So, I mean, the Golan Heights is very unbuilt up because when it was originally conquered by Israel, there was a general consensus that they were going to give it back at some point.
As in, we took the Sinai, we took the West Bank, we took Gaza and we took the Golan Heights.
And most people thought the Sinai is the most likely to go.
And after that, the Golan Heights.
Why?
Because it has less religious significance, so we wanted it less.
But also, because at the time, Syria was the major Arab military power.
And it was our, along with Egypt, was our biggest threat.
And the idea is that we'll give up the Golan Heights in exchange for a peace deal with Syria, just like we gave up the Sinai in exchange for a peace deal with Egypt.
That was what everyone thought would happen.
It didn't happen because the Syrian state refused the deal.
We offered them the Golan Heights back, and they said, no, we want even more, whatever.
It was a technical thing.
And then after that, the Syrian state collapsed.
But what it meant was people didn't come to live here in the decades after the Yom Kippur War because they thought, well, why am I going to go live somewhere where I'm going to just have to leave in 10 years?
So actually, it's quite bucolic here.
And it's also very safe because Syria is no longer a military threat.
It's non-existent as a military threat.
Hezbollah don't target the Golan Heights, even though they could logistically, because they don't consider it to be, they consider their job to be to conquer, ideally, northern Israel, but they consider it to be Syria's job to conquer the Golan Heights.
They don't have a claim on it.
There are no Palestinians here.
There are Druze Arabs who are, they vary, but they're not militantly hostile to Israel.
So there's no terrorism here.
It's a very safe place.
It's very nice.
I'm sort of itching to see with your camera what the view is out of your window.
Is it rolling, rolling fields with sheep in it?
Should we try?
Yeah, go and try.
So I don't think we're going to.
No, we're not going to do it.
Can you see?
No, I can only see sky.
Only Sky and Green Fields00:02:42
Now?
You can describe the...
Oh, I can, yeah.
Yes, I can.
Oh, right.
It's green.
It's green.
I've seen your keyboard Sorry Sorry.
Okay.
I've got my headphones in.
Sorry.
So I don't know if you saw.
Across the road is actually quite an ugly house.
Yeah.
It's a kind of a villa.
Actually, it's an interesting guy.
He's actually an Israeli Arab who became rich delivering those water cooler things that and he came and so he grew up in Arab villas that he made you know he made good money so he came to live in this town instead.
So yeah, things are very peaceful and calm and nicer.
No, it looks really nice.
In fact, Mount Hermon, which is the tallest mountain in Israel, half it's in Israel, half it's in Lebanon, is the camera for you is not long enough, but if I go around the corner, if I poke my head out the window, I can see Mount Hermon.
Snowcaps which fell upon the hill of Zion.
There the Lord promised his blessing and life forevermore.
Amen.
So thank you.
Gabriel, tell us where we can find your sub stack and tell us remember.Zionism.com, if memory serves.
I think most people have loved you and so thank you.
I'm just guessing.
I'm speaking for my audience here.
I think you've been great, and we've had a little bit of gentle wrangling.
Well, I hope that our mutual rabbinical friend...
Well, I hope so too.
And I hope you didn't hate the experience.
No, no, no.
Look, again, like I say, I'm open to, I'm just, I'm a bit beyond.
I guess I cycle through so many ideologies.
I'm just a bit beyond being offended by things.
I'm a bit beyond feeling defensive about things either.
Good.
Excellent.
Thank you.
Everyone.
Oh, you know, actually, I'll say something.
I might say, why is it not saying?
Say it.
In a hypothetical world where no one knew what was in the Talmud, right?
Maybe I would lie.
I don't know.
I haven't thought about what I would do.
It's not because there's a law that says I can lie, but because maybe I would, because there are occasions when it's valid to lie.
And maybe this would be an occasion.
The truth is, you can go online now and you can read the entire Talmud in English.
You want to do it?
Safario.com.
It's all there.
It's all translated.
It's got a commentary.
When Lying Is Valid00:01:25
There's a lot of it.
All of it.
Every single word.
Every single word of the Talmud is translated.
And my point is, there's no point in lying.
If any Jews are listening to this, you might as well be open because even if you think, you know, I'll just lie and then they'll like me more, it's a waste of time.
The Talmud is what it is.
Some people are not going to like parts of it.
There's no point.
There's no point not being open about it.
Yeah, yeah.
No, look, I agree.
I'm totally at honesty is the best policy kind of guy.
And it's good to meet a fellow fellow spirit in that regard.
Everyone, if you've enjoyed this podcast, obviously you have.
Do, well, first of all, go to Gabriel's website and give him some support.
Read interesting articles.
You've got a measure of the man now.
Anything you can see is worth reading.
And for me, yeah, look, do please continue sharing and liking and supporting me.
Those of you who can, who can make the effort, the financial commitment, thank you.
Become a paid subscriber on Substack or wherever.
Or go to my website, jamesdaningpole.co.uk and support my sponsors.