June 16, 2017 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Let's talk about religion this week. | ||
| Whether you're a believer or a non-believer, religion has and probably always will play some role in society. | ||
| This is why religion has been at least a part of so many of the discussions I've had on this show, from interviews with an atheist like Sam Harris, to a Catholic like Bishop Barron, to a Christian like Dinesh D'Souza, to an Orthodox Jew like Ben Shapiro, to ex-Muslim Yasmin Mohamed. | ||
| To Atheist Muslim Ali Rizvi, to Jew turned Atheist turned Christian Andrew Clavin, and so on. | ||
| All of these religious descriptors exist for each of these individual people, no matter how confusing they may be to anyone from the outside looking in. | ||
| I for one have consistently enjoyed talking to people from all walks of life and seeing what they believe and how they took, or did not take, the leap of faith to get where they are in their spiritual journey. | ||
| As I've said many times before, I myself am not a believer, but I don't really care what anyone else believes as long as their religious beliefs don't take the form of legislating my life. | ||
| In the privacy of your own home, you can believe in Yahweh or Jesus or Mohammed or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and that's none of my business. | ||
| If your religious beliefs give you some sense of purpose or inner peace, then great. | ||
| It's when your beliefs bleed into who I can marry or wanting to throw me off a roof that I have a problem with you and your beliefs. | ||
| As for that leap of faith, I usually explain my feelings about belief with a simple basketball analogy. | ||
| If you told me that you saw LeBron James dunk from half court last night, well I couldn't just take that on faith alone. | ||
| I'd need some sort of evidence, like at the very least seeing the videotape with my own two eyes as proof of your outrageous claim. | ||
| So it seems only logical to me to treat the biggest questions of the universe with the same intellectual rigor as my imaginary basketball analogy. | ||
| Belief aside, there are many attachments people have to religion which often are cultural and based in tradition. | ||
| For me, being Jewish is a connection to the history, and often very painful history, of the Jewish people, but also being aware of the traditions, rich cultural heritage and historical ties that I have to the people who came before me. | ||
| While I'm not religious myself, it's the educational emphasis of Judaism which lets atheists like Albert Einstein or Carl Sagan stay connected to their cultural identity without giving up their commitment to logic and reason. | ||
| Without comparing myself intellectually anywhere near those two legends, it's this type of understanding of Judaism that I believe in, but I have no desire to push this on you or anyone else. | ||
| Joining me to discuss belief, religion, and why Jews are so funny is Rabbi David Wolpe of Sinai Temple here in Los Angeles. | ||
| Rabbi Wolpe was named America's Most Influential Rabbi by Newsweek Magazine and one of the 50 most influential Jews by the Jerusalem Post. | ||
| Where Larry David and Jesus and half of Lenny Kravitz fell on that list? | ||
| We'll soon find out. | ||
| Rabbi David Wolpe, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I feel like we've already spent 45 minutes together. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| Now I'm going to have to repeat everything. | ||
| It's okay, because I actually didn't tell you the truth about any of my opinions up to this point, so it's fine. | ||
| Ah, you were doing a little bait and switch, now I can get the real stuff. | ||
| All right, so there's a lot I want to talk to you about. | ||
| It's Monday right now. | ||
| Is it Monday or Tuesday? | ||
| Tuesday. | ||
| It's Tuesday! | ||
| See, I didn't tell you the truth about that either. | ||
| So it's Tuesday afternoon. | ||
| What does a rabbi normally do around three o'clock on a Tuesday afternoon? | ||
| Normally, I have meetings. | ||
| I have meetings with staff. | ||
| I have meetings with congregants. | ||
| For advice, for counsel, I meet with various charities, I meet with bar mitzvah kids, I meet with wedding couples, I write, I teach, weddings, funerals, all those sorts of things. | ||
| So you're sort of on call? | ||
| All the time, sure. | ||
| Do you have hours? | ||
| Does a rabbi have hours? | ||
| You have hours where you meet with people. | ||
| But you don't necessarily, I mean, if somebody's sick in the hospital, you don't say, I'm sorry, I can't see you. | ||
| It's, you know, it's not a good time. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But you have hours where you have essentially office hours where you make set meetings. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I thought a good jumping off point for us would be that I saw that Newsweek called you one of the 50 most influential Jews. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So the question is were you above or below Larry Dave? | ||
| So that was Jerusalem Post actually did that. | ||
| What Newsweek called you? | ||
| Newsweek called me the one for about seven or eight years Newsweek strangely judge the most influential rabbis in america so one of the years i was the most influential rabbi in america which means that i really hit the sweet spot because in the thousands of years of jewish history for seven years they ranked rabbis and by ranking rabbis what i mean is they got three people who said okay this is number one this is number two so you can't take these things too seriously and uh... | ||
| And influence is a very amorphous thing, and no, I'm not as influential as Larry David. | ||
| Not as influential as Larry David. | ||
| Or nearly as funny or creative. | ||
| Okay, but for the record, that was the Jerusalem Post. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And not Newsweek. | ||
| But the reason I wanted to start with that question was because I think at least sort of in my world, most of the Jews that I'm around, I'm around a lot of Jews, I'm Jewish, that there is a cultural attachment to Judaism that's separate sort of from the religious piece of Judaism. | ||
| Now as a rabbi, that's probably not the thing that you want to hear first, but that does seem to me what sort of the average secular Jew is. | ||
| And this is one of the things that separates Judaism from Christianity that I think most Christians, and many Jews, don't appreciate. | ||
| Which is, Christianity is a religion. | ||
| If you believe in Jesus, you're Christian. | ||
| If you don't believe in Jesus, you're not Christian. | ||
| Judaism is a religious family. | ||
| So you're born Jewish. | ||
| The only way to leave a family is to choose another family. | ||
| But as long as you don't choose another family, you can dislike your family. | ||
| Many of us do, right? | ||
| But you're still part of the family. | ||
| So, Jews have this very close connection. | ||
| Now, These two systems, they each have advantages and disadvantages. | ||
| The advantage of having a religion is it's much more easily spread. | ||
| Because if you have somebody with a completely different culture who says, I believe in Jesus, they're Christian like you are. | ||
| The advantage of having a religious family is Jews feel a powerful sense of connection to one another. | ||
| And that's why when Jews are in trouble in a far-flung land, you can be sure that there will be a Jewish rescue attempt. | ||
| You can be sure of it, because Jews feel that familial connection in a way that Christians don't. | ||
| Do you think there is some sort of risk in separating the religious side and that familial side, that heritage side? | ||
| Well, for me, I don't think Judaism can survive as a cultural phenomenon without religion. | ||
| I mean, it's what Will Herbert called cut flower ethics. | ||
| That if you remove flowers from the soil in which they grew, they'll last for a generation or two, but then they'll disappear. | ||
| And I think the same thing will happen with Judaism over time. | ||
| Without the religious roots that nourish it, it will eventually disappear. | ||
| So what is it about Judaism that has allowed So much secularism, and so much science, and thinking, and learning, and education. | ||
| All of the things that, for people that don't like religion, they'll say, ah, see, religion always tells you what to think, and religion hates science, and all of those things, but if you look at, you know, the hundred greatest scientists of all time, half of them are usually Jews, or this type of thing. | ||
| So part of it is that Judaism has a fierce intellectual tradition. | ||
| If you study Talmud, there are arguments on every single page, and that tradition of argumentation was always true, and status was given to intellect. | ||
| That is, it's not that wealth didn't have status in the Jewish tradition, it did, like every other society, but you wanted to marry The rabbi, I mean that was, he was the leader of the community and he had the social status and you became a rabbi by knowing more. | ||
| Really it was a knowledge competition more than anything else and when you have that sort of intellectual tradition, once you liberate it from being solely a religious one, You get these trained intellects that look around the world and and hungrily became experts, not just in science, in medicine, in music, in mathematics, in chess. | ||
| I used to be a tournament chess player. | ||
| It's astonishing how many of the world champions of chess have been Jewish. | ||
| And it's all the same. | ||
| I think it's all the same cultural tradition. | ||
| Yeah, do you see sort of a chasm between all that scientific knowledge and mathematical knowledge and all that, and then sort of that you have to take a leap of faith to believe in God, which is sort of the reverse of what science would... It's sort of the reverse. | ||
| I actually don't think it's the reverse. | ||
| I mean, I understand how people could see it that way, and some do see it that way, but I... | ||
| I think that the more you know about the world and the more you appreciate the wonder of the world and sort of the iron laws of nature, the more you almost feel like What Robert Jastrow, the physicist, said, he says, as the physicist peers over the horizon, he says, he feels like he sees a God who knew we were coming. | ||
| In other words, why does the world have such laws? | ||
| Why does it obey such laws? | ||
| What created a system that we could figure out? | ||
| And why is it that we have minds that presumably were just jerry-rigged by evolution, right? | ||
| There's no reason why our minds should be able to figure out these things. | ||
| And yet, we're in consonance with the universe. | ||
| I mean, I think that the idea that there is a designer, as science presumes there's a design, makes perfect sense. | ||
| So, I'm sure, as a rabbi in L.A., you probably have a lot of skeptics in your community. | ||
| I got a few. | ||
| You know, you probably got a couple atheists in there and some agnostics and all that. | ||
| Generally, those people are not, they're not thought of as apostates or, as you just said, they're still part of the family. | ||
| How do you have that conversation with them? | ||
| Have you ever had someone come up to you and say, Oh sure, all the time. | ||
| And some of my books actually address exactly that. | ||
| And as you know, and as we've talked about, I've had debates with Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins and all these very articulate and well-spoken atheists. | ||
| I really do think that a lot of this is your orientation towards the world. | ||
| And it's not so much an intellectual decision in the sense that When I teach Jewish theology. | ||
| And I've taught it for many years at a bunch of different universities. | ||
| So I put up all the classical Western proofs for God. | ||
| The teleological proof and the cosmological proof. | ||
| I've never had someone look at the board and go, oh, now I believe. | ||
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Right? | |
| Because even though we pretend it's a purely intellectual argument, it's not. | ||
| And you can see that when you see how emotional people become, atheists or believers, when they start to argue this. | ||
| It's really deep in us, this orientation towards the universe. | ||
| So I think that the best argument for religion is to be in a religious community for a while and see how it helps you see the world differently. | ||
| Yeah, so when you talk about a religious community, let's break down some of the different religious communities. | ||
| For somebody that's watching that has no idea what's going on with those crazy Jews, the basic three that at least we have. | ||
| The big three. | ||
| The big three in the West. | ||
| We've got reform, conservative, And orthodox. | ||
| Can you just sort of break down the basics? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| By the way, I do want to point out that you said to me right before we started, no question is off the table. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| I don't know what kind of trouble you could get yourself into. | ||
| That's all right. | ||
| I've gotten myself into enough trouble already. | ||
| Already here in these ten minutes? | ||
| No, no, no, no, no, no. | ||
| In life. | ||
| So first of all, orthodoxy, now I'm going to give you not my perspective on them, but their self-definition. | ||
| Orthodoxy's self-definition is That it believes it is true to the Torah that God gave Moses at Sinai thousands of years ago and the authoritative interpretations of the rabbis of that Torah which essentially are untouched by history. | ||
| They're really, they live above history and so the decision of the authoritative rabbi today was in some sense either literally known to or in theory known to Moses thousands of years ago. | ||
| That's orthodoxy. | ||
| Yeah, but for the literal part. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So these words are to... And the words in the Torah are literally what God spoke. | ||
| Maybe God didn't speak the way I speak. | ||
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Right. | |
| It doesn't have to be... literally doesn't mean literally. | ||
| But the literal interpretation... But they are exactly the words that God intended Moses to have in the Torah thousands of years ago. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| The conservative movement assumes that the tradition grows and changes. | ||
| That it is decided essentially by the community of devoted Jews. | ||
| That that community grows and changes too and that history has a very profound impact in the way that people see themselves, their community, and that therefore the Torah has to constantly be subject to the interpretation that takes into account what we know about the world that our ancestors did not know. | ||
| The reform movement places its emphasis primarily on individual choice and individual liberty, also tends to have a strong social justice and progressive political orientation. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That must be the most difficult part of being a rabbi, or any clergy member. | ||
| What's that? | ||
| The political part. | ||
| That you're sort of thrust into politics all the time, right? | ||
| It's hard to define the most difficult part, but it is a difficult part. | ||
| And some rabbis are very political. | ||
| My own orientation is to be as little political as is possible, which doesn't mean not at all. | ||
| But my assumption is twofold. | ||
| First of all, there are people in my congregation who know as much about politics as I do. | ||
| So for me to get up there and preach to them because I read an article this morning is Hubristic and presumptuous or as we would say chutzpah dick. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The second is that I know very well that you can look at the Jewish tradition and say Judaism says and come out with a very right-wing agenda or a very left-wing agenda and both of them will have lots of verses and lots of rabbis to quote and so when people presume that Judaism speaks in either a right or a left voice I think they're they're wearing blinders. | ||
| What do you make of the state of Jews in America in 2017? | ||
| There's always an article every year, Judaism's over, they're done, this, that, the other thing. | ||
| Numbers-wise, I guess it's not great. | ||
| There was a professor at Brandeis, a philosopher, many years ago named Simon Rabidovich, and he wrote an essay called, Israel, the ever-dying people. | ||
| And he quotes Jews in every generation who say, we're the last, after us there aren't going to be any more. | ||
| I'm an optimist by nature, or I'm hopeful by nature, let me put it that way. | ||
| So I presume that Judaism is going through an interesting, sometimes painful transformation. | ||
| What it will be in a hundred years, I don't know. | ||
| What I do know is that no one would have predicted a hundred years ago where we are now. | ||
| So, I try to stay out of the profit business because I see that people... Look, I watch Sunday morning talk shows, and here are presumably the best informed pundits in the world, and they're wrong at least 50% of the time. | ||
| So for me to presume that this thousands of year old tradition in this complex land, I know what will happen, especially because I'm aware that what will happen to Jews in America has more to do with what will happen to America than what will happen to Jews. | ||
| If you had said to a Jew in Germany, what's Judaism in Germany going to be like in 50 years, in the year 1900, they would have looked at the Jewish community and been completely wrong. | ||
| So, a lot of it is, sometimes there's returns to tradition, there's a systolic, diastolic movement. | ||
| I assume Judaism will survive. | ||
| In what exact way, I don't know. | ||
| I can already tell we're gonna kind of bounce all over the place while we're doing this. | ||
| You mentioned Mount Sinai before. | ||
| I did. | ||
| That's where Moses got the Ten Commandments according to the lore. | ||
| I went to Mount Sinai in 1997. | ||
| I was 21 years old. | ||
| I went through Egypt. | ||
| I went from Israel actually through Sinai. | ||
| It was a lot safer at the time. | ||
| I was on like an overnight bus ride and I made it to Mount Sinai. | ||
| That's the first time someone told me a story about having bad pigeon, but go ahead. | ||
| It's something at like midnight so that it's cool and that by the time you get to the top, it's sunny. | ||
| I got there at like 8 a.m. | ||
| and I ended up hiking in the middle of the day. | ||
| I had just eaten some pigeon in Cairo and it was a mess, it was a mess to put it mildly. | ||
| I got to the top of the mountain and I-- | ||
| That's the first time someone told me a story about having bad pigeon, but go ahead, please go ahead. | ||
| It was bad pigeon and worse. | ||
| But I got to the top of the mountain and I truly remember thinking this, | ||
| that if God exists, that I will get some sort of sign. | ||
| That Moses saw the Ten Commandments here, I'm gonna get some kind of sign. | ||
| I got up there, and it's pretty, have you been there by any chance? | ||
| It's pretty barren, there's a little, there's a guy that actually works there, and he sells water and soda, and that's it. | ||
| And there were like two other people, and they were quibbling over something. | ||
| And I looked around, and there were no bushes, there was some twigs and things. | ||
| You know, nothing happened, and that has always sort of stuck with me. | ||
| Like, I was ready for it, I was 21. | ||
| I think I had been in Amsterdam for two weeks before that, doing God knows what. | ||
| Maybe that's where you got the sign. | ||
| I probably had a sign in Amsterdam, very possibly. | ||
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But that experience, I'm sure you've heard that sort of thing before. | |
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| So, look, I think part of it is that the moments of illumination sometimes come to you in At times that you're not looking for them, unaware. | ||
| And if you think back over your life and you think of moments where, for example, you intensely connected with another human being or where you felt inspired by the beauty and the wonder of the world for no reason other than you were inspired by the beauty and the wonder of the world. | ||
| What I would say to you is that's a Sinai moment. | ||
| It may not have happened at Sinai. | ||
| It may have happened, you know, I don't know, it may have happened in Simi Valley. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But it's a Sinai moment. | ||
| And fidelity to the moment is more important than fidelity to the place. | ||
| Simi Valley is actually very similar. | ||
| It is similar. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That was slick. | ||
| It is pretty similar. | ||
| So the battle, I think, between sort of religion and the cultural part of Judaism, do you think this can sort of be reconciled? | ||
| I think that there will always be people who love being Jewish, but don't have a religious orientation or a religious feeling. | ||
| And that's I mean and many of them will make fantastic contributions both by the way to The world, but also sometimes to Judaism. | ||
| I mean, Theodor Herzl was not a religious Jew, but he made an unparalleled contribution to the Jewish people and to the Jewish tradition. | ||
| So, it's complicated, and I am, as you've probably already intuited, I'm really not a bright-line person. | ||
| I'm not like, this is the way you have to be, and if you're not this way, then you're outside of the ambit of what's acceptable. | ||
| Because I just I think the world is awash with gray. | ||
| Yeah, but is that right there sort of uniquely Jewish? | ||
| That concept that a rabbi would sit across from me and say that? | ||
| I'm sure I can find a priest that would say it. | ||
| Sure, and you can find a lot of rabbis who won't say it. | ||
| Yeah, but I think I could probably find a lot more rabbis who would. | ||
| That might be, and one of the reasons, again, this is at least part of the Talmudic tradition. | ||
| There is a statement, there's an impure animal, it's called a sheret, it means a lizard, basically, and in the Talmud it says that somebody who can't give you 70 reasons why this impure animal is pure shouldn't be a rabbi. | ||
| In other words, if you can't argue the contrary of what it is you know to be true, Then you don't have the intellectual agility to be a rabbi, which means that you are trained in some sense to see both sides. | ||
| And if you have an empathetic heart, then you realize that it's pretty rare that something is so clearly black and white that you can't imagine the other side. | ||
| Now, there are such things, obviously, and even things where you can't imagine the other side doesn't mean that you don't sometimes condemn them. | ||
| But I always assume that life is richer and the human experience is more elevated if you can manage to get at least a scintilla of understanding of what the person across from you thinks. | ||
| Yeah, so when you see someone like a Larry David or a Seinfeld or somebody, I can bring almost anything back to sitcoms basically, when you see them sort of offering that version of of Jews, sort of like, you know, New York or L.A., ultra-liberal, you know, sort of a-religious, but there's a cultural affinity, or, Larry, to incur your enthusiasm, he sort of has an absolute aversion to religion and all that. | ||
| Do you see that as a, is it a net good because he's putting some sort of Jewish ideas out there, or do you see it as, well, there's a, I don't want to say disrespect of religion, or just his take on what religion. | ||
| What bothers me about it is the ignorance of it. | ||
| Because here you have a tradition of thousands of years of devotion and brilliance and exploration of life and meaning and it's reduced to a joke about corned beef. | ||
| So there's part of me that thinks, gee, it's wonderful that these creative, funny Jewish minds are doing things that are creative and funny and calling them Jewish. | ||
| But there's another part of me that mourns the loss of the realization that you have made a deep, rich, foundational tradition of Western civilization into shtick and that's too bad. | ||
| Why are Jews funny? | ||
| Well the traditional answer is Jews are funny because in oppression you don't have that many outlets for hostility or even to alleviate hostility and one of the things about humor that I mean people know is that if you feel something very deeply even if it's pain and you make a joke It makes it a little bit better. | ||
| I read once that Nietzsche, the philosopher, said that wit closes the coffin on an emotion. | ||
| You feel something and you don't want to feel it, you make a joke and it's gone. | ||
| So Jews have had to feel a lot of things they didn't wanna feel. | ||
| So it's not surprising. | ||
| Is that it? | ||
| I mean, we could go through the list. | ||
| That's part of it. | ||
| Forget the 50 greatest rabbis, we go to the 100 greatest comics. | ||
| No question. | ||
| And probably 70 of them would be Jewish. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So you think it's an attachment. | ||
| But it's changing now. | ||
| As other immigrant groups, and this is the second part of it, which is the outsider, also, I think, sees, so, You get a different perspective of the world if you're not ensconced in it. | ||
| The idea that whoever discovered water wasn't a fish, right? | ||
| You have to be somewhere outside in order to see what it is, and the outsider view is also part of comedy. | ||
| Do you think Jews have sort of lost the cred as the outsider? | ||
| Because we've been sort of hunted and hounded, and I grew up knowing Holocaust survivors and everything else, but now because Jews have become successful, I think Jews in Beverly Hills aren't outsiders, but I think you go to Jews in France, even though they may be wealthy, or Jews in Hungary, and they feel pretty outside still. | ||
| And this is the genius and the wonder of America that I think people don't appreciate enough. | ||
| First of all, any Jew who's American, who isn't patriotic, is an idiot and doesn't know anything about history or about their own, about the country or their own people. | ||
| But the reason that America is so much better for Jews is that it's not because Americans are nicer than people elsewhere, and it's not because we have a great constitution, because there are other countries that have wonderful constitutions and tyrannical governments. | ||
| It's because elsewhere in the world you had throughout history Germans and Jews. | ||
| Hungarians and Jews. | ||
| Jews were always the identifiable other. | ||
| In America, you don't have that. | ||
| In America, what you have is this salad of groups. | ||
| There are Koreans, and African-Americans, and Jews, and Hindus, and Muslims, and Protestants, and Catholics, and on, and on, and on, and on. | ||
| Thousands of groups. | ||
| So Jews have never been the identifiable other. | ||
| It's not like everybody got together and said, ugh. | ||
| There aren't Americans and Jews. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so that's why, yeah, we don't have the same sense of being outsiders as we once did, but that's a good thing. | ||
| So I've, a couple times on this show, mentioned something about, you know, there's that great line from Fiddler on the Roof, where he says something, Tevye says something to the effect of, you know, we're the chosen people, I just wish to see somebody else. | ||
| I think a lot of Jews feel that, that feeling of, wait a minute, wait a minute, whether you're a believer or a not believer, they say, we're the chosen people, but if you look at the history of the Jews from the Holocaust and pogroms, And being kicked out of virtually every other country, the amount of dwindling Jews in France right now, everything else, this is an odd, how do you reconcile that with a choice of chosen people? | ||
| Well, I would say, in fact, it goes back to the answer that we were just talking about, which is, if you are the identifiable other, and you refuse to assimilate into the mainstream, then people will resent you. | ||
| And this is not-- | ||
| Wouldn't that be a great argument for just assimilating and calling it wraps? | ||
| If you think that the whole world should be the same and vanilla is the only flavor, yes. | ||
| But if you think that the proliferation of traditions is a glory, I would say a glory to God, | ||
| but certainly a glory to humanity, then no. | ||
| And I think that most of us would believe that resisting being like everybody else | ||
| is inherently a good thing, even though for most of history-- | ||
| It was seen as a bad thing I think in his Jews were right And so in medieval times when they didn't want to be Christian or they didn't want to be Muslim Despite the fact that it was resented. | ||
| I I think that that's tremendous It cost them very dearly and by the way over the generations many many many Jews did disappear and So you have populations of people all over the world who have Jewish ancestry who have no idea that they have Jewish ancestry. | ||
| Let's shift to Israel for a little bit. | ||
| That has something to do with the Jews, right? | ||
| There's something in there. | ||
| So I know you can make many arguments, and I'd be happy for you to lay them out, you know, religious arguments for the reasons that Israel should exist as a state. | ||
| I think you can make many secular arguments that make as much sense, historical sense, that have nothing to do with God giving this group of people this piece of land. | ||
| All right, well, let's start there then, because I thought you were gonna go more on the religious side. | ||
| So let's talk about- Historically, I just think historically, here's a people that, you know, That inhabited that land, that had that land, that always wished to return to that land, that was forcibly exiled from that land and returned to it. | ||
| So, there's my historical argument. | ||
| You wrapped that up pretty neatly. | ||
| I wrapped that, exactly. | ||
| All right, so when people say, well, wait a minute, the Palestinians lived there. | ||
| Now, I know we can sort of... Do we want to do this? | ||
| Well, we can do this for the next five hours, but let's just do a couple minutes of the historical stuff before... Here's a couple minutes. | ||
| One of the things that people don't realize is there never was an independent state ever in that area. | ||
| After Israel was destroyed thousands of years ago. | ||
| There wasn't a Palestine. | ||
| It was always part of a bigger empire. | ||
| It was never a separate country until 1948 when it became Israel again. | ||
| Meaning it was part of the Ottoman Empire. | ||
| It was part of the Ottoman Empire. | ||
| It was part of the Roman Empire. | ||
| It was always part of someone's empire. | ||
| It was never a separate state. | ||
| If you come to a place, and also there is the reality that throughout history when people have come to a place and they've built it up and they've made it their own, it's become their own. | ||
| Now, a lot of origins of states are lost to prehistory. | ||
| We don't know. | ||
| How France became France. | ||
| I assure you if we did, it would involve war and conquest as the beginning of every state inevitably does. | ||
| The question now is less the origin of it than the disposition of it. | ||
| That is, how is it that you accommodate the different people who live in that land in a way that makes it possible to have peace? | ||
| I don't think that it is too much in a world that has 48 Muslim states, To have a Jewish one. | ||
| And I don't think that most of the world thinks that it's too much. | ||
| So when the UN focuses so much on Israel, and so much of the media is constantly attacking Israel, and so much of what I see from the modern left, not really from the right anymore. | ||
| Well, it depends right where. | ||
| It depends where. | ||
| Go to Europe. | ||
| At least through an American lens. | ||
| Right, through an American lens, yes. | ||
| This endless focus on Israel, this place that's the size of New Jersey, that has one airport, that at one point without the West Bank is about six miles wide or something. | ||
| I mean it's absurdly tiny. | ||
| What is that focus? | ||
| Is that just that chosen people thing again? | ||
| So I think that it's a lot of different things. | ||
| Is there an element of anti-semitism? | ||
| Unquestionably. | ||
| I mean anybody who denies that is being ridiculous. | ||
| Of course there is. | ||
| It's also the fact that, don't forget that Jews are still, the origin of Christianity is Judaism, and Christians and Jews had this sibling rivalry that got enshrined, unfortunately, in the New Testament, because you know that family quarrels are sometimes the most bitter. | ||
| So that that always the existence of Jews in Israel always has a special meaning that today a much better one But for a long time a very negative one to Christians and and and that venom Continued on even in people who left Christianity unfortunately and then in the Muslim world The confluence of a political and and a clearly anti-semitic ideology | ||
| Made it, you know, made it basically so that Israel had almost nowhere to turn. | ||
| And the U.N. | ||
| is just a moral swamp. | ||
| It's just a moral swamp. | ||
| I mean, when North Korea, you know, I mean, when Libya is on the Human Rights Council. | ||
| And Saudi Arabia is running women's rights. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It's just a moral swamp. | ||
| It's such a... Look, I've done some work with the U.N. | ||
| and I just want to say, for the record, There are things in the UN that do really wonderful work around the world, but as an institution, you want to throw your hands up and say, really, this is the best that humanity can come up with. | ||
| Yeah, well, it's certainly not the best humanity can come up with, but yet here we are. | ||
| That focus, though, that sort of focus, and it's interesting, you said there has to be a piece of anti-Semitism. | ||
| Related to this sort of relentless onslaught. | ||
| I always find there's an interesting situation with the Christians that I think you sort of alluded to. | ||
| Maybe it used to be that rivalry, but now if you look at evangelical support for Israel and Christian support in general, I bet you that statistically it's probably higher than Jewish support for Israel, which is insane. | ||
| No, I've had that experience that I've gone on trips to Israel at times when there's been like an intifada or whatever. | ||
| The only other groups that are there are Christian groups. | ||
| Jewish groups aren't there. | ||
| And you say to yourself, this is an extraordinary, really an extraordinary phenomenon, and the amount of genuine goodwill in the, let's just talk about America now, in the American Christian community, the right American Christian community, I'm talking about the right wing now, because that's where the evangelicals almost all are, not all, but almost all are, is Extraordinary. | ||
| It's really extraordinary. | ||
| Look, I mean, I've had this experience, this experience is enshrined in one of my books. | ||
| One of my books called Why Faith Matters, the preface was written by Rick Warren. | ||
| Now the idea that an evangelical minister would write a preface to a rabbi's book about faith, about faith! | ||
| It's just, that's a different world. | ||
| Let me tell you a beautiful story. | ||
| I had a professor, a wonderful man named Eliezer Slomovic. | ||
| And he came from Eastern Europe, and he learned when you go by a church, you spit. | ||
| That was what he was taught as a child, because they all want to kill you. | ||
| That's what he learned. | ||
| All of his family went through camps. | ||
| He escaped, but he went to a labor camp. | ||
| A lot of his family died in the Holocaust. | ||
| He comes to the United States. | ||
| He starts teaching at the University of Judaism, now called the American Jewish University. | ||
| There's an interfaith conference in Berkeley, and the president of the university tells him, Eliezer, I want you to go. | ||
| And he says, I'm not going. | ||
| There's no way I'm going to an interfaith conference. | ||
| There's no way I'm going to sit there with Christians. | ||
| But he's an immigrant. | ||
| He's new. | ||
| And the president says, you've got to go. | ||
| So he goes. | ||
| The opening meal, the minister who's leading the meal says, I would like to begin this meal the way our Lord Jesus Christ would have begun the meal. | ||
| Baruch atah Adonai Eloheinu melech ha'olam hamotzi lechem min ha'aretz, which is the Hebrew blessing over bread. | ||
| And Eliezer said he started to cry. | ||
| He didn't know that the world could be as different as it was when he was growing up. | ||
| And that's what it is to live now and to live in America. | ||
| In an odd twist, did they serve all shellfish? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| You can use that. | ||
| I don't know, I don't know, but good of you to ask. | ||
| All right, so the interfaithing you mentioned, is that an odd place for a rabbi to be? | ||
| Because there's nothing about converting other people in Judaism, right? | ||
| You're not looking to convert... Well, yes and no. | ||
| No, you're not looking... I mean, there is something about... Before Constantine, and before it was made a capital crime, Jews did convert people who were monotheists, but who were non-monotheists. | ||
| An interfaith thing that was not really a conversion. | ||
| It's an opportunity for people to talk about their beliefs. | ||
| And you can certainly learn from other religious traditions. | ||
| I don't believe, and I don't think that anyone should believe, that Judaism has a monopoly on truth. | ||
| I've learned a lot from Christian ministers. | ||
| I've learned a lot from dialogue with Muslims. | ||
| So I think that that's a good thing. | ||
| With Hindu, I've had gurus at the synagogue. | ||
| I've had the Dalai Lama at the synagogue. | ||
| I think that's a good thing. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| So I'm not saying you specifically, but just generally the idea that Jews aren't looking to proselytize, so that it's a little different, so that if you do an interfaith thing, and you've got a third Jews, and a third Christians, and a third Muslims, well, the Christians and the Muslims would love to have those Jews convert, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| They certainly, yeah, well... That is a fundamental difference. | ||
| It is a fundamental difference. | ||
| Not all Christians, not all Muslims feel that way, but yeah. | ||
| Jews basically feel, it's stated several times in the Talmud, that whatever the world to come is, The righteous of all nations have a place in the world to come. | ||
| So I don't have, I don't need to save your soul, because if you're a good enough person, you're saved because Judaism believes that it's how you act in this world that makes the difference. | ||
| It's not whether you believe X, Y, or Z. So, yeah, we don't have the same motivation. | ||
| We have a motivation towards goodness more than we do a motivation towards a specific belief. | ||
| So let's talk about the afterlife a little bit. | ||
| Okay, I'm all in favor of it. | ||
| I'm a big, I am a big fan of the afterlife. | ||
| Big proponent of the afterlife. | ||
| Big fan of the afterlife. | ||
| I can tell you do watch Gerber Enthusiasm, that had a little Larry to it. | ||
| But there's no, well there's no heaven and hell, right? | ||
| Well not exactly. | ||
| Judaism tends not to define exactly what happens to you after you die. | ||
| And that makes sense, because as soon as you start to define it, it starts to sound ridiculous. | ||
| Mark Twain has a passage in Letters from Earth where he says people think they're going to lie on green fields and listen to harp music. | ||
| He says they wouldn't want to do it for five minutes while they're alive. | ||
| They think they'll be happy for the rest of eternity doing it after they die. | ||
| What I would say that Judaism says is that there's something about the human being that is eternal. | ||
| And just as you could not have anticipated this world before you came into it, | ||
| you never would have imagined like bricks and eyes and tuna fish and ideas and words. | ||
| I mean, who would have imagined? | ||
| You can't possibly imagine what another world is like, but there is one. | ||
| So does that change the ability for, or not the ability, I guess, | ||
| the actions that you take as a rabbi? | ||
| Like everything in Judaism that I know is sort of about life. | ||
| It's like it's here. | ||
| It's now right. | ||
| It's this kind of thing Well, I think you're not like that. | ||
| I like that's why I think it's so amorphous is that the emphasis has to be on here because you don't want to be you don't want to act here and Like a, again, as put in the Talmud, like a servant for a reward. | ||
| You're not doing this so you get that. | ||
| If you do, then religious life has no meaning. | ||
| The whole point is to do it because you think it's worth doing, right? | ||
| That's what goodness is. | ||
| Goodness isn't being good so that you get a reward. | ||
| Goodness is being good Because you believe in goodness. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right, hopefully just for its own sake. | |
| So when you conceptualize God, I mean, is it a conscious being? | ||
| I mean, is God watching this right now? | ||
| Does God have YouTube? | ||
| I mean, what are we talking about here? | ||
| I think God doesn't need YouTube. | ||
| I don't mean to dampen your no-doubt Gigantic audience but so the way I put it to the high school kids is I say look to a 14 year old I said remember imagine when a two-year-old can a two-year-old imagine what a 14 year old is like no not only can you not a two-year-old can I can't imagine it they can't even imagine what it is that they're not able to grasp we are in Jewish reckoning and | ||
| The distance between us and God is infinitely greater than the distance between a two-year-old and a fourteen-year-old. | ||
| So I don't begin to know what God's like. | ||
| And I wouldn't begin to say, yeah, God's listening to us, which is a very anthropomorphic conception of God. | ||
| All I do believe is that you can live your life in a way that is in conformity with the way you were intended to live, or less so. | ||
| That's what I know. | ||
| So there are moments... | ||
| I think in some ways I put a greater emphasis on godliness than I do on God. | ||
| That is the way that I believe God wants us, wants in quotes, because again wants is a human thing, wants us to act without worrying too much about what God is like because I know that I'm incapable of beginning to understand that. | ||
| Could you do all that without God? | ||
| You could. | ||
| The question that I always wonder is, does that stick? | ||
| Not for a life. | ||
| I mean, there could be atheists who are kinder than any religious believer. | ||
| I know a lot of good atheists. | ||
| I'm sure you do, too. | ||
| The question is, as a society, does that get transmitted generation to generation if you don't believe that there's an ultimate standard that transcends us? | ||
| And I'm deeply skeptical that that would happen. | ||
| So what do you make about sort of the general state of religion altogether, not just Judaism, but the general state of religion in America in 2017? | ||
| I mean, by most polls we see that- In America. | ||
| Yeah, the amount of non-believers is growing tremendously, atheists growing tremendously, I think Jedi's up there, which I'm okay with that one. | ||
| Do you sense that religion as an institution is weakening in America? | ||
| I like the way you ask the question because I think what is weakening are institutions. | ||
| I think institutions in general don't have the appeal that they once did. | ||
| People don't want to sit in buildings and pray. | ||
| They want to go out. | ||
| They want to be on mountaintops. | ||
| They want to be on hikes. | ||
| I think the feeling that religion speaks to is not lessening, but I think that the organization and the institution speaks less to people than it once did. | ||
| What do you do about that as a rabbi? | ||
| You've got a nice big building. | ||
| Well actually it's funny because I have an article coming out this week in the Los Angeles Jewish Journal about taking services outside. | ||
| Part of the reason is that I think that especially younger people don't feel connected to the buildings that they didn't build after all. | ||
| The generation before them built this building, feel great about it, but they inherited it. | ||
| What you do about it, I think, is you reconfigure religion. | ||
| And when I said earlier that I didn't know what Judaism would look like in a hundred years, my assumption was that it will look different. | ||
| And one of the ways that it'll look different is I suspect that it will reintegrate into the natural world in a way that we haven't so far, at least in America. | ||
| And I don't... What do you mean by that? | ||
| I mean that the idea of worship in nature and the idea not a worship of nature but | ||
| worship in nature the idea of meditation and alternative ways of connecting | ||
| to the Jewish tradition and using the learning of the Jewish tradition to | ||
| open as opposed to to only have narrower communities will become a greater and | ||
| greater trend so you will have probably two different kinds of Jewish | ||
| communities ones that are more self-sufficient and more institution based and | ||
| others that I think are looser and broader so basically the sort of | ||
| Orthodox ones that you referenced earlier they'll | ||
| They'll keep all that sort of older stuff. | ||
| I think, although there are challenges to orthodoxy that it's going to be very hard for the community. | ||
| The principal ones are the challenge of the position of women, which is a constant issue in the orthodox community. | ||
| Inclusion. | ||
| LGBTQ inclusion, which is also a challenge to the Orthodox community. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| So we're in LA. | ||
| You said I could ask you anything. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I see these ultra-Orthodox guys out there. | ||
| It's 100 degrees in Los Angeles. | ||
| They're wearing a big wool coat, a big wool hat. | ||
| This can't be what God wants. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| Well, if you're walking down Wilshire, sweating, like it's Poland in 1832. | ||
| Exactly, that's the point. | ||
| The point is that that dress wasn't originally Jewish dress. | ||
| It was the dress of Polish noblemen in the 19th century, which is why, as a conservative Jew, I say history clearly affects the way Jews practice. | ||
| But at a certain point, people who are If not conservative, then reactionary. | ||
| What they tend to do is they pick a period in history which is the ideal period and they try to recreate that period over and over and over and over and over again, wherever they are, wherever they go, like the clock has stopped. | ||
| It's a strategy that works in some ways, but I think in other ways is unproductive. | ||
| All right, fair enough. | ||
| You mentioned the LGBT community. | ||
| You were for gay marriage, what, something like six years ago, before it was legal here. | ||
| How did your congregation take it? | ||
| Did you have to take counsel with other rabbis to say that you wanted to say this, et cetera? | ||
| The uproar was so great in my congregation that when I announced that I was going to do gay marriages, it literally was on the front page of the New York and the LA Times. | ||
| That's how upheaval-ish, to coin a phrase, it was. | ||
| There were a lot of people in my congregation... That was after it was legal in California, but not yet legally legal. | ||
| Right, but not yet legal, but it was before the Supreme Court decision. | ||
| My congregation, and I had waited until I thought it wouldn't split my congregation apart, my congregation was... | ||
| Many, I mean, many people were very supportive. | ||
| I don't want to paint with too broad a brush. | ||
| Many were very upset. | ||
| Part of the reason that many were upset is not only because some were conservative, but also I think there were some, I again don't want to paint with too broad a brush, but I have, my congregation is about half from Iran, and many who had immigrated from Iran, for them this was a giant cultural shift that they really didn't like. | ||
| So, For me, it was, here was the, here was sort of the contrast that I was struck with. | ||
| I knew that it was going to be, I didn't know it was going to be quite as big as it turned out to be. | ||
| I knew it was going to be big and I prepared it. | ||
| I taught a series of classes and so on. | ||
| And then I wrote a letter about why I was doing it. | ||
| And before I sent it out, I wanted my daughter to know, she was at the time, I guess about 15, Fourteen or fifteen. | ||
| I wanted her to know because she was going to hear stuff and she went to a school with a lot of people from the congregation and I thought people might say bad things about me and I wanted her to know what I was doing. | ||
| So I said, Samara, I just want you to know I'm sending this letter out to the congregation to say that I'm going to start doing same-sex marriages. | ||
| And she looked at me strangely and she said, what took you so long? | ||
| And I said, yes, that's the point. | ||
| The point is that this is a huge generational shift. | ||
| The biggest one I think maybe humanity has ever seen in one generation. | ||
| From the people for whom it was really inconceivable. | ||
| It was like I was saying I was going to marry Martians. | ||
| They couldn't imagine how a rabbi could even think of doing such a thing. | ||
| To someone who said, well, it was like I was saying to her, I'm now going to marry people who are blonde to people who are redhead. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| So it was incredible. | ||
| So I'm curious then, well first off, it strikes me that you're in a particularly unique situation because generally American Jews are liberal. | ||
| You're in a congregation in Los Angeles, which is uber liberal. | ||
| On the west side of Los Angeles. | ||
| On the west side of Los Angeles. | ||
| That is not liberal, by and large. | ||
| And your congregation is not liberal. | ||
| That's sort of like just a fascinating little insider mix into what you're sort of dealing with there. | ||
| So when I've had other people on that have argued from a Jewish perspective, when we talked about marriage, | ||
| so when I've had Ben Shapiro and Dennis Prager on and we've talked about this kind of thing, | ||
| both of them have basically got it to the point of saying, they're not really for it, | ||
| but that this is where their libertarianism sort of takes over, so just get the state out of it | ||
| and I don't care. | ||
| Yours doesn't seem to come from that. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I think that that's, I don't, let me just put it this way, without insulting any individual, I don't approve of that point of view and I don't, and I don't honestly have a great deal of admiration for it. | ||
| Why not just for the government should be out of religion, or government should be out of your right to marry, and that's that? | ||
| Well, because the only reason that they're saying that, they didn't feel that 10 years ago, the only reason that they're saying that is because the cultural backlash against saying the government shouldn't do that is too great. | ||
| So I think that they're being forced into a more moral position, but it's not because they advocated it. | ||
| And if you think that it's okay, if you think that people shouldn't do it, Then don't say people shouldn't, they wouldn't say that about abortion. | ||
| I mean, if you really think that there's a moral issue here, then stand up for the moral issue and make a case for it. | ||
| For the record, I basically said that. | ||
| Because I think there is a moral issue here, and the moral issue here is that when someone comes to me and says, it's not, you know, the other day there was a cover story on this about people who've come out in the gay community, in the Orthodox community, and how they're struggling with it. | ||
| And as I read through it, I just thought there's not enough of an acknowledgement that your sexual identity, it's fundamental to who you are. | ||
| It just is. | ||
| It's not like the clothes you wear. | ||
| It's not, you know, that I don't like mushrooms. | ||
| I'm a vegetarian. | ||
| It's not nearly as fundamental to me, right, as my sexual identity. | ||
| So when someone comes to you and says, This is how I was born. | ||
| This is how God made me. | ||
| And if it's not whatever connection of genetics or I didn't choose this, this is who I am. | ||
| And you're telling me that in the Jewish tradition, there is no place for me to express my love to the only kind of people that I can love this way? | ||
| Who can say no to that? | ||
| I mean, who can say, I'm sorry, but you have to put away who you are because there's a verse in Leviticus. | ||
| So I think a lot of people are gonna be watching this. | ||
| People that are non-believers, but some people who are believers of whatever faith. | ||
| And they won't like this, but okay. | ||
| No, I was gonna say the reverse. | ||
| I think they're gonna say, holy shit, I've been waiting for someone of faith to say that. | ||
| I mean, look, some of the most moving experiences that I've had have been a result of this. | ||
| In fact, the most, I have to say, this sounds very strange, but it didn't sound strange to me. | ||
| The most romantic moment I have ever seen at a wedding was the first wedding I did between two men. | ||
| And I can tell you, I mean, they taped the whole thing, I'm sure that they won't identify them, but one of them turned to the other, they decided they wanted to do vows. | ||
| And so I said, sure, if you want to do vows at your wedding, you do vows at your wedding. | ||
| So one of them said, I want to tell you when I decided to marry you. | ||
| One night you fell asleep first, you always fall asleep first. | ||
| And I was looking at you and I started to cry. | ||
| And I woke you up. | ||
| And you said, what? | ||
| And I said, you have to promise me That I'll die first because I can't stand the idea of being in this world without you. | ||
| And you looked at me with just infinite tenderness and you said, I promise. | ||
| And then you fell right back asleep. | ||
| But at that moment, I decided I wanted to marry you. | ||
| And when he said that, first of all, there was not a dry eye in the house. | ||
| And I thought anybody who would witness this moment and say, this is an abomination. | ||
| I have no, I have a very hard time with. | ||
| Yeah, so, all right, so then, so you make this decision. | ||
| Now, that strikes me also as somewhat unique because you don't have to clear that with anyone, right? | ||
| Like the conservative movement, they have sort of. | ||
| No, the conservative movement does not, right, the conservative movement has the latitude, some do and some don't, but they knew, yeah. | ||
| And I let my congregation, I let the key people in my congregation know that I was going to do this, but I didn't ask their permission. | ||
| Yeah, wait, what do you mean some do and some don't? | ||
| Meaning... No, there's some conservative rabbis will do gay marriages and some won't. | ||
| Oh, so there isn't something, like, written in the... Right, no. | ||
| The guide, like, it's like a party platform, sort of, right? | ||
| There is, right, there is, there is a committee of law and standards, but they basically said, you know, you're gonna have to make this decision on your own. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Did you go to find counsel with some other rabbis? | ||
| I read a lot of what was written about it, but I knew that I wanted to do it. | ||
| My question was tactical. | ||
| My question was, how do I do this with minimum damage to my community? | ||
| Because what had happened to me was, several years before, A young man who was gay came to me and said, why won't you do gay marriages? | ||
| And I said, I'm going to give you an answer, but you won't like it. | ||
| I said, but here's the truth. | ||
| I want to. | ||
| I said, but I sort of feel, if you'll forgive the grandiosity of the analogy, I feel like Abraham Lincoln did at the beginning of the Civil War, which is you don't issue the Emancipation Proclamation before you're ready. | ||
| I said, if I do it now, it's going to tear my community apart. | ||
| I said, I have to wait until they're ready It'll still be a big thing, but it won't tear them apart because I'm the rabbi of a community. | ||
| That wasn't good enough for him. | ||
| I completely understand that, but that was my job. | ||
| Were you ever able to reconcile that with him at any point? | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
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Really? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I came back to him and I said, this is why I... And I don't know, he still would have preferred, I'm sure, that I had done it years before, but at least I did it. | ||
| And also, I think he was pleased at how big a splash it made, because that made him feel proud. | ||
| What kind of backlash did you get? | ||
| I had a lot of people who threatened to resign, although only a couple did, and at least of the couple who did, one came back. | ||
| I got a lot of really not nice letters, attacks, one of which I shared with you, some private, some public. | ||
| But the hardest part, really, the hardest part was that I hurt people that I really care about. | ||
| Because there were people who were like good people and kind people and they identify with their rabbi and they can't, how could you do this? | ||
| I mean, that's how they felt. | ||
| It's like, how could you possibly do this? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I told my daughter, again to return to my daughter, during the Boer War, Churchill said, it's exhilarating to be shot at without result. | ||
| And I said to her, I said to her, the lesson here is if you really believe in something, The people who love you will still love you, and sooner or later the world will move on, and you will have the satisfaction of having done what you know is right, and you'll survive. | ||
| So, in that sense, it was a beautiful experience, even though it was a hard one. | ||
| How do you navigate those other political pieces? | ||
| Because I'm sure there's a constant battle between trying to remain neutral and also what a clergyman is legally allowed to do. | ||
| There are different kinds of political pieces. | ||
| I mean, there's politics in the synagogue itself. | ||
| And then I actually wrote, I occasionally write columns for Time online and I wrote a column against repealing the Johnson Amendment. | ||
| The Johnson Amendment is the one where you shouldn't, I don't think rabbis should endorse candidates. | ||
| I think that that's a mistake and you shouldn't ask them to because then you're going to have the Republican shul and the Democratic shul and that's not good. | ||
| But my basic political orientation is I will be a firm supporter of Israel from the pulpit and any other venue I can. | ||
| But am I going to take a position as a rabbi on taxes? | ||
| No. | ||
| Am I going to take a position on most political issues? | ||
| I think that it's not... I will do it interpersonally. | ||
| You ask me personally, I will tell you. | ||
| But as a rabbi, I think I only ought to take a position on things that are clearly Jewish, where I think that Judaism speaks fairly univocally on them. | ||
| Do you get pushed into sometimes having to talk about things that you don't want to talk about? | ||
| Yes, I do sometimes, which, okay, that's fair. | ||
| I mean, it's not as though you don't have a community and they don't have a say. | ||
| Sometimes they have a say too, you know, and they say, we really want you to talk about this and tell us what you think. | ||
| When I gave, I told you, I gave the invocation at the Democratic National Committee. | ||
| A lot of my congregation was very upset at that. | ||
| I said to them, listen, if the Republicans had asked me, I would have done that. | ||
| I said, I think if a major political party asks you to give a blessing as a clergy, you give a blessing. | ||
| So in fact, The next month or two months later, they had a big Republican Jewish dinner and they said, OK, come give the invocation. | ||
| I said, sure, I'd be happy to. | ||
| And I went and I did it. | ||
| But there's an example of like they had a clear say and they were right to say, I don't want my rabbi to be a Democrat or a Republican. | ||
| I want it to be a rabbi. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When I've talked to a few people on this, but Dennis Prager particularly talked about sort of the Judeo-Christian roots of the United States and that we need those, I was basically arguing that if we would just be governed by The Constitution. | ||
| If we could just follow the words of this document, that would be enough for the civil pluralistic society that we want. | ||
| And he basically was saying that no, we need to stay rooted in this Judeo-Christian idea. | ||
| Well, I wonder, I am not enough of a constitutional scholar to answer this question adequately, but I wonder if you could make the argument that the Constitution was in fact rooted in that Judeo-Christian idea, and there's a sort of dovetailing of your two arguments. | ||
| So I think that that's sort of where we ended up leaving it, that there's enough of it sort of in the framing of what we went with with the Constitution. | ||
| I mean, that all men are created equal, that they're endowed by their Creator, I mean, that's the Bill of Rights, but still. | ||
| Yeah, that there's some stuff in there. | ||
| I feel like there's so much more we could talk about. | ||
| We'll circle back to some people that we talked about at the beginning. | ||
| So you've mentioned that you've debated Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, some of my favorite people, and Prager and Shapiro and a couple other people. | ||
| Do you think we're losing the ability to do this? | ||
| Now, this wasn't a debate, what we did here. | ||
| I really wanted to hear what you thought about these things, but just the general concept of sitting down with people and being okay with some ideas that you would agree with or disagree with. | ||
| I think what we are losing to some extent, some of the people, not all, some of the people that you mentioned there are perfectly willing to sit down and talk with people who differ with them. | ||
| What I think that they're not always willing to do is to be prepared that their ideas might change. | ||
| And part of the reason that that's so is because even though many people won't say it, I know this as a rabbi, you get captured by your own constituency. | ||
| And what happens is, if someone who has a presence on TV or radio or whatever, if they say something that's different from what they've been saying before because they've changed their mind, they will get A gigantic onslaught from the people, by the way, whom they like and who are their followers and who are their supporters, and they'll say, just as I mentioned with Gay Marriage, how could you do this to me that you always said this and now you're saying that? | ||
| So, there's a hardening, and part of the hardening is not the hardening of the person only, it's a hardening of the constituency behind the person. | ||
| So, that's a tough one. | ||
| That is a tough one. | ||
| I mean, I had this experience sometimes when I would debate the God stuff, and I felt like the person, and I'm sure it was true of me, although I like to think not as much, the person on the other side would make a concession to this argument or that argument, but they'd be letting down the home team. | ||
| So they didn't. | ||
| That's sort of the hardest thing to do, right? | ||
| It's a hard thing to do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A couple weeks ago, when that whole Bill O'Reilly thing happened, when he was getting fired, I tweeted out something to the effect of, I said, I don't know the specifics of what he did, but the fact that we revel in such public destruction of people, I think is dangerous. | ||
| And the tweet took off, but I also was getting an insane amount of hate. | ||
| And then someone found, somebody searched a tweet of mine from, I think, 2011, And found a tweet where I was sort of reveling in Keith Olbermann in one of his many firings from somewhere. | ||
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And they sent it to me, and they said, see, you see, you hypocrite. | |
| And I normally don't respond to people that are coming after me, but I just wrote, yes, I've evolved in six years. | ||
| And I thought just that, and then I got a lot of accolades for that, but I thought, this is so dangerous, this line of thinking, that if you thought something once. | ||
| You can't change it, and also, I'm, Not a big advocate of the charge of hypocrisy. | ||
| I really prefer the charge of imperfection. | ||
| Because the truth is, yes, I know a lot of people, for example, who defend traditional marriage and they've been married five times. | ||
| And you say to them, they're hypocrites, but the answer is no. | ||
| Part of it is you can believe something and really think that it's good and still either not be able to live up to it or be disappointed in yourself. | ||
| If you think of imperfection, then it gives people more latitude. | ||
| to change and more latitude to admit that they did something they shouldn't have done. | ||
| If you're constantly ready to pounce, it freezes people into positions that I think are unhelpful. | ||
| So it's so interesting because you say that and a few other things that you've said, | ||
| they strike me as very not religious things. | ||
| Now I understand, I understand you're framing-- | ||
| From my point of view, they are deeply religious. | ||
| No, I understand that and that's, so you're framing them within your understanding-- | ||
| Right. | ||
| Appreciation-- - Here's my basic, my basic-- | ||
| Most people would hear that last piece about being able to change and evolve and accept this | ||
| and go, that is just not religion. | ||
| And what I would say is repentance and admitting what you've done wrong. | ||
| And the realization that all human beings are flawed, that's the heart of the religious tradition. | ||
| And this idea that you have to jump on someone whenever they do something that's bad, that to me is antithetical to the tradition that I was raised in, certainly. | ||
| Alright, so one more for you. | ||
| Now, about a half hour ago, Was it during the break? | ||
| We took a 10 second break. | ||
| You said, I don't know, I think it was on air, you said that you could beat Brigitte's ending. | ||
| Now she gave me a great five minute, she gave me a great five minute ending on freedom and liberty and Western values and individualism and all of this stuff. | ||
| So give me some great, A piece of Jewish wisdom for people that are just trying to find a little peace in the universe these days. | ||
| Because I think that's what people are looking for. | ||
| Without being competitive with Brigitte. | ||
| And I'm going to send this to Brigitte. | ||
| Which I would not do because Brigitte and I are friends and I would not begin to... I'm sending this directly to Brigitte. | ||
| Good. | ||
| This is what I would say. | ||
| What people have to realize is the power that they have To change other people's lives in an instant. | ||
| Because all of your viewers and all of your listeners know that people have said things or done things that changed their life even though they never go back and tell them. | ||
| You know, to the third grade teacher who said this, I never forgot it and it changed my life. | ||
| And that realization that people can change and change each other is crucial, it's pivotal, and it's powerful. | ||
| And I will close with a story that illustrates it. | ||
| That seems like a rabbinical thing to do. | ||
| It's a very rabbinical thing to do, and here goes. | ||
| It's one of my favorite stories. | ||
| So there was a rabbi who used to travel around the world, and he would sing and play music, and his name was Shlomo Carlebach. | ||
| He was, in his time, very well known. | ||
| I used to live on the Upper West. | ||
| There you go, so you know Carlebach. | ||
| The Carlebach Synagogue. | ||
| There's a Carlebach Synagogue. | ||
| So, once, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he went to Eastern Europe, and he was playing in this small community in the former Soviet Union. | ||
| He had the experience where everybody was cold to him. | ||
| They all, like, closed the door either literally or metaphorically in his face, except for one guy. | ||
| And he spent all of Shabbat, all of the Sabbath there, and at the end of it, before he left, he said to this guy, he said, listen, I understand why these people don't want to hear from me. | ||
| I know that they went through, you know, the Second World War, and then the jackboot of communism, and with the fall of the Soviet Union, more things, and then they have shortages, and winter. | ||
| He says, what, I don't understand. | ||
| I don't understand you. | ||
| He says, why are you so opening and why are you so loving and why are you so welcoming? | ||
| Why are you so different? | ||
| And the man said, I can tell you exactly why. | ||
| And I'll tell you when it happened. | ||
| Look, he said, I'm an old man and I have lived in this town my entire life. | ||
| And I remember before the first world war, it was the dead of winter and a rumor swept through the town that the Cossacks were coming and they were going to loot and pillage and burn and destroy. | ||
| So all the parents from the town gathered up all the children and they brought us to the rabbi's house. | ||
| And they ringed around the rabbi's house all night long and he walked up and down between the rooms where all the children slept. | ||
| And I was curled up in a corner of the rabbi's study. | ||
| But I couldn't sleep because it was bitter cold. | ||
| And in the middle of the night, the rabbi came up behind me and he took his cloak off his shoulders and he spread it over me and he said, good child, sweet child. | ||
| You know, said the rabbi to Karl Bach, it has been almost 80 years since the rabbi spread his coat on me, but it still keeps me warm. | ||
| Those sorts of moments, they're not just nice, they're sacred, they're religious moments. | ||
| You can do them for someone else in an instant, almost every day. | ||
| And many years from now, even though you might not know it, it will still keep them warm. | ||
| I think you matched Brigitte. | ||
| I think you did it. | ||
| Rabbi Wolpe, it's been an absolute pleasure. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And for more on Rabbi Wolpe, well, you can find him at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles and follow him on Twitter, at Rabbi Wolpe. |
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