Dec. 19, 2018 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:02:40
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| A priest, a rabbi, and a comedian walk into a YouTube studio that was once a garage. | ||
| Bishop Robert Barron, Rabbi David Wolpe, good to have you guys here. | ||
| Good to be here. | ||
| I'm very happy to be doing this because we are smack in between Hanukkah and Christmas, so it seemed like the right time to get you two together, and I've had you both on the show individually and enjoyed them very much, and I thought, Let's have a conversation about religion and meeting and social media and all sorts of other things. | ||
| So first, I thought we'd just talk a little bit about the way that people are talking about religion these days. | ||
| I know that you both saw at least a portion of my chat from a couple weeks ago with Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro. | ||
| Ben is obviously Orthodox Jew. | ||
| Jordan comes through things through a Christian perspective. | ||
| The idea, though, that people, that the average people out there aren't necessarily getting the messages that you guys talk about in the traditional way and that they're getting them through YouTube videos and podcasts and things like that. | ||
| What do you make of that? | ||
| You know, I'm pretty good with it, actually. | ||
| I think it's a sign of our time, and it's the way people communicate. | ||
| And so, those two gentlemen have found a way, as you have, to use the social media very creatively. | ||
| And if they can communicate some of the truth of religion, why not? | ||
| And also, I think, especially with Jordan Peterson in mind. | ||
| It's a smart presentation of religious themes, and speaking on my own tradition, after Vatican II, we kind of dumbed things down, which I think has been a pastoral disaster, actually. | ||
| And one reason we've lost a lot of young people, we presented Catholicism in a very flat, secularized, unintelligent way. | ||
| And Jordan Peterson is presenting, you know, at least a version of religion, a version of biblical interpretation in a very compelling, very intelligent way. | ||
| And look how young people are responding to it like mad. | ||
| I think that's a very hopeful sign. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| I think that the twist is that, you know, we were talking right before the show started about people that have debated, and the Harris's to some extent, but much more the Hitchens of blessed memory, and others would take religion, Richard Dawkins, and say it is this collection of ridiculous dogmas and nothing worthwhile, and anything that is worthwhile in it, we have in the secular world better. | ||
| And the counter-argument used to be, well, you don't necessarily have to buy all of religion to realize that the themes are deep and complicated and inspiring and beautiful, and I think that they're being framed that way. | ||
| I mean, I don't know, I'm not sure you know, I'm not sure he knows what exactly Peterson's religious commitment is, but one thing that is clear is that he, and many of the people who listen to him and follow him, take religious themes, ideas, and sometimes even scriptural stories as indicative of something deeper | ||
| about the nature of the world. | ||
| Do you think that's enough? | ||
| I mean as-- | ||
| Enough for what? | ||
| Enough for just a human, not just someone that's publicly talking about this, | ||
| but is that rich enough to just take the themes and the stories without perhaps some of the deeper-- | ||
| My principal concern as somebody who's associated with institutional religion, | ||
| which is like anathema to many people, is when someone tells me, for example, | ||
| that they are spiritual but not religious, what I always wanna say to them | ||
| is how much do you give to charity? | ||
| Because to have your own life enriched but for it not to be expressed in conduct is not enough. | ||
| So the question that I would always have is, in what way does it influence the way you treat other human beings, how charitable you are, whether you are part of a community and you both take from that community but also contribute to it. | ||
| If it does all of those things, then I'm much more persuaded that it's effective. | ||
| If all it does is get you to attend a lecture, read a book, and feel like you've been elevated, Then it's not enough. | ||
| Yeah, I suspect you probably agree with the premise there. | ||
| Yeah, it's not enough. | ||
| I mean, I think it's a good starting point. | ||
| To me, what Jordan Peterson does with the Bible is similar to what the Church Fathers in our tradition would have called the moral sense of the Scripture. | ||
| So you look at the Bible in a number of ways, and one is to uncover its importance for moral behavior. | ||
| We might say today for our psychology, you know. | ||
| Good! | ||
| Wonderful! | ||
| But then there's a lot of other dimensions to read in the Bible. | ||
| The Bible makes certain objective claims about God, and it says in the New Testament about Jesus, about eternal life, you know. | ||
| And I think that's not touched on so much by Jordan Peterson. | ||
| Now again, I don't want to badmouth it. | ||
| I think it's a very good starting point for a lot of people. | ||
| It's a way in. | ||
| Why not begin with the moral, psychological sense? | ||
| But then I'd say, Keep going, you know. | ||
| And finally, you do have to make metaphysical claims, it seems to me, in the religious realm. | ||
| You can't simply leave it at the level of subjective appropriation. | ||
| You have to say, is it true that God exists? | ||
| Is it true that God's the creator of all things? | ||
| In the case of Christianity, is it true that God sent his only son that we might have life in his name? | ||
| So you have to wrestle with those metaphysical issues. | ||
| But I'm fine with him as an opening of a door, you know. | ||
| So it's so interesting to me that people actually care about a debate about the nature of truth. | ||
| It's like we live in a time when everyone's on Twitter all day, we can be distracted by video games and a gajillion other things, and yet somehow through that, that video that we did has over a million views already and a couple hundred thousand on the audio podcast. | ||
| And it's a two-hour conversation about these things. | ||
| So one of the things that we really focused on was the sort of what I think they would both argue are the bedrock values of a Judeo-Christian society. | ||
| So when someone says that to you, since I have someone from the Judeo and Christian part here, what does that actually mean to you when someone says the values of the Judeo-Christian society? | ||
| I think deep respect for the dignity of the individual made in the image and likeness of God, the call to justice, the call to peace, the call to non-violence, the call to love, the call to compassion. | ||
| I'd see all that as the great trajectory of the biblical revelation. | ||
| Those are the behavioral implications of the more profound metaphysical claims. | ||
| But I'd see all that we have very much in common. | ||
| Anyone in a biblical frame of mind would see those things. | ||
| Yeah, I completely agree, and I think that the implication of the second half of what the bishop was saying is that there is, and this is one of the reasons I think why Ben and Jordan communicate so effectively, is they agree about this. | ||
| The truth is an objective concept that exists, as opposed to something that's entirely the invention of human beings, in a relative sense, depending on time and place. | ||
| And that doesn't mean that you have easy access to it. | ||
| You may never, in fact, understand it. | ||
| But even the statement that there is such a thing as a truth is, in our time, somewhat countercultural. | ||
| So one of the things that we talked about was, this has been argued by many people, but Jordan in that conversation was talking about it, that there's a sense right now that all the good ideas of the world, of freedom and the individual and all those things, came from the Enlightenment. | ||
| Now, I'm an Enlightenment guy. | ||
| You can go into my room over there, every book is from an Enlightenment thinker. | ||
| Some of these books right here are. | ||
| But as a guy who's debated some of the people that have written some of these books that have been in this room, I suspect you would argue that the Enlightenment values alone, which I suppose you hold many of... Sure. | ||
| Weren't enough, right? | ||
| I would say, first of all, they have more religious roots than the radical Enlightenment theorists admit to. | ||
| Can you explain that a little bit? | ||
|
unidentified
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Sure. | |
| I mean, when you talk about, for example, the dignity of the individual, which is very much an Enlightenment idea, well, the first statement about human nature in the Bible is that a human being is created in the image of God. | ||
| So, I mean, I hate to say for every good, oh, we had it first, but we clearly had that first. | ||
| We being, you know, anybody who associates themselves with this tradition. | ||
| And also, by the way, to be fair, you know, I've traveled in the East. | ||
| You find many of these ideas in places where the Enlightenment never took hold. | ||
| So to argue, like a Jonathan Israel does, who's an Enlightenment historian, that these are all legacies of the Enlightenment. | ||
| Well, what about India? | ||
| What about Southeast Asia, where many of these ideas also have currency, although in different form? | ||
| And the second part of it is that the Enlightenment was a mixed bag. | ||
| The French Revolution was a horrible bloodbath, just as Burke had predicted it would be. | ||
| And part of it was because the Enlightenment was not so much about many of the values that I think we are rediscovering of community charity mutual interdependence that are that are much more associated with religious communal work than they are with the enlightenment ideas | ||
| The underpinning part, I think you certainly agree with. | ||
| It's very close to my own perspective on it, you know. | ||
| Part of the problem is, you say, the Enlightenment. | ||
| Well, of course, who's against light? | ||
| Everyone wants light. | ||
| But the implication is, well, prior to that must have been just those terrible dark ages. | ||
| That's all a distortion because you're dead right. | ||
| I mean, I'd say the best of the Enlightenment was a sort of Representation of key ideas out of the great biblical tradition. | ||
| So, human dignity is one, but think of, you know, Jefferson, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. | ||
| Because look in classical political philosophy, equality is not a huge value. | ||
| In fact, in Plato and Aristotle, Cicero, people like that, inequality is fundamental. | ||
| And the rightly ordered society, you know, takes into account all these deep inequalities. | ||
| Where's that idea come from? | ||
| How come it's totally non-self-evident to Aristotle, but it's totally self-evident to Jefferson? | ||
| What intervened in there but the Judeo-Christian revelation? | ||
| Freedom, equality, human rights. | ||
| They're endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. | ||
| That, to me, is the after-effects of Christian and Jewish revelation. | ||
| That's the best of the Enlightenment. | ||
| And then the Enlightenment does carry A dark side, excuse the mixing of metaphors, but it does. | ||
| A hyper-individualism, a hyper-rationalism, a certain closing in upon a purely scientific view of the world, all of that is the dark side of the Enlightenment. | ||
| So, I would just look at it critically, appreciating huge elements of it, which I think fundamentally are grounded in the scripture, and then being wary of certain negative qualities of it. | ||
| So I sense maybe there's a little disagreement there just because of the way Jews generally have viewed science, perhaps a little bit differently, like a hyper-scientific view of the world usually doesn't become in conflict with a certain percentage of religious Jews. | ||
| No, I think, for example, I mean the vast majority of Jews, even religious Jews, don't find evolution to be, but that's today, don't find evolution to be in conflict with the Bible, although some would, but not, but fewer, | ||
| and I think that Judaism is hospitable to science as a general rule. What I would | ||
| say, though, it emerges from the discussion is what you started with, which is why | ||
| is it that people are hospitable to these sorts of discussions? | ||
| Now, the answer is because we have a world in which human power is magnified far beyond anything we ever could have imagined before to cure disease. | ||
| I mean, it's like, you know, when I was in high school, I was I'm a pretty avid atheist, and I read and memorized most of Bertrand Russell. | ||
| And I remember Russell writing in one of his books, people used to say that faith moved mountains and no one believed it. | ||
| Now they say the atom bomb moves mountains and everyone believes it. | ||
| And that was the hyper-scientific view. | ||
| Well, now we have a world in which you can manipulate genes, artificial intelligence is doing increasingly remarkable things, and I think People are recognizing, not only recognizing, but they're feeling on a gut level, if we don't know what our first principles are, this genie out of the bottle is going to destroy us. | ||
| So you don't fear a hyper-scientific world as long as it comes within the context of... I fear, like every person, I almost want to rope in every thoughtful person, I fear our information outrunning our wisdom, yes. | ||
| But as long as it doesn't, then I don't fear it. | ||
| And that's closely my own view about scientism. | ||
| I'm all in favor of the sciences. | ||
| And I always try to celebrate the fact that, you know, Georges Lemaitre, a priest, formulated the Big Bang Theory of Cosmic Origins. | ||
| I mean, so the myth that the Catholic Church stands against the sciences is just that. | ||
| It's a myth. | ||
| And Mendel. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| I mean, there's so many people. | ||
| Copernicus himself, you know. | ||
| But scientism is the reduction of all knowledge to the scientific form of knowledge. | ||
| And that is a dark side of the Enlightenment. | ||
| If you say, that's the sum total of what we can know legitimately, we know through the scientific method, when in fact, literature, the Bible, drama, poetry, philosophy, all that is a bearer of wisdom, but it's not scientific. | ||
| But I find dealing with the young people today, scientism is rampant. | ||
| So the binary option is science or nonsense. | ||
| Religion, clearly not science, therefore now read Hitchens, Dawkins and Company. | ||
| You find that binary choice. | ||
| So I want to fight in favor of other ways of knowing that are not scientific. | ||
| Do you both sense that the resurgence of these ideas and the starvation to just hear people talk about these things, honestly, is also sort of a failure of the secular world? | ||
| I asked Ben and Jordan this and I hate the question because I I believe so much in the secular world, and I love secular ideas that free us and all of these things, but that sort of, there's a feeling right now, and I think it has something to do with social media, and that our public squares have become sort of, they're open, which is great, but then have also become forums for hysteria and fake news and all of these things, that it's a sort of failure of the secular world. | ||
| Go ahead, please. | ||
| Yes, I'm not sure which world hasn't failed, but the secular world certainly has, and it has in part because of exactly what we've been saying, which is, once again, remove first principles from the discussion. | ||
| What's the only thing you can be certain of? | ||
| The only thing you can be certain of is your own emotional reaction. | ||
| That bothers me, therefore it's bad. | ||
| And so what you get is, as you said, this hyper-hysterical reaction. | ||
| Everybody is a group to be offended because this is what I feel. | ||
| And the idea that we can share principles and discuss them has sort of disappeared. | ||
| Scholasticism, Talmudic argument, the things that we cut our teeth on, they don't exist because there's no shared space in which we can all agree about the same thing. | ||
| Which is why, because culture and literature and music, all of them are not shared, they're all balkanized, and the only thing that we all share is politics. | ||
| So everything gets politicized. | ||
| So that's exactly what my next question was gonna be, which is... | ||
| Are politics our new religion, and how actually dangerous is that? | ||
| Yes, super dangerous. | ||
| I mean, I would say with Paul Tillich, who said, you know, religion's your ultimate concern. | ||
| So everyone's got a religion, meaning there's something that's of ultimate value to you. | ||
| Or put in biblical language, something that you worship. | ||
| You know, worship comes from worth-ship. | ||
| What's of highest worth to you? | ||
| And you can, Tillich said, all you need to know about a person you can find out by asking one question. | ||
| What do you worship? | ||
| And that's absolutely right, it seems to me. | ||
| I mean, what's of highest value to you? | ||
| When it's not God, then we get mischief. | ||
| So put whatever you want in that place, science or politics or culture or the president or whatever. | ||
|
unidentified
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Trouble. | |
| The Bible calls that idolatry, by the way. | ||
| So that diagnosis is still altogether valid. | ||
| And yes, if politics becomes your ultimate concern, that's going to be bad for you, for everyone in the conversation, and for politics. | ||
| Politics will become corrupt. | ||
| That sort of explains the political situation we're in right now. | ||
| It does in many ways, right. | ||
| And so that's the trouble, Steve, with a secularism that creates what Charles Taylor called the buffered self, right? | ||
| The self that's in this little self-contained place, buffered from any contact with the transcendent. | ||
| That becomes suffocating. | ||
| And there's another shadow side, if you want, of a hyper-rationalistic view of the world. | ||
| Would you both argue that on, and I think I probably asked you both this individually, but I'm sort of struggling with this one. | ||
| This has been where I'm at lately, that on a micro level, on a personal level, say a Michael Shermer right here or Sam Harris right here, could be absolutely moral and decent and give to charity and live full, rich lives that are every bit as meaningful as any believer, but that perhaps at the macro level, that simply can't work. | ||
| I mean, Sam is a good example. | ||
| Sam takes his morality extremely seriously, as you know. | ||
| And what I would say is that there is what the mid-twentieth century Jewish philosopher Will Herbert called cut flower ethics. | ||
| He said they stay fresh for a while, but the question is, without the soil that nurtured them, how long does that stay? | ||
| And so, yeah, you can get individual growths that are as beautiful as any growths that ever existed, but the question is transmissibility and the thickness of the culture in which You know, I mean, if you look around the Western world, I think there's a lot of evidence that, in fact, ethics aren't that effectively transmitted, and part of the reason is because there is no soil, there's no grounding, there's no certainty. | ||
| If you even wanted to introduce ethical education into school systems, people would scream. | ||
| And yet, without ethical education, all the other things are imperiled. | ||
| That was helpful. | ||
| I've used that image before, never knowing where it came from, the cut flowers thing, because it's really good. | ||
| For a while, oh sure, the country's kind of going on the fumes of a religious system, but if you take those flowers out of the ground, they are going to fade. | ||
| Who was it again? | ||
| Will Herbert. | ||
| He's the one who wrote Protestant Catholic Jew in the middle of the 20th century. | ||
| By the way, I would also say, That, and I think again, I'm sure that the bishop would, I suspect the bishop will agree with me. | ||
| I'm gonna get to some disagreements, don't worry. | ||
| Is that religion doesn't mean that you have to walk into my synagogue. | ||
| You should, but it doesn't mean that you have to. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| No, but seriously, religion is reinvented in all sorts of ways. | ||
| I mean, my niece's husband is one of the people high up in Burning Man. | ||
| And there's a lot that goes on there that has a serious, like a serious religious component, even though they may not call it religion. | ||
| The question is, can society reinvent religion or take from religion and reconfigure it in ways that are enduring and lasting and meaningful? | ||
| It doesn't have to be a small orthodoxy. | ||
| So I got a good philosophical one for you. | ||
| If somebody could come up with that, Would you guys be against it? | ||
| If someone could come up with that bedrock that would allow those fresh cut flowers to stay and stay and stay. | ||
| A new version of all of this that maybe felt more contemporary or something like that. | ||
| And it gave all of the answers that you are asking for. | ||
| Here you may come across a disagreement because Judaism is not solely morals and behaviors. | ||
| It's also a people and a history and a land and a language and lots of other things and that is not going to get replaced. | ||
| by somebody coming up with an ethical system. | ||
| I'd say the ground, finally, is God. | ||
| So call God what you want. | ||
| It's the unconditioned. | ||
| The unconditioned true, good, and beautiful. | ||
| That's God, and that's the ground for these great ethical commitments. | ||
| I never met Christopher Hitchens, but I've read him and watched him carefully, and I was always struck by the intensity of his ethical commitments, which to me seemed incoherent in light of a completely atheistic view of the world. | ||
| But there was a Jeremiah-like passion for ethical, and I would say, look, that's it. | ||
| That's the door in if you want. | ||
| You could do cosmological type arguments that had very little traction with Hitchens, but my way in for him was, follow your own ethical passion. | ||
| You're going to come find what I mean by God, which is the unconditioned good. | ||
| You don't want just any old justice. | ||
| You want justice all the time. | ||
| You want justice in every way. | ||
| You want justice to fill the whole earth. | ||
| That's a hunger and thirst for God. | ||
| And what if they don't get there at the end? | ||
| What is that like? | ||
| The right answer is that they're already there. | ||
| See, it's not that they're trying to get there, it's you've already been seized by God. | ||
| If you've got that passion for justice, that's God already working in you, you know? | ||
| So it's not so much the quest for God out there, but God's already grasped you at the root of your being and filled you with this prophetic passion. | ||
| So I would say, in a way, He's already been found, you know? | ||
| So, let's get to some of the differences here. | ||
| So we're talking about Judeo-Christian values. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But those are not exactly the same thing. | ||
| So what, maybe each of you could pick perhaps one thing. | ||
| Now I guess Judaism came first, not I guess, but Judaism did come first. | ||
| I'll give you a big one. | ||
| Older brothers in the faith. | ||
| Christianity differ, which is in vicarious atonement. | ||
| In the Jewish tradition, if you don't make reparations to the person whom you've hurt, God can't forgive you. | ||
| That's a big difference. | ||
| I mean, and this was illustrated most famously, not exclusively, but most famously, when one of the prosecutors at Nuremberg asked the priest, does that mean that if, say, Eichmann repented on his deathbed and accepted Jesus, he would be forgiven and saved, but Anne Frank would go to hell? | ||
| And the priest said, that's the mystery of grace. | ||
| That's a difference. | ||
| If I were to name a difference, it's Christ is the difference. | ||
| So I would not reduce things to ethics. | ||
| We find all kinds of common ground when it comes to ethics, but I'd resist the Kantian move to reduce religion to ethics. | ||
| I mean, that's a dimension of it. | ||
| It's a consequence of it. | ||
| The difference is Jesus. | ||
| And Jesus means the coming together of divinity and humanity in such a way that humanity is transfigured and brought up into a share in the divine life. | ||
| And that's the mystical heart of Christianity. | ||
| From that flows all kinds of ethical implications. | ||
| But that's the central mystery, I think, is divinization. | ||
| The Greek fathers call it theosis. | ||
| The Latins call it deificatio, that God became one of us, that we might become a share in his own life. | ||
| And the Jews call it false. | ||
| That is true. | ||
| That's why to call someone a Jew for Jesus is an oxymoron, because that was actually the critical dividing line between Jews and Christians, was the acceptance of Jesus as divine or the Son of God or the Messiah. | ||
| So what do you see, wrong isn't the right term, but what do you see as conflicting with your values? | ||
| So first of all, a human being doesn't become God in the Jewish tradition. | ||
| God is transcended and imminent, but always intangible. | ||
|
unidentified
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That does not take human form, never took human form. | |
| And also, even though Christianity Talks about three-in-one and one-in-three. | ||
| I remember when I was in high school and we had a Baptist preacher come to our high school and told us, you know, you seem like nice boys and girls, but you're all going to hell. | ||
| And I asked him, I said, well, if something is perfect, it doesn't need anything added to it. | ||
| So is the Father perfect? | ||
| And he said, yes. | ||
| And I said, we're done. | ||
| We're done. | ||
| We don't need anything else. | ||
| That's, I mean, that's been the Jewish view. | ||
| But I also want to say This is an argument that has gone on for thousands of years. | ||
| And every now and then I'll get someone on my Facebook and say, what about this verse? | ||
| And I'll think, really? | ||
| Really? | ||
| That's why it almost feels a little silly for me to frame a question like that. | ||
| But I know that people watching don't want you guys to sit here and sort of agree on everything, even though you disagree on the margins or you just are people of different faith. | ||
| And that's just fine. | ||
| But I think there's always like this feeling of like, unless there's some core thing that is not argued about that we're missing something. | ||
| I like Relit's argument, and to do it publicly is a good thing. | ||
| I've been involved in many... Well, we're putting this on YouTube, and the commenters are very kind. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, believe me, I know about YouTube commentators. | |
| But I've been involved in a lot of Catholic-Jewish dialogues over the years. | ||
| We hardly ever mention the J-word, by which I mean Jesus. | ||
| So we tend to say, it's great that we're nice to each other, and we've overcome these old animosities, and we stand for the great ethical principles, which is great and true, and I never, ever want to go back behind it. | ||
| But I would say, well, now what about Jesus? | ||
| Let's talk about Jesus. | ||
| And then people get very squirrely. | ||
| Now, I certainly understand, given our rather regrettable history on this thing, that we're always worried about religious violence. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| At the same time, I think it's a desideratum that we find a way to have a respectful and nonviolent argument. | ||
| I think argument's a good thing. | ||
| As you say, quite rightly, the rabbinic tradition, the scholastic tradition, they love arguments. | ||
| Thomas Aquinas argues with everybody. | ||
| There's something very Talmudic about Thomas Aquinas, and I think that's a great thing that we need to recover. | ||
| There's something very urban about Aquinas. | ||
| A theologian moved out of the monasteries into the cities, into places like Paris, and there's a lot of different points of view and people shouting things from the floor, and his writings reflect that lively sort of conversation. | ||
| I like that. | ||
| I think that's a healthy thing. | ||
| Well, I think that partly explains what's happening on YouTube these days with conversation. | ||
| I mean, that's what brought you guys here. | ||
| And the fascination with religion. | ||
| Now, it's often done poorly. | ||
| God knows. | ||
| There's people often just sharing a lot of, you know, strong feelings. | ||
| But I like the fact there's obviously great interest in religion. | ||
| Yeah, so I thought this would be interesting. | ||
| I know you can't obviously tell me what the people of your congregation are coming to you with privately, but I wonder if there's general trends that maybe are the same or different that you both are hearing about. | ||
| So I wonder if you could sort of tell me just a general trend of the type of things that people are struggling with right now. | ||
| Sure, I would say... And have you seen that change, let's say, in 20 years? | ||
| I would say increasingly the trend is finding a partner being lonely. | ||
| I think there is. | ||
| I think we are. | ||
| I mean, you know, he wrote, I don't know how many years ago, Putnam wrote the book Bowling Alone. | ||
| But I think we're bowling alone more and more and more. | ||
| And the more effective technology becomes, the more we can insulate ourselves and cocoon ourselves against it, against the world. | ||
| You can, you know, order your food in and you can watch whatever you want. | ||
| And yet there is this deep human desire for connection. | ||
| The problem is the connection takes work and it takes effort. | ||
| And so in some ways we're becoming a less effortful society and therefore a lonelier society. | ||
| I get a lot of that. | ||
| And then there are all the range of human problems. | ||
| Family problems, marriage problems, and meaning problems. | ||
| I think there's a sense in which just like all the commandments could be reduced to, do not steal, because all of them are a form of stealing in one way or another, all human problems can be reduced to, I don't have meaning. | ||
| Because other people give you meaning, community gives you meaning, a good job gives you meaning, a spouse that loves you. | ||
| I mean, You know, meaning is sort of, it's the ground, it's the Tillichian ground of being that we're all looking for. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What about for you is sort of trends that people are coming to? | ||
| What I would find both in my ministry as bishop, but also kind of the online work that I do in evangelization, is the meaning thing. | ||
| Because the stats are all showing, you know, when I was a kid back in the 70s, about 3% of our country would have said, I have no religion. | ||
| I mean, 97% of the country would have said, I'm religious. | ||
| Now, maybe not ardently so, but 97% had a religious affiliation. | ||
| Now it's 25%. | ||
| Among young people, it's 40%. | ||
| Among young Catholics, or 30 and younger, it's 50%. | ||
| Now say, I have no religion. | ||
| And that expresses itself as a very deep hunger and alienation. | ||
| And I sense that all the time. | ||
| People want truth. | ||
| They want meaning. | ||
| They want religious purpose. | ||
| But it's the cut flowers thing, that more and more they're losing contact with the sources of that. | ||
| And it's causing enormous existential suffering. | ||
| The Pope has talked about the existential margins. | ||
| I like that, you know. | ||
| The church goes out to the margins, he says. | ||
| Economic and political margins. | ||
| But he also named the existential margins. | ||
| People that are cut off from God. | ||
| And I find that all the time. | ||
| More than when I started 30 some years ago. | ||
| But also, I wonder what you think about the fact that that's true here, and it's certainly true for Jews here. | ||
| I mean, there's no difference. | ||
| But elsewhere in the world, that's not true. | ||
| There are parts of the world where religious affiliation has exploded. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| In the West, it's true. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| But in the West, it isn't. | ||
| So, what's the pivot? | ||
| What's the difference? | ||
| Well, in some ways, you know, it's from modernity to post-modernity. | ||
| You might say that shadow of the Enlightenment finding more and more expression. | ||
| You know, if a hyper-rationalism, a scientific view of the world, the buffered self, if all that is taking more and more root in people's psyches, that's going to happen. | ||
| You know, the alienation will be deeper. | ||
| As you say, a lot of other societies around the world, religion is still very strong and growing. | ||
| But yeah, I think in the West, it's the after effects of modernity and probably post-modernity. | ||
| So I also, I want to bring in Aldous Huxley here. | ||
| I would love to have Aldous Huxley. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'll let you do that. | |
| Well, he died in Ohio, so it wasn't bad. | ||
| If we're going to summon him, he doesn't have that far to go. | ||
| In Brave New World, Which I have to say I think about all the time as I read about China. | ||
| Yeah, they're instituting these policies. | ||
| They're instituting these policies that increase authoritarianism, but they're making people, they're satisfying the basic needs that people have. | ||
| I think that increasingly as you satisfy certain basic needs that people have, They will give up on everything else that they don't absolutely have to have. | ||
| So, I mean, this is why there's that great speech in Brave New World where he says, I want God, I want sin, I want messiness, I want unhappiness. | ||
| People are opting out of that, because the truth is, when people come to a synagogue or to a church, And they say, you know, it's so hard and the place is too political. | ||
| Too political, by the way, always means I didn't get what I wanted. | ||
| That's what political always means. | ||
| Nobody gets what they want and says it's too political. | ||
| What they're saying is the friction of dealing with other human beings in uncomfortable ways is something I don't have to put up with, so I won't. | ||
| I'll text instead of call you know when I was when when when all of us were younger they used to say about a telephone that it gave you intimacy without danger because you could talk on the phone but you'd have to face the person now it's like multiplied many times texting gives you intimate there is actually danger but not the kind of danger of facing someone And so we've created all these technologies that are like Soma to make people, to lull people into individual comfort, and we're paying a tremendous price. | ||
| So is this the irony, though? | ||
| I mean, what brings us, the three of us together, is the internet, right? | ||
| I mean, this incredibly powerful thing that now is spreading the messages that you guys care about is also the very force That is allowing for us to be alone when we're surrounded by people. | ||
| And so it always goes with all things human. | ||
| It's both good and bad. | ||
| You mentioned Huxley. | ||
| I'll mention Teilhard de Chardin, the great Jesuit. | ||
| Scientist, theologian, but he talked about the noosphere. | ||
| He dreamed of this next stage of evolution where the whole planet would be connected through a sort of brain-like structure, and it seemed so fantastic back in the 1950s. | ||
| Well, it's happened. | ||
| We're the result of it. | ||
| We're participating in it. | ||
| And there's something beautiful about that. | ||
| He dreamed of this sense of connection that we're going to have, and we do have that. | ||
| I mean, I don't want to stress the positive side of Internet and social media and all that stuff. | ||
| It's terrific in many ways. | ||
| But like all things human, and biblical people know that, it's going to go bad, you know? | ||
| In time, sin is going to reassert itself and the thing will be corrupted in some ways. | ||
| But the positive remains, and I love that. | ||
| I love the noosphere. | ||
| I think it's a positive development. | ||
| Yeah, it's interesting because, so I've had obviously you both on individually, we both got into hot water from different communities online after we chatted because I had you on and I had people's say, on the left, who were angry that I even sat down with the bishop. | ||
| It's like, gay, I sat down with the bishop, and you told me church doctrine, and then told me a little bit about your personal feelings, and people were just annoyed that I even sat down with you in the first place. | ||
| You got into a lot of hot water because you said something to the effect of your head and your heart not being in exactly the same place with this, and you had, so then you had people, say, more on the right, or more traditional, or whatever you wanna call that, angry at you, and I thought, We must have done something right here. | ||
| Because we're both getting hate, so to speak, from different quarters. | ||
| And that's sort of the beauty and the horrors of the internet. | ||
| Yeah, and I've sensed it from the very beginning when I started doing work on YouTube. | ||
| And as I say, I didn't even know you could comment. | ||
| I was that naive about YouTube. | ||
| I put things up there. | ||
| And I'm just inundated with negative comments because, you know, the vast majority of people, we all know, don't write in to say, gosh, I love your video, what a terrific video, God bless you. | ||
| You guys, love the outfit there. | ||
| Yeah, the outfit in black really works on you. | ||
| 97% are going after you, but I mean, now I'm used to it, and I like it because I get some traction. | ||
| You know, I can, all right, at the very least now I can find some way to engage you and talk to you. | ||
| I gotta remind myself all the time, there's a person behind those, Those harsh words. | ||
| Somebody, maybe in his mom's basement or who knows where he is or she is, but somebody was writing those words, as vicious and cruel as they might be. | ||
| So it's a pastoral opportunity. | ||
| I mean, I wouldn't want to miss that. | ||
| And I've encouraged my students, this is the cutting edge of pastoral ministry in many ways. | ||
| We've got to learn how to engage that world very creatively, or we're missing a giant opportunity. | ||
| So it's interesting, just talking about the gay marriage issue for a minute, which it's already legal here, I don't even really like belaboring it because it seems like the ship has sailed and most people are basically okay with it at this point. | ||
| Jews sort of were ahead on this, generally speaking. | ||
| Yes, generally speaking. | ||
| Or at least secular Jews, right? | ||
| Not organized Jews. | ||
| You had a little bit of an insurrection in your own temple when you took a position pro-gay marriage. | ||
| So what is the... | ||
| Well, what is it? | ||
| Is it about the history of Jews being the other or something else that allow Jews generally to evolve on social issues a little bit? | ||
| So this is a really interesting question about why Jews tend to be, I mean, 80% of Jews find themselves on the left of the political spectrum. | ||
| That has shifted somewhat in the last I don't know, 20-30 years, but it's still true and there's been a lot of diagnosis about why that is, whether it's lamentation from the right or cheering from the left. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I know a little bit about this. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So I think that there is a lot of discussion in society right now is about the perception of the other. | ||
| And I think Jews have an instinctive otherness. | ||
| There's a phrase in the Bible that uses the word ger toshav, which means a resident alien. | ||
| And a classic commentary on it says, this is how you should always feel in the world. | ||
| Like you're both resident and alien. | ||
| And I think that that's been the Jewish historical experience. | ||
| They always felt like they didn't entirely belong. | ||
| So when they see someone else who doesn't entirely belong, there's an instinctive sympathy that gets played out. | ||
| That way, and I think that that is still true for most Jews, and even Jews who would find themselves on the right in this would still say that they have that instinct of sympathy. | ||
| It expresses itself in different ways. | ||
| So that, now I'm Jewish, so that rings very true to me. | ||
| Does that, so Christianity, which has been more of a majority religion, let's say, You wouldn't inherently feel that. | ||
| Do you think that has a little bit to do with it? | ||
| Well, no, I think there's a tension. | ||
| What you're talking about, you know, is obviously a deeply biblical intuition about compassion for the other, and especially for someone on the margins. | ||
| All that's there, I think, and Catholic teaching reflects that, the deep compassion for everybody. | ||
| At the same time, the natural law tradition that comes up, not just out of Greek philosophy, but out of biblical sources, and the nature of marriage and the integrity of the sexual act, etc., etc., I mean, all that is deeply biblical in its origins. | ||
| It's supported by the philosophical tradition. | ||
| And let's face it, there was a consensus of the peoples up until about 25 years ago that this was the right way to understand marriage, sexuality. | ||
| So, I mean, I wouldn't want to You know, characterize the church's position as somehow retrograde or we're so behind the times. | ||
| It's coming up out of this very tradition we were just talking about, you know. | ||
| So I'd make that distinction between defending the integrity of marriage, classically defined, and reaching out with love and compassion and non-violence and welcome to everybody, you know. | ||
| I think that's the place the church wants to find us. | ||
| So here's a hard And perhaps unpopular thing to say, but you're exactly right that it was only in the 1980s that Andrew Sullivan wrote about gay marriage. | ||
| It's very recent in the span of history. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And you see this dynamic being played out again and again. | ||
| So, for example, when my daughter went to college, which was, she's just graduating, so four years ago, the first questions they asked them was, what's your name? | ||
| give us a favorite animal and what is your preferred gender pronoun? | ||
| So some people said, "Call me them," for example, and got very offended. - I'm delighted. | ||
| And got very offended when someone would say, "You." | ||
| And in discussions with her, I was saying to her, "Yeah, I understand why people who are young | ||
| don't yet get what it is to grow up and be oriented a certain way." | ||
| They won't until they're my age, and then there'll be something else that a young person will ask them that they won't be able to do. | ||
| But there has to be a circle of compassion here, which I understand is hard for people who feel themselves not accepted, but they have to realize to some extent that people are trained in lots of deep ways. | ||
| And I first learned this, I took my junior year abroad in Scotland. | ||
| And there was this guy who made a really, didn't know I was Jewish, made a really anti-Semitic remark. | ||
| So I started to talk to him. | ||
| I did exactly what you said. | ||
| I didn't, time was not a pastor, but I took it as an opportunity. | ||
| And after several discussions, he said to me, you know, I worship my father. | ||
| And my father always told me that Jews were terrible. | ||
| And it's so hard for me to see them because I feel like I'm betraying my father. | ||
| And it was the first time I really understood that you can be trained in such a way that it's hard to get out of and that the victim, in quote, of your training has to have a certain amount of compassion for the time it takes for others to adjust. | ||
| That's powerful. | ||
| What are some of the other issues that people are coming to you about? | ||
| Well, the one I sense the most, as I say, is this quest for God. | ||
| I mean, it's a hunger and thirst for God. | ||
| I would just use the most fundamental religious language I can find. | ||
| People are dissatisfied with the goods of the world. | ||
| And especially in the West, they have them in huge quantities. | ||
| They have all the wealth and pleasure and power and honor they can get, in many cases. | ||
| And then they're desperately unhappy. | ||
| And they want something which the world can't give. | ||
| They want something the sciences can't give. | ||
| They want something secularism can't give. | ||
| And so, in a way, there is a great opportunity now, it seems to me, for religious people to, again, publicly reassert the great spiritual tradition. | ||
| So how important is happiness? | ||
| I was just going to say... Did I get it? | ||
| Did I get it? | ||
| I was just going to say, and one of the things we have lost is the capacity to be creatively unhappy. | ||
| Because for most of human history that wasn't what I mean the pursuit of happiness made most people did not assume that they had a right to be happy and in fact being unhappy was one of the wellsprings of Creativity and art and literature and and social movements and so on and I think now because our mechanisms for alleviating acute unhappiness are so good Both medically and socially, I think we've a little bit lost the capacity to be unhappy. | ||
| So the founding fathers kind of burdened us with the pursuit to be happy, right? | ||
| The pursuit of happiness. | ||
| But you know what's interesting about that to me? | ||
| It's a very enlightenment sort of thing. | ||
| Jefferson didn't define happiness. | ||
| He said we have a right to pursue it according to our own will. | ||
| Prior to that period, What preoccupied the minds of the great thinkers was, well, what is happiness? | ||
| So whether it's Aquinas or it's Cicero or it's Plato or it's Aristotle, they're deeply interested in what makes us happy. | ||
| There's a shift at modernity that says, well, we don't really know what's going to make us happy, but you pursue it your way, you pursue it that way, and we have a right to do it. | ||
| But I think that question still, it haunts the human heart. | ||
| Well, how important do you think the question is? | ||
| It's the only question that finally matters. | ||
| Well, do you think that's more important than the question of meaning? | ||
| It is the question of meaning. | ||
| It is the question of the same thing. | ||
| What gives me beatitudo? | ||
| Now, that doesn't mean psychological contentment. | ||
| I quite agree with you there. | ||
| We're not going to get psychological contentment very often. | ||
| And I think you're right that it's an engine of progress, the fact that we don't have psychological contentment. | ||
| Beatitudo is the joy of the heart, or it's shalom, or it's this peace at the level of the soul that people want. | ||
| I won't get it perfectly in this life. | ||
| I aspire to it perfectly in the life to come. | ||
| But it's deep in me to want it. | ||
| And that's what drives me, you know? | ||
| And if you suppress that, St. | ||
| John of the Cross said that, if you suppress that, very dangerous things happen, psychologically and spiritually. | ||
| And I think you see that all over the place now. | ||
| That question's not important. | ||
| Don't worry about that question. | ||
| Seek wealth, pleasure, honor, power. | ||
| Seek what scientists can tell you. | ||
| But that's not going to satisfy the longing of the heart. | ||
| Shimon Peres, who was the President of Israel, Prime Minister briefly, said the great contribution of the Jews to the world was dissatisfaction. | ||
| And if you think about it, I mean, if people, towards the end of their life, you ask them when they were happiest, it wasn't once they achieved the goal that they were, it's always on the way there. | ||
| I mean, there is something about unhappiness that makes you happy, strange as it sounds. | ||
| Well, it gives you drive, I suppose. | ||
| Right, and those are the moments that you think of nostalgically. | ||
| Yeah, but how important So you said it's the same question. | ||
| I think so. | ||
|
unidentified
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Meaning. | |
| The pursuit of happiness and the pursuit of morality. | ||
| Of meaning. | ||
| Of meaning. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you think that's the same question? | ||
| Well, I wouldn't know. | ||
| I wouldn't use the word happy. | ||
| I would say the pursuit of meaning. | ||
| I mean, you can be Deeply troubled, pained, and you wouldn't call yourself happy, and yet you would say, I'm where I'm supposed to be and this is... I'm looking for a different word because happy has connotations. | ||
| Yeah, I agree with you on that. | ||
| That's the psychological contentment. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| of something too trivial, almost. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Here's the interesting thing. | ||
| I quite agree with you on that. | ||
| Aquinas says, for example, you want to see a picture of Beata Tudor, so the Latin for happiness. | ||
| He said, look at the crucified Jesus. | ||
| Because Jesus on the cross, wealth, pleasure, honor, power, he's got none of them. | ||
| They're all stripped away. | ||
| But he's doing the will of his Father. | ||
| And so he says, paradoxically, that's a picture of a happy man. | ||
| Now, no psychological contentment whatsoever, on the contrary. | ||
| But yet we hold that image up, in Catholic churches anyway. | ||
| And we want people to contemplate that image, you know? | ||
| So not a picture of someone wealthy, someone powerful, someone full of psychological pleasure. | ||
| We hold up the crucified Jesus, and we say, that's beatitudo. | ||
| That's what you're seeking, you know? | ||
| To be stripped away of many of those things. | ||
| So self-sacrifice, is somebody who sacrifices themselves happy? | ||
| I don't think happy is the right word, you know? | ||
| Are you both constantly amazed at just what people can put up with that they don't think they can? | ||
| Fulfilled, something whole. | ||
| Meaning. - Yeah, maybe. | ||
| Are you both constantly amazed at just what people can put up with | ||
| that they don't think they can? | ||
| That people come to you with disease or death or whatever it is, lost their job, | ||
| losing the house, the whole thing, and they think everything's falling apart | ||
| and that in most cases, they always make it through one way or another? | ||
| That must be one of the things that you both find that it's got to give you something. | ||
| So I just, a couple months ago I did the funeral of Max Webb, who died at 101, and he had survived 18 concentration camps. | ||
| And he was a remarkable, just a remarkable man. | ||
| And And he would, I mean, he, when he, when the Nazis came to his town and said to his mother, if you hear that I was shot or hung, it might be true, if you hear that I starved, don't believe it. | ||
| And that's what he was like. | ||
| He just had a life force that was indomitable. | ||
| And what he put up with in his life was literally unimaginable to someone | ||
| who didn't go through a similar experience. | ||
| And so, yes, when I look at that and I see, and he was, I think, genuinely, | ||
| most of the time, a happy man. | ||
| And I think that that's because there was no question in his life, | ||
| in his mind, that life was meaningful, that God was real, that miracles were real, | ||
| that his survival had a purpose, that he had to commemorate the people | ||
| didn't survive. | ||
| I mean, in some ways, his life was more peopled by the people who weren't there than, for most of us, by the people who are. | ||
| What do you chalk it up to that a young person or child, I don't know how old he was exactly when that happened, that a young person could have that? | ||
| Because you haven't had the time to think all these things through. | ||
| So I think part of it is intrinsic nature. | ||
| There are people who are fortunate enough to have that God-given resilience. | ||
| And then I think that part of it was the The furnace that he went through that refined his character and made him determined not to have lived in vain. | ||
| It reminds me of, so just a quick story, Hugo Grin, who was a rabbi in Britain, when he was a child he was in Auschwitz, and his father, it was Hanukkah, we've just finished Hanukkah, so his father took the margarine ration and he used it to light The Hanukkah menorah. | ||
| And Grian, who was like 11 or 12 at the time, like screamed at his father and said, how can you? | ||
| We're supposed to be eating this. | ||
| This is our food. | ||
| This is what survives. | ||
| His father said, my child, we've learned that you can live for three weeks without food. | ||
| You can live for three days without water, but you can't live for three minutes without hope. | ||
| So the people who learned that lesson were different. | ||
| There's ultimate concern, yeah. | ||
| I mean, you're up against it as a religious figure all the time. | ||
| You're up against suffering from the very beginning. | ||
| I remember when I was newly ordained. | ||
| I'm 26 years old, you know, and I was in the funeral director's car behind the third hearse of that week. | ||
| I was doing my third funeral that week, and I remember thinking, what am I doing? | ||
| I'm 26 years old. | ||
| This is a beautiful day. | ||
| I'm behind my third, you know, But you do it, because those are those limit experiences where people have a sense of God. | ||
| It's often when pushed to those limits. | ||
| Just, you know, recently, I'm out here in sunny, beautiful Southern California, and all my Chicago friends are, oh, they're in Montecito and Santa Barbara. | ||
| Of course, Santa Barbara gets the terrible Thomas fire, followed by the even more terrible mudslide that killed 20 people in one night. | ||
| I was at a funeral of a man who lost his wife and two kids in that mudslide. | ||
| As you know, we go there. | ||
| We always go to those places. | ||
| We're called to stand in those places and have that awful responsibility, and awful in the full sense of that term, to speak. | ||
| Divine word at that moment, but those are the limit Experiences where people often have the most powerful sense of God of the unconditioned and some people are able to say like I'm I I had a couple of brain tumors and I went through lymphoma and people would and and whenever people come to my office and Say, you know, how did how did you feel? | ||
| Because people always come to us and say why me right? | ||
| Yeah, I said look what I was thinking was I was born in the richest country in the world. | ||
| I had parents who loved me. | ||
| I was never hungry. | ||
| Why me? | ||
| I mean, that's what I was asking, why me? | ||
| The other stuff, it's like, I don't expect and I don't think any of us should expect an uninterrupted run of blessing, but what we tend to do is we count everything that's good in our lives as natural and everything that's bad as unfair. | ||
| Obviously, there are radically unfair things, but for most of us, I mean, we're very lucky to be here. | ||
| Just very lucky. | ||
| Yeah, just on a purely personal level, not just the sort of idea level. | ||
| There's gotta be those moments, not just when you're 26, but even now, where someone presents something to you and it's like, where do you guys just get the sort of fortitude and energy to get up and have to be strong when you just don't feel like it? | ||
| I know what it's like doing what I do, and dealing with a certain amount of hate, and it can be kind of exhausting. | ||
| I think I'll have a different answer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah? | |
| Alright, cool. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think so. | |
| I mean, mine is the holy hour. | ||
| So, I mean, I begin every day with an hour of prayer, most of it in silence before the blessed sacrament. | ||
| I mean, so it's just this time of communion with the Lord. | ||
| And I'm a morning guy. | ||
| I wake up early. | ||
| And so before any distractions come in, I'll spend an hour with a cup of coffee and the tabernacle, you know, so it's just a time of communion. | ||
| And that's where I bring all this stuff to the Lord. | ||
| I'll bring what I'm worried about. | ||
| I'll bring people's needs and concerns. | ||
| People say all the time, you know, the priests and bishops, pray for me, pray for me. | ||
| So I try to do that. | ||
| Like, Lord, I don't remember all their names, but everyone that asked me to pray for them, I'm now doing it, you know. | ||
| But that's, for me, super important, because you're absolutely right. | ||
| There are times when you're like, I don't know what to say. | ||
| I don't know what to say. | ||
| I remember years ago, I'm a young priest, and there was a man who had killed himself, before killing himself, had killed his son. | ||
| And this made the papers, you know. | ||
| I was at the funeral parlor, not attending that wake, but another one from my parish. | ||
| But on the way out, I noticed these two coffins in the room. | ||
| It's very unusual, you know. | ||
| And then I saw the name, and I thought, that's... So I went in, you know, and the wife and mother saw me, had the collar on. | ||
| She comes over, and she went, Like, okay, you know, religious guy. | ||
| I did that. | ||
| And that was it. | ||
| I mean, I didn't say one word to her. | ||
| I didn't know what I could say. | ||
| But somehow, weirdly, you know, this, just the presence of a religious representative going, like, look, I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I don't know either. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Somehow there's a context of something here that we're both acknowledging through all of this darkness. | ||
| So that's what you face pastorally. | ||
| I think that's a beautiful idea. | ||
| That presence is more powerful than answers. | ||
| Answers are, but presence is. | ||
| But what I was going to say is that I think actually part of what Part of what I find is what I'm sure you find. | ||
| You think, oh my God, I can't believe I gotta do another podcast today. | ||
| And you drag yourself in here, but then the doing brings its own powerful energy. | ||
| And so there are times when I'll say, I can't believe I gotta go do a wedding. | ||
| I can't believe I gotta go do a, I really don't wanna get up, I really don't wanna get dressed. | ||
| But there is never a time when I'm standing up and doing it where I don't think, oh my God, I'm so blessed to be able to do this. | ||
| Because there is, I'm a big advocate of what used to be called the James Lang theory of emotion, which is not that you feel something and then you do it, but you do something and the feelings will then rise and swell to fill the moment, and that's what happens. | ||
| The one that comes to my mind is the psalm. | ||
| They go out, they go out full of tears, carrying seed for the sowing. | ||
| They come back, they come back full of song, carrying the sheaves. | ||
| That, to me, is pastoral experience, very often. | ||
| You're driving to the hospital, and you're like, I don't want to go to the hospital. | ||
| And you're kind of full of tears about it, but then you come back, you come back singing. | ||
| I mean, the car's singing. | ||
| It did something to you. | ||
| And I think James is right as well. | ||
| It must feel nice for you guys just to be able to admit that briefly, because I think people probably look at you guys, it's that woman going like this. | ||
| It's like that you're these superhuman things or something, or that you're supposed to know everything and give them everything. | ||
| So just a moment where you can admit, oh, I was in the car in this, or I didn't want to get out of bed. | ||
| It's probably just for you guys. | ||
| So it's a little therapy. | ||
| I don't even have a question for this, but I just thought this was an interesting thing that happened to me about two months ago. | ||
| Jordan and I were on tour together. | ||
| We were in Salt Lake City and a couple came up to me before the show and they just looked very sad and disturbed. | ||
| And they came up to me and they said this was their one night out. | ||
| They've been dealing with a lot. | ||
| Her father had just died within the week. | ||
| He had been diagnosed, the guy that I was standing with, had been diagnosed, I think, with testicular cancer | ||
| and that she was pregnant with their baby that they had been told was not gonna live. | ||
| But the child was still in utero. | ||
| And I mean, I truly, I had one of those moments where I had no idea what to say. | ||
| It was like slow motion. | ||
| I was like, you know, I had given them tickets to my meet and greet after not knowing any of this. | ||
| So when I came up to them, I was like, you know, being all friendly and everything, and I did not know what to say. | ||
| And I just said, God bless you guys. | ||
| I could not, like, it seemed like the only words that had any value whatsoever. | ||
| So I don't even have a question for that. | ||
| I just thought it was interesting that it was just what, There was nothing left in my brain to say, basically. | ||
| That's what you said, though. | ||
| See, that's very interesting to me. | ||
| Because, I mean, somewhere in your soul, those words came out, you know? | ||
| Even if, I guess, from what you said, explicitly, you're a non-believer, right? | ||
| At this point, I wouldn't say I'm a non-believer. | ||
| He was before the podcast. | ||
|
unidentified
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You guys have banged me around a lot, you know? | |
| That's very interesting. | ||
| I think that's really worth just meditating on. | ||
| That came from somewhere in your developing psyche and soul or whatever, and that's very powerful, it seems to me. | ||
| And what I would say to you is, yes, what you told them was the only thing you can really tell someone who's suffering, which is you're not alone. | ||
| That is the essential human message. | ||
| You're not alone. | ||
| God bless you. | ||
| You responded. | ||
| You were present in their moment of pain, and there's nothing else that someone can ask of you. | ||
| Yeah, it was certainly powerful. | ||
| Alright, so I want to wrap with some, let's give some people some concrete steps to have these conversations for themselves. | ||
| Do you guys have any tricks, and I really mean this sort of within the realm of what your last book was about, to help people do some of this online? | ||
| It's one thing when they come to your offices, it's one thing when we sit here and do this. | ||
| But in the online world, which we've already discussed, there's some great things going on and some terrible things going on. | ||
| How do people do this? | ||
| Because it's just a litany of, you know, one-upping each other and taking each other down and the rest of it. | ||
| Are there tricks that you guys have found that you think can make these conversations a little more effective, I suppose? | ||
| Well, at sort of the practical level, there's sort of grander philosophical things we could say about it, but at the practical level, that thing I said earlier is always realize you're dealing with a person behind the words. | ||
| It's so easy to say, look, those words are wounding me, and so I'm going to respond, you know, with wounding words of my own. | ||
| There's a person. | ||
| There's a person. | ||
| There's a person behind those words. | ||
| But secondly, I mean, to move out of a purely emotional ambit I have nothing against the emotions, but if you stay purely in the emotional ambit, we start doing this back and forth, you know, you've hurt me, I'll hurt you. | ||
| Is there something of objective truth that we can talk about? | ||
| So even as you're objecting to me, as people often do, you know, I think, okay, really, really smart people in the great tradition have held the central thing you're saying, even within all this kind of jumbled language or highly charged Emotion there's a there's an argument in there. | ||
| There's a there's a truth claim being made Can you identify that and do in a way that is very affirming? | ||
| What I hear you saying through all of this is this and and actually to say lots of really smart people have held this position Do I have that right? | ||
| And that kind of response, I find, can just disarm people and can break through some of the emotion, the emotionality, and try to, now we can begin to have an argument. | ||
| We can start talking about the truth claim being made. | ||
| It is useful to remember that no one wins arguments. | ||
| They're fun to have, but argument is a process of convincing yourself that you were right. | ||
| I've almost never walked away from an argument saying, yeah, he was right, I was wrong, he out-argued me, I'm done. | ||
| And so, if you realize that if you argue with the person, if you resist the desire to just argue, and you resist the desire to be clever, which is really hard. | ||
| It's really hard. | ||
| You think of a clever response and to not say it. | ||
| My father used to tell me that there's a Yiddish phrase, who is a hero, one who resists a wisecrack. | ||
| And I'm not at all heroic. | ||
| Yes, this is where you go. | ||
| I went back into stand-up. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's very good. | |
| And then you use the magic, there is a magic tool that human beings have, which is the question. | ||
| You just ask a question. | ||
| Instead of arguing, or you do, you say, what do you think about this? | ||
| Or how do you feel about that? | ||
| It's remarkable how powerful a question can be. | ||
| I.I. | ||
| Rabi, who was a Nobel Prize winning physicist, at the end of his life in Haaretz, a paper in Israel, they said to him, who is the greatest influence in your life? | ||
| And he said, my mother. | ||
| Because when I used to come home from Cheder, which was Jewish religious school in Eastern Europe, every day she would say to me, Yitzi, did you ask any good questions today? | ||
| And I always thought that was great. | ||
| So you learn to ask questions, and you might be amazed that people tell you things. | ||
| And the respect for your opponent, I'm thinking now with this conversation between a rabbi and a Catholic bishop, my hero, Thomas Aquinas, who read everybody and dialogued with everybody, the Christian tradition, of course, but also the pagan philosophers and scientists, also Muslim scholars, also Moses Maimonides, always refers to Maimonides as Rabbi Moises. | ||
| Oh, you're first and very respectfully, you know, which is not the commonest attitude in the Christian Middle Ages. | ||
| But there's Aquinas having this seminar, conversation with all these different voices and speaking with great respect of them and to them. | ||
| I think that's a great model for us now. | ||
| All right, so I do have one bonus one for you, which is since we're right between Hanukkah and Christmas right now, I have always personally liked when Hanukkah and Christmas were at the same time. | ||
| Because I always feel like then everyone's sort of celebrating the exact same thing at the same time. | ||
| And it's like, whatever the differences are, it just doesn't matter. | ||
| Everyone's getting presents on at least one of the same days, something like that. | ||
| This year, Hanukkah was early. | ||
| They always say it's early. | ||
| Well, you could probably do a show on that when they tell you the Jewish holidays are, but let's say early. | ||
| I'm just curious, have either one of you ever thought of that? | ||
| Do you like it better when they fall out together because maybe there's something in a wider community, or does it not matter at all? | ||
| No, I mean, look, really, I've always been a fan of Christmas. | ||
| I enjoy Christmas. | ||
| I like Christmas music. | ||
| I especially like the Christmas music that was written by Jews. | ||
| It was mostly Israeli. | ||
| So, it's not, and I think that the reason that I like Christmas is because When your hands are full so you don't feel like you need a handout. | ||
| You can enjoy other people's religious tradition when you feel secure in your own. | ||
| And so it never felt like a threat to me. | ||
| It always felt like a beautiful holiday and I loved it. | ||
| And also because of one of the things that I always tell high school students, which is that you can't spend your life living in the minds of other people. | ||
| You know, we spend so much time worrying about what other people will think about us all the time. | ||
| I mean, that social media is so much about what will other people think about us. | ||
| But the truth is they probably think about us as much as we think about them. | ||
| And that's not all that much. | ||
| And at the end of the day, you've got to live with you. | ||
| So that to me is the and so I enjoy Christmas knowing it's not mine. | ||
| And if people don't like that, I feel like, OK, but they'll send me a mean email and then they won't think about me, but I'll still be here. | ||
| Solid answer to a strange question. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Maybe I'll just say this. | |
| I've always loved Hanukkah and what it celebrates, the purification of the temple, which I think is really needed today. | ||
| Namely, a recovery of worship. | ||
| You know, I think people need a sacred space. | ||
| They need a temple. | ||
| A place to pray. | ||
| And what's happened in the hyper-secularized world is they've lost the sense of where do I go? | ||
| Where do I go to pray? | ||
| And the temple needs to be reclaimed and purified. | ||
| So I think that's a beautiful thing for everybody. | ||
| And one of the nice things about Hanukkah is there's no Jewish holiday for the dedication of the temple. | ||
| There's only a Jewish holiday for the rededication of the temple. | ||
| And when we talk about the renewal of religion, what we're really talking about is Hanukkah. | ||
| Well, gentlemen, it's been an absolute pleasure. | ||
| I thank you guys for doing this tape. | ||
| This is a busy season for you guys. | ||
|
unidentified
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It is, a little bit. | |
| I hope when you guys were driving here, well, I hope when you were driving here, you were like, uh, I don't have to do that. | ||
| And you were, when you woke up this morning, you were like, uh. | ||
| Now we go back carrying the sheets. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Well, thank you so much. | ||
| We're going to link to, uh, to your books down below and all that good stuff. | ||
| And thank you guys for watching and comment right down below. | ||
| Maybe they'll read it. |
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