Feb. 13, 2019 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
58:17
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Joining me today is an entrepreneur, the co-founder of Clarity Capital and the author of God in the Crowd, 21st Century Judaism. | ||
| Talkeen, and welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thank you, Dave. | ||
| So there's a lot that I want to talk to you about here, because I mentioned to you right before we started that most of the conversations that I've had here about religion have come from a Christian perspective. | ||
| So adding a Jewish element to this, I thought, would be interesting. | ||
| Your story is kind of fascinating. | ||
| You're a Jew from Florida. | ||
| And yet your religious awakening was because of a Christian minister in New England. | ||
| Am I getting that correct? | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| Let's start there. | ||
| So I grew up in boarding schools, mainly in New Hampshire. | ||
| I was born in Florida and grew up there until age 10, but then New Hampshire. | ||
| You know, I got into Judaism for what I today describe as the wrong reasons. | ||
| I don't know if you've seen the picture of the boy in the Warsaw ghetto with his hands up, kind of iconic picture. | ||
| I saw that when I was 16 years old and immediately became aware that I was looking at the picture wrong. | ||
| You know, it's framed in a way that almost begs this juxtaposition between the boy's innocence, he was six or seven years old, angelic face, And the Nazi barbarism. | ||
| You can see on the right side of the picture we've got the Nazis with their guns pointed in his direction. | ||
| And that never spoke to me. | ||
| And I tried to muster anger and hatred for these Nazis. | ||
| All I saw was irrelevance. | ||
| I didn't have a good sense of Jewish history, but enough of a sense to realize that was just that generation's manifestation of an age-old phenomenon that just keeps coming back. | ||
| It was in Iraq during the Farhud two years earlier. | ||
| It was with Russian Cossacks 30 years earlier. | ||
| This keeps happening. | ||
| But if you look at the left side of the picture, and you can Google it, Boy in the Warsaw Ghetto, I think is the first thing that comes up. | ||
| You see the boy's family, and they're being, I think, evacuated from their building. | ||
| This is the liquidation of the ghetto in 1943. | ||
| And they're in this state of shocked submission. | ||
| You see it in their body language and their expressions. | ||
| And I was furious at them for having abrogated their responsibility to this boy. | ||
| How could they not have had a contingency plan? | ||
| They're the Jews. | ||
| Had they convinced themselves that they were Polish? | ||
| And here they were, about to be marched off to their deaths. | ||
| As far as I know, everyone in that picture was dead within weeks. | ||
| But it only took me about a week to realize I'm probably as close in age to the parents as I am to the child. | ||
| What's my contingency plan? | ||
| And for the first time, I started thinking of myself as a Jew. | ||
| And I come from a typical American home. | ||
| All three of my older brothers married non-Jewish women. | ||
| We pretty much shake out the way American Judaism does. | ||
| We had no training. | ||
| I had no familiarity with Judaism at the time. | ||
| So you didn't grow up religious in any particular way? | ||
| No. | ||
| I guess not if you were going to boarding school in the Northeast. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So what happened? | ||
| Then you have this wake-up. | ||
| So Reverend Thompson was the school chaplain. | ||
| It was at Exeter. | ||
| It's a prep school in New Hampshire. | ||
| He was a Congregationalist minister. | ||
| It's a branch of Calvinism that was the kind of original religion in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. | ||
| Very open, very Old Testament focused, and he knew a lot about Judaism. | ||
| And he arranged a weekly Shabbat dinner for the Jewish kids, which I started going to after that. | ||
| It never really meant anything to me up until that moment. | ||
| And got me into, I don't know if it's exactly religion, but a sort of a spirituality that's tied to this ritual of Shabbat, a sort of a mode shift. | ||
| And, you know, from that point, I kind of dug into everything I could, took every class that had to do with Judaism. | ||
| I read the Old Testament. | ||
| Never became a believer in the kind of classical sense, in the God of Scripture. | ||
| I still haven't been able to access that, but found my way to Israel through that. | ||
| Yeah, and you ended up in the Israeli Air Force. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| That's quite a jump from boarding school in New England. | ||
| Strange trick of fate, yeah, that's right. | ||
| Yeah, what was that like? | ||
| We're just doing the biographical stuff first. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It certainly wasn't the plan. | ||
| I became enamored with Zionism on a summer tour, on something like a birthright-type program, the summer after I saw that picture. | ||
| And I fell in love. | ||
| I think that's the best way to describe it. | ||
| You know, suspended pretty much all logic. | ||
| And I think the notion that got me is this was the opposite of what I saw in that picture. | ||
| And it took me until then to realize that the thing that struck me the most was the lack of dignity in that picture. | ||
| We had no agency. | ||
| We were just victims. | ||
| And it was such a terrible way to kind of define ourselves and think of ourselves. | ||
| as a people. | ||
| And, you know, when I asked Jewish friends at Exeter, or even my family, you know, is there a contingency plan? | ||
| What do we do? | ||
| You know, my grandfather was German. | ||
| I think he conceived of himself when he was, you know, my age at the time, as German way before he was Jewish, until he was notified, you're no longer German. | ||
| And luckily that happened in 1936, and not in 1939. | ||
| So he could still leave. | ||
| What happens if we get that call? | ||
| What's our plan? | ||
| And people thought that was a crazy question. | ||
| Yeah, well, it's just not a pleasant thing to have to think about. | ||
| Yeah, who talks about that? | ||
| And in Israel, I saw people who had not just asked that question with all the courage that it takes to, you know, you need to muster in order to ask, but they'd answered it. | ||
| And here was dignity. | ||
| And it was intoxicating to me. | ||
| And so I, at that point, I think realized I was going to make my way somehow to Israel, whether I was going to live there or just be very involved. | ||
| And when I finally did move, I understood that military service was kind of the ticket to full membership. | ||
| And so I did what I was told, and I ended up- But ending up in the Air Force is not an easy route for that ticket. | ||
| That's probably the most complex route, I would imagine. | ||
| Yeah, at the time it was very complicated, and it certainly wasn't a natural fit for me. | ||
| It required a lot of adjustments along the way. | ||
| But that is where I ended up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And kind of what I think brought me to the book, ultimately, is that, you know, I found myself, it's such a focused and intense experience. | ||
| You know, the Academy is just extremely, it's just a concentrated sort of knowledge and skills dump. | ||
| And it doesn't let up after you graduate that I really never had time to examine What is this? | ||
| What exactly am I pursuing? | ||
| What is Judaism? | ||
| What is Israel? | ||
| I didn't know Israel. | ||
| I knew a very narrow cut, you know, kind of the several hundred people in the aircrew community in Israel. | ||
| That's what I knew. | ||
| That was Israel for me. | ||
| That's not reflective of society. | ||
| And, you know, it took me Probably, you know, eight or nine years of service to kind of step back and say, OK, now can I have the time to investigate what this is? | ||
| And that was actually a moment of crisis because I had already done things that I couldn't take back. | ||
| I mean, you know, there's a very combat intensive decade, the 1990s in Israel. | ||
| What had started sort of as a romantic sort of teach for America or Peace Corps type adventure for a college kid ended up being something that I couldn't couldn't erase. | ||
| There's things I could not take back. | ||
| And I had to really understand what it is that I was doing there. | ||
| And I started kind of a search into what is Judaism exactly? | ||
| All right, so that's a perfect setup on a personal note for everything that the book is about and that we're gonna talk about here. | ||
| So first, I was trying to think of the right way to do this interview because it's a little weird talking about Judaism in a religious sense because it's an ethnicity and a culture and a religion. | ||
| And usually when people are talking about religion, you can remove those two other things because people are from all parts of the world and have different traditions and all of that. | ||
| But Jews have the same traditions and those are at least at some level related to religion and all that. | ||
| What's the easiest way to start that conversation about culture and tradition and religion, all in one mixed bag? | ||
| Well, that is very much at the heart of this book, is that we're called upon, the generations of Jews who are alive today, are called upon to redefine Judaism. | ||
| And I think kind of the premise I start with is, in our story, It's almost a 4,000-year story. | ||
| We have two episodes of fundamental reinvention. | ||
| Judaism's constantly evolving. | ||
| We've always changed. | ||
| There's no generation that bequeathed the same Judaism to their kids that they inherited from their parents. | ||
| But there were two fundamental reinventions. | ||
| One is the Exodus, where we leave Egypt unclear what we are exactly. | ||
| We're some group, but it's unclear exactly what it is. | ||
| And 40 years later, arrive in the Promised Land, With sovereignty, we control ourselves and we're governed by a book of law, which will stay with us for as long as our story lasts, and it's still with us today. | ||
| It's a fundamental reconfiguration of what this is, what this enterprise is, Judaism. | ||
| And the second is the Roman expulsion from Israel in the year 135. | ||
| Which is the end of sovereignty in Israel, the end of a geographic. | ||
| So Jews didn't all show up there in 1948? | ||
| We'll get to that later. | ||
| Yeah, we'll get to that, we'll get to that. | ||
| Okay, let's just dispel that right now. | ||
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| So here we are, a people configured very much like any other people around us. | ||
| The Phoenicians and Abbatians, we looked like any province of the Roman Empire in most ways. | ||
| And then off we go, we're scattered to hundreds of nodes around the world with an already complex orthodoxy that was to continue evolving dramatically over the next 2,000 years. | ||
| No central conductor, no Pope officiating over our evolution, almost no contact between most of the nodes, right? | ||
| If you were off in some shtetl in Poland and I was in Casablanca, we didn't even know about each other. | ||
| We certainly were not in touch with each other for most of that period. | ||
| I would have bet against the idea that there'd be a coherent identity called Jew 1,800 years after that event. | ||
| It's something I think bears investigation. | ||
| But you think there's a reason for that? | ||
| I do. | ||
| And I think that was the second fundamental reinvention. | ||
| We reconfigured ourselves at that point. | ||
| We became a people that was about a set of questions. | ||
| And debating a set of questions, ethical questions, which we still do today. | ||
| I think we're on the eve of a third fundamental reinvention. | ||
| And that comes from the fact, or at least what I posit, is that anti-Semitism is no longer a defining force for the Jews. | ||
| For 1,800 years, it was. | ||
| For most of that period, we didn't have the choice to be, you know, we talk about religion, you know, we use the word faith and religion sort of interchangeably, and then I'd say, faith is not a central component of Judaism. | ||
| Not in the way we define ourselves and not the way we were defined. | ||
| No one asked you what you believed before you stepped into the gas chambers, right? | ||
| You could be secular, you could be an atheist, you could be whatever. | ||
| It didn't matter. | ||
| You were a Jew. | ||
| So it wasn't a religion. | ||
| It wasn't a faith. | ||
| And I think in that sense the Nazis got us right in many ways. | ||
| It's not really about whether we believe or not. | ||
| Which is why there seemingly are so many Jewish atheists, which we can get into a little bit. | ||
| I think that works and has worked throughout Jewish history. | ||
| I mean, faith is not a precondition to Jewish observance, even Orthodox Jewish observance. | ||
| But what we're facing today, I think, is certainly not precedented in the last 2,000 years, is that 90% of us live in the United States and in Israel. | ||
| two jurisdictions that I think are largely devoid of anti-semitism in any practical day-to-day way. | ||
| I have, you know, maybe a correction is on the left there is something happening today that we should maybe talk about. | ||
| It's a fault in the book. | ||
| I'm maybe too dismissive of that, and I hope it's a passing, you know, fad, but essentially in this country being Jewish is a choice today. | ||
| It wasn't for our grandparents' generation. | ||
| We're Jewish. | ||
| Kind of in the sense that you are in Europe today, right? | ||
| If you're a French Jew, you're a Jew. | ||
| I mean, to other French people, that's how we're looked at. | ||
| In this country, you are truly an American. | ||
| And in Israel, you are truly Israeli. | ||
| Judaism is a choice. | ||
| That's our challenge. | ||
| It's a huge opportunity because for the first time, I think we can write our own script throughout the Jewish world, not just in Israel. | ||
| We can decide what this is. | ||
| What is this enterprise? | ||
| But it's also a threat because right now if we see what's happening in this country, and it's much easier to track it in this country, We're voting with our feet. | ||
| We are marrying ourselves out of existence, which, you know, the first section of the book is called Should There Be Jews? | ||
| And I think we have to start with that fundamental question and ask it honestly and bravely. | ||
| Yeah, so why is your answer to that question yes? | ||
| Because I think a certain amount of people would say, all right, well, so I was gonna ask you this at the end, but when I had my first sit down with Sam Harris, who's obviously one of the most well-known atheists, but he was born Jewish. | ||
| I don't think he considers himself Jewish in any real sense, but I don't want to speak for him specifically. | ||
| We did talk about this a couple years ago, and he said that there would be a nice end story to the Jews, which is that they would all give up on all of the superstition and all the rest of it, and just sort of evolve out of it, and that would be a pleasant ending. | ||
| That's his basic premise on that. | ||
| But that's not your premise. | ||
| So I'd love to hear, so why is the answer Well, what I think I would agree with is if we are going to end, that's the best way to do it. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| The atheist is the dreamer. | ||
| But I would say, look, I mean... | ||
| When I look at what Sam Harris has, I think, tried to do over time, which to me, and I don't know if he'd put it this way, but to me, it's very much inventing a religion that doesn't require faith, right? | ||
| Or an ethical system. | ||
| Maybe religion is the wrong word. | ||
| In that, you know, there's a lot that's wired in us from the Savannah, right? | ||
| A lot of altruism and morality that is wired in us. | ||
| Let's build on that. | ||
| Let's take the Golden Rule as a starting point and build on that. | ||
| I like that. | ||
| I think the issue with it is... | ||
| You know, I use the wisdom of crowds as a framework for Jewish governance in Diaspora, and I believe in that. | ||
| I think there is something quite compelling about this notion of a group defining itself and governing itself through crowd wisdom. | ||
| It's a great kind of noise cancellation mechanism. | ||
| And this is what you'd say is sort of the lack of the top-down part of Judaism, because there is no Pope, not everybody's Or we're not all pointing one way for this, or looking for wisdom in that direction. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| It's coming from the people. | ||
| Yeah, it requires diversity, it requires independent thought. | ||
| That's Jewish. | ||
| One of the issues, and you see this in markets all the time, markets at the end of the day, financial markets are in many ways an exercise in crowd wisdom. | ||
| We're trying to divine a truth. | ||
| What is the value of that stock? | ||
| What is the present value of future earnings of this company? | ||
| That's what we're all trying to guess at, at its essence. | ||
| And one thing you'll find is If you look at it long term, if you chart the S&P 500 for the last 100 years, you'll see that it's incredible how closely, if you look at the actual present value of future earnings in retrospect of the securities in that index, | ||
| You'll find that the market is incredibly good at getting it right over long periods of time. | ||
| But zoom in on any short time frame, two years, five years, it's almost always wrong. | ||
| The market is almost always wrong in the short term. | ||
| So the notion of inventing a code of ethics from scratch leaves us hostage to the sensibilities of our generation. | ||
| You know, often it's a tough question to say, but had I been born a Lutheran in Germany, And come of age in the 1930s. | ||
| Can I say I would definitely would not have joined the Nazi movement? | ||
| Of course not. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| It's a horrible question to face, but I think it's an important one to think about. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So we're all hostage to kind of the prevailing winds of our era. | ||
| What I think Judaism does, and the reason I think it has value not just to Jews, but to humanity, is it is a methodically recorded History of the evolution of our ethics as a species, right? | ||
| It's a critically important reference point, and it's a unique reference point. | ||
| Now, there's a record of papal edicts that also goes back a long way, and I think it's also extremely valuable. | ||
| It's different though, right? | ||
| It's the opinion of one man, a very learned man in general, but it's one man. | ||
| What we have now is a snapshot of the crowd wisdom of a generation on questions that, you know, And Judaism is always great about kind of highlighting the two tensions, right? | ||
| Hillel and Shammai, you go into a wedding, you're introduced to the bride, and the person who introduces you is, isn't she beautiful? | ||
| And you don't think she's beautiful. | ||
| What do you say? | ||
| Okay, so Shammai will say, well, the most important guiding ethic is truth, right? | ||
| Honesty is a critical value that we'd be pursuing. | ||
| I would come down on the side of, tell the truth. | ||
| No, I don't think you're beautiful. | ||
| That's a tough one at the wedding. | ||
| We'll say no. | ||
| Humanity is a more, now understand that honesty, I'm giving it its due for sure. | ||
| I get your point. | ||
| However, here's where I think the optimum is. | ||
| That is the exercise of Judaism. | ||
| It has been, I think, forever. | ||
| But we've recorded the history, the evolution of both the consensus views and the dissenting views on a host of topics. | ||
| That is Talmud. | ||
| That is that exercise. | ||
| So when we Use a term like justice today. | ||
| Justice is not a natural phenomenon. | ||
| It's a human invention. | ||
| And we could have invented it in a lot of different ways. | ||
| We did invent it in a lot of different ways. | ||
| Our kind of prevailing concept of justice 100 years ago is quite different from what it is today. | ||
| And let's have the humility to admit that 100 years from now, we will probably evolve significantly further. | ||
| The fact that we have a record of the trajectory of that evolution, not just on justice, but on hundreds of ethical questions, that's a gift of Judaism. | ||
| And to me, personally, it's a privilege to be a link in that chain. | ||
| I want that. | ||
| I mean, that's exciting to me. | ||
| So this is why when you have three Jews at a table, you have four opinions, basically. | ||
| A hundred percent, yes. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| It's annoying, but it's got huge value. | ||
| It's loud. | ||
| There's a lot of yelling involved. | ||
| There's a lot to do there, but let's just go to the God part of that first, because there is this interesting phenomenon with, I think, Jews describing themselves as Jewish atheists. | ||
| I think the average person hearing that would go, well, how does that make any sense? | ||
| How can you say you're a member of a religion if you don't believe in the basic tenet of the religion? | ||
| I mean, you could open up any Old Testament or any book that they're gonna have at any synagogue anywhere. | ||
| It's a lot about God. | ||
| So how can you be a Jew and then not necessarily be a believer? | ||
| Well, so I think the notion of God, even in Jewish scripture, is actually quite fluid, right? | ||
| It's not just some guy with a beard who cares about what you eat, right? | ||
| We refer to that entity in the masculine, in the feminine, in the singular, in the plural. | ||
| It's a very evolving notion. | ||
| And as we get to kind of the post-biblical era, I think some of the greatest Jewish sages of history have questionable faith in the God of Scripture. | ||
| Maimonides himself, I'm not convinced, is a true believer in the God of Scripture as laid out in the Old Testament. | ||
| What I do think, though, is there's tremendous value in having a reference point. | ||
| And to me, the notion, and I think a lot of maybe more devout people will take issue with it. | ||
| I understand that. | ||
| And this is kind of part of the debate that we have to have. | ||
| An invented God can be just as meaningful and as valuable, certainly as a spiritual rallying point, as a revealed God. | ||
| And we can actually work together. | ||
| If you're a true believer, so to speak, and I'm not, we can work together. | ||
| I've been thinking in terms of, if you and I start a business that makes circles, that's our product. | ||
| Anybody can come in and order a circle of any size. | ||
| You just tell us the radius and we'll make your circle. | ||
| We need a point to draw that circle around, right? | ||
| We need a point and a radius. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Now, I could be of the view that we can put that point on the ceiling, on the floor, in space. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| It really doesn't matter. | ||
| As long as we have the radius and a point, we can make the circle. | ||
| You can be of the view that, no, I'm sorry, that this circle is not kosher unless the point around which is drawn is right in the middle of that wall. | ||
| We can work together. | ||
| Because, okay, so let's do it, I don't care where it goes, you do care where it goes, let's put it where you want it. | ||
| And that's fine. | ||
| As long as, and this is an exercise very much in love and in humility, as long as you're okay with the idea that I think you're crazy, that it needs to be in the middle of that wall, and I'm okay with, you think I'm a heretic, that I don't care, the result is the same. | ||
| We have our circle and we can work together. | ||
| And in many ways, I think that is Judaism. | ||
| And if, you know, we've conflated faith with religion, in this country, and that's a very Christian notion. | ||
| It's not a Jewish notion. | ||
| Faith is not really a critical part of Judaism. | ||
| So does that explain why someone like Albert Einstein, who certainly, you know, God doesn't play dice with the universe, so he wasn't a believer in any sort of traditional sense, although maybe in the way that you're describing it, He was extremely proud of being Jewish. | ||
| He was going to be the first president of Israel, and obviously he lived through Germany during the Holocaust, or at least was a child at the beginning of it. | ||
| That type of person, though, seems to exist. | ||
| There's a lot of that. | ||
| You go to hospitals in New York City where they have a Shabbat elevator for doctors, and that seems very strange, and yet it somehow kind of functions. | ||
| That's just a piece of everything that you're talking about, basically. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, it sounds crazy, but operating system is a better term to me. | ||
| It captures Judaism better than religion does, right? | ||
| It's a code through which we operate, or a lens through which we see the world. | ||
| We don't have to see it the same way. | ||
| That's okay. | ||
| So what about the cultural and traditional part of it? | ||
| Because most Jews, so I grew up in Long Island, everyone was either Jewish or Greek or Italian basically, but a certain ethnic identity that most of them came from Ellis Island, you know, they were Grandparents or something came from Ellis Island, eventually lived in Brooklyn or Queens, and then they made it to Long Island. | ||
| But I grew up, obviously, around a lot of Jewish people. | ||
| Most people weren't religious, per se, but there was a huge cultural identity. | ||
| There's a sense of humor, mostly a sense of humor, I would say, perhaps more than anything else. | ||
| A certain way of talking to each other, a certain, like, Seinfeldian way of looking at the world. | ||
| Do you think that is enough to sustain something long enough? | ||
| No, I think it's great. | ||
| It's essential. | ||
| It's more an outgrowth of the core than core itself. | ||
| But no, it's not. | ||
| Again, we need to ask ourselves, do we want this people to continue existing? | ||
| If we do, we need a much more tangible, much more accessible, much more definable source of identity than Humor's difficult to kind of put your finger on, Ayume and I. And we know, we both know what we're talking about when we say Jewish humor. | ||
| We know what we're talking about when we say Jewish thinking. | ||
| This is a Jewish way of thinking, of looking at a problem. | ||
| We get that, but it is a little bit too nuanced, I think, to communicate to, certainly to future generations or to other people. | ||
| Yeah, so what is it, so what's needed then in this vision of the future that you think would be the right way to continue this incredible and also tragic So the good news is I see a path to making it not tragic, but still incredible. | ||
| And it is a shift in our story, right? | ||
| But even that right there is a huge part of it, right? | ||
| It's sort of acknowledging, like, it's a little bit weird to look back at the history of our ancestors and go, man, there was a lot of death here. | ||
| There was a lot of Yeah, look, I hear that. | ||
| that happen, I've talked about it many times. | ||
| I have family members on both sides that died in the Holocaust. | ||
| Family members that live in Israel now. | ||
| That people, it's a history of pogroms and genocides and Holocaust and all of these things | ||
| that make it a little bit tough to look at the future or something like that. | ||
| Yeah, look, I hear that. | ||
| I have conflicting feelings on using that history as an anchor of identity, even though many of us do. | ||
| And for many of us, it's still relevant, you know, to be clear. | ||
| Well, Israel is changing that, I suppose. | ||
| So that gets to what you said earlier. | ||
| So in Israel, you feel it, right? | ||
| In Israel, you do feel that in a way that I don't think you do in the United States, which is you're in the Middle East. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And our neighbors have not reconciled themselves with the notion of Jewish sovereignty, and we see that. | ||
| And it might be difficult to see from here, especially if you're not, it's not your day-to-day, I understand that. | ||
| Those crazy, greedy Jews want a country that's about six miles wide at one point. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You know, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right. | |
| They never take enough. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, if you kind of look at it, it doesn't take a ton of analysis, but what are the other Jewish options in the Middle East? | ||
| We have 7.2 million Jews in Israel. | ||
| Where are they supposed to go? | ||
| Back to Baghdad? | ||
| Damascus? | ||
| Cairo? | ||
| Where are you supposed to go? | ||
| The entire Middle East has been ethnically cleansed of 100% of its Jews. | ||
|
unidentified
|
100%. | |
| There's one guy in Egypt, isn't there one? | ||
| I read about that, I'm not sure that's right. | ||
| I went to Egypt, I met that one. | ||
| I'm not kidding, I met the one guy. | ||
| Yeah, I think he's gone, but I did meet the guy. | ||
| Or I met the guy that claimed he was a Jew, I don't know. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| So you look at that, and by the way, the tragedy of that is the Baghdadi Jewish community is a thousand years older than Islam itself, and it's been eradicated. | ||
| Zero. | ||
| There is no formula for existing as a Jew in the Middle East outside of Israel. | ||
| It doesn't work. | ||
| I mean, there are no exceptions to that rule. | ||
| That's clear enough. | ||
| And when you live in Israel, I think it's something that's quite clear. | ||
| So we're not in a place where we can escape that anymore, or yet, I think. | ||
| I'm an optimist in terms of Israel's eventual acceptance among the community of nations in the Middle East. | ||
| I think there's a lot of reasons to think that's happening right now. | ||
| That's sort of a whole other show, more about geopolitics, I guess, than anything else. | ||
| Yeah, but I think they've started to just accept, wow, these guys are here and they're actually giving us water and a whole bunch of other things. | ||
| There's a lot we can do together. | ||
| Agreed. | ||
| So anyhow, I don't think We can divorce ourselves completely from our past, nor should we. | ||
| I think that's fine. | ||
| But as an anchor for identity, particularly in the United States, where my children's generation in this country sees the Holocaust as kind of ancient history. | ||
| It has no bearing on their lives. | ||
| They see themselves as very privileged, well-educated Americans with a great future, Americans and Israelis with a great future, wherever they end up in either country. | ||
| So selling them on Jewish identity through the Holocaust or through, you know, the Inquisition or through, you know, that part of Jewish history for now is not working. | ||
| And I hope it continues not working, right? | ||
| I mean, a lot of people have reacted to the book by saying, you know, one good wave of antisemitism and we solve your problem. | ||
| So that's, I Yeah, I hope, first of all, should we hope for that? | ||
| I mean, that doesn't sound like a... And it's also a pathetic notion that we can't, without anti-Semites, there can't be Jews. | ||
| I mean, there's so much more to this legacy than hatred and persecution. | ||
| So much more. | ||
| There's so much richness here and beauty that we can develop and now steer. | ||
| Now that we have the agency to actually steer ourselves, let's do it. | ||
| Let's claim it. | ||
| This is, to me, a very exciting moment in Jewish history. | ||
| With the threat associated with it, obviously. | ||
| Yeah, it's interesting because right now in America, and you referenced this a little bit earlier, that with what's going on with the left, if you were to ask me where anti-Semitism is in America right now, are there some KKK members that might be far-right extremists? | ||
| Yes, there are, and they've always been here. | ||
| I don't think there's any more of them. | ||
| I don't think they have any institutional power. | ||
| I think the media makes it seem like they're everywhere and they're just not. | ||
| They call everybody a Nazi. | ||
| I just don't think that's real. | ||
| I don't, I just simply don't think it's real. | ||
| Where I am concerned about anti-Semitism though is what is happening on the left, that Jews are no longer victims and they love victimhood because they view victimhood as virtue. | ||
| So now Jews are thought of as white. | ||
| So my brown Brother-in-law, whose parents were both refugees kicked out of their countries, is now privileged. | ||
| He's an immigrant and child of refugees, and he's brown, but he's now privileged. | ||
| And I see a much more, what actually I think is systemic racism, because they're trying to build this all into the system of how we view each other. | ||
| I see that really hardening on the left, and I think that's why so many, and I talk about this all the time, why I see minority groups breaking from leftism. | ||
| I see this happening with black people. | ||
| There's a lot of evidence that it's happening. | ||
| I see it happening with gay people. | ||
| I see it happening with Jewish people. | ||
| I think it's happening with Asian people now. | ||
| So in a certain way, I'm hopeful because Jews are going, ah, the old thing maybe isn't working the way it always has. | ||
| So I hope I'm not naive. | ||
| I'm an optimist on that as well, in that I think the ideologies that have I think for very natural and good reasons have surfaced, right? | ||
| We're always going to be overshooting and undershooting truth. | ||
| That's us, we're human beings, are in many ways self-defeating, right? | ||
| Intersectionality as an exclusionary ideology versus as a framework for understanding social phenomena I mean, it's collapsing in the face of Louis Farrakhan right now. | ||
| How are you supposed to be gay and still be on board with this? | ||
| How are you supposed to be a Jew and still be on board with this? | ||
| And I think, I feel like we're, by the way, even, I mean, if you look at what to me is a shame because, you know, blacks and Jews in this country have been kindred spirits for over a hundred years, you know. | ||
| We founded the NAACP. | ||
| This was our fight. | ||
| Black education, the schools in the South, We're Jewish, we marched and died in Mississippi. | ||
| Yeah, I was gonna say most of those people in those pictures marching with Martin Luther King, most of the white people were Jewish. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| So this is a false divide, which I think ultimately corrects itself. | ||
| I was speaking to a group recently about Black Lives Matter. | ||
| And, you know, to me this ultimately has to be self-correcting. | ||
| You take the people who really have been on your side and have tied your fate to yours, And for some reason have decided that they're on the other side, right? | ||
| If you look at the 2016 social policy agenda of the Black Lives Matter movement, It has one foreign policy clause. | ||
| It's to condemn the genocidal apartheid state of Israel. | ||
| For some reason the Palestinian population keeps going up. | ||
| This is the worst genocide ever. | ||
| Jews are supposed to be good with numbers? | ||
| These people can't get anything right. | ||
| But you kind of look at that, and if Black Lives Matter, which they do to me, my wife and I adopted two Darfurian refugees 10 years ago in Israel. | ||
| They live in Israel now. | ||
| There is a genocide going on right now in Darfur between 300,000 and 400,000 people killed because they are black. | ||
| The foreign policy agenda that you chose in a movement who flies the flag of black lives is not that? | ||
| I have to believe is ultimately gonna collapse under the weight of its own just unreasonableness. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It doesn't work. | |
| It doesn't make sense. | ||
| It's interesting, though, because I don't see that as a tension between blacks and Jews, because I really don't see that tension. | ||
| I see that as a tension between what I would say basically are crazy leftists versus everyone else, pretty much. | ||
| That just happens to be a political slice. | ||
| I don't think that's really a racial tension. | ||
| Does that make sense? | ||
| Yeah, no, I hear that. | ||
| I mean, I had plenty of black interlocutors who see it exactly as we do. | ||
| By the way, who also say, kind of like we do about Judaism, victimhood is a terrible basis for identity. | ||
| It's a self-defeating and it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, ultimately. | ||
| Let's aspire to something better than that. | ||
| By the way, not ignoring the past, right? | ||
| There is a legacy here that we, of course, have to acknowledge if we're going to do anything about it. | ||
| But does that also explain the endless sort of focused hatred of Israel from The modern left, and not just in America, but in virtually every country, or the UN, which is basically the biggest crock in the history of the world, why they all, you know, for every one condemnation of another country, there's 27 against Israel or something. | ||
| Completely insane. | ||
| That Jews in Israel are no longer victims, and the left loves victims. | ||
| So now that you're not victims anymore, you automatically are the enemy. | ||
| I would argue it's better to not be a victim and to be alive than to be liked by a bunch of people | ||
| who want you to live like slaves. | ||
| But is it really that simple to boil it down? | ||
| 'Cause I think it's pretty close to that. | ||
| Look, I wish that were the best explanation for it. | ||
| I fear that antisemitism, it might be a better explanation because there are plenty of countries, | ||
| Singapore is succeeding wildly, incredible. | ||
| Singapore is an incredible story. | ||
| There are no UN resolutions against Singapore. | ||
| So well, no, I mean, I mean the history of the Jews was you guys were on the you were there on the victim side of this whole thing. | ||
| We liked it. | ||
| Yeah, we liked it that way. | ||
| That's the way it was, right? | ||
| And there's some weird thing about like the chosen people thing about that. | ||
| It's like, ah, see, guess they're not that chosen or something like that. | ||
| But my favorite line ever is from Fiddler on the Roof, which is, I know we're the chosen people. | ||
| I just wish we could be chosen for something else. | ||
| So I don't mean that in terms of a success of a country. | ||
| I mean the uniqueness of a success of a country that was so associated with being slaughtered and everything else that no longer acts as a victim, that that flips the whole thing on its head. | ||
| Yeah, it could be that. | ||
| I just see the suspension of logic In a lot of the condemnations of Israel that I think you're talking about remind me very much of the suspension of logic in classic European anti-Semitic tropes, right? | ||
| The blood libel. | ||
| Things that don't really make sense, right? | ||
| It rhymes with that. | ||
| And the fact that there are Jews in this case and Jews in that case seems to be not a coincidence, unfortunately. | ||
| And I try to see it differently because it feels like a cop-out to say, oh, it's anti-Semitism. | ||
| It's tough for me to find an explanation of it. | ||
| You know, things like you can't be a Zionist and a feminist, right? | ||
| You're gonna pick the first liberal democracy to elect a female head of state to say you can't be that and a feminist? | ||
| That's strange. | ||
| Better women's representation on corporate boards and in corporate managements than the United States. | ||
| That's the country that feminists can't get on board with when its neighborhood is exactly the opposite of that? | ||
| Remind me again, are they throwing gays off roofs in Israel? | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| I think Tel Aviv, I forgot which magazine put it out, number one gay city on earth. | ||
| How is it that the Spanish Pride Parade will boycott Israeli marchers, or the Chicago Dyke March will throw people out for having a Star of David on? | ||
| These things don't make sense, and to me it very much rhymes with something from our history. | ||
| I think we're at a place where we can, I don't know, maybe it's too much to say, safely ignore it, but it doesn't have to factor into our lives in any huge way. | ||
| In Israel, you don't feel that in your day-to-day. | ||
| You don't feel embattled or, you know, that we're not glued to the TV to watch, you know, UN votes and see what happens. | ||
| We're kind of okay. | ||
| We know that story. | ||
| And Trump's obliterating that thing anyway. | ||
| Yeah, true. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| So hopefully these are cycles that work themselves out. | ||
| But again, I'm kind of almost allergic to anything that might lead us to define ourselves on those terms. | ||
| Let's not let the haters define us. | ||
| We're in a place where we have the agency to do it ourselves. | ||
| And that, to me, is the exciting part of this. | ||
| But that's why I wrote the book. | ||
| So with all this in mind, one of the things that I'm always amazed by is when they do that happiness index, that world happiness index that comes out every year, Israel is usually somewhere between like 10 and 15 on that. | ||
| And yet if you turn on CNN, all you ever see are bombs blowing up and terrorist attacks and buses blowing up and all that. | ||
| Now there obviously is some connection to the good things that you're talking about And the ability to still be happy in a pretty rough part of the world. | ||
| What do you see that as? | ||
| If you believe in the premise that I'm offering. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, you've spent time in Israel. | ||
| It is a happy place. | ||
| No Israelis are surprised by those rankings. | ||
| We get it. | ||
| And I think there's a certain appreciation of that. | ||
| Yeah, I think a big piece of it is community. | ||
| And, you know, a part of why the book is, I think, getting the reception that it's getting right now is there's a thirst for that. | ||
| In many ways, we're losing it. | ||
| Maybe there's a pendulum that swings kind of between, you kind of think we can conceive of ourselves as individuals, we can conceive of ourselves as cells in an organism, you know, called community, religion, country, however you choose to define it. | ||
| It seems that we're kind of on an individualistic extreme of the swing of that pendulum today. | ||
| And there is a communal itch that needs to get scratched. | ||
| I think that's wired into us right now. | ||
| And one of the things that Israel is getting right, and there are many things that Israel is getting wrong, as I describe in the book, one of the things that Israel is getting right is it is a community and a sense of I have your back and you have mine. | ||
| We have responsibility for each other. | ||
| We're not just individuals in some rat race. | ||
| We are part of something bigger. | ||
| How much of that do you think is a Jewish ethic, per se, versus the fact that everyone has to go to the army, which then would obviously create a very similar ethic? | ||
| Yeah, so I think they're both at play. | ||
| It is a profoundly Jewish ethic, though. | ||
| If you look at other diasporas, Look what this Jewish community in the United States did in the 70s and 80s on behalf of Soviet Jewry, right? | ||
| People they hadn't met before, people that they hadn't had any association with for generations, but still felt that these are people we need to stick our necks out for and write checks for and march for and protest for and get them out. | ||
| And look what Israeli Jewry did, right? | ||
| A population of four and a half million people absorbed over a million immigrants in a year and a half. | ||
| It's a huge nut to swallow from a fiscal perspective, from a social And did it unquestioningly. | ||
| Of course, it was the obvious thing we were going to do. | ||
| We do look out for each other. | ||
| And that is a Jewish notion. | ||
| Look what we did for Yemeni Jewry and Ethiopian Jewry and Iraqi Jewry. | ||
| We take responsibility for each other. | ||
| So that is a very Jewish ethic. | ||
| And it permeates Israeli society. | ||
| You can feel that. | ||
| And that's part of it. | ||
| And I think part of it is through military service. | ||
| You do get exposed in a real Many of us do, at least, in a frontal way to people who have genocidal intentions towards you. | ||
| Luckily, they don't have the means to fulfill those intentions, but they're pretty obvious. | ||
| I mean, it's not something you... Anybody who serves will see that. | ||
| I don't think that... So, does that make you happy? | ||
| I don't know, but it certainly forges a sense of community, I think. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You have some stories about combat and how that relates to all of this. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, you know, one of the things I try to talk about is, you know, if we're going to revive a Jewish spark, which, you know, I think two or three generations of Jews in Israel and the United States have tried to extinguish in many ways. | ||
| What are the starting points? | ||
| You know, are there embers that we can fit? | ||
| Wait, what do you mean by that? | ||
| That two or three generations of Jews have tried to extinguish? | ||
| You mean just sort of run from religion? | ||
| Well, if you look at it, I segment Israeli society and it's my segmentation. | ||
| People have issues with this specific segmentation, but I do see it and I think a lot of people see it as well. | ||
| When we look at the notion of Jewish statehood, there are three separate constituencies in Israel that are defined, in my view, by what their vision is for Jewish statehood. | ||
| And these are visions that were never reconciled. | ||
| They should have been, but they weren't. | ||
| Instead, in 1947, we came up with an agreement to split them into different communities. | ||
| And that's how we are in Israel today. | ||
| There's a community they call the secularists that really want a harbor, a safe haven for the Jews. | ||
| That is structured as a democracy. | ||
| That's pretty much it. | ||
| That was Herzl's vision. | ||
| That's a Hadam's vision with some Jewish trappings. | ||
| You know, the national holiday should be Jewish holidays, but not much more than that. | ||
| We're not gonna have the government prescribed religious practice to the citizenry. | ||
| That's the secularist vision. | ||
| There is a theocratic vision. | ||
| Which had very few adherents in 1947 when the Status Quo Agreement, which is the agreement that cemented those constituencies into different camps. | ||
| There are very few adherents with almost no political ambitions. | ||
| Today, that group is big and growing massively and has maximalist political ambitions to turn Israel into a theocracy. | ||
| And then there's what I call a territorialist vision, which says the whole land of Israel is a God-given gift And there is no human prerogative in relinquishing it. | ||
| We can't step away from it. | ||
| These are three competing camps in Israeli society whose views we're going to have to reconcile. | ||
| When I talk about extinguishing Judaism, though, it was the secularists who ruled Israel, certainly until 1977, and I would argue to a great extent to this day. | ||
| And the original secularists were Russians, right? | ||
| The architects of Jewish statehood were Central Europeans, right? | ||
| Hungarians, Austrians, you know, Herzl, Echadam, Israel Zangwill, that crowd. | ||
| The actual builders were Russians. | ||
| They were the Eastern Europeans who were escaping pogroms when they came to Israel. | ||
| And these guys came at the dawn of Bolshevism, and the Tsar was their enemy, and the Bolshevik revolution was largely Jewish, from the leadership down to the ground troops. | ||
| Anti-Semitism was so embedded in Russia that it became very quickly clear, as Trotsky understood too late, we're still the Jews and we're not welcome in this enterprise. | ||
| But people who have had drunk that socialist Kool-Aid came to Israel and that was the elite of our country for the first, you know, 50 years of its existence. | ||
| And certainly pre-state, right? | ||
| The kibbutzniks, the guys who taught me to be an Israeli, right? | ||
| The guys I was with at the Academy were primarily kibbutzniks. | ||
| That was Israel's elite. | ||
| So they were like small-scale socialists at some level? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I'd spend weekends on, you know, my friend's kibbutzim, and there was a commissar. | ||
| That was the title in the kibbutz. | ||
| I don't know how small scale. | ||
| I mean, that ethic has more or less died. | ||
| But what's interesting is, There was a baby that was thrown out with the bathwater when they came to Israel. | ||
| It's that these people are fanatical about expunging any vestige of a European anti-Semitic stereotype in Israel. | ||
| We were going to be muscular and feisty and we're not going to lock ourselves in a cheder studying Talmud or anything like that. | ||
| We're going to be out in the fields farming and fighting and defending our land. | ||
| And in many ways, I think it was an abrogation of many things that are Jewish. | ||
| By the way, you can be both, right? | ||
| You can stand up for yourself and also study. | ||
| You can do both. | ||
| One of the stories I tell in the book is kind of interesting. | ||
| I did nothing Jewish growing up except for fasting on Yom Kippur. | ||
| For whatever reason, it was kind of an easy thing to understand. | ||
| We're Jews. | ||
| We fast on Yom Kippur. | ||
| That's our thing. | ||
| I did nothing else. | ||
| But I did that. | ||
| It was kind of a challenge. | ||
| I don't know what it was. | ||
| The first time I didn't fast on Yom Kippur was my first Yom Kippur at the Academy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was a feast. | |
| It was a feast on Yom Kippur. | ||
| The kibbutzniks made, I write in the book, grilled cheese sandwiches was the thing, which was really ham and cheese. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I didn't want to shock anybody, but that's really what it was. | |
| Wow, so you illustrate that point, meaning that they were really going out of their way to erase any connection to religion, even though they had come to a country to be safe, Because they were persecuted for their religion. | ||
| I mean, there's some real psychological stuff in there. | ||
| But here's the interesting irony. | ||
| It was a very un-nuanced attempt to erase that history. | ||
| Yom Kippur was still an anchor point. | ||
| It was a day of rebellion against our ancestors. | ||
| So we were still orbiting the same Death Star, so to speak. | ||
| We were just in the opposite orbit. | ||
| We hadn't gone off into space, which is actually really good news if you want to rekindle Judaism. | ||
| And I think a lot of the ethic of the Israel Defense Forces is Jewish despite itself. | ||
| So one of the When I started flying in reserves, it was a very ethically fraught period for the Air Force in Israel. | ||
| These are dilemmas that now my colleagues in the U.S. | ||
| Air Force and Navy face, and the British Air Force. | ||
| We're all facing these today, which is, how do you fight a war in civilian areas when your enemy can dictate exactly where that war is going to be fought? | ||
| If you're launching rockets out of schools and hospitals at civilian targets, How are you supposed to contend with that challenge? | ||
| And it's tough. | ||
| There are no perfect answers to that. | ||
| But one of the stories we talk about is there was a Hamas planner named Saleh Shkadeh, who had been responsible for really hundreds of civilian deaths in Israel. | ||
| There was a kind of a wave of bus bombings, primarily bus bombings, but also restaurants, cafes. | ||
| This is like late 90s? | ||
| This is early 2000s. | ||
| This is what we call the Second Intifada, exactly. | ||
| And we had tried to target this guy a number of times and... | ||
| Our rules of engagement were clear enough to the enemies, as I write. | ||
| It was a very kind of a cat-and-mouse game as we kind of got more nuanced in finessing the rules of engagement. | ||
| It only took a few weeks for the other side, whether it was Hezbollah in Lebanon or Hamas in Gaza, to understand how close could we bomb to civilian targets, how close could we bomb to UN facilities, what types of munitions we could use in these situations. | ||
| It was kind of very clear, and we tipped our hand in many ways. | ||
| I think So when we see this on the media during a war, that Israel has bombed all of this stuff and they show you all of this destruction, you're really missing the subtext. | ||
| I mean, I think a certain amount of people, I try to tweet about it at least, show that, you know, they dropped leaflets saying, you guys got to get out of this house because there's people, you know... Text messages. | ||
| Text messages. | ||
| I mean, no army in the history of the world would do anything like this ever. | ||
| The Israelis keep doing it, and as you're saying, their enemies actually take advantage of that. | ||
| Intentionally, which is now they put bombs in hospitals. | ||
| And they say, well, what are you gonna do? | ||
| Knowing that the world will be more than happy to condemn the Jews. | ||
| Right. | ||
| By the way, which to me is okay to ignore. | ||
| It's okay to ignore. | ||
| We need to defend ourselves. | ||
| You mean ignore the media outrage? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's there and I think we sometimes pay a little bit too much attention to it. | ||
| These same critics weren't doing much when we were being exterminated. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Now that we're defending ourselves, we're going to not take their advice. | ||
| We're going to do this the way we want to do it. | ||
| Ethically. | ||
| Ethically. | ||
| But not to appease a European critic or the UN or anything like that. | ||
| But to do this Jewishly. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And there is a way to do it. | ||
| And it's not clean. | ||
| And it's not simple. | ||
| And these dilemmas are real. | ||
| And you're not going to solve them in any perfect way. | ||
| So, you know, the You get the kind of frustration of not being able to get this guy, and watching buses blow up, children killed over and over again with his fingerprints on each of these. | ||
| It was a very tough thing to go through. | ||
| When we finally got a shot at him, there was an intelligence failure, and we hit the house that he was in. | ||
| It was on the outskirts of Gaza City, but 14 people were there, and nine of them were civilians. | ||
| And Israel erupted in outrage, and this is not the European, we don't need the UN and the Europeans to tell us when there's a problem, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Two class-action lawsuits against the Israeli Air Force by Jewish-Israeli civil rights groups. | ||
| 27 pilots quitting, right? | ||
| It was the kind of famous, the pilots letter, which was kind of an open letter published in the newspaper saying we're stepping down from active service. | ||
| And this became a morale crisis in the Air Force. | ||
| And the way we addressed it, and this to me is sort of the connection, it's why these stories are in there, is Dan Halutz, who at the time was the Commander-in-Chief of the Air Force. | ||
| Did a tour of the various bases and wings of the Air Force to do a debriefing. | ||
| Debriefing is almost a religious ritual in the Israeli Air Force. | ||
| It's a very, very rigorous, painful, methodical, kind of very Talmudic exercise of going through everything that went wrong. | ||
| Some of the things that went right, but mainly went wrong. | ||
| And how do we improve? | ||
| And it's rank blind, and he put himself out there and he came to our | ||
| wing, we're the wing that conducted the operation. So he started with us. And there were about 50 people in the | ||
| room, and we had an almost all night session, which started with his debriefing, but progressed very quickly into a | ||
| kind of an ethical debate as to how do we conduct ourselves. | ||
| And the way I describe it, which I think some of my colleagues who read it think it was pretty accurate, and it | ||
| was 2002, so some time has passed. A friend of mine from the US | ||
| Navy read it and said, what you guys conducted would be mutiny in our organization. | ||
| And I understand that. | ||
| I understand it because it was a complete subversion of the hierarchy in pursuit of a truth, an ethical truth, which is elusive. | ||
| But it is a very Jewish way to conduct yourself. | ||
| It's not hierarchical. | ||
| It is a crowd's wisdom that is guiding us. | ||
| And that doesn't mean you're going to get perfect answers, and our answers have not been perfect since then, but they've improved. | ||
| And it provided real clarity on how we navigate this dilemma. | ||
| What do we define as optima? | ||
| You can't, on the one hand, please the virtue of truth, Tell the bride that she's ugly And at the same time the virtue of humanity you're gonna have to navigate Optima and that's life, right? | ||
| And it gets it's a very Jewish exercise and it's how we conduct ourselves to say that we solve them that we solved it But this is this is the way we muddle through In Judaism and to me there's value in that it was not extinguished Yeah, so it's interesting that you said that we should just ignore, or that Israelis should just ignore the media portion of this, because that always seems to be a huge part of any of this in the Middle East at any time. | ||
| It's like there's just this endless focus on this absurdly tiny piece of land with virtually no natural resources. | ||
| I guess they found natural gas in the last 10 years, but for most of their history certainly had no oil. | ||
| This like obsessive focus where it's like they're just kind of living and going on and doing their thing and I guess maybe we should all probably pay less attention to the media. | ||
| I think that's probably right. | ||
| I guess the Jews aren't doing a great job of controlling the media. | ||
| I guess that's what I'm really saying. | ||
| That's right, that's right. | ||
| Yeah, we've lost control of the media. | ||
| That's the bigger problem here. | ||
| By the way, to be clear, we joke, I have a Palestinian business partner. | ||
| I'm a co-owner in a Palestinian business. | ||
| We joke about this. | ||
| The Palestinians get this as well. | ||
| By the way, and I think my partner, who is today's, is a close friend, I think also sees it as part of the Palestinian problem. | ||
| I'm a pro-Palestine guy. | ||
| I'd love to see a Palestinian state tomorrow. | ||
| The challenge for the Palestinians is very much the same as our challenge. | ||
| They need to define themselves in a framework that is something other than victimhood. | ||
| Take away the Jews, what are the Palestinians exactly? | ||
| If they continue to define themselves with us as the backdrop, they're never going to be anybody. | ||
| And there's so much potential to build something exciting in Palestine. | ||
| And in many ways, when we talk about the media, maybe it's too strong a term, we should ignore it. | ||
| We're all complicit in perpetuating that human failure in the Middle East. | ||
| We're complicit in it. | ||
| We're placing no demands on the Arab world to take some sort of responsibility for its future. | ||
| It's so easy to say, oh, it's the Jews' fault, over and over again. | ||
| At some point, that rings hollow in Israel, so we start ignoring it. | ||
| In the Arab world, it's a very intoxicating notion, right? | ||
| If someone sells you victimhood, it's something that's kind of easy to embrace, but at the end of the day, it's toxic. | ||
| You should steer away from it. | ||
| Yeah, and interestingly, I think that does ring back to the way you were defining sort of an old anti-Semitism that's now thrust on Israel, because Egypt can bomb the hell out of the border of Gaza and blow up tunnels and do whatever they want. | ||
| No one cares. | ||
| Saudi Arabia can bomb the hell out of Yemen and kill thousands and thousands of people in cause of famine and nobody cares. | ||
| Genocide in Darfur. | ||
| Yeah, and so there's this odd asymmetry there. | ||
| Well, there's an asymmetry, there's a literal asymmetry in the powers of both sides. | ||
| Which is being used against each other, and then there's an asymmetry of media and everything else. | ||
| So it does have that one through line that these weird people kind of survived through this thing. | ||
| And look who the real victims are, right? | ||
| They're black Sudanese, they're Yemeni civilians, they're Iraqi civilians, they're Syrian civilians. | ||
| These are the real victims. | ||
| They're not getting attention, right? | ||
| No UN resolutions coming in lately on Darfur or anything. | ||
| We're very focused on a problem that I don't think it's a huge problem. | ||
| In fact, we're probably contributing more to its perpetuation than its solution. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| So let's finish with some of the future of how this stuff can work out. | ||
| I have a sense of how you think it can work out on the Israeli side. | ||
| They just have to sort of keep going, basically, I think, and sort of reconcile, I think, what you think those three different pillars of society are, which is not easy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Would you say that's a bigger problem for them than the external pressures? | ||
| Much, much bigger. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In fact, it's the only thing I'm really frightened of in Israel. | ||
| I don't think the Palestinian issue sinks us. | ||
| I don't think the Iranians sink us. | ||
| I don't think the greater Middle East sinks us. | ||
| We sink ourselves. | ||
| I think the good news is it's the same medicine in Israel and the United States. | ||
| It's got to be about Judaism. | ||
| We didn't come to start a Jewish state just to have another democracy in the world. | ||
| This is the Jewish state. | ||
| It's the nation-state of the Jews. | ||
| What does that mean for Dave Rubin, who's not a citizen of that state, but is a Jew? | ||
| We are his self-proclaimed nation-state. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| What's our responsibility to him? | ||
| These are questions that we haven't really answered. | ||
| And they're not just Israeli questions. | ||
| They're Jewish questions. | ||
| So ultimately, I think we're all engaged, Israeli, American, and rest of world, Jewry, in the same exercise, which is good news, because we don't have a dozen different prescriptions. | ||
| It's one. | ||
| It's one. | ||
| The exercise is we need to define Judaism for the 21st century. | ||
| What does that mean exactly? | ||
| Who's in? | ||
| Who's out? | ||
| How do you get in? | ||
| How do you leave? | ||
| And I don't actually put down a definition for Judaism. | ||
| I put down a mechanism, because the definition should evolve. | ||
| It should be static. | ||
| Whatever I say today is probably wrong to start with, but certainly will be wrong, you know, ten years from now. | ||
| What's important is that we have a mechanism for continuing to refine and hone the definition of what Jewish is. | ||
| And the last section of the book is exactly that. | ||
| I'll leave it as a surprise. | ||
| Ah, because you wrote a book, I got it, I got it. | ||
| Well, it's been a pleasure chatting with you. | ||
| I think this is a really fascinating thing because it permeates so many of the issues that I talk about just related, because this is related to free speech, it's related to oppression and perceived oppression and freedom and liberty and all of these things and history and the rest of it. | ||
| So I thoroughly enjoyed this, so thanks for coming in. | ||
| Same, thank you. | ||
| And for more on Tal, you can follow him on Twitter, although you're not a big Twitter. | ||
| No. | ||
| Facebook, wrong generation. | ||
| That's why you've got a big smile, because you're not on Twitter that often. |
Export Selection