April 2, 2021 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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[Outro Music] | |
| Hey everybody, we are live on YouTube. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin, and in honor of Passover and Easter, we're gonna be discussing how to find freedom, peace, and hopefully some hope in our challenging times. | ||
| Joining me today are the senior rabbi of Sinai Temple right here in Los Angeles, Rabbi David Wolpe, and the founder of Word on Fire Ministries in Santa Barbara, California, Bishop Robert Barron. | ||
| Gentlemen, welcome back to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Thank you, Dave. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| I feel like you guys are my two official clergymen. | ||
| You are the clergy of the Rubin Report, so I'm thrilled to do this show with you today, and we're going to try to keep it as apolitical as possible and just talk about spirituality, meaning, purpose, hope. | ||
| All of that good stuff, but I'm gonna start, I'm gonna put you guys both on the spot right now. | ||
| And Rabbi, since we're in the middle of Passover, I'm gonna start with you because we've already had the seders. | ||
| Today is Good Friday, obviously Sunday is Easter. | ||
| What is the main meaning that you would want your congregants or anyone watching this to hear and to know about Passover right now? | ||
| I think the main meaning of Passover is the multiple levels of freedom That the holiday teaches. | ||
| There is obviously a political level that people should be free, which is one of the reasons why Passover was, for the pilgrims, such a powerful holiday, because they wanted to found a free country. | ||
| There's also internal freedom. | ||
| There are people who are enslaved inside themselves to all sorts of things. | ||
| And then there is the freedom of knowing, ultimately, that there is something greater than ourselves. | ||
| Which doesn't relieve us of the responsibility of doing things in this world, but lets us know that there are limitations to human talent and genius, and there is something greater. | ||
| So, I think all those levels of freedom and our responsibility to ourselves, to the world, and ultimately to God, is what is the core of the Passover teaching. | ||
| Bishop, same question to you, this time Easter. | ||
| Jesus Christ is risen from the dead, and therefore God's love is greater than anything that's in the world. | ||
| So on the cross, Jesus takes on all of human dysfunction. | ||
| If you look at those passion narratives in the Gospels, you know, you've got stupidity and you've got arrogance and injustice and cruelty and violence, and all of it comes upon him. | ||
| He goes under the darkness of the world. | ||
| But then through the power of the resurrection, the God of Israel shows himself to be more powerful than anything that's in the world. | ||
| And therefore, it's a message indeed of liberation, of New life of hope. | ||
| So I'd say that. | ||
| I'd put the focus on the facticity of the resurrection, but then we can draw all kinds of implications from that. | ||
| And I really love what the rabbis said about freedom. | ||
| I think it's absolutely right. | ||
| Freedom from, to be sure. | ||
| Freedom from forms of oppression. | ||
| But always in the Bible, it's freedom for, as well. | ||
| And ultimately, freedom for the worship of the true God. | ||
| I love in the Passover account, or in the Exodus account, When Moses says to Pharaoh, you know, let my people go, okay, that they might worship me in the desert. | ||
| And so it's freedom from oppression, but then freedom for the worship of the true God. | ||
| I could say more about it later, but the very fact that the cross and resurrection is central to Catholic worship. | ||
| So the Mass, which represents the cross of Jesus, is our greatest act of worship. | ||
| Freedom from all the powers of the world, freedom for The worship of the true God. | ||
| That's Easter, I think. | ||
| So as I said, I don't want to go too political, but obviously the word freedom, the word freedom in and of itself right now seems particularly political. | ||
| How much feedback are you guys getting from your congregants about how they are worried about the state of freedom at the moment? | ||
| Bishop, I'll go to you first. | ||
| Well, the congregants are always interested in these political matters, and you do hear from All parts of the spectrum, to be sure. | ||
| But what I would stress is this fundamental spiritual freedom that is more important than political freedom. | ||
| Political freedom is a function of this more basic spiritual freedom. | ||
| You know, we read it, in fact, at Mass last night. | ||
| We had the account of the Passover and all the familiar elements of, you know, put the blood on the lintel and the angel will pass over and the firstborn of The Egyptians, both man and beast, will be destroyed. | ||
| But then there's a little line that says, and I will execute judgment upon the gods of Egypt. | ||
| And I think that, in some ways, is the key. | ||
| The pharaoh was a political figure, if you want, but in the ancient world, they didn't make those distinctions that we do between religion and politics. | ||
| He was altogether a religious figure. | ||
| And so God is passing judgment not just on the political oppression of the pharaoh, but upon the false gods of Egypt. | ||
| And it's the worship of the true God that he wants to make possible, you know? | ||
| The same is true today. | ||
| There's all kinds of false gods that are at large in the land. | ||
| You know, today we'd worship wealth and power and privilege and honor and our own sovereign selves. | ||
| Those are all the false gods now of America or of the West that God passes judgment upon. | ||
| And so it's freedom from oppression, freedom for The worship of the true God. | ||
| I think that's always the central issue. | ||
| Rabbi, did you sense that people this year at the Seders, that it felt more relevant or something? | ||
| I mean, that's what I felt at our Seders this year. | ||
| It had a particular meaning this year. | ||
| You know, I would say, first of all, I entirely identify with what the Bishop said, absolutely, about false gods. | ||
| I think, by the way, that the The principal false god is the worship of politics as religion, and a truly religious devotion that people have to their political stance, such that they have equal faith in it with the faith that believers are intended to have in religion, and that is, that's a social ill. | ||
| That's not a good thing. | ||
| And then the other part of it, yes, is Mitzrayim actually in Hebrew, which is the Hebrew word for Egypt, comes from the word meaning narrow. | ||
| And we've all been in a very narrow place. | ||
| We've been home. | ||
| We've been locked in. | ||
| And this idea now that we are being freed and the pace of freedom or the slowness of freedom is, I think, something that people feel very, very deeply. | ||
| And the other element of this is that the Passover was the time that Israel became a people, not just a family, not just a clan, but a people. | ||
| And the opportunity, the bishop and I were talking about this right before we began the show, to worship together again, to be a people, is I think something that we desperately need. | ||
| In fact, I really believe, this is maybe presumptuous, I think we need it more than we realize we need it. | ||
| Because I don't know what your experience has been, but when I see people in person, I'm almost startled at my own joy. | ||
| Yeah, well, let's continue down that path because I'm amazed by that too. | ||
| I mean, I did a little meetup with some of the members of the Rubin Report community a few weeks ago in LA, and I kid you not, People were literally crying, saying hello to other people, just to be out. | ||
| The tears of joy, obviously. | ||
| But that, missing that, where... Well, I actually don't know what you both are doing in terms of live congregants right now. | ||
| So, actually, Bishop, what are you doing right now? | ||
| And I know Santa Barbara has probably, I'm guessing, slightly more lax rules than here in Los Angeles? | ||
| It did for a time. | ||
| Now it's actually worse than L.A., but that's another issue. | ||
| But last night, I had the biggest crowd I've had since COVID started. | ||
| Last night, I was up in Santa Maria at a parish, John Neumann, and it was, for the first time in a long time, there were a lot of people in the church and then many outside the church. | ||
| And I agree with the rabbi. | ||
| It was thrilling. | ||
| I mean, it's thrilling to be in that again after this long hiatus. | ||
| But you know, let me go back to the The Exodus account again. | ||
| Because the figure of Moses to me is so important, you know, for both the Passover and for Easter. | ||
| Because Moses is a liberator. | ||
| I mean, we all know that. | ||
| And he's played this very important role up and down the centuries, very much in our country, you know, people identifying with Moses the liberator. | ||
| But of course, a little bit later in Exodus, Moses is the lawgiver. | ||
| And those two ideas are not mutually exclusive, you know. | ||
| We tend to think that way. | ||
| If I'm free, I'm freed from all these laws and rules and regulations. | ||
| Well, no. | ||
| Israel receives through the Liberator now a whole set of laws, many of which are not what we call moral laws, but liturgical laws. | ||
| So he's teaching Israel how to give God right praise. | ||
| Not because God needs it. | ||
| God needs nothing. | ||
| But he's training a people in right worship. | ||
| See, that's why I think the fact that a lot of the churches have not been worshiping We've not been as present in the society. | ||
| That's bad for the society. | ||
| Because I think the job of the churches in many ways is to teach a society right praise. | ||
| So we don't privatize religion, but the liturgy is a public act. | ||
| And it's bad for society if liturgy is suppressed. | ||
| So I think that's an important moment we're at now as we come back, all of us come back to worship God. | ||
| That has huge societal implications. | ||
| I want to piggyback two comments on that. | ||
| The first is, we do have an inclination to slavery inside ourselves. | ||
| That is, there are people who feel safe inside and are afraid to go outside because freedom... I mean, Eric Fromm wrote a book years ago, Escape from Freedom. | ||
| And there's a phrase in the Bible that God delivered the Israelites with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. | ||
| And a rabbi in the 18th century said, you don't need both. | ||
| The mighty hand, though, is what brought them out, and the outstretched arm was to keep them from going back, because the Israelites wanted to go back. | ||
| Slavery was safe. | ||
| It was slavery, but it was safe. | ||
| And that's a preference for order over freedom. | ||
| And as the bishop says, certainly in the Jewish tradition, law is a prerequisite for being free. | ||
| You can't be free without laws. | ||
| If everybody drives and no one observes traffic laws, there's no freedom. | ||
| There's an impossibility of getting from one place to the other. | ||
| And so every society seeks its balance. | ||
| America has always tried to err on the side of freedom, but it is a constant struggle, both within our lives and within our society. | ||
| Do you guys think that all of this that we're discussing right now | ||
| in relation to COVID and lockdowns and freedom and everything else | ||
| presents a truly unique opportunity that maybe for guys like you | ||
| that are heads of congregations to bring new people into the fold? | ||
| Because I really sense, and I think you guys know from talking to me, | ||
| I mean, I'm more of a believer now than I've ever been in my adult life for sure. | ||
| And one of the things that I found in the last year is that most of the people who are making sense to me | ||
| are believers because they're believing in something outside of the day-to-day, | ||
| okay, I turned on CNN, here we go. | ||
| And I wonder if you sort of relish in that opportunity. | ||
| I suspect you probably do. | ||
| Bishop? | ||
| Well, I've been beating this drum for a long time, both here in LA, but also nationally, is to say, we can't just presume, oh, the people all come charging back when we open the doors. | ||
| Catholics have now had a year of practice of staying away from church, which is really bad. | ||
| Now, you know, we did it for good reasons and all that, but I've been saying we've got to be very proactive in drawing our people back. | ||
| And I've been saying to those who are coming to Mass now, you've got to be evangelizers. | ||
| When the day comes, I want you to bring two or three people back to Mass who've been away for a while. | ||
| So yes, it is, I think, a great opportunity. | ||
| As I mentioned, too, it's of huge importance for the wider society. | ||
| The churches can't retreat into privacy. | ||
| I think, especially now, we should Be a public force in the society. | ||
| But yeah, it's a moment, it's an opportunity. | ||
| Rabbi, Jews don't evangelize as well as Catholics. | ||
| So what do you do? | ||
| Well, we evangelize to Jews. | ||
| And to, I think, what is properly called the unchurched. | ||
| But it is, I think that it is both a moment of peril and a moment of possibility. | ||
| That is, a lot of people have discovered Oh, I can sit at home and watch the services, you know, with a cup of coffee and in my pajamas and have been comfortable with that. | ||
| And we'll take some luring to get back, especially if they're scared. | ||
| But having said that, I really do believe exactly what you said, Dave, which is that never has a religious message, at least in my lifetime, been as compelling and as important as now because people realize that A pandemic is a spiritual crisis. | ||
| It's not just a public health crisis. | ||
| It's a spiritual crisis. | ||
| And the things that people are coming to me with, they're, you know, the first thing that the Bible calls not good is aloneness. | ||
| It is not good for a person to be alone. | ||
| Everything is called good until you get aloneness. | ||
| And that's what the pandemic, there's been a plague of isolation. | ||
| And people feel it not just as an emotional or as a mental health issue, but as a genuine spiritual issue and people who have deep spiritual lives, I venture to say, feel the aloneness less than those who feel like they're alone in the universe. | ||
| And that seems to be the ultimate irony of what we've done to ourselves. | ||
| We're social creatures and they told us basically to be anti-social. | ||
| Bishop, what else are you doing on that front? | ||
| Maybe that's not directly related to what you're doing in the church, but just to help people sort of reconnect at the moment. | ||
| Well, one thing I did at the beginning of COVID is I told people, look, see this as an opportunity maybe to read that great spiritual book that you've been putting off for years. | ||
| You've got more time and more space to do it. | ||
| Reach out to people in need. | ||
| So during the COVID period, all sorts of folks, they were in need of basic sustenance and supplies and so on. | ||
| Reach out by Zoom or by phone call to those who are lonely. | ||
| So I said, take advantage of the opportunities we have during, you know, COVID. | ||
| But then the parishes too, we're trying to find all sorts of ways to re-engage the kids, to re-engage the older folks, to have pilgrimages and public processions and activities. | ||
| So we're trying, we're hopeful that in a few months maybe, if the vaccinations continue, we can do it. | ||
| But we're trying to be proactive and just engage people. | ||
| We can't succumb to this privatization or we can't just throw up our hands. | ||
| I think we've got to be active, proactive. | ||
| Yeah, Rabbi, what about you? | ||
| So the same, I mean, we've had drop-bys and our school has been running now, and the school is now in person, which is a great thing. | ||
| And we're starting in-person services this Saturday. | ||
| We've had them outside, now we're gonna have them inside this Saturday. | ||
| But again, it's gotta be, you know, it's limited to 25%. | ||
| It's actually not this Saturday, but next Saturday, sorry. | ||
| It's limited to 25% and there's social distancing and we're hoping Eventually, to have those rules relaxed and have people, yeah, you were gonna, I see a question on your lipstick. | ||
| Well, yeah, I'm curious, do either one of you, can you look to a specific verse or parable from the Bible about fear in general? | ||
| Because I think what a lot of people, it really is just gonna be the fear thing to get over, to literally just walk into those doors again, whether the door is a temple, a church, or a school. | ||
| I will tell you that the most common thing in the Torah that God says is, in Hebrew it's al tira, in English it's do not be afraid. | ||
| That actually, the single indispensable quality to lead a good life is courage. | ||
| Without courage, you're a slave. | ||
| When the Israelites left Egypt, they stood at the sea, say the rabbis, and it wasn't until one man, Nachshon, jumped into the sea that the sea parted. | ||
| Because God wanted them to take a risk. | ||
| It's like, I'm not going to part the sea unless you actually do something. | ||
| And the same thing here. | ||
| I understand that there are risks in the world, but there are always risks in the world. | ||
| And all of us know you can't do anything. | ||
| You can't achieve. | ||
| You can't fall in love. | ||
| You can't have a child. | ||
| You can't make a friend, anything, unless you're willing to take a risk emotionally, physically. | ||
| And so, um, I think that the, The culture of risk aversion has gone too far. | ||
| I understand why people are risk averse. | ||
| I mean, you know, I buried people who've had COVID and it's real. | ||
| Nonetheless, life is in part about, you know, jumping into the sea. | ||
| The theme of fear, you're right, is central to the Bible, and the New Testament in some ways culminates with the claim that perfect love casts out all fear. | ||
| It doesn't say perfect love casts out all hate. | ||
| So the opposite of love is fear. | ||
| I think of Paul Tillich, the German-American theologian of the last century, who said, fear is the fundamental problem. | ||
| It's not so much pride, Tillich thought, but fear. | ||
| Because I'm afraid, I cling to myself. | ||
| Because I'm afraid, I set up barriers. | ||
| Because I'm afraid, I lash out at my enemies, etc. | ||
| Perfect love casts out all fear. | ||
| Well, what do we see in the cross but the perfect love of God? | ||
| Which took upon itself all of the darkness of the world. | ||
| Which is why the risen Jesus, in all the accounts, always does two basic things, is he shows his wounds. | ||
| It's a very important move, I think. | ||
| Don't forget what you did. | ||
| Don't forget what the world has done. | ||
| The wounds of Jesus are our own sins, the sin of the world. | ||
| So there it is. | ||
| But then he says, Shalom. | ||
| So there's that word that I think in many ways sums up the whole of biblical revelation, the peace that God has always wanted his people to have, but it comes on the far side of fear. | ||
| It comes on the far side of a fear that he's conquered through his dying and his rising. | ||
| There's, if you want, the Easter message that conquers the fear that bedevils us. | ||
| So the South African author, Alan Paton has a beautiful scene in one of his novels, not Cry, Beloved Country, but another novel about a guy who goes to heaven and he comes before God and God says, where are your wounds? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he says, I don't have any wounds. | ||
| And God says, why? | ||
| Was there nothing worth fighting for? | ||
| Yeah, that's good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So actually, that's a perfect segue to where I want to go, which was just a little something maybe more personal to both of you. | ||
| But in this past year, as you've had to, you still had to bury people and do services, and then most things were on Zoom and all sorts of that. | ||
| I just wonder, just on a personal note, how, what kind of toll this took for you guys? | ||
| And did it challenge any of the beliefs that you talk about and that you live your life for? | ||
| Rabbi? | ||
| I would say it was certainly the hardest year that I've had as a rabbi, and every clergy that I've spoken to has said basically the same. | ||
| And I've had other years that were very difficult in lots of ways. | ||
| But first of all, the incoming volume of sadness and isolation was tremendous, and the inability to respond. | ||
| I mean, I have to say, Not to, I never thought that not being able to visit people in the hospital would be such a burden, but it was a real burden to say to people that I've now known for 20 some years, I can't come see you, you know, in the hospital. | ||
| I can't be with your mother in her last moments. | ||
| You know, can you put the phone up to her ear for God's sakes, which is, which is not the way any of us, it's not why we do this. | ||
| We didn't go into this business, you know, to make phone calls when people are dying. | ||
| And so, That part was very difficult but but the part it didn't challenge my faith because I saw that even that was still so powerful and people would say look I know you couldn't be here but the fact that you called or the fact that people showed up on Zoom for the memorial service meant so much that it reminds us that that they're just | ||
| There is nothing more powerful than presence, however that presence is configured. | ||
| Yeah, it's a good question. | ||
| I'm sort of, you know, musing about it. | ||
| In some ways, personally, in some ways, it was a good year in the measure that it kind of slowed me down. | ||
| And a lot of the travel that I was doing, I couldn't do anymore. | ||
| I was at home much more often. | ||
| I finished a book. | ||
| I'd been, I was on the back burner. | ||
| I finished this book during the COVID year. | ||
| I did have more time for prayer, so I do a holy hour in the morning, and it became sometimes a holy hour and a half. | ||
| So there were some things that were good about it, that it kind of stopped me in my tracks, slowed me down. | ||
| I totally agree with what the rabbi said there about pastorally it was a real difficult year, and how important touch is. | ||
| You sort of forget that, that actually touching people, being in touch with people, how important that is pastorally, and we couldn't do that. | ||
| And also the hospital thing, I felt that for sure. | ||
| In the worst part of COVID, when people were dying of COVID, and some of our priests, if they put the hazmat suit on and all that, they could come in like spacemen to visit people. | ||
| But that was devastating to families, and we did the same thing. | ||
| It's like just a phone, maybe just by phone you could speak some words of comfort. | ||
| That was really hard, personally. | ||
| So it's kind of a mixed bag in a way, and I try to encourage people To see a positive element to quieting down, slowing down, having more time with family, et cetera. | ||
| So maybe that was a grace of this year. | ||
| But pastorally, it was hard, absolutely. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| Yeah, so since I said I was gonna try to keep us away from politics, but as you said, Rabbi, everything sort of brings us back to politics in a weird way. | ||
| I'm curious, without going into anything specifically political, unless you want to, Are you talking to other clergy members about how, when things really open up and people start coming back, how you're gonna deal with things like sermons, where people are going to expect you, basically, to do politics at this point, because of all of the things that we're talking about here. | ||
| Like, basically, where do you guys get your guidance from? | ||
| I try very hard to avoid, it's not always avoidable, I tried very hard to avoid it and to have the kinds of conversations that we've been having here. | ||
| Because one of the things that I'm always aware of is I don't know more about politics than my congregants do. | ||
| It's not like I have some special, you know, pipeline to political wisdom. | ||
| And so I'm sort of investing my political opinions with illegitimate authority if I get up there and say, you know, this is what you should believe. | ||
| So, I really try to avoid it, and also, honestly, they get enough of it in the rest of the world. | ||
| But the rest of the world, as you point out, doesn't offer spiritual comfort, and doesn't offer guidance, and won't tell them what Passover is about, and won't say what Easter represents. | ||
| So, that's my job. | ||
| Yeah, I agree. | ||
| It would be irresponsible of me to get up in a pulpit and say, you know, here's the political party you should vote for or the candidate. | ||
| We articulate principles. | ||
| So, Catholic social teaching has all kinds of general principles, and we're meant to talk about those. | ||
| I'll tell you a story. | ||
| Right before the election, I wrote a little piece, 800 word piece, where I laid that out. | ||
| I said, look, I'm not going to recommend a candidate. | ||
| I'm just going to say, here are some basic principles. | ||
| And at the beginning of the article, I said, I'm sure I'll offend everybody, which indeed I did. | ||
| So I wrote that piece and I was flooded left and right, all yelling at me. | ||
| Why aren't you telling people to vote for Biden or vote for Trump? | ||
| So that's the way we tend to do it in the Catholic context is we articulate general principles. | ||
| And then let people decide, because I agree with the rabbi, too. | ||
| I don't claim expertise as an expert in fiscal policy or foreign policy. | ||
| I've got my private opinions. | ||
| But as a bishop, my job is to lay out the principles. | ||
| So we keep doing that. | ||
| I did do this. | ||
| Here's what I did, not this last election, but the election before, and I repeated it again in miniature before this last election. | ||
| I used John Rawls' idea, what's called original position. | ||
| I said, you're about to be born in America. | ||
| You don't know who you'll be. | ||
| You could be gifted, not gifted. | ||
| You could be white, black, Latino. | ||
| You have no idea. | ||
| You could be a man, you could be a woman, anything. | ||
| Now, vote for the candidate who's going to create the society you want to live in if you don't know who you're going to be. | ||
| And the idea of that is, don't only vote for the candidate who will serve your self-interest, but who's going to be better for the collective. | ||
| And when you've made that decision, I think that you've chosen the candidate that you should vote for. | ||
| And of course, people will come on different sides of that decision. | ||
| I don't really think that that necessarily pushes you right or left, but it does broaden people's thinking about what's good for the society. | ||
| All right, I pushed us, I pushed us into politics. | ||
| Let me, let me, Bishop, do you want to add something quickly? | ||
| No, I was just going to say, David, we've talked about comm boxes and how, you know, crazy people can be there. | ||
| COVID made them all crazier. | ||
| I think that's true. | ||
| My experience in the comm box world, everyone got crazier during COVID. | ||
| Everyone got more extreme. | ||
| So I hope maybe that will calm down as we come out of it. | ||
| Yeah, I'm curious, do you guys think there's also an interesting opportunity for more interfaith dialogue, or even how, do you think that's particularly important right now? | ||
| I mean, I know you guys, we've done this before on my show, and I know you've appeared other places together and do these sorts of events, but I do sense that, as I said before, the people that are making sense to me, they're talking about things like Judeo-Christian values, and that is something that obviously brings two people of different faiths like you guys together. | ||
| We should make common cause. | ||
| I've been saying that for years now in ecumenical dialogue with other Christians is, you know, we can fight about the 16th century till the cows come home, or we can make common cause against a rising culture that is, you know, the culture of self-definition, the culture of self-creation, of values are simply a function of my, you know, private whim. | ||
| Well, the great religious traditions, I mean, grounded in our case in the Bible, stand to thwart that. | ||
| And we ought to speak Because as our friend Jordan Peterson often points out, a society gets sick if it loses contact with these great articulations of value, and religions do that. | ||
| You know, so we can't just retreat into privacy, as I say, but we should make common cause. | ||
| I think all, I would say certainly all biblical people should make common cause and speak to a culture that really needs what we have to say. | ||
| So let me give you an example that I think fits very beautifully into what the Bishop was talking about. | ||
| Last night, on Thursday nights, I do a Torah class on Clubhouse. | ||
| And this one was about Passover and love. | ||
| And someone was saying that for a lot of their designing AIs to respond, artificial intelligence to respond to men when they send messages in to women on the Internet. | ||
| And this idea of drawing people away From actual human interaction and contact to idealized screen interactions. | ||
| This is like the antithesis of everything that Judeo-Christian Values speaks about. | ||
| The antithesis of it. | ||
| Because we believe in the friction of real human interaction and of face-to-faceness. | ||
| And so I think that, yes, the things that we believe are so enormously important in our culture that We have to join together to represent them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, you know, between obviously today, Good Friday, Easter, Sunday, we're in the midst of Passover. | ||
| I know you both are extremely busy, so I'm going to just give you one more question on the hope thing that we've sort of been bouncing around for about a half hour now about. | ||
| Can you just give one last message of hope to people from your perspective and from a religious perspective and from maybe even a secular perspective? | ||
| Bishop, you first. | ||
| God's love is more powerful than anything that's in the world, and that's the ground for hope. | ||
| Not a ground for naive optimism, but a real ground for hope. | ||
| And so relying on the world, whether that's politics or economics or whatever, culture, that's not going to do it. | ||
| But relying upon God, whose love is greater than anything that's in the world, that's the ground for hope. | ||
| So the more we awaken a sense of God among our people, the more hope there will be. | ||
| That's what the Easter message is, I think. | ||
| I want to both affirm and also give one direction to that, which is that the Passover message is that as well, but it is that we are God's hands in this world, that every human being is an image of God, and the hope comes not only from the presence of God, but from our ability to use that presence to be godly in this world, and that redemption In this world to the extent that it will come before an ultimate redemption will come through human effort and decency and goodness and kindness and that those qualities exist in abundance, even though we have to work somewhat to reawaken them in our day. | ||
| Well, gentlemen, I thank you for your time. | ||
| Happy Passover, happy Easter. | ||
| We're gonna let you go. | ||
| I'm gonna finish up with some words that are gonna be far less interesting than what you guys have offered up, but thank you guys and have a good weekend. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Always a great pleasure. | ||
| Yeah, and I hope we can do this in person soon enough. | ||
| I'd love it. | ||
| All right, thanks to Rabbi David Wolpe and Bishop Robert Barron. | ||
| And I hope that was just the right way to send you guys off on the weekend. | ||
| If you're celebrating, happy Good Friday to you and happy Easter. | ||
| I know we've done the seders already, but Passover is winding down. | ||
| And yeah, in case you couldn't tell, I needed to get a little away from like the political madness. | ||
| I was on Twitter this morning and it was just like one, We had the show booked already, of course, but it was just like one crazy thing after another, the CDC saying one thing five minutes ago and another thing the next day and passports for vaccines and don't go outside. | ||
| And I saw that the president or the prime minister of England saying vaccinated people can't even be indoors together, like just such craziness, like such sort of secularism on steroids craziness. | ||
| And I think we did a little something there for a half hour that hopefully gave you a little bit of peace. | ||
| And as I've been saying a lot lately, you know, we can all just sit here and just look at the world horizontally. | ||
| But maybe if you look up every now and again, that was probably the most religious thing I've ever done. | ||
| If you look up every now and again, maybe there's something there. | ||
| Anyway, have a great weekend, everybody, and I will be off the machines, but if you want to say hi and share some food pictures and wine and music and that kind of stuff, reubenreport.locals.com. |
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