June 15, 2023 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
22:19
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| So Yoram, we've sat down several times over the years and one of the things that I'm really | ||
| interested in right now is figuring out how Israel can help America. | ||
| Because clearly you guys have some issues here, nobody's denying that. | ||
| But America has a whole lot of issues, and we seem to export issues across the world. | ||
| We have political division, we have this blue state, red state situation. | ||
| We seem to be lacking in national cohesion at the moment. | ||
| And one thing that I'm seeing very strongly in Israel is despite a certain division and this judicial reform situation and religious and secular and all of those things there is still something that's binding this country together and I have not been here in eight years and when I see the difference It is unbelievable, and I mean unbelievable, going in the right direction, where so many of our big cities, and this is the biggest city in the country, are going in the other direction. | ||
| So I actually don't want to focus on the problems. | ||
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unidentified
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What is right here right now? | |
| Or have I completely misdiagnosed it? | ||
| I don't think I have on this beautiful day. | ||
| And I should mention we're probably on the best real estate in the entire country right now. | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| Always a pleasure to meet you next to the Kotel and the Temple Mount. | ||
| Not bad. | ||
| That's our past and that's our future right here in one camera shot. | ||
| No, I think I basically agree with you. | ||
| Israel always has problems. | ||
| Every country has problems. | ||
| But overall, if you look at the trajectory for the last 15-20 years, Israel is doing immensely well. | ||
| I mean, let's consider. | ||
| 20 years ago, Israel had terrific energy problems. | ||
| Now we're a net exporter of energy due to natural gas fines and maybe even oil fines soon. | ||
| I should pause you for a moment. | ||
| What people heard back there, that was the Muslim call to prayer. | ||
| How many times a day does that go off? | ||
| Five times a day. | ||
| They got us beat. | ||
| We only go three. | ||
| So people will be hearing that in the background as we do this. | ||
| Here in the Jewish state of Israel, the Muslim call to prayer obviously is still respected and allowed. | ||
| That's part of being in the Middle East. | ||
| It's alright. | ||
| So look, we're energy exporters. | ||
| We're about to start exporting gas to the Europeans. | ||
| Because they don't have natural resources. | ||
| Yeah, that's a whole other thing. | ||
| We're a water exporter. | ||
| We have 15 years of successful pioneering desalination so that, you know, 20 years ago we were still being told don't, you know, take short showers. | ||
| And now we've all the water we want, we sell it to other people. | ||
| And financially Israel just Keeps on growing we were hit less than just about any other country in 2008 by the by the world economic shock, so you know all of these these material aspects are The country's just doing beautifully and if you switch to looking at foreign affairs Again 20 years ago we had | ||
| A hostile Arab world. | ||
| Today, thanks to Trump and Netanyahu, we have five new peace treaties. | ||
| Every time you go to the airport, there are jets taking off to take people to the Gulf and bring people from the Gulf. | ||
| And that's a whole new relationship with the entire Middle East. | ||
| There are problems there too, but it's improving. | ||
| I think you zero in on the most important thing. | ||
| The most important thing is, for any country, is how many children are people having. | ||
| Because if people aren't having children, it means they're not investing in the future. | ||
| They don't believe in the future. | ||
| They have no confidence in the future. | ||
| And here in Israel, the Jewish birth rate has been going up steadily for over 20 years. | ||
| At this point, Jews are having as many children as Arabs. | ||
| And if the trends continue, Jews will be having more children than Arabs. | ||
| If you can imagine this, Israel's per woman birth rate is approaching twice the birth rate in the United States. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| It's over three at this point. | ||
| It's over three children per woman. | ||
| These numbers, they're not just one sector of the population. | ||
| The most secular Tel Avivis still have more children than Americans do, or almost any European country. | ||
| So that's what I'm interested in. | ||
| That's the thing that I think maybe Israel can export to America that we're missing. | ||
| Because again, we can talk about the divisions here, but despite the external threats, which I guess aren't as, or not I guess, I understand are less than what they used to be, not gone obviously with Iran, but are what they are, and then now there's some internal stuff, but still the driving thing, the family thing, I mean, you run the National Conservatism Conference really all about that. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Why is that working here? | ||
| What is it that I can bring back to America and say, guys, there's this tiny Jersey-sized place across the world that has something that can help us fix our national problem right now? | ||
| Look, Israelis are connected to reality. | ||
| You know, in part it's because of the nature of Judaism, which is a very down-to-earth religion in a lot of ways, and in part it's the environment of having to deal with constant security issues. | ||
| And both of these two things create a population that is You know, you can say tribal. | ||
| People say that, you know, use that term in a negative sense. | ||
| Here, I'd like to say it in a positive sense. | ||
| Israeli Jews, you know, are, despite the fact that they're divided into all sorts of different subgroups and competitions just like everywhere else, but the overall feeling is feeling a family. | ||
| It's, we have a religious inheritance that says that God promises that even if we're | ||
| at the farthest corner of the earth, this is from Deuteronomy, even if we're at the | ||
| farthest corner of the earth, God is going to bring us back. | ||
| And the project of bringing the Jews back to our ancient homeland is something that, | ||
| you know, some people are really excited about it all the time and some people, you know, | ||
| they're a little bit more cynical. | ||
| But the overall feel of the country is, you know, is just that, is, you know, we're coming | ||
| home, we're fulfilling a biblical promise. | ||
| And by the way, people remember that, you know, even if they don't believe in God, they | ||
| remember that. | ||
| It's important to them that we're fulfilling the promise. | ||
| And they're very realistic about what we need to do in order to be able to do that. | ||
| So people serve in the military. | ||
| You know, whenever there's a serious military situation, the army is flooded with volunteers, people who don't even owe being drafted. | ||
| They call up and say, what can I do? | ||
| They know. | ||
| It's up to them. | ||
| If they let the country down, then there's not going to be a country here. | ||
| So people serve in the military. | ||
| I've served in the military. | ||
| I have sons and daughters who've served in different security services of the country. | ||
| And, you know, it's the same kind of thing about voting and participating in our democracy, and it's the same kind of thing about having children. | ||
| Like, you know, I know a lot of liberals are real cynical about this. | ||
| You know, if you say, well, you know, if somebody has children for the sake of his country, then he obviously doesn't love his children. | ||
| I think that's... | ||
| I'm sorry, I think it's a complete crock. | ||
| I think it's the opposite. | ||
| If you have something to live for that you care about, and you want to bring children into that thing that you're living for and that you care about, then your children, when they're born into that, then they've got an inheritance. | ||
| They've got a purpose in life. | ||
| Of course they can reject it if they want to. | ||
| But for most children, you know, that's the healthiest thing, is to grow up into a struggle where from the first moment, you know, people are saying, you know, you're not nobody, you're important. | ||
| You know, God brought you back here to Israel in order to rebuild this land and we need you. | ||
| I mean, that gives the children a sense of strength, a sense of belonging, a sense of place. | ||
| It makes them, in a lot of ways, morally more resilient. | ||
| Again, I'm not saying that we have no problems. | ||
| We have lots of problems. | ||
| But if we're comparing to America or Europe right now, these are kids growing up with a purpose | ||
| and they're gonna get married and they're gonna have kids because they believe in that purpose. | ||
| So it's interesting to be sitting here and you're giving me very much what this CD's about. | ||
| There's sort of the philosophical and religious and cultural, and then you're also giving me a very real-world example, literally multiply, and combining those two things seems to be the solution. | ||
| So how do we get that to America? | ||
| How do we get that message, not only to America, but you know, you're doing NatCon, and you know, I'm going to Hungary next week, which is a real bastion of those ideas. | ||
| They seem to be really taking root in Eastern Europe. | ||
| But how do we get that to countries, I mean, from an American perspective, where we seem so afraid, where the woke have destroyed almost everything that might have brought us together. | ||
| It's infected virtually everything, and we don't have, say, a national religion, that might be the thing to be the final protection there. | ||
| Well, look, America did have a national religion. | ||
| I mean, this is an important part of this conversation, is that America... | ||
| You know, not just culturally, but by law. | ||
| According to the Supreme Court of the United States, America was a Christian nation, a Christian people, by law up until World War II. | ||
| And I understand, I understand very, very well the, you know, the reasons why after the two world wars people, you know, were tired of that inheritance and they wanted to try liberalism. | ||
| But at this point, look, at this point you've seen Liberalism takes you straight into woke neo-Marxism. | ||
| Okay, so it takes two generations, but the bottom line is, if you rip the Bible out of the schools, you don't allow people to say prayers, it means that all the children are going to school to be brainwashed to think that their inheritance, their religious, political, constitutional inheritance is not important. | ||
| And that's got to be turned around. | ||
| Obviously, you're not going to turn 300 million people in one step. | ||
| That's clear. | ||
| But there are places in the United States where Either there's a Christian majority or, more likely, there's a pro-Christian majority that you could build, where, you know, where different kinds of Christians, along with Orthodox Jews and other people who are more conservative, can negotiate a public culture, you know, in certain states, which is going to be more like the culture in Israel. | ||
| When I say more like Israel, I mean that both the government and the leading figures who are not in government and the education system and the public will be more focused on Well, more focused on knowing something about the Bible, more focused on their purpose and their role, more focused on a mission of turning, I don't know, let's say, the state of Florida into something like what Hungary is. | ||
| I'm not saying you have to agree with everything that Orbán does, but I'm saying that the Hungarian leadership, and much of its people at this point, they look at Israel and they want to be like Israel, and they're recreating a kind of a sense of mission that is, in a sense, Israeli-like, and that has to happen. | ||
| That needs to start happening in In certain places in the United States, once there's, you know, two or three states, they don't have to be exactly the same, different models where, you know, people are focused, you know, we want to have a future, we're going to have children, we're going to serve in the military, we're going to teach religion as our cultural inheritance, even if we're not 100% believers with it. | ||
| We need two or three places in America that look like that. | ||
| I think that as soon as those things exist, people, normal people, you know, the left, look, the left is always going to say, oh, it's Iran, you're fascists. | ||
| Forget them. | ||
| I'm saying that normal people will find themselves saying, you know, I'd just much rather live in a place like that. | ||
| I see the, you know, the ruin and the devastation that these woke neo-Marxists are bringing. | ||
| I want a normal life, and they'll start to realize that what they're calling a normal life is actually a life that is still somewhat within a biblical framework, which maybe they didn't realize before. | ||
| So we've discussed this many times, and you've written about this, and you've talked about this a million times, but somewhat briefly, because I know a certain set of people that maybe are just hearing you for the first time, they're going to go, wait a minute. | ||
| Here I'm watching an Orthodox Jew sitting in Jerusalem, basically saying America should be a Christian nation. | ||
| What do you do with the minorities within that? | ||
| So you sort of said that the Christians and the Orthodox Jews could kind of work together on this. | ||
| What do you, how do you make the room for the atheists, for gay people, for Muslims, | ||
| for anyone that's outside of that, within that structure, especially in a place like America, that's truly, | ||
| that's as multicultural as you can possibly get. | ||
| Look, I think that being realistic about the situation right now includes understanding | ||
| right now includes understanding that there just are not that many Christians at all in | ||
|
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that there just are not that many Christians at all Look, I think that being realistic about the situation | |
| America at this moment whose goal is to drive out all of the Jews and all of the Muslims and | ||
| all the gays so that it's impossible for them to live there. | ||
| It's like this bogeyman that haunts the secular imagination. | ||
| I'm not saying that historically it's impossible that something like that could happen, but the people who are saying this are people who don't, they don't actually know American Christians. | ||
| They don't actually understand that, you know, Americans are, American Christians, I mean, they're having the same problems everybody else is having. | ||
| No, it's infecting everything. | ||
| They're having problems with their kids. | ||
| And, you know, they're more likely to say to you, you know, I'm most concerned about how my kids can stay Christian than, you know, to start telling you how, you know, the country needs to be homogeneously Christian. | ||
| So, OK, so you'll find some kooks here and there, but I'm talking about the practical political people who are going to be in these negotiations across the United States. | ||
| Almost everywhere I go, the feeling I get is they want Jews. | ||
| They want Jews to help them. | ||
| They want Jews to help them, you know, not just in the instrumental sense of, you know, having Jews in my coalition will make it easier for, you know, for people to know that I'm not the Ayatollah, but, I mean, I'm sure there's some of that, but well beyond that, you know, Christians are having, internally, a cultural crisis over the Bible. | ||
| And I know this because ten years ago I published a book on the philosophy of the Bible. | ||
| And since then I've had hundreds of conversations initiated by American and European Christians of every possible denomination. | ||
| And the message is just uniform. | ||
| They say, look, the Bible is the most politically incorrect book ever written. The attacks, we're losing our children | ||
| not because of the you know of the gospel and the New Testament and Jesus. We're | ||
| losing our children because we don't know how to teach the Old | ||
| Testament and they're asking Jews to come and help them explain the Old Testament | ||
| which which by the way is something really important for America right now. | ||
| The Old Testament, it's the classical source for the idea of a nation, of one nation under God. | ||
| That's a biblical idea. | ||
| There's no Greek or Roman source for that. | ||
| One nation under God, that powerful American thought, it's actually a biblical thought. | ||
| And so what Christians are asking Jews to do is help us understand what these stories are all about. | ||
| Why does the Old Testament, which is 80% of the Christian Bible, why is it so concerned with the nation and the independence of the nation and the inheritance of the nation? | ||
| What is all of this about tribes and how you unify the tribes of a nation? | ||
| What is all of this about, you know, about a nation having borders that, you know, don't just keep people out, but they actually keep you sane by helping you understand that your goal is not to conquer the rest of the | ||
| world. Maybe we'll teach some stuff to the rest of the world, | ||
| but it's not our job to go conquer the rest of the world. | ||
| It's our job to fix our problems at home and create a godly society, or as people today would say, | ||
| a society people would just want to live in. | ||
| The return of that to the public discussion, I think, from the many, many Christians I've seen across | ||
| the United States and talks late into the night, and trying to understand what they want, what they want is | ||
| a place where their children can grow up Christian. | ||
| And they see Jews, certainly, as being able to help them. | ||
| You know, you and I know that with gays, the situation is a little bit more complicated, | ||
| not a lot more complicated, because they want to make sure that they have space to be able | ||
| to tell their children, look, this is the normative path is young man marries a young | ||
| woman. | ||
| They want to be able to say that. | ||
| I don't think... | ||
| Which I have no problem with, by the way. | ||
| It is the normative path. | ||
| But I don't think that that has to lead to persecution. | ||
| In America today, I think it's absurd. | ||
| It's absurd to say that that will lead to persecution, because in any case, anybody | ||
| running for office on this kind of a platform is going to be sitting down with Dave Rubin | ||
| and saying, look, let's talk. | ||
| I want to say the things in a way that's not going to alienate potential voters. | ||
| That's what's going to happen. | ||
| All right, I got one more for you, because it's getting a bit warm out here. | ||
| So as we sit here, let's get away from politics completely. | ||
| You live in Jerusalem. | ||
| Right before you got up here, I was just standing here looking at the wall and just everything, Mount Scopus, just the whole thing here. | ||
| And I actually, I've been feeling this incredible sense of peace since I've been here. | ||
| Everywhere that I've gone, just an incredible sense of peace. | ||
| And I said to my producer... Dave, buy an apartment in Jerusalem. | ||
| I don't have the Shapiro money yet. | ||
| I'm working on it. | ||
| Come on, man. | ||
| But I said to my producer, Phoenix, you know, I'm having trouble coming up with like a word to describe, like peaceful, okay, fine. | ||
| And he said, you know, it's everything all at once. | ||
| And I thought that that was a pretty good description of this. | ||
| And I wonder what your description of this would be as someone that lives here and that knows the history, but is trying to lead the path to the future and all that. | ||
| I think what it feels like to me is the center of the world. | ||
| I think that was the other thing that he said, actually. | ||
| This is where it began, and it's being broadcast from here. | ||
| Some people can hear it, and some people can't hear it. | ||
| Look, I'll tell you, we live in remotes, which is kind of the outskirts of the city. | ||
| Up on a hill, you can, kind of overlooking the city. | ||
| And when I, every Friday night when the sun is setting, and I walk to the synagogue, you know, with my boys, I think of this Yom Kippur prayer, Ashrei Ayin Shurat Tazot. | ||
| Blessed, happy is the eye that got to see this. | ||
| And the Yom Kippur prayer, it's a 2,000-year-old prayer talking about the destruction of Jerusalem and saying how blessed were those who lived before us because they got to see God's presence in Jerusalem as it was being built. | ||
| And we don't get to see it for 2,000 years. | ||
| And today, we do get to see it. | ||
| We get to see it. | ||
| Every Friday night, we see the peace descending on the Holy City, and we see it being rebuilt. | ||
| And it gives hope, because it gives hope for Jews, it gives hope for all mankind, that, you know, something precious that was destroyed can be restored, and we can all take part in it. | ||
| It was good to see you, my friend. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about international issues, check out our international playlist. | ||
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