A positive and a negative make light

Lio: If you have a desire for unity, then maybe you can call yourself a Jew. If you have a desire to stay separate, then maybe you're not a Jew. And by the way, why did you come back to America? It's not the best climate for Jews, right?

Seth: The...

Lio: ...world is not a nice place.

Seth: We're...

Lio: ...sitting here and we're like, we're reading out loud all these terrible things that we do to each other. We do it pretty well with electricity. We bring plus and minus together, we make light. But between people, no, it's very hard.

Seth: The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was. All things are mortal but the Jew. All other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?

Lio: Listen, enough of that. This is a podcast, and we're not going to try to find, we're going to find the solution to antisemitism, okay? We're going to stop that right here, right now, from this stinking basement. When we get to the bottom of this, we're going to read from this mystery book, which you're not going to find out about until the end of the series. And we're going to really entertain every perspective. We're not going to say, oh, you can't say this, you can't say that. No, we're going to say everything. Because if we're not going to be able to talk about it, we're not going to be able to solve it. We're going to really grab you in the kishke, and we're going to squeeze until we get something. Either a bowel movement or a freaking solution. We want to know what happened 3,500 years ago in Babylon that started this whole meshuggah and we want to finish it here in 2020. That's it.

Seth: The old ones will pass. They will bear their fate or they will not. They are dust, economic and moral dust in a cruel world. Two million and perhaps less. The survivors are only a remnant that shall survive. We have to accept it.

Lio: Sounds like something a Nazi would say, right? Those words were uttered by Chaim Weizmann, the first president of Israel, in a speech on August 4, 1937, two years before the war, at the 20th Zionist Congress.

Seth: They were dust, only a remnant shall survive, and we must accept it.

Lio: It shows you that, as we've said here many times, we are our own worst enemy, allowing ourselves to be taken by our disputes. I'm just amazed every time we're reading these things. We spoke last time about the storms in the south. They all started with this animosity between the Orthodox Hasidic Jews and the enlightened Jews. This set into motion a chain of events that eventually created these pogroms and eventually gave birth to Zionism.

Seth: My Jewish friend in New York posted something about Black Lives Matter, and I saw this thing that Black Lives Matter has this kind of anti-Israel agenda.

Voice: Israel, we know you murder children too. Israel, we know you murder children too.

Seth: By the way...

Lio: Everybody's great, that's not a question. We're looking for love here, remember.

Seth: So I sent it to her, and she said, you know, this organization is very anti-Israel. And she wrote back, I'm not a Zionist. It's like a Jewish person living in New York today doesn't understand that none of us, meaning you and me, are for the persecution of anyone. We don't want anyone being treated unfairly. It's the same thing here. We can't look at the other half of the Jewish people and say, I don't really care. It's not my agenda because what will happen next is they'll round us all up again.

Lio: NMP, right? Not my people. We're very nearsighted when it comes to the past. We think that we're convinced that whatever I believe in today, this is it. We've done that experiment in the last episode. I have so many...

Seth: ...friends on the left, especially in New York now, who are so into these marches and Black Lives Matter and everything. And I completely understand.

Lio: It feels good, right? You're part of something, a change. Of course, you don't want there to be persecution. Freedom and equal rights, right? But then to go to the other half of the people and want to overthrow...

Seth: ...them with weapons or tear down. There has to be a way for both sides to come together without a war. There has to be this thing above that we talked about in the last episode. Who will bring that way? You know, something that we see with the virus is how do you get a message to all of humanity in a short period of time and get them to change their behavior?

Lio: Unleash a virus in a global pandemic. Everybody listens. Are you saying that you just created the virus? I'm sure some people are saying it.

Seth: That's not what I was saying. I was saying from the virus, we can take an example that we've entered such an age, such a time, such a period now that a message can reach all of humanity and change all of humanity quickly.

Lio: Now is probably the best time to be alive. It's probably better to be alive now than to be dead now. But the point is, it's such an unusual time in history because we're not simply moving from one period to another. We're really re-examining all the institutions. I think that's what's interesting about this time, that we're looking at our politics and our economics and our education and our relationships and how we carry ourselves day to day and...

Lio: ...kids...

Lio: ...and family. Every institution is being opened up. Like you let all the pus out, as we said before, and you can start looking at what's wrong and what needs to be fixed. So that part is good, but I think to understand today, we want to really, as we said, we want to go back. So let's rewind.

Seth: We came out of the last episode. We're in Russia, 19th century, right? It's 1881.

Lio: That's that turning point for Jews. If you ask a Jew who's a Zionist, they'll tell you 1881. That was the year when Zionism was born. Suddenly, out of nowhere, Jews who were either fighting to just stay separate from society, but within the foreign society, mind their own business, whatever they were doing to get by, to make a living. And the Jews who said, no, let's integrate, let's assimilate, become like everyone else. That will alleviate all the pressure, right? Because we're different. Everybody hates us.

Seth: Let's be like everyone else. Let's be like...

Lio: ...everyone else. Let's leave us alone. And then something happens, things flip, and there's this allergic reaction of the people and the establishment to the exact efforts to assimilate and to integrate. That's what hasn't happened here just yet, but I think we're on the cusp.

Seth: Also, the Jews that come and begin to assimilate, they bring with them this Jewish quality.

Lio: It's not just like, okay, society...

Seth: ...has painters and cobblers and shoemakers, and now Jews come and become painters and cobblers and shoemakers. When the Jews come, in addition to being a painter, cobbler, and shoemaker, they bring this Jewish quality with them. It's true.

Lio: I think we see it all throughout history. Whenever you add that quality to something, it takes a different form. Like it forces maybe a slightly higher... an innovation. Innovation, exactly. It's a way of kind of looking at things from a slightly higher degree. And I think we said, and I think we read in this book earlier, that when Jews unite, this is not simply just a nice, ethical, like everybody's kind to each other. There's really a change in perception almost, without getting too much into it. It's like something happens, like we begin to live on a higher level. It's kind of like all your cells in the body decide to work together and produce you, allow you, your consciousness to exist in them, right? Yeah, more than just a bunch of carbon and oxygen. Exactly. When they start working together, all of a sudden it's this... So I think that perhaps this whole idea of unity, this connection that Jews are supposed to bring to humanity, is really what we're seeing is kind of like a natural phenomenon. And that's what we're seeing here in the book, that the reaction to them not doing it is also natural, because somehow the body is fighting with itself to like, no, we gotta unite. Yeah, we need this force pulling here and this force pulling there, but then we need to be above it. And when we do it, we can start to see things from a higher vantage point. We get a higher perspective. That's the higher ground that we're talking about. And I think just anyone who has that quality for unity carries that ability with them intuitively. And that's what they bring into everything they do. And that's why wherever there's this massive change, right? In history and industry and technology, there's always like a Jew involved, inevitably without their... Exactly. Not to do with education. They don't have to be educated people or exceptionally bright or anything. It's just a remnant of that connection which opened up for them the whole system.

Seth: It gets to why we're doing this podcast and what we're doing here. It's to shine a light on that, that this is a process that is happening so that it no longer happens in the dark and that it doesn't have to advance to the exact same pattern that we read about through how many civilizations already, but that we can learn what's happening, even if we're completely unconscious that this quality exists in us.

Lio: Exactly. And do something about it for...

Lio: ...a change. Do something about it...

Lio: ...for a change. And so, without getting too technical, let's read that in the year 1881, because this is talking about the milestone. Let's kind of just read that thing that will get us into the birthplace of Zionism and the birth hour...

Seth: ...of... Okay, so we're talking now after the storms in the south. Is that where we are?

Lio: That's basically it, yes. It's right after the storms in the south. For the pogroms. The pogroms, which caught everyone by surprise, but were not really as surprised as we had said. We realized the Jew killed the czar and all that stuff. Right. It was really a culmination of a process. It says, I think in the book, they said that in Israel at the time, the Jews who were there thought, well, you know, again, all of a sudden, without forewarning, without anything that would lead to it, suddenly there's a turn in the mood of society and everybody suddenly begins to attack the Jews, and the government becomes disillusioned with them. But it's not the case. In 1881,

Seth: ...he says, Indeed, however traumatic, the pogroms did not appear out of the blue. They were a long time coming. While Jews are not the culprits or the perpetrators of the crimes against them, the linkage between their disdain for each other and the nation's aversion towards them is plainly evident, not just in the case of Russia, but throughout Jewish history... And then Bartal, this historian, he describes it very well. In 1881 was a milestone in modern Jewish history. It marked the largest shift towards the emergence of the modern movements that influenced that chapter in Jewish history. As a result of the open anti-Jewish policy adopted by the government of the new czar, Alexander III, members of the Haskalah, the Enlightenment movement, rarely tended to cooperate with the state anymore. The social class in Jewry that had been acculturated and identified with the Russian urban milieu was struck a hard blow by the glaring change in the government's policy vis-à-vis the Jews. Their disillusionment with the cold, hostile reactions of Russian intellectuals during the pogroms in the following years led many radicals among the Jewish intelligentsia to develop a national Jewish consciousness. In the new Jewish nationalist thinking, a historical model was shaped that attempted to explain the emergence of the Jewish nationalist movement. This model, which would reproduce itself many times throughout the 20th century in every attempt by the Jews to cope with hostility toward them, had three stages. It opened with the hope of integration,

Lio: ...continued...

Seth: ...with the outright rejection by the non-Jews, and culminated in a renewed awakening of the old Jewish identity in a new guise. A national guise. A national guise. For many years, this model played a key role in Zionist historiography and directly connected the period of the pogroms in Russia to the inception of the new settlement in Palestine.

Lio: So this is the pattern we were looking for. It's the same events that are repeating themselves. And the same thing, by the way, happened in Spain, though we dealt with a few chapters before, the first two stages are always identical. You start with the hope of integration. Hey, let's just be like everyone. Why can we be like everyone? I remember growing up in Israel, and everyone in Rabin was like, we just want to be like everyone else. We just want to be like the rest of the world. Why can we just be that? And then trying to be that, and then the outright rejection by the non-Jewish side. And then the third part really shifts and adjusts with the times. During the expulsion from Spain, it did not happen exactly because there was no concept of nationalism. Humanity was not ripe for that idea of, oh, let's create a nation. It wasn't there.

Seth: It's kind of happening today in Europe a little...

Lio: Imperialistic, really.

Seth: ...happening here in the states yet. It's happening in Europe, but I think it's the move in Europe, like in France. It's not like let's build a nation. It's like let's get out of here before they kill us.

Lio: So that's the thing. In this instance, what happened after, in this case in 1881, is the Jews realized that they could and probably should find a place where they would not be persecuted. For the first time, that option was on the table for them. So I think those sentiments had a destination, and that destination was...

Lio: ...Israel. It was really a very pragmatic reaction to a process that they unwittingly had set in motion. And I think Professor Haberer continues to talk about it when he describes the storms in the South.

Seth: The Jewish response to the pogroms of the early 1880s has been of great interest to historians concerned with the rise of modern Jewish national consciousness and its politico-cultural expression, Zionism. To some, this response was akin to a revolution, to a sharp break with previous assimilationist tendencies which necessarily undermined the authority of groups most clearly identified with Jewish adaptation to Russian life. Indeed, as previously mentioned, the Jews' faith in socialist cosmopolitanism had been seriously challenged by the massive anti-Jewish riots, which in turn compelled Jewish socialists to reconsider their allegiance to revolutionary populism. We didn't get to that yet in the United States.

Lio: Well, we're on the cusp. I was looking for this clip. I hope we can find that. You have a Black Lives Matter protest, which, by the way, no conspiracy here, no finger-pointing, but is funded in part by Jewish people. I believe George Soros' son is one of the funding powers behind it. And part of the agenda is definitely anti-Israel.

Voice: Israel, we know you! You murder Jews in

Lio: two! And it just happens almost, like it just emerges from within. I don't know if this was at the inception of this movement, but it's clear that everything is political. It's clear that everything is always serving some political interests, even though it's rooted in a true pain of the people, right? That's what Jews always feel, by the way, as we saw. They feel that. But somehow it takes the shape of anti-Jewism, antisemitism, anti-Zionism today. And just the other day, there was a Black Lives Matter demonstration, and they were shouting antisemitic tropes against Jews. What does that have to do with anything?

Seth: Just as is happening in the U.S. today, where Jews are excluded from the progressive groups which they themselves were leaders in creating, the Russian parties had dismally failed to live up to their professed internationalism in the face of brutal anti-Jewish persecution. Thus, according to conventional interpretations, antisemitism, particularly among Gentile revolutionaries, undermined a Jewish socialist's cosmopolitan worldview and forced him either to renounce his Russian-centered revolutionary convictions or, paradoxically, confirm them anew in a cosmopolitan assimilationist fashion.

Lio: Basically, that would be the next fork in the road.

Seth: So I grew up in America, you know, an American Jew, maybe not, definitely not religious. I go to university. I have inside of me this feeling of human rights. I have inside of me this feeling of equality. And I see during the 2008 financial crisis, how banks take the money from the taxpayers and bail themselves out. It seems very wrong to me. I see the U.S. military went into South America and proxy wars all over. And I say, that's wrong. And I fight for these revolutionary ideas. And it turns out that these movements that I helped, not me, I'm saying me as a Jew, I helped found.

Lio: Let's say that I support internally.

Seth: Then start

Lio: turning on the Jews.

Seth: Yes.

Lio: It's exactly what history is showing us. It's not our theory. It's just what happens.

Seth: Something pure inside of it, but at some point without unity, it hits a certain point. It's almost like a piece of fruit. It goes, it goes, and then it rots, right? I have a picture of the fruit, yeah. And that's where I just picked it up in the air. It's like, it goes, it goes, it goes, and then it rots. It turns to green mush with mold all over it. And in order to keep it in that beautiful, tasty place, it

Lio: needs... But it has to be an evolutionary process. Incorporation. Exactly. Constantly incorporating the new conditions of the environment. Let that

Seth: arise. Let that kind of revolutionary spirit erupt. It's correct in nature, but it has to then be planted into the next thing. It has

Lio: to be... Integrated. All that energy, exactly, it has to be integrated, managed.

Lio: Integrated.

Lio: It's a lot like, I think, all other big forces in nature, right? It takes a long time to start a fire, right? You got to like two stones and rub them together until sparks come out and they have to catch just the right amount of dry weeds in order to... And a little bit of air. But then once the fire is up, it can easily go out of control or it can heat up an entire city. What's the difference? It's just being channeled in the right way. And I think people, again, I'm not a great political scientist or not even a great expert in history, but you can see that it takes a lot of work to mobilize people. Like it's usually a lot of effort and a lot of pain and a lot of suffering and a lot of despair and a disparaging attitude. A lot of forces have to eventually get a person out of his chair and say, I'm going to sacrifice my little comfortable spot here in front of the TV and fight for something. Right? But once they're up and mobilized, that's the moment to use it. And usually who's waiting to use it? The same manipulative egoists that are already holding on to power, right? Either on the right or on the left. It's not us. It's not the people who are looking for love and unity. By then it's already out of our hands. It's the same political forces that are waiting for the awakening to use it. Let's get looting. Let's get civil wars. All those things are very good for people who want to maintain power because it's very easy to take a lot

Seth: of...

Lio: They co-opt the...

Seth: That energy. Right. That's right. Oh, wow. So clearly exactly what's happening. There's something that arises up and then somebody behind the scenes co-opts that movement and uses it.

Lio: Yeah. And you can see, by the way, with war, for example, is a great way to take that energy and turn it outwardly. You take people and send them to war. Okay, so

Lio: we need

Lio: quickly to figure out how to use this the right way. How do we co-opt the movement in the right way? There's good news and bad news, I think. Start with the bad news. The bad news is that once the process starts, it's very hard to... Once the dam breaks, it's not like, okay, let's put some pipes and get some of the... No, the

Seth: dam broke.

Lio: Yeah. But before it breaks, if you have the right pipes in place and the water keeps rising and rising, you can open some power and you can release it, channel it in the right places, make power, get energy out of it. So I think the bad news is that there's some processes that have started that are already happening. Like they have to kind of run their course to some extent.

Seth: And by the way, why did you come back to America?

Lio: Before you get to

Seth: the good news.

Lio: Before you get to

Seth: the goodness.

Lio: It's a good question. I mean, it's not the best climate for Jews, right? Like you don't see, you know, I hear that there's about 50,000 Jews who left just in the last three months.

Lio: Left where?

Lio: America to go back to Israel. Really? And they're looking up to a quarter million making Aliyah.

Seth: Wow. Yeah.

Lio: I heard a friend, a friend of mine, friend of ours, you know, we both know this guy. And he's a young guy. He said, America is becoming fascist. I'm probably, I don't have a place here. I'm going to Israel. Suddenly Israel is not looking such a terrible place when they're after you.

Seth: I heard a friend said recently, you know, we need a good alien attack that would unite humanity.

Lio: Yeah. So, well, we had it. We got a virus. The virus was a good start. I think, I bet there will be like a second wave or second virus, third virus. You know, there's hundreds of thousands of viruses waiting in line to help us.

Lio: Unite. Help

Lio: us unite and realize that we are all in this

Seth: together. So Zionism developed not really as some pioneer's dream, but it developed here at the end of the 1800s as a safe haven.

Lio: They had no choice. They were part of this process that unraveled and unraveled, and they found themselves the same people they were marching with. It's like most of this guy, Louis Greenberg, the historian, he says it. Okay, most of the Jewish...

Seth: Narodniki.

Lio: What is it? Narodniki.

Seth: It's members

Lio: of the socialist movement in Russia. They were

Seth: stunned by the open antisemitism revealed in the ranks of their Russian comrades. It'd be like a Jew marching in a Black Lives Matter thing, and all of a sudden he arrives at the big center of the march and everyone's yelling, like, kill the Jews. Burn him. What? Wait a second. I just stayed up all night making my posters and rallying. No, making posters is nothing, but putting his sweat and blood into this room. Yeah, yeah, of course. Equality. Yeah, read on. Okay. Because of this hostility, Jewish revolutionaries left the ranks of the Narodniki, some even joining the newly formed Zionist groups. Clearly, for Greenberg, revolutionary antisemitism was the decisive variable in the set of circumstances which drove many, if not most Jews, to abandon the revolutionary movement.

Lio: By the way, fun fact, the women's march, right, that massive march that started after Trump got into power, remember that was started by three ladies. There was a black lady, a Spanish lady, four ladies, I think, a black girl, Latina, and a Muslim. I think Linda Sarsour was part of it. And then the Israeli, a Jewish woman. After they started the whole thing, they were talking, they had a conversation about racism and all that. And the Jewish woman said, as a Jewish woman, I feel obligated to help support the cause of anti-racism. And the Latina and the black woman turned to her and said, oh, we think you should start by looking at your own people's actions, you know, on racism. And she was like, what? One thing leads to another and they split, they break up. So now there's two massive women's marches. Well, now there's nothing, but there used to be for the last couple of years, there were two marches that were always marching, two separate women's movements, because the same core that started the movement suddenly turned on the Jewish woman. I think it's amazing.

Seth: It's amazing to me because to this day, for example, we can see how much deeper this is. Israel's had a female prime minister. Israel has gay nightclubs. Israel has a very mixed kind of society. But then, for example, you take in Afghanistan, a 60-year-old guy can marry a nine-year-old woman. But I don't see so many protests in the street against Afghanistan. In Iran, in 70 countries, it's illegal to be gay today. In Iran, you could get hanged for being gay. But the United States flew billions of dollars of cash to Iran. You don't see all of the LGBTQ community coming out against Obama for sending cash over to Iran for hanging gay people. There's something really weird about the Jewish thing.

Lio: Really weird about the

Seth: Jewish thing. It's so weird, it's so

Lio: weird. It's like dozens of countries that still have slaves today. In China, they eat dogs, well they stopped now. Forget about dogs, in

Seth: China they have Muslim people in concentration camps. Who's stopping to buy their iPhones? Who's stopping to buy their computers and other clothes coming from China? Nobody.

Lio: The world is not a nice place and everything is relative. Fine. I

Seth: can see the world's not a nice place if I go to the grocery store, but I'm talking about there's something weird about this Jewish situation. That's unusual when you start to look at, okay, whatever everyone says about the Jews, fine, it's all true. But now let's also look at every other nation where they still have slaves, where a man can marry a little girl. There's plenty of other places where it's...

Lio: Don't even start that list because all the Jewish PR in the last 20 years has been exactly that. I mean, the first half of the PR, the first decade, was, hey, there's slaves here and there's gays there that are getting killed. And there's this there and they make bombs and they do this and they were like, we care about your crimes against humanity. And then the second half, they changed that tune and said, OK, let's focus on the good stuff. There's that many Nobel Prize winners. There's that many museums per capita. It's like, oh, you're so arrogant. You know, we hate you. So it doesn't matter. It won't do us any good because that's not the reason why we're being attacked. Why this pattern repeats itself.

Seth: Right. There's something above. There's something.

Lio: Exactly. And that's, I think, what I think we're trying to do is just to say, hey, just look at the numbers. Look at history. Look at the patterns. Don't sit here saying, oh, it's, you know, they're mad because whatever, Zuckerberg owns Facebook. And what happened 50 years before that and 50 years before that and 500 years before that? There's always a reason. What's the root cause? We are trying to find here the root cause according to laws of nature. If there are laws, we're not very good at discerning the laws that govern human relations. But if there is something, that's what we're trying to find out here.

Seth: I definitely realize there's a huge difference between men and women. We'll do another podcast about that. That's a different podcast. Yeah. No, but it's clear that they don't understand each other. Maybe like last episode with the two words, where some people hear one word and some people hear the

Lio: other. Oh, Chloe and Treadmill.

Seth: Yeah. It's clear that you say we're not good at discerning the laws of nature. I mean, like how long will it take till men and women start to understand that they're speaking a different language?

Lio: We'll do a separate podcast on that, on the superior qualities of women. We'll do that later. For now, we just want to just kind

Seth: of... Back to our story.

Lio: Well, yeah, I mean, just to say that this story doesn't, sadly, have a happy ending because it will take us to Germany. We're not there yet, so we still have just a few moments.

Seth: The Zionist movement at the end of the 1800s, beginning of 1900s, right? Yeah,

Lio: Jews saying, let's be our own mass. Clearly, it doesn't work for us to be isolationists. It doesn't work for us to be assimilationists. Something is not right. Maybe the solution will be Zion, right? A land for Jews. Oh, great idea. We had it 2,000 years ago. Let's go back to it. By the way, just that in itself is groundbreaking, if you think about it, right? Yet another supernatural kind of observation. What people came out and said, we need a nation, give us a nation. Nobody gives a nation to anyone. After the Spanish expulsion, that concept couldn't be let's have a nation because it was before the spring of nations and all that took place in 1848. It will happen a couple of centuries later when people suddenly collectively feel like doing something together. That's a huge step forward in human evolution. So we are today at the apex of that whole trajectory. But again, when Zionism started, it wasn't great. It was the unwanted child of persecuted Judaism. Orthodox Jewry detested it. And as we will see later in the book, assimilationist Western societies, such as England and Germany, scoffed at it. It was a weird thing. And the worst part of it was that you would think that everybody's saying, well, let's go to a land, a country that will be our own. There we can be together. No. They simply carried over the entire... The whole rift in the people. They brought it... 2,000 years of disunity. Between the religious and the kind of

Seth: left.

Lio: Yeah, that was the shape that it took now. This whole right and left thing, that keeps going forever. More conservative and more liberal, you could say. They carried it into Israel, and again, I cringe a little bit because we're sitting here and we're kind of bad-mouthing our own people.

Lio: In a way.

Lio: No, no—not personally, but we're sitting here, and we're reading out loud all these terrible things that we do to each other.

Seth: We're trying to look at it like scientists, even though neither

Lio: of us are scientists.

Seth: I mean, we have all these opinions around it and things like

Lio: that. My father's a physicist, so I'm close. Okay, that's why you know everything, because my mom's an architect.

Seth: We are discovering, we're uncovering a pattern. It's

Lio: a diagnosis. It's a differential session for a house. They would bring the

Lio: cleaning lady and some other guy and whoever he had just to have opposing views and opinions so you can kind of, because he understood that from having the opposing view, you can now then create a synthesis and get to a higher level. Without it, it's like you have a thesis, right? And antithesis, and they just go fruit becomes moldy. Yeah, if you just have a thesis, they will just go into one circle; it doesn't go to the next. Exactly. You need to combine, you have to create a synthesis, and then you get an energy boost, and you can jump to a higher level. That's the thing that's hard for us to understand. I think as humanity we do it pretty well with electricity: bring plus and minus together, we make light, but between people, no, it's very hard. Who's going to be the resistor in the middle? Who's going to be the one who

Seth: can, uh, the resistor in the middle between this plus and minus force and yeah between

Lio: everything, conservative and liberal, between the right and the left, between nationalism and cosmopolitanism, between all those opposites that we have.

Seth: I don't think any beef ever in history were they able to look so clearly at the pattern, and were they equipped to actually do it, and now you're saying that. I say we are; our generation is, but we didn't get yet to the tool of how, how can we do it? Maybe

Lio: this

Seth: is not

Lio: the podcast. I mean, if you think about it, Seth, who taught humanity to do anything? It's only when we really looked at nature and tried to study it and to understand it we were able to learn from it and then innovate on it. It's us; it's

Lio: no one else. All

Lio: the scientists, the wise people, the sages, that's all people. It's not like some, you know, alien came down and helped us out. We have to be able to look at things, and I think now that this looking at things has to happen collectively, like it feels like it can't just happen in one person, it has to happen collectively. And that's where you need a group that will start to disseminate these ideas, and I think that's where we're sitting here and not talking between ourselves but doing something that people will be able to hear and share. I think it's great because a hundred years ago, it would have been unthinkable. By the way, this just, you know, we're getting kind of dreamy. Yeah, read that line from the poem by Uzi Zvi Greenberg.

Lio: He

Lio: was an Orthodox, and then he became a Zionist, right? A lot of people like that at the turn of the 20th century. And he came to Palestine in 1923 and wrote this line about the Orthodox Hasidic Jews in Poland.

Seth: In his 1939 poem, Now that the gates to all the countries are shut, the dark hour has come. The Polish peddlers have finally remembered Palestine, the end to all exiles. It is a sign that all hope is lost. What is he saying?

Lio: That, you know, when you remember

Seth: about... If it's

Lio: the time that you have to return, then all hope is lost? Where you are, in that place, yeah. In Poland, for

Lio: example.

Lio: Yeah. Yeah, by 1939, it was kind of late.

Seth: Yeah, it's pretty late.

Lio: To remind you, Weizmann made those comments that you read at the beginning in 1937. So two whole years before the war even started. You

Seth: could say it's a stiff-necked people.

Lio: You could say. There's other little things that are telltale signs of these relationships. They talk about how the Orthodox, they lived in Israel at the time, in Petah Tikva, there was a big community of them, and they were farmers also, but they preferred

Seth: to... Okay, I'll read it here. The

Lio: deeply

Seth: religious colonists in Petah Tikva demanded that all Jews maintain a religious way of life. They refused to hire the young socialist Jewish workers on cultural and economic grounds, and instead...

Lio: And religious...

Seth: And religious grounds, and instead employed Arab laborers in their field. As one might imagine, the young socialists in turn regarded these Orthodox Jews as the epitome of hypocrisy, disguising class interests and prejudice by sanctimonious piety.

Lio: That's Professor Anita Shapira, by the way. And, you know, even Ben-Gurion didn't like that.

Seth: Didn't like the Orthodox?

Lio: Yeah, he said, he described the farmers in Petah Tikva as having installed an idol in the temple and desecrated the land by idolatry. And by the way, I don't know if you remember, but growing up in Israel, you could feel that rift between the secular and religious. Not as a kid back then, like in the late 70s, early 80s, it was still like okay, you know, there's them, there's us, we're kind of like, but then as soon as they got into politics that rift grew tremendously and again you have these mobilized groups of people against the other. And it was just a never-ending thing, religious Orthodox Jews burning bus shelters in Israel.

Lio: Oh, really?

Lio: Oh, yeah, because you have girls in bikinis on them. That was great. Like my friends and I, on the way to school, we would look at like a new print ad on a bus that would come out with a girl in a bikini. We're like, how long is it going to take for that one to burn?

Lio: Sure enough, three

Lio: days later, it's up in flames. So even in

Seth: today. The Jews have their own country, and there they fight amongst each other.

Lio: I would say even more than that. I remember I told you about this anecdote. Even, and that's not just between secular and religious, even within the Orthodox, like in the days of the First Temple and the Second Temple, there were stories of, I'll just name a few so people can Google it. Rav Feivelzon, the genius, the Gaon, he was asked by other religious people at knife point to stop giving his lessons because of his unique worldview. Then a day later, the Gaon Rav Yaakov Eisenbach in Modin, he was attacked by two boys and sent to a hospital. And another case, 24 hours later, was in Mea Shearim, when the Admor from Belza came for the shiva of someone. And he was attacked with yells and screams. That's just recently, right? These things. But 72 years earlier, there was a story of the guy who tried to push Rav Kook, who was Israel's chief rabbi, the first chief rabbi. He tried to push him off the roof of Yeshivat Chaye Olam in Jerusalem.

Lio: Because

Lio: of seemingly an argument he had with Rav Zonenfeld. So all this, you know, this all sounds like some Yiddish lesson, but the point is, Kook, everybody knows him, an amazing sage, he was actually friends with Zonenfeld, who had opposing views on the future in Israel, but they were friends, they were close. For them, that argument was a point of connection, right, of plus and minus coming together. But the people surrounding them, they didn't get it. And this guy actually tried to push him from the roof, I mean, push him and drop from the roof with him and kill him. And later he confessed that he couldn't do it. He felt he was too heavy. It was interesting, right? So this is 1926. This is exactly around the same time, the turn of the century, Jews coming to Israel. Those animosities, this unity continues and continues. Even it was clear back then and it's clear now. And I think the book ends it here.

Seth: The closer we come to our time, the more poignantly we must ask ourselves if and how our own relations with the members of our tribe impact our lives and indeed our survival. As we will see in the following chapters, German Jewry went through a similar process of assimilation and rejection around the same time. But in Germany, the consequences were beyond anyone's worst nightmare.

Lio: And with this optimistic note, we want to close another chapter. It gets heavy at times. I feel it's good. Do you feel it's good?

Seth: I feel we are in the middle of the movie. You know, no more are we reading about it. This is our life. I hope so much that the people listening with us are getting this and that we will be able to unite and come out to a good life, learn something together and come out to a good life.

Lio: We have to do it. The clock is ticking. I think there's no question about it. This is The Jew Function. You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, at The Jew Function. Come, join the conversation, say something, send us love mail, hate mail. It doesn't matter. We think that this is important enough to get any sane Jewish person involved, and even non-Jews, because as I think we've seen, it's about a desire. If you have a desire for unity, then maybe you can call yourself a Jew. And if you have a desire to stay separate, then maybe you're not a Jew. Maybe that should be the new definition. How do you like that? I can't wait to read the comments. All right. I'll see you later, Seth.

Seth: See you later.