Jews, plagues & the corona virus

Lio: It's not a real plague until it's blamed on the Jews.

voice1: God is spreading it in your synagogues. You're under judgment because you oppose His son, the Lord Jesus Christ. That is why you have a plague in your life.

Lio: This is a special edition of The Jew Function podcast.

Lio: We took a break from talking about the root of antisemitism and its solution to discuss good old-fashioned antisemitism in the context of the coronavirus pandemic.

Voice: There are now more than a million confirmed cases of coronavirus around the world, and at least 50,000 people have died.

Lio: My name is Lio. I'm stuck in Israel because of the virus. I'm here with Seth. Hi, everyone.

Voice: We're stuck in New Jersey.

Lio: We care about the safety of the world. We care about the well-being of all the people in it, including Jewish people. In the podcast, and in fact, years ago, we were talking about the rise of antisemitism around the world and in America. In fact, I made a film about it in 2014, and that's when people were laughing about this topic, and now it's not so laughable. We got like a three-week vacation from straight-up antisemitism when the pandemic hit the U.S.

Lio: I literally thought for a minute antisemitism was over. Wow, is it possible? Did we fix it already? I think in some respects, the correction has started. And I think this virus is also helping us reassess a lot of things. And it comes at a very opportune time.

Voice: Queen Elizabeth urges people to show self-discipline and resolve during the coronavirus pandemic and to take comfort in the knowledge that...

Lio: Literally, venom, right? It means like this poisonous, toxic secretion. It's actually something that the cells secrete in response to a toxic environment. The secretion of that is what the old Greeks called virus. It's a highly contended issue, and I don't want to get into it. Angry emails saying you're an idiot, you can't get infected by anything. It's not about that. I'm just saying if a virus is really a reaction to a toxic environment, maybe that environment was toxic on all levels, right? On the still, vegetative, animate. And we were doing all sorts of bad things to the planet on the highest level, toxic because of the toxic environment that exists between people. It's almost like we got to a point where we couldn't separate. Just taking care of humans on a basic level, totally destroying the planet, right?

Lio: There's enough money for everyone. There's enough food for everyone. There's enough land for everyone. There's enough of everything. There's enough solar power for everyone. There's enough gasoline now for everyone. In fact, right now, there are tankers sitting in the ocean holding gas because there's nowhere for it to go. There's enough of everything. The only problem is our greed.

Lio: Thinking, oh, I'm just gonna live life, I'm just gonna get another car, I'm just gonna make more money. You're just making these things more important than some level of consideration, of care for something.

Lio: I'm thinking about a loved one, right? And it's like your anniversary for your loved one or something like that. And she's waiting for you to come home, and you're going to have some great plan together, and, meanwhile, you are out building a building because, in your mind, I'm going to build this great building, and then we're going to be so wealthy, we're going to do this, and we're going to take the penthouse, and she's just sitting there at home and looking at her watch, and another hour goes by, and you're not home, and another hour, and you're like, I'm going to build this thing. One day we're gonna this and I'm gonna and then you finally come home and she's so angry and it's so late and she's like, Where are you? It was our special day. All I wanted was your love and you're, Oh no, but I built all of this. Didn't you see what I built? And don't you understand my... It's like it doesn't matter how many gazillion things we do. If we don't do the thing that matters, if we don't do the important thing,

Voice: It's worthless. I wrote my number on a piece of paper, taped it on my drone. I ran up to the roof and flew my drone across the...

Lio: Stress, we kind of come to that conclusion that oh, connection, relationship, the people around you, that's more important than anything else. But as soon as the external threat goes away, we're back to our usual backstabbing, chasing, exploiting... raping the planet, as we love to say here on our podcast every once in a while. That's a trick. We cannot get off that treadmill. In fact, we couldn't do it for so long that nature kind of gave us a push. Now the question is, what role do Jews, do we, have in that?

Voice: That's the way the Jews work. They are deceivers. They plot. They lie. They do whatever they have to do to accomplish their political agenda.

Lio: It's important to say we're not encouraging antisemitism, we're just saying that it's a natural thing for people to have that sentiment. We have a few radical points we make in the podcast, right? One thing is that it's a natural thing. It's a natural reaction. The other thing is it's irrational.

Lio: It's natural. Why is it natural? It's natural because, we said, you're going to have to listen to the podcast, you go back all the way to Babylon. All these tribes were living together. Some people in humanity from all the tribes, didn't matter what color, didn't matter how fat, how skinny, what their whatever, what their beliefs were, where they came from. Decided that unity had to be the solution because there was this growing egoism in that society, and that's who the Jews are: the people who are aimed towards unity. Those are the people called Jew. The ideology of unity.

Seth: Those are...

Lio: The people called Jew. So if that is the thing that is going to be the solution to our problems, right? Because you can, well, it's capitalism. Well, it's this. Well, but if we care for each other, we're not going to create economic systems that are going to hurt each other.

voice2: The sale of fake coronavirus masks and testing kits is currently being tackled in a number of countries.

Lio: He talked about the ecological crisis. We were going off a cliff. We were choking out the air, choking out the oceans. We were also headed right into World War III. It's exactly at this point that the virus meets us and forces us to suddenly relate to every other person around you. Suddenly, whether you like it or not, you have to be very much concerned about the person standing in front of you in line behind you. Someone is sneezing, someone's, you know, do you have a little fever? Are you a little peaky? Everything okay? Are you eating well? What's going on at home?

Seth: You should become concerned for the...

Lio: Other. Halfway towards loving the other as yourself. Halfway towards that is just don't hurt anyone, right? That's like the halfway mark.

Voice: Soundly in month two. Folks have kind of gotten over that and have been able to refocus on true empathy, on truly connecting with our patients.

Lio: Personal question. And I think a lot of that... Jews, that group, that group founded around an ideology.

Voice: Human being in the stretcher who needs our care and to some extent needs to be shown.

Lio: Again, not someone born into it necessarily. Anyone who feels that they have this. Desire to unite or bring the people together. So let's expand the definition of Jewish. These people have a certain role, a certain responsibility towards the rest of society. In other words, can society do it by itself, or does it need someone to show it the way?

Lio: Here's another tweet from Yeshiva University. A class was Zoom-bombed. Here's a new vocab word, zoom bombed, by Nazis. So I guess they were giving a class in the university and some Nazi joined with pictures of you-know-what antisemitic pictures and zoom bombed them. We can look that up. Oof.

Lio: We're not a good source for those things. You can just go online and google it. You can get all the gory details. What we're here to do is just to rattle some cages and challenge some perceptions because we have to. We're Jewish, we're concerned, and we have to solve this. Because if not now, it's going to come to us later. The conditions are right for it. America is a great country, but it's also really, really prepped for another Holocaust.

Lio: God, is Holocaust? What we talked about in the podcast also was every single country that was the peak of humanity, Egypt, Persia...

Seth: Greece...

Lio: Rome, every country, Spain at the height of civilization...

Seth: Germany.

Lio: Exactly. That's where the biggest explosion of antisemitism comes. Guys, you have to go listen to the podcast. The connections are really uncanny. It will really fry up some wires in your brain, and that's okay. We're here, we're going to walk through it together. We hope this is an opportunity, as we said, to look into things. Because everything stopped, it kind of forces us to spend some time with these big questions and look at them. Nobody likes to talk about it. Nobody likes to talk about any sort of Jewish disunity. Certainly, Jews don't like when other Jews do it. So we apologize in advance. But if the end goal is ultimate love, not Shakespearean love or Katy Perry love but, like, a real higher level of existence, a higher perception of reality, if you will. You know, I'm for it. Are you for it, Seth? Just like when you look at a caterpillar becoming a butterfly, it doesn't become a butterfly all at once. First, it stops, right? It stops. It gets into a cocoon, gets into isolation. And then...

voice6: The caterpillar reaches a certain stage of growth. And at that stage of growth, it just stops eating. It can't take in anymore at this point. It's reaching a maximum size. Cell in that caterpillar body at that time, you would look around and say, Oh my god, our world is coming to an end. And yet, in the midst of those billions of cells, there are other cells genetically identical to them, no different. But they think differently. They respond to the signals differently. These cells have the interesting name called imaginal cells. And these imaginal cells come up with new visions. And what happens is in the midst of all this chaos, when all the other cells are running around thinking the end of the world is coming, the new imaginal cells are laying out new ideas, new visions, a new plan, a new scheme, a new way of life. And around these ideas, the cells reorganize and they start to create new massive organizations to create something much more fabulous than the previous system, a system that is much more sustainable, a system with a higher level of evolution.

Lio: They're constructing called restructuring everything and reorganizing it into this beautiful magnificent creature with wings that can fly. It's beautiful. It's beautiful. And it's not to say also that every single person wearing a yarmulke or every single person who grew up as a Jew understands what we're talking about, and it could be that somebody who grew up in a Catholic home... So we're talking about specifically the inclination towards unifying everybody. The people now who are awakening, who understand that an old kind of world is ending and a new world where we are all one. Those people are the imaginal cells of humanity.

Lio: To me, it's a great moment in time. It's an opportunity to try something new. If you're listening to this, if you're hearing it and you're a Jew or you have that feeling, that desire to live towards that ideal, then maybe you're also a Jew. Listen to the podcast to see if that is true. Those people are what we call in this language Israel. Yas el, straight to nature, straight to this force. We are meeting the coronavirus, you could say, like coming down on all humanity, and there's a certain part of humanity that's rising to this together. And you could have somebody all the way on the other side of the world, somebody in some African village, somebody somewhere in Europe, it doesn't even matter. There's such a network. Literally a network connecting everyone.

Lio: Paper, toilet paper, toilet paper is mighty trouble, paper, paper, toilet paper, toilet paper— we're starting to see the full picture, so to speak. I do see here in Israel; the amount of mud and backstabbing and just political swamp fishing that's happening here since the last round of elections and before the next round of elections is amazing at this time. People still can't get along. And I think that also says something about us, such a heavy role on the one hand, and on the other hand, where else would it be if not here? You've got this country of eight million people. They can actually try and do something and show the world that you can tackle this epidemic without living under a communist totalitarian regime, right? You can do it because of love, not out of fear of being trampled by a tank.

Lio: That's a lot of attention on this tiny little tree over there.

Lio: Well, hold on. They say that Israel and the United States created the virus to later sell the vaccine to everyone. That's another good one. But I think we're talking a different kind of vaccine. Which, by the way, Seth, did you see that study that strengthening your social connections actually boosts your immune system? So even science is starting to touch on the fact that something about the way we relate to one another. If you feel in love, if you feel this kind of...

Lio: Confidence in life, like your body fights off all these...

Seth: Things much better than the process of all those things.

Lio: A natural boost.

Voice: The contested holy city of Jerusalem has seen many conflicts over the centuries, often between people of different religions. But now there's also a sense that a common threat could be an opportunity.

Voice: There is a certain willingness to put conflict on hold and collaborate during these difficult times, and I would say why not?

Lio: These cracks in our unity. And at the same time, you see these covers on the like on Esquire magazine had a big cover that says we are one.

Voice: We all face the same dangers now. We are one family, and we should collaborate and work as a...

Lio: Family together. It's funny how those two sentiments are really brought into stark relief during this epidemic.

Voice: It's a challenge that affects everyone so universally, so equally, that I think it's a real opportunity to unite.

Lio: But more on that later. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter at The Jew Function. Watch some great conversations on our YouTube channel, The Jew Function. You can find this podcast on SoundCloud, Spotify, Google, iTunes, really anywhere. Just Google the Jew Function and together we'll figure out the Jew function, function in humanity, and hopefully the destination that humanity is going to. It's going to be great. From myself and from Seth, we wish you a happy isolation. We'll do it together. Every.

Seth: Shalom.