The politics of LOVE

Seth: You can kill every Jew that you can put your hands on, but you'll never destroy the entire nation.

Lio: This guy comes and says he had the most students, 24,000 students. He says, this is the rule, do that, and yet we do everything but that.

Seth: You know what I mean? Like, we all hurt. Our whole lives, love your neighbor as yourself, but it never registered.

Lio: All they want to do is just build another summer house, and suddenly they have to actually save the country.

Seth: The Jews have an obligation to the world, and until they carry it out, they cannot be destroyed.

Lio: We have a chance to build a global temple. We don't care about money; we care about uniting the world.

Seth: We understand the message coming from Abraham, and we understand what happens when we do it and when we don't. The Jews saw the most, 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: Okay, listen, enough of that. This is a podcast, The Jew Function, and we're going to find the solution to antisemitism. From this stinking basement, when we get to the bottom of this, we're gonna read from this mystery book, which you're not gonna find out about until the end of the series. We're gonna really entertain every perspective. We're not gonna say, oh, you can't say this or that. We're gonna say everything. Because if we're not gonna be able to talk about it, we're not gonna be able to solve it. We're gonna really grab you and squeeze until we get something, right? Either a bowel movement or a solution. We wanna know what happened 3,500 years ago in Babylon that started this whole saga, and we want to finish it here in...

Seth: 2020. That's it. Titus, like many great leaders before him and after him, did not, and in fact, could not succeed. You can kill every Jew that you can put your hands on, but you'll never destroy the entire nation. Since the Jews have an obligation to the world, and until they carry it out, they cannot be destroyed. That said, until they carry it out, they will continue to be tormented, hated, admired, and despised all at the same time and often by the same people. Adolf Hitler, perhaps the symbol of satanic antisemitism, wrote in his book Mein Kampf: "When over long periods of human history I scrutinized the activity of the Jewish people, suddenly there arose in me the fearful question whether inscrutable destiny, perhaps, for reasons unknown to us, poor mortals, did not desire the final victory of this little nation."

Lio: Wow. No, but it is surprising, right? Such a tiny number of people, and they cannot be destroyed while bigger nations rise and fall. We're reading from this mystery book. I find it amazing that every time we sit down to read this, something is happening in the world, and it somehow parallels what we're talking about. You know, even now, we're still in the days of corona. Even now, this is happening. It seems like somehow the Jews are getting an unfair treatment by the plague. I'm not even talking about antisemitism. That is on the rise, but I'm saying that in, like, for example, five percent of the deceased from the disease are Jews while they make only 0. percent of the population. And the article says it's hard to put your finger on the painful reason for why this plague is striking specifically the people of our nation. It's always a conundrum.

Seth: They weren't doing anything to cause it, like gathering in groups or anything?

Lio: Again, there are probably circumstances, right? But we're not interested in circumstances. We're interested in the underlying principle.

Lio: We're trying to find out why this nation cannot be destroyed, and at the same time, why they're subjected to so much torment. It's like just finish the job and be done with it, right? We're kept in this existential purgatory. We...

Seth: Have to fulfill...

Lio: This mission. It's a closing scene of a serious man. He thinks he's out of one calamity and he immediately plunges into another.

Lio: So, is there an end?

Lio: To the calamities. Nobody missed it. It's too good. Nobody missed it. This is the end of antiquity, right? The ancient times, right after the destruction of the Second Temple, right before the final dispersion of the Jews. This is the last of the three Jewish-Roman wars, revolts. This is over a period of seventy years from sixty-six CE to 136 CE. So 70 years, nice round numbers. Jews were trying to kind of get at the Romans, but they're not able to do it because they're not maintaining their inner unity. The book is saying, and in the process, they inflict tremendous harm on one another, as we mentioned last time, within a five-month period. We're talking about the Great Revolt. The first one, population of Jerusalem went down from 2.7 million people to about half of that. You know, it's a Holocaust, and we're not talking about it because we did it to ourselves.

Seth: We don't even know about it. I consider myself pretty well-educated around Jews and who we are. But I didn't realize that every time someone came to kill us, we had tried to kill ourselves, kill each other before that. I didn't know.

Lio: Nobody likes to talk about it, Seth. You know, think about it in your family when people are having a fight. You don't do it in public. You put out a nice, unified front. Well, look at...

Seth: The coronavirus, right? We're trying to understand what's the problem so that we can figure out what the solution is. I don't think that it was clear yet to the Jewish people what the actual, well no, actually, how can we say that? Because since Rabbi Akiv, I mean, it's always been love your neighbor as yourself. Love, love, do it, love, love, love the neighbor.

Lio: Since Abraham. Since...

Seth: Abraham, right. So actually maybe we did know. But, you know, we always heard that.

Lio: 1,500 years, man. More. No, from Abraham to Akiv.

Seth: Yeah.

Lio: Right? And then another 2,000 years.

Seth: Yeah, so I guess we have been hearing it. But you know what? Sometimes you hear things, but you know, like when you say something to a kid, like a teenager, something like the words, they hear the sound, but it actually doesn't go in and register. You know what I mean? Like we all heard our whole lives, love your neighbor as yourself, but it didn't register. You know what I'm saying? We all heard those sounds, but it was just kind of like a formality: like, hey, how are you doing today? Like, oh, yeah, yeah, hey, how are you? You know, you don't even answer. When someone says, How you doing? You just reply back, oh, how you doing? You don't even. It just war, it just sounds...

Lio: What? 'Cause you run on autopilot.

Seth: Yeah. Well, I think also there's this matter of the torments that are kind of pushing us to hear it. And now maybe, not maybe, and now what we're saying, the reason we're doing this podcast is now we're going to get ahead of the torments. We're going to say we understand already the cycle. We understand the message coming from Abraham, and we understand what happens when we do it and when we don't do...

Lio: It. We started this a couple of years ago, The Jew Function, and that's when antisemitism was making headlines. There's some other stuff. You would think that right away, as people heard about what's going on, why Jews are being targeted again en masse, why this whole craziness is happening, that people would maybe stop and ask, and if they heard an answer that covered all the bases, they would say, Oh, yeah, well, this is it, we'll give it a try. But no, people, we, I, we all choose all other answers besides that answer. For some reason, it's so funny. It's like it's beyond me, Seth. I don't know. It's on the one hand, it's like a crazy answer because it's hard to prove scientifically. It's more like a feeling, it's a gesture. On the other hand, it explains everything. So why people don't want to go...

Seth: We all knew that driving for an hour or two hours each way to work was horrible. We all knew we were filling the ocean with too much trash, and that was horrible. We all knew we were polluting everything. We all knew we felt empty inside, but we couldn't stop. You know what I'm saying? We couldn't stop until comes the virus and then it makes a change. So maybe that's also the thing, Lio. It's like we know, but we're just incapable. Until there's some kind of moment or something, which has to be now, we're incapable of doing it, of making that change. There has to be like enough of a...

Lio: I don't know. I call it the guy with a whip, you know? I always liked those, you know, in the pictures when they drew the scenes in Egypt...

Seth: He was carrying the bricks for the pyramids, yeah.

Lio: Yeah, and on top of every brick there was like an Egyptian with a whip. I was like, wow, how much is this guy getting paid to whip this guy? That's hard work. But I think if we get enough of those guys with the whips, enough of those, eventually people listen. Eventually, I'm not sure this is the...

Lio: Answer. We...

Lio: Know that during the Holocaust, and we'll get to the Holocaust, that's a contentious topic we're building up to it. We know that during that time, there were people, for example, Baal Hasulam, who went and tried to warn the entire Jewish population.

Seth: Critical masses. That's what I was looking for before. The word critical mass. You need...

Lio: Giving...

Seth: The exact medicine, but until you have a critical mass. It's like in the 70s, someone came out and said, like, eat healthy food. And then everyone's, yeah, yeah, yeah, McDonald's, McDonald's, McDonald's. And then until today, there's like a critical mass to eat healthy food, for example, and you can drive down the turnpike in New Jersey and every single gas station you can get, you know, something quote-unquote healthy...

Lio: Etc. So that's a question, right? I'm sorry, what drives consciousness change shift, right? The shift in...

Lio: Consciousness.

Seth: Yeah, what makes the flip until it's a new world? It's a new way, and it's not advancing through beatings, but advancing through...

Lio: Through sheer common sense. And how people say, you know, this is killing us. Maybe we'll try something else. It's like that scene in the Simpsons when Homer Simpson wants to get his own cable TV, and he climbs up on the, like, how hard can it be, climbs up on the thing and he takes out the wire cutters and he looks at the things like, let's try the red one. He clips the red one. He's like, you know, he gets a shock and he's like, hmm, let's try the red wire again. You know, so. I think that's kind of like how it works in history. And if you don't get it in one generation, the next generation is sort of bound to repeat at least some of the mistakes. It carries over, but not entirely. You know, that's why I think it's bound by time. That's why I think it's urgent that we act on it now, that we don't wait for another generation, because the next one might have to come out of a war's Holocaust, a third world war. I don't know. Let's go back to the book. We'll talk about an interesting character, Rabbi Akiva. This guy was not a Jew.

Seth: Famous for the love your neighbor as yourself line, right.

Lio: Famous for making the great rule of the Torah, of the Jewish law. Love your neighbor as yourself, was not born a Jew, but insisted on becoming. This is actually someone who, you know, unlike the forced conversions that we've seen earlier. This one he wanted, he really wanted it. Let me read a little bit about him. Akiva...

Seth: Ben Yosef, better known as Rabbi Akiva, was a Jew by desire. He was born around the year 50 CE and he lived until approximately 136. Not much is known about his life. Maimonides writes that his father, Yosef, converted to Judaism. Rabbi Akiva was a simple man pasturing the herds of Kalba Savua, whose daughter, Rachel, he later married. At some point, while already an adult, he went through a transformation and decided not only to study the essence of Judaism, but to dedicate his entire life to studying it. He developed such a thirst for the laws of life, the same laws that Ptolemy, that we read about earlier, he learned from the ancient...

Lio: Guy who brought the sages, the 70 sages, to translate from...

Seth: That he dropped everything and went to learn with the sages of his time. Indeed, Rabbi Akiva was so prodigious in his learning that his teacher soon regarded him as a major authority of rules, and he became the most illustrious teacher of all time with no less than 24,000 disciples. What Rabbi Akiva taught was very simple: the greatest rule in the Torah is love your neighbor as yourself. Yet, even the great Rabbi Akiva could not save his disciples from internal hatred and its ramification. The Talmud writes that all but five of Rabbi Akiba's 24,000 disciples died at the same time because they didn't love their neighbor as themselves. And since they could not love one another as their teacher instructed them, they died in a plague, it was called.

Lio: Did that end the plague, yeah? It's probably corona-related plague, but we cannot confirm that. First of all, we keep talking about Jew being a desire. Being a desire towards unity and here again you have this person who has this desire who displays the same attitude just like Abraham who was not a...

Seth: Jew. This is before religion too. Right, we were just, there were different tribes. These people came together from all the tribes. They had this desire. They were called Jew.

Lio: They were called Jews because of the desire to unite for unity. They were called Israel because of that desire to go straight towards the creation. That's the premise, right? That's the premise of this entire nation. And when they're doing it, somehow the system rewards them, sustains them, maintains them. When they don't do it, they suffer, yet they don't disappear. They simply get pushed into fulfilling their mission. And here is another guy who comes with the same simple rule. The great rule in Hebrew, by the way, is the word klal, which means kol, inclusive. So klal means it includes everything. It's not simply a principle. It includes all the details. So you can get to all the details by keeping that rule, the klal, or you can get to it by following all the details. Either way, the whole and the particular are the same. So here you have the simple rule, and yet for 2,000 years following that, it's relegated to the side of the Torah study.

Seth: I would say to this day it's still relegated to the side of Torah study.

Lio: That's what I'm saying. So this guy comes and says, right, he had the most students, 24,000 students. He says, this is the rule. Do that. And yet we do everything but that.

Seth: But every day I wake up in the morning, right? And I think to myself, before Corona, you'd get up in the morning, okay, I have to pay my mortgage. You get up in the morning, I have to feed my kids. I'm not getting up in the morning and thinking, unfortunately. Before Corona. Now, of course, I've changed and I'm only thinking about you. But I didn't get up before Corona and say to myself, you know, today I need to get up and how can I love Lio? How can I take care of Lio's needs?

Lio: The reverse is also true. I guarantee to you, Hitler didn't get up in the morning and think, ah, I'm going to be an evil guy today. No, he genuinely believed he was doing good for humanity, for his people. Nobody gets up in the morning thinking I'm going to be a satanic antisemite. No. Everybody gets up thinking they’re doing the best as they see, feel, believe, right? And yet,

Seth: Somehow we are all missing out in this world. I just want to make a break for a second. I don't know if anybody else hears Lio or if it's just me hearing him kind of with the weird connection. He is, by the way, in exile in

Lio: Israel.

Seth: This time he's in exile in Israel. He can't leave because of the virus and he's on some kind of makeshift set. So I just want our listeners to know that if they hear limited supplies. Most of

Lio: The checks.

Seth: You could see Lio holding his microphone taped to the top of a pen. I don't give up everything.

Lio: Where were we?

Seth: Nobody wakes up in the morning saying that they're going to do it, wanting to be evil.

Lio: And yet even the Talmud, those books, they do talk about those students of Rabbi Akiva who did not keep that. Even his own students were not able to keep that rule of love, and they let unfounded hatred plague them. It's funny they're using that word, right? That's the plague. It's a community spread of hate instead of love. But it's not in vain, right? Five of them survived, and they wrote the Zohar, the Mishnah, the Talmud. These are the foundation of all of Jewish lore, I guess, including the internality of the

Seth: Book of Zohar with the internality of the Torah. Without the writings of these five students who survived, there would be no Jews today. There would be no knowledge of what Jews brought. There would be no way to bring this unity and peace to the world.

Lio: That's the question. Are we bringing peace to the world? I don't know, Seth.

Seth: We are.

Lio: No, we're good. We're going to be on the spaceship when it leaves. That's okay. I'm sorry to bring politics into it, but it's such a fascinating topic. There's a whole, not party, there's a whole bloc, right? The left bloc in Israel was founded in the last couple of years on just a simple premise, which was not, you know, equal pay or better social security. But no, we just had a simple goal to remove the Prime Minister from power. Anything that will get him to do that. That was your political agenda. What do you promise our people? Not this guy. Wait, but do you have an alternative? No, we got nothing. Just not this guy. So this country that should be the beacon of

Seth: Unity. Is anything but. And unity is precisely, it's not about wiping out somebody else. Unity is precisely connecting above. You be you, I be me, and we connect above the differences. It would be what an example to the entire world. For this tiny little country to show an example of unity, it doesn't mean that the left wipes out the right or the right wipes out the left, but somehow each of them brings what they bring to the table. In that unity, there's some new thing that's born that we don't see when everyone's bickering and fighting and killing each other down below.

Lio: Now this is a golden opportunity to try it when you have this common enemy, so to speak, ravaging through the people. You want to bring people together; you want to unite everything. No, people are still interested in pursuing whatever they call justice. It's like,

Lio: I don't care,

Lio: You know, whatever the guy on top does. They're all corrupt bastards. No one can tell me otherwise. You don't become a politician by being a good person. So let's agree on that at least. Let's unite around that concept. Those guys have a terrible job now. They have to wake up in the morning and make decisions for the country, and everybody just wants to kill them if they don't deliver. It's very stressful. All they want to do is just build another summer house, and suddenly they have to actually save the country. It's terrible.

Seth: The time that the nation unites, you know, you can have the right against the left, but if there's like an antif or if there's some kind of war, the country unites, and there's like brotherhood. And then the enemy goes away, and then the people start fighting again. It's exactly what we've been reading about in the book.

Lio: The good news is that there was a 30% decline in the number of people killed on the roads, and there's less terror attacks. So clearly the Corona has done something good for the Middle

Lio: East.

Lio: But I don't think it's a sustainable strategy.

Seth: The Corona's not sustainable. I don't think so. It's not going to help. Here we are. Here's The Jew Function. There's a mission here. What is the mission here? Because now we're crystallizing what it is. We told this whole story of the history, and we're really coming to some kind of pinnacle moment here.

Lio: After this episode, we're going to fast forward about a thousand years. Maybe more. This is kind of the last time that we or the Jews of that time had an opportunity, had a chance to reclaim their unity, their role. Rabbi Akiva's death kind of seals that episode. And then after that moment in time, everything just plunges into darkness. And I mean, it was really

Seth: Dark. So the temple is destroyed during Rabbi Akiva's time, right? And then he... there's the famous

Lio: When he was young. Remember, he was born 50 CE, the temple was destroyed 70 CE. And after that, there were a couple of other revolts.

Seth: Right. So his students were in hiding when they wrote the Zohar. But there's that story that he tells when he laughs at the destruction of the temple, because

Lio: That's an interesting one that you're getting into, like commentary, the secrets of Torah, which I don't know if we're

Lio: Permitted to

Lio: Pay great. Just a nice thing that I've heard is that the destruction of something is the birth of something new. It does give me hope, you know, looking at the world today. The sensation of destruction, of doom and gloom and crisis everywhere, and we can't go to work the way we used to, we can't go to school the way we used to, we can't commute to work the way we used to, we can't harass each other the way we used to. I think it's maybe an opportunity. That's a hope that this destruction is allowing us to enter into something new. The word crisis, we know, means that little

Lio: In

Lio: Hebrew, it's the birth stool that the woman sits on to give birth. And even in Chinese,

Lio: Mmm,

Lio: Coincidence, crisis spelled the same as opportunity.

Lio: Really

Lio: There's something here. There is something here. If the temple was the symbol of unity, but it only served the people of Israel, now we have a chance to build a global temple. Which means it

Seth: Will probably have to be virtual.

Lio: Not talking about bricks. No, not talking about bricks. We're talking about living in this network of connections governed by this rule: love your neighbor

Lio: As yourself.

Lio: Again, a principle, not a moral paradigm.

Seth: Let's read the end of this chapter here. The land that was intended to foster a nation built on love of others ejected its people precisely because they had become a symbol of baseless hatred. As such, they were unworthy of statehood, people, or sovereignty. Officially, they have retained the title Jews, but the essence of Jewishness, which lies in the tenet, love your neighbor as yourself, was no longer existent in them. They broke the vow they had made some 17 centuries earlier to be as one man with one heart, that was at Mount Sinai, and project that oneness to the world so that humanity would be as one as well. And once they broke it, they stopped being a nation and regressed into a collection of strangers who bear the same name, Jew. Today, Jews come together only when the hatred of the world compels them. Now that the world blames them for everything that is wrong and painful, this hatred keeps this fold alive. Without the nation's animosity, we would have ceased to exist many generations ago.

Lio: But we will see that nature will simply not let us disappear quietly into the darkness. We have to do something. And if we don't do it, we pay a heavy toll.

Seth: So we have people listening to the podcast, what do we have to

Lio: Do? Well, you have to subscribe, like, join us on Twitter.

Seth: I was speaking of first of all,

Lio: Send Jio, Spiegel. See Jio. Well, I don't know if money's gonna be any good. I heard from what's his name, Escobar was, no, not Escobar, El Chapo, when he was running away from the law he had like two million dollars in cash on him, and they ended up burning half of it to keep warm. Just burn the hundreds. They burn better. Maybe that's what we can do with the money right now. We don't need money, Seth. We don't care about money. We care about uniting the world.

Music: Come on, people, gather round. Above this time and space. Come on, people, gather round. Let's find a hiding place.

Music: Come on, people, gather round. The circle awaits. Come on, people, gather round.

Music: Free your mind, your heart will kick the beat. Let's all sing together.

Lio: So get up

Music: On your feet. Complete in the circle, come on. Complete in the circle, unplay. Complete in the circle, let the love shine night and day. Complete in the circle, come my way. Complete in the circle. Circle, unbreakable, complete in the circle. Let the love shine not

Seth: To end. That's what we want to do. Unite all humanity. Let's try.

Lio: Let's try. And now this is a perfect time now. Everybody's at home. You have plenty of time to think. Let's do that. Let's do that. So,

Seth: Where are we going from here?

Lio: So, next week we're going to fast forward about 1,000 years into the future. Spain. Yeah, the Spanish Inquisition, it's going to be blood, more blood. But there's going to be more interesting patterns to follow. No, it's going to be exciting. It's the expulsion of the Jews, the discovery of America. We're coming closer to this.

Seth: So we're coming into, we're going to see Spain, right? And then already we're now many chapters, we're four chapters into the book, we can start to see some patterns developing, right? We start to see something happening here. Each time there's a nation that's kind of the pinnacle of civilization at the time. There's the Jews right along with them. Seems like each time, well, not seems like, I mean, what we're discovering through history and through this book with all of these, you know, 600 historical references, I mean, footnotes pointing out the accuracy of all these things that the Jews by not uniting this other force, we talked about these two parallel forces that are moving through history together: the development. I don't know if you want to call it the ego, but the arts and the culture and the politics and the power and all of these things, the cultures from Egypt to Greece to Persia to Rome, and now we're going to come to Spain. Every time you notice, it's not just like there was also, by the way, you can see in my book, many, many people, small. Other people also hated on the Jews, but these big calamities, it's always the big civilization. Egypt. There was no bigger civilization at the time. Greece, no bigger civilization at the time. It's not like there was a giant civilization and then some other one. No, the biggest civilization at the time, that's where all our holidays come from. That's where each of you know, I mean, basically pick every single great civilization in history and we have a holiday affiliated with it when they tried to kill us. But like literally every single one.

Lio: They can't. They won't. The system won't allow it. It does allow a great deal of

Seth: Suffering. More than that, though. What do we need to do to end the cycle?

Lio: I don't know. We got to listen

Seth: To

Lio: I want to know now. I'm gonna read the I can't wait another 12 episodes. We read it until people get it. We already revealed it in

Lio: Chapter 4. I love it. It's very simple. I don't know. Rabbi Akiva, love your friend as yourself. How difficult is that? Actually, you know, we didn't touch on it. Maybe next week. Right? There's Rabbi Akiva's complete rule, then there's like the half-rule.

Lio: Yeah.

Lio: When the convert came to, the proselyte came to Hillel, one of the students asked, What do I have to do?

Seth: First, just don't hurt others. Don't do to

Lio: Stay at home. Everybody you don't like

Seth: To go

Lio: Home to you.

Seth: Yeah, yeah. Everybody go home.

Lio: Don't hurt anybody. Stop polluting. Whatever you hate,

Seth: Stop trying to take over everyone else's business. Just stop everybody's stuff. That's halfway to love your neighbor as yourself. Just that, what you don't... what does he say exactly? You know, the thing that you don't like. Don't

Lio: Exactly

Seth: Yeah, that's like a discernment there. That's like the coronavirus step. It's like just stop hurting everybody else.

Lio: Yeah, you don't like being hurt? Stop hurting the planet and everyone in it. Very simple. On that note, at the Jew Function on Facebook, on Twitter, on SoundCloud, on Spotify, on iTunes. Basically everywhere.

Lio: Shalom from New Jersey

Lio: I love you, big hug from Israel, and wash your hands well.