w/ Dr. Naya Lekht, the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy

Lio: Hello and welcome to TheJewFunction. I'm Lio and I'm joined by Seth, my co-host. There he is. We have a beautiful show today for you. First of all, if you haven't subscribed to TheJewFunction channel, please do so. You can catch TheJewFunction on YouTube, on Spotify, obviously. But you'll also find clips on Instagram, on X, on Facebook, on TikTok. Any future platform, we'll be there. So if you haven't left us a nice review, please do it because it helps the algorithm. And if you want to talk to us, drop us a line. We're ready to talk to anyone and everyone about this persistent issue of antisemitism.

Today we have a great talk. We actually wanted to speak to this particular person and our producer was able to get her and she agreed to come on the show. And this is great because every once in a while we love to talk to people who are actually out there fighting antisemitism with their bare knuckles and not just talking about it, not just writing academic papers about it, but are trying to do something. We'll see if what she's doing is successful or not. We'll see what's her connection to antisemitism, if she has a good answer for what is a Jew. We'll see all of that.

We're joined by a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, ISGAP for short, and she works on modern antisemitism and how it hides in academic language and activist movements and cultural narratives—some of the things that you've heard on this show often. She also has a course, I hope she's still running it, it's called "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Jew?" And she'll tell us about it. And she also just recently started a new initiative called Stop Anti-Zionism, which we'll talk about as well. So without further ado, I'd like to invite Dr. Naya Lekht.

Naya: Hi, guys. Thanks for having me. Good morning.

Lio: So what brings you to TheJewFunction? No, I'm just kidding. What I wanted to ask, because I saw some of the things—why would someone get involved with fighting antisemitism? It's such a thankless job. And I don't seem to see that we're making any real progress. In fact, the more we fight it, the stronger it gets. So what brought you into this world? Maybe give us a little background, how you found yourself as a research fellow at ISGAP.

Naya: Sure, great big questions. Okay, so to answer them, I'm going to take a few steps back. I was born in the former Soviet Union. And I came to this country, to America, when I was a child, to Los Angeles. I was about six years old. So it's important to say that I didn't really experience the Soviet state. However, I was raised by parents who did. And those stories that they would tell me—and I'm happy to share some of them—of what they experienced, both street-level antisemitism as well as state-sponsored anti-Zionism by the Soviet Union, left a deep impression on me as a child.

They sent me to a Jewish day school. Now, Soviet Jews—not all, but most Soviet Jews—were very secular and atheist. And I will say that my family was pretty not observant, but they had a very strong sense of Jewish history and Jewish memory. And my parents sent me to a Jewish day school growing up. And again, I never really experienced any form of antisemitism growing up, but I heard about what my parents went through.

My grandfather spoke with me often. He's from Poland. He survived the Holocaust by fleeing to the Soviet Union. His whole family was killed in Baranowice, Poland at that time. So you have to understand—here I am as a child hearing these stories. I become this vessel of a sense of deep responsibility for my people. I just become very aware that the Jewish people have a collective story.

So I go to college in the early 2000s up in Northern California to UC Santa Cruz. And it was 2001, 2002. It was right after 9/11. And the university had just shifted overnight. Right away, there was anti-American discourse, rhetoric, as well as anti-Israel discourse, which is anti-Zionist discourse. And if it wasn't for my parents, who told me what they did and educated me, I don't think I would have been able to decode this anti-Israel ideology that masks itself, as you said in your introductory remarks, in human rights language and political discourse. I wouldn't have understood it.

Why do I say that? Because unfortunately, American Jews—and I'm not saying this in a way to criticize Jews in America, I feel they're my fellow brothers and sisters—but they were very slow to recognizing the threat of this ideology from the Soviet Union.

So you asked me, why is it that I do this? I went to college, I studied literature and history, I pursued a PhD in Russian literature. I wanted to be a professor of Russian literature. I think that if there wasn't the level of anti-Zionism and antisemitism that was surging, I think I would have done that. I think that most people don't want to be in the battle. Most people want to live a peaceful life.

But seeing what I was seeing and seeing the American Jewish community struggle by not being able to identify, articulate, confront the problem—I felt, well, it's funny, I always say this now: American Jews played a huge role in liberating Soviet Jews. And I feel that it is our time, the Soviet Jews who are now here, to give back to American Jews and help them. I see myself kind of as part of that chain of Jewish memory, of the Jewish people. I want to help them. That's what really drives me.

It's not so much that I want to fight antisemitism or anti-Zionism as much as I want to unite the Jewish people. I do think that when Jews fight together, when they are united and they do something, it's their purpose. The Jewish people have many purposes, the commandments. But I do think that when you correctly identify the threat and you fight it, you're actually shining a light to the rest of the world.

So that's really in a nutshell what drives me. I think that if there wasn't any serious threat, I think I would be teaching at a university. I mean, I was teaching at a university. I left and I could explain later why, but I think I would have just taught classes in literature. I love Tolstoy. I love Chekhov. I love Turgenev, the great 19th century golden age literature. I think that's what I would be doing.

But as a Jewish person—and I hate this as a Jew, I hate it—but okay, fine. As a Jewish person, when I was seeing the surge of this ideology of anti-Zionism becoming unmanageable—and it was unmanageable by the very people, the American Jews who had decided to be our leaders, the legacy organizations—they weren't able to confront it. So that's when I stepped up. And others stepped up. I'm not the only one.

Lio: And do you concern yourself with the roots of it? Or did you concern yourself with why it's happening? Or did you just roll up your sleeves and just jump in? We're going to fight. We're going to educate people on the history. We're going to do this, do that. Was there ever in that trajectory for you, and maybe the people that you work with—we know some of the people, we're familiar with some of the people, other people working at ISGAP—were there serious discussions about, okay, what's happening? Why is it still happening? What are we doing wrong?

Naya: Absolutely, of course. I think that any serious study of any ideological threat must trace its genealogy in order to understand it. So once more, to answer your question, you asked about my trajectory. I think when I was 18, 19 years old, I really was just rolling up my sleeves. I wasn't really concerning myself with the genealogy of this ideological threat to the Jews under anti-Zionism or antisemitism.

But yes, today, as somebody who considers myself really a student of Jewish history, a scholar of anti-Jewish—I call it, I don't say antisemitism or really anti-Zionism. I believe it's anti-Jewish movements. That's how I talk about it. I consider myself a scholar of anti-Jewish movements because there are three dominant movements of Jew hatred: anti-Judaism, antisemitism, and anti-Zionism. And we can discuss all three and I could explain what I mean by that.

But absolutely, at ISGAP, a lot of work is done on the front of tracing the threat back to the Muslim Brotherhood, Qatar, of course right now, Iran as well. I participate in the Summer Oxford Program, which brings together about 50 to 60 scholars every year for an intensive two-week study. We hear from experts, from global experts, from Soviet anti-Zionism to Muslim sources, Islamist sources of antisemitism, to why has this ideology mutated and become so dominant in the West?

The Soviet Union fell apart. And the funny thing is, once it fell apart, all of it—all of their ideology, all of the anti-Zionism, the phantom legs of that anti-Zionism—also collapsed, but it migrated. And it's like we're all living in this Soviet reality, but we're in the West, in a free country, in free society. So it's fascinating to see how does something that was created by a totalitarian regime find such fertile ground in liberal societies? What's going on there?

Seth: What is going on there?

Naya: Well, what's going on there is that the liberal societies have been captured by totalitarianism. They are actually functioning—on the whole, United States of America is a democratic, free country. But there are certain institutions like the institutions of higher education who are actually now functioning like totalitarian regimes. Cancel culture, right? They're canceling people. This is what the Soviets did. This is what all totalitarian regimes do. When you don't tout the party line, you are purged. This is the same behavior.

There is a correct way to interpret the world and an incorrect way to interpret the world. In the Soviet Union, every student had to take a class on the history of Marxist theory. Every student had to take it because it was teaching Soviet citizens how to correctly interpret the world. That's happening in our K-12 now and in higher education. There is a correct way to interpret conflict, and it's through the paradigm of the oppressor and oppressed. I think you guys are aware of that. So the very strange thing is that while we're living in this free society, we have institutions that are actually functioning like totalitarian regimes.

Lio: That's the insidious nature of the problem, because they're taking advantage of the soft democracy to actually undermine democracy. That's the paradox. If we look—go ahead.

Seth: If we look at the humanities' development—like if you were to take, say, humanity and say humanity is like one person—if you take one person's development, learning to walk, being born is not fun, right? You're in this warm, everything is perfect situation and then you're born into the world. Maybe someone slaps you as soon as you're born and it's cold and you're hungry and you're pooping on yourself. It's not nice. Then you have to learn to walk. Then you get your first fever. Then you become a teenager, you go to school, you make some friends—all good. Then you become a teenager, right? You have pimples all over, again everything's awkward again. Then you leave the house. You've been taken care of, if you were lucky, by your parents your whole life. Then you leave the house and now, from people feeding you your whole life, now you're in the world. Now you got to feed yourself, you have to pay your bills.

So we look at just—and then you get married and there's all kinds of challenges around that and raising kids—we look at just one person's life. It's not simple. So if we go, "Ah, why is walking so hard?" or "Why are the teenage years so hard?"—we don't say that because it's normal, what happens to everyone.

If we look at humanity the same—you start with caveman, I'm leaving the religious "we're only six thousand years old" out of it for the time being—let's just even look at the progress of civilization. There was no electricity, there was no running water, many of the modern things we have today. If you look at humanity's development, there was slavery in basically every place in the world. It's also not without its problems and troubles.

And if you look from the outside at any frame of the movie, you can say, "Oh, that's bad, that's bad." But if you look at the whole movie of where humanity came from—some cave-dwelling savage—to the Messianic vision of the Jewish people, that everyone will live in one brotherhood together and "my house would be a house"—we're somewhere along that path, right?

It's actually not so weird that there's wars and people hate each other and all these things. What can happen though is if there was maybe just a small group of intelligent people who maybe received the Torah and had a lot of time to go through many different civilizations and refine themselves, maybe they can offer the world a crash course on how to speed this process up.

But just sitting back and saying, "Well, why is walking so hard? Why are the teenage years so hard? Why is there a problem here?"—it's kind of normal that we expect, as humanity is developing, we're going to have problems, right?

You had mentioned earlier that you saw when the Jews get together, they have something special. So let's point to that and see what we have, what have you found that we have, and what happens when we use that special thing that we have? And maybe we can find something in here.

Naya: I think it was Rabbi Soloveitchik. He said that we have a Brit Goral, which is a covenant of fate. Not faith—fate, F-A-T-E. I think when I read that a few years ago, it really sparked in me that Jewish history is backwards and forwards. And I think he captured that very well.

We look back and we interpret the events that happened to the Jewish people, but few of us ask, "And then what's next?" I think that when Rabbi Soloveitchik put forth this idea of a covenant of fate—fate means forward, not back, right? It's a destiny. I think that when the Jewish people unite and start to interpret their past correctly together, they start then moving towards the right direction for the future.

What do I mean by that? I think that one of the biggest tragedies—and again, I'm only speaking about American Jewry because I feel I have a very unique position in that I am from an immigrant family. So I tend to arrive at this moment from both being an American, deeply committed American Jew, but also carrying that legacy of the Jew who lived in the Soviet Union.

And one of the biggest tragedies for American Jewry is that they forgot who they were. They forgot that they are a nation, an Am. They decided to privilege religion over ethnicity and nationhood. This happened, by the way, mostly with the Reform and Conservative Movement, but it still very much exists within the Orthodox movement as well.

I work with many students. We could talk about that later about the youth in general and capturing their pulse. But if you ask them who the Jewish people are, most people say it's a religion. It's a minority. It's a religion.

And the funny thing is, I teach, and one of the things that is central, critical to my teaching is actually saying, no, no, before we became a religion, we were a civilization, we're a nation, we're an Am, we're a B'nai, we're actually tribal.

And that is the big—why I say that's a tragedy—because when you forget that, you will miss, and I keep on using that word today, anti-Zionism. Because look, there was anti-Judaism, which was attack of Jews on their religion; antisemitism, assault on their supposed race; and anti-Zionism is an assault on Jewish national origin. But if you don't have an identity that's deeply rooted in national origin, you're going to miss it.

But there's something that Bret Stephens identified, which is the October 8th Jew. And the October 8th Jew suddenly woke up because the American Jew has had a deep vacation from history and came back. Very deep. Very long, rather. And it's beautiful. American Jew is a story of success, right? And all of a sudden, the success now, they've been told that they're guilty, that they're white privileged, et cetera.

And October 8th, it became a catalyst where I see now American Jews uniting. And so you asked, Seth, well, what happens when we unite? What happens when we unite is that we have a sense of who we are. And I said earlier in my remarks that we forgot who we are. And so when you start remembering who you are, you're able to then achieve this Soloveitchik idea of a covenant of fate, of knowing where you're going.

Where are we going? What is our purpose in this world? Right now, everyone thinks our purpose is to fight antisemitism, and that's great. But let's go. And then what? What is our real purpose as the Jewish people in this world? I think that we're not there yet in the Jewish community. I think what we're doing is we're all running around trying to—

Seth: Did you just ask the big question? What is our real purpose as the Jewish people in this world?

Lio: Don't rub your hands in satisfaction. Wait a second. Let's put a pin on it. I want to hear the rest of the story first, and then I have a question.

Naya: Well, I was just wrapping up and I was just saying that because we have forgotten who we are, but the Jew hatred reminds us who we are. Then we unite. We remember. It's cyclical. This isn't unique. This happens in history, in Jewish history over and over. We remember who we are, but I guess when we start forgetting, when things get really good and comfortable, when we get that vacation from history.

And I guess what I'm trying to tell you is that what I would love to see from the Jewish community beyond just fighting antisemitism is reclaiming, with deep pride, the Jewish story—the Jewish story of peoplehood, of nationhood. That's what I would want.

Lio: Okay. So let's put it on the shelf here. We'll get back to it very, very soon. I want you to, specifically because you actually have done your research, to just share with us how you view the difference between these different antis, right? Anti-Judaism, antisemitism, anti-Zionism. We also have our own take on it, but I'm curious to see what you think of those different forms of antipathy.

Naya: Yes, great question. So one of the biggest—when we lost our sovereignty in Judea, the Romans kicked us out. We were then in Galut or Diaspora for about 2,000 years. This 2,000 years is marked by history of this, as you say, antipathy. And there are three dominant eras of this antipathy: anti-Judaism, antisemitism, and anti-Zionism.

Anti-Judaism is Christian-based. It's how the Christian world imagined the Jew, constructed the Jew. You see, all three eras, all three movements are basically a demonization project. Over and over and over, we get demonized into a villain.

I teach my students that if I had to explain to people what is Jew hatred, it's a demonization project. But how do you construct a demon? That's really the deeper question and the more important question. What you do is you take what is moral, what society has identified to be moral, and the Jew is constructed in opposition as violating the tenets of that morality.

So in the era of anti-Judaism, we were constructed quite literally as demons and as Christ killers. That was the libel—deicide, Christ killers. We were seen as an obstacle to salvation. That is how we were constructed as demons, literally and metaphorically. Because dominant society in Europe, medieval society in Europe, was Christian.

Society evolves and what society deems to be moral goes through an evolution, kind of a mutation, if you will. That's why Rabbi Jonathan Sacks said that antisemitism is like a virus because it tends to mutate. And when he said that—this was, by the way, the year 2017—it kind of sparked in me an interest. Okay, well, why does it mutate? What is it about this type of hatred that mutates?

Well, the reason it mutates actually is because what civilizations consider moral tends to shift. So in the post-Christian world, in post-Enlightenment Europe, the age of reason, science, rationale—a new morality emerged around race science. This idea that human beings can be categorized based on racial features. And that sounds very strange to us today. That sounds extremely unprogressive and immoral, as it should be. But it was very moral. In fact, in universities in Germany, people studied, they classified human beings based on their racial features.

So the Jew was constructed once again in the era of antisemitism as a demon, this time violating the tenets of purity of race. That was how we were constructed as demons. Well, today, nobody wants to be an antisemite because we've correctly developed the immune response to that second variant of Jew hatred, antisemitism.

Now, it took a catastrophe, a huge catastrophe to compel the world to have a moral realignment. And that's also something I want to talk about in a bit—that actually Jew hatred forces the world to have a moral realignment.

Today, in the era of anti-Zionism, the way that morality is conceived is around the idea of human rights. Today's church is the United Nations, right? If you're following my analogy from anti-Judaism, where in the church the Jews were constructed as demons—the Jews are constructed as demons in the United Nations, in bodies that preserve human rights.

The world has cast certain things as evil. What are they? Racism is evil. Apartheid is evil. Nazism is evil. Colonialism is evil. Decolonization, good. So in this era, once again, the Jew finds himself constructed as a villain, violating the morality. But it's actually a very toxic morality, by the way. We're going to have another moral realignment.

And I'm convinced, by the way, that once in the future, historians, human beings look back at this era of anti-Zionism, they will also think that it was wrong to categorize human beings based on good and bad, based on whether they're white or non-white, oppressor versus oppressed. It's another categorization of good and evil, just like in the era of antisemitism.

So what unites all three of these eras, really, is that the Jew finds himself as the central villain. Jew hatred is very complicated. It's not just "othering" or scapegoating or just a hate. That's why I don't like to use that term. It's not just a hate. It's a virtuous hate. People who are infected by this feel that they are cleansing the world. They did so in the era of anti-Judaism, antisemitism, and today, because Israel violates the purity of human rights. Jews violated the purity of race. Judaism violated the purity of religion.

That's how I conceive of these three, and that's what I teach and write about.

Lio: By the way, I'm curious—in that chain, which was beautifully explained, you mentioned that the Jews at some point, when Europe became toxic in the Middle Ages, they found refuge in the Islamic world and the Ottoman Empire, and they lived there pretty comfortably. In fact, sending letters to their brothers from Germany to come over because it's actually much nicer and safer in Turkey and there's a safe route to Israel from there.

And it's only later, it's only in the middle of the 20th century that the awakening in the Arab world and the Muslim Brotherhood and all those movements started to push against the Jew, which was, by the way, also extremely dominant and in great positions of power all throughout the Ottoman Empire, in Egypt especially. And then this new form of Jewish hatred was also being exported—or rather imported—into the West as well, on top of all these other things. Just to add to the mix. Is that in your...

Naya: Yes and no. I think that with Islam, it's a little bit more complicated. I think that while it is true that a Jew in the Ottoman Empire, probably in the 19th century, fared better than a Jew in Eastern Europe in the Pale of Settlement, it's important to kind of step back and look at Muslim history.

For instance, Khaybar. What they chant—they chant a lot, "Khaybar, Khaybar, Jew." Yahud, Khaybar is a huge massacre committed by, I believe, in the 12th century.

Lio: No, earlier. That was by Muhammad when he just established himself and he moved from—

Naya: So when they chant this, it's—I don't want to just paint this kind of saccharine story of—

Lio: Oh, no, no. It's never—Jews, it's never comfortable for too long. Who's that? Jackie Mason said, Jews always are going to see a doctor or coming back from a doctor. There's never really a relax. In the US, which enjoyed, as you said, a long period of—as some guests call it—the life in the Golden Medina, even that is not that long of a time when you look at the big picture.

Okay, so now I want to challenge—well, not challenge, but maybe sort of add a twist to everything you just shared with us. Because we feel that Jewish hatred—maybe the word hatred is even wrong. I mean, the hate is an expression. It's an outward expression. What's that?

Naya: You're right. The hatred is an expression of the demonization.

Lio: Of the demonization? And even the demonization sits on a deep need of a person to relate to the Jew in a certain way. Now, where does that come from? That's a big question.

What we're saying and what historic patterns are showing and what the Jewish sages are writing about—let us, and again, it's not me and Seth, we're speaking from the shoulders of giant Jewish sages that wrote throughout history all the way up to the 20th century. Yehuda Ashlag, Baal HaSulam, and you mentioned Soloveitchik, and all the big sages—they all talk about it in these terms: that this external hate, which takes the form of demonization, which is then expressed as anti-Judaism, antisemitism, anti-Zionism, is actually a reaction to a certain conduct.

Seth: So you said Jew hatred causes the world to have a realignment.

Lio: Yeah. So you want to go into that? Okay, I want to finish my question. I actually see that what you're speaking and what Naya is saying is like these two—

Seth: Yeah, I was gonna marry the two.

Lio: Because, you know, it's interesting. You're talking about those things in almost objective terms, right? Like the system has to realign itself. We call it, we say the system has to rebalance itself.

And when we look at—which is what we're called, TheJewFunction—because we're talking about the function of certain components in the human network, right? Like there's a Jew function, there's a Gentile function, and you need both of them.

The Jews—in the network, you need to have hubs that serve as these nexuses of information and resources and money and ideas and influence. And then you have all those other nodes. And the system cannot survive if you start to kill off the hubs. That's why the system will never allow the complete elimination of the Jews. Hence we defy all statistics.

But the flip side of this coin is that the reason why the network applies this pressure on the hubs is whenever the hubs don't conduct themselves in a certain way. If I, as a hub, am not aligned with the program of the system, there's a problem.

So as long as the system is egoistic and people need to be fulfilled egoistically—food, sex, money, power, knowledge, all those things—the Jew is there to provide that fulfillment, is actually strategically placed and is being restricted, confined to be exactly what the system needs to provide for all those needs of people.

But as the system starts to change—and there are moments in history where it happens, and now we are going through a major change in the system—now the system wants something else. It wants people to connect. It wants people to start working as a network, not as egoistic individuals.

And let me ask you—yeah, sorry, go ahead.

Seth: No. So that's the end of the story. Well, I'm just connecting to this moral realignment idea.

Before you get to the final one here, what were the realignments that happened from the anti-Judaism and the antisemitism? And then let's pick up where we are here before we get to the third one. Because those things happened, how did that realign the world?

Naya: Okay, so my thesis works and it doesn't work at the same time. Because my argument is that a catastrophe, a big catastrophe, forces this moral realignment. And we can identify that in the era of the second variant, antisemitism. But see, there isn't a huge catastrophe in the era of anti-Judaism. There isn't this one massacre.

What happens is it gradually kind of erodes because a new kind of idea emerges—the idea of enlightenment, the idea of tolerance, the idea of equality. These new ideas replace Christianity. But that is because fundamentally anti-Judaism is very different from antisemitism and anti-Zionism. Because anti-Judaism wasn't really against Jews. It was against Judaism.

So for instance, the big theologians of the era of anti-Judaism—St. Augustine, Martin Luther—they wrote, interestingly, that we must preserve the Jews, but we must de-Judaize our civilization. So there was—which you don't have in the era of antisemitism. You don't want to preserve the Jews, right? In the era of anti-Judaism, you could still save yourself by conversion.

So it takes a little bit of unpacking the era of anti-Judaism to see that it wasn't so much that the Jews were a problem. It was the Jewish faith. The Christians had basically gone to war with the Jewish faith. So the problem was Judaism. That's why it's the era of anti-Judaism.

St. Augustine wrote a very important homily, which was called the Witness Doctrine, in which he said that the Jew must remain, but remain in eternal suffering. So keep the Jew, oppress the Jew, but make sure that the Jew suffers. Why? Because the Jew didn't accept Jesus Christ, and therefore his suffering will function as a witness to the Christians. This is what happens when you don't accept Jesus Christ. You live in perpetual suffering.

So, of course, when we talk about that shift from anti-Judaism to antisemitism, you won't have a major catastrophe because while there were massacres against Jews—Jews were, for instance, burnt alive in the 12th century in a big tower in the town of Norwich. There were terrible massacres against Jews. Blood libel, which was also born in the 12th century in Europe, basically compelled or birthed an era of deep anti-Jewish violence. But what you won't find in the anti-Judaism era is this one kind of genocidal—

Seth: That's okay. We can paint in broad strokes. We want to see the development of humanity. What are these realignments that happen through—

Naya: So in the era of antisemitism, which I identified as the era of understanding morality, understanding what is good based on kind of a race science—as I said before, classifying people as good and evil based on racial features. There's the Aryans at the top, the Slavs, the Gypsies, the Arabs, and of course, the Jews at the very, very bottom.

What happened was, after the Holocaust, the world had to take a really hard look at itself. And I believe that they had to reject antisemitism. They had to reject this demonization of the Jew based on race. But it also forced the world to reject race as well, this idea of race.

Well, what are the governing ideas today? How do we understand good and bad in the world that we live in today?

Lio: Brown and white.

Naya: Brown and white. Okay, so right. Who is a colonizer? Who's the colonized? Who's the—right. This is actually a very toxic way of looking at the world, I believe.

So what's going to happen, I believe, is that once anti-Zionism will be denounced—and I do think it's going to be another catastrophe, and October 7th was not that catastrophe, and I can explain why—there may be a time where society is going to have to look back and think, okay, was this the right way to approach good and bad?

Lio: That's basically what I'm saying. So following on this trajectory, and as Seth said, to bring it back to where I was going, we also think that the Jews play a bigger role in this continuous evolution of the world. Not so much moral. You can say more of a cosmic, spiritual, if you want. Something just an evolution.

I mean, when you look at humanity, as Seth was painting initially that picture of the developing human, humanity is also developing. We are also part of evolution. But what changes is not that we get another head or a tail. It's more internal. Evolution becomes more nuanced. Everything becomes more, right? Technology becomes more nuanced, nano, everything becomes more nuanced.

And so what's developing here is how we relate to each other. That's what's developing. And what's happening inside each person—that inner world is developing.

Naya: I just want to say something, because as you were speaking about networks and your show, the title "Jew function," and what is the function of the Jew—look, you can push back, you can agree or disagree with me, but I'm just going to go way back, even before the three eras.

I think that what Judaism offered the world is completely radical—a rupture from ethical monotheism. Ethical monotheism with a list of things to do: good things to do, bad things to do, do this, mitzvot, right, commandments. This is what you do—positive and negative.

And what I always tell my students is, what person, what civilization wants a list that tells them—wants a mirror, basically, because that really is what the function of the Jew is, is this mirror. Who wants to be told? I think you guys understand. Who wants to be told?

Lio: We have Professor Patterson here, so—

Naya: He's great. He talks about this too, of course.

Lio: The Jew is the mirror, and he doesn't let you stay asleep and unconscious, and so you have to do something about it.

Naya: We're still functioning as the mirror. That's why you're so rightly—right, Lio, you're so right. We're such a statistical—we're an anomaly. It doesn't compute mathematically. We have to exist because our function, among other things, is to be that mirror.

Lio: So we want to take it a step further. We're not just the mirror, because a mirror is—the image of a mirror is inanimate. It just stands there. You see yourself. You can break the mirror, you can run away, you can go face it, but it kind of puts the mirror in a passive state. But it's not what's happening here.

The Jews are actually a microcosm. All of humanity is developing. The Jews were just put in an accelerator, right, since the time of Abraham in Babylon. Some representatives from all the nations gathered around him and like, "We'll do the special, the accelerated route." All the rest of humanity, you go and continue to evolve at your own pace, and we're going to meet you later, right? And the Jews go and evolve.

Seth: You see the Jews evolving alongside Egypt, alongside Greece, alongside Rome. Like every one of our stories, it's a story of humanity. The Jews parallel there.

Lio: Exactly. And why? What's evolving? What are we practicing? We're practicing a new way of relating to one another. That's what's happening here.

All these mitzvot, all those things, are simply a framework designed to take a group of people and help them connect to some higher force in nature. Force of love, they say, they call it. Yashar El—straight to the Creator. That's the root of that word. Israel. Yashar El—straight to the Creator. Or Jew from the word Yehudi—unity. Someone that unifies everything to one thing.

And it's not a moral thing. It's much deeper than that. This is actually a higher form of consciousness, a new way of existing in relation to nature and everything around you. Your whole perception changes. The Jews are like the two-eyed person in the world of the one-eyed man, right? We see depth where others only see a flat picture.

And that scares people. That annoys people. They also see the potential. And so they bring Jews to create some acceleration. So the Jew can be blamed for bringing the bad things to society. And that's why you can't define them. Oh, the revolutionaries? No, they're pacifists. They keep to themselves? No, they assimilate. They're capitalists, communists, right? Because it only depends on how you look at them. It's not—they themselves are not it. We're just the accelerator. And we help society move through the process of growing our egos, becoming bigger egoists.

And now we can talk. We can talk about a new form of connection above that.

And so what we claim here in TheJewFunction is that we're not just a passive mirror. We have to pave the way. We have to show each time, not simply a mirror, but almost like a more corrected image of the viewer, that the viewer can now align themselves to it.

It's like, what's that new mirror set, the one that you work out with, that vertical mirror?

Seth: Yeah, I know what you're talking about.

Naya: Yeah, the name—

Lio: Yeah, yeah. Well, whatever the brand name is, but you know that you stand before it and there's another person there and you have to follow their movement and they're like this buffed up instructor and you see your reflection, but you see it on them as well. So you're like, "Oh, I'm going to be this," right? It's not simply—so it's providing a mirror of the current state, but also an image of that future, of that destiny, that fate.

Naya: Let me ask you then a question, just to challenge you a little bit.

Lio: Okay, great, finally.

Naya: If that would be so, if that would be the truth—and it's a compelling idea—but if that would be the truth, then why would societies reject that? Why wouldn't they want to say, "Oh, that's the better version of myself. I want to do that"?

Lio: Because we're not being that better version all the time. We're running away from it because it is a big list.

Naya: We're not always appearing correctly.

Lio: We're not expressing it. And especially—and we can talk about October 7th, because I know you have something to say about it—but October 7th was a great, terrible example, a terrifying example of the amount of disunity that almost tore this country apart.

It wasn't simply argument, like the Talmud is full of argument. The problem is not argument. The problem is that above the argument, you can then say, "Okay, we're done arguing for today. Let's go grab a beer." That part was missing. Okay, we can argue, but let's sit around the Shabbat table. We're family.

No, families were breaking apart. I don't know if you were in Israel on October 6th. It was terrible. I haven't been to the Second Temple, but it was going in that direction. People were really going against each other. And that necessitated an alignment of the system. And that alignment is usually very violent.

Seth: Sometimes it could just be—so we talked about the development of the human. We talked about the development of humanity. If you want to really zoom out and look at the development of Earth, Earth was a ball of fire, then it was a ball of ice. It was a lot of back and forth until it balanced and then a crust formed and then eventually some grass starts to grow, right?

But it's also—it's not easy. Because if we don't identify what is the goal of the Jews, or even say we want the Earth to be this beautiful place with waterfalls and stuff—okay, well, it's a cold, dark, empty space. I got a plan. It's going to take 5 billion years. It's going to heat it, cool it, right? Eventually, a lot of things are going to happen.

We have to understand what's the goal we want. If we want a goal that everyone is going to love everyone and we're going to—that nobody has to starve. There's plenty of money, right? I mean, there's trillions and trillions of dollars. There's no shortage of money on the planet. There's no shortage of food on the planet. There's no shortage of brains.

So let's define a goal. It's not—so on the one hand, we need a group who can do it and it will attract a lot of people to them. But also, you say, why? Because it's not such a—

Lio: It's hard work. It's not so easy. No, it's hard work. As we said earlier, that mirror forces you to look at yourself. And many people don't want it.

Seth: But hard work can be fun and it can be wonderful. Like nobody—if a guy is climbing Everest because he loves climbing Everest, it's hard work. But he loves what's happening. So we have to have someone like you who's an educator. We have to educate people to what's the process that humanity is really going through and what's the goal? What's the point?

If we don't have a shared goal, right? If you're sitting with someone, you're fighting about something, you're like, wait a second. This person's goal is completely different than my goal. We're never going to be able to see eye to eye about what's happening here.

Lio: But if the goal is love, then it's all fair. Go crazy. We allow?

Naya: I have to push back.

Lio: Yeah, push, push.

Naya: Just because I'm, again, a student of history, I think anything that offers a utopia—I think human beings are flawed. I think we desperately want to live in the world of the John Lennon song, "Imagine." Imagine there's no borders. There's no crimes. Everybody's, as you say, we end hunger. Human beings are narcissistic. Human beings have egos. Human beings are—okay, you said it.

So anything that promises a utopia, I'm very suspect of.

Seth: Well, let's make some pit stops along the way.

Lio: Hold on, hold on. This is a very good—this is a very good stop. If we were a bunch of rocks and someone said, "Hey, down the line there's a tree in our future," everyone's like, "See, rocks, we don't grow, we don't change. It's just a rock. We maintain our shape. That's what we're good at. We've been doing it for millions of years. Forget about the trees."

Suddenly, somehow, suddenly you get like a coral, which is like—

Seth: Right, a billion years, yeah, it takes a long time, but suddenly you have like a coral, which is some sort of a growing—

Lio: And suddenly you have vegetation. Same thing for animate.

We are at—and by the way, this is not, as we said, it's not our idea. When you read the words of the sages and they explain that this is not about some, "Oh, it'll just happen. We'll just all love each other." No, we saw the '70s revolution and the '60s. It's not enough to just—you have to understand what's stopping you, what's preventing you from reaching that. And you just said it: the human ego.

They call it, in Judaism, in Jewish—the Torah calls it the will to receive in order to receive. It's a desire to receive pleasure at the expense of everything and everyone. That's what's standing. So as long as we share some interest—

Seth: She's bursting.

Naya: No, no. I just—I agree with you. As you're speaking, Jordan Peterson came to mind, where he wrote, he basically wrote 10 lessons of how to improve the world. And actually, it's not about improving the world—

Lio: About improving yourself.

Naya: He says, make your bed. Don't make your bed first.

Lio: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know.

Naya: I remember that. And I think this is the problem with Jews is that we have been taught—I'm telling you, because I went to Reform Conservative Jewish Day School growing up, under the banner of Tikkun Olam. We have taught that we have to fix everything in the world.

Lio: Great. So, say no more. We know. We know. Because our last guest was also like hammering it up.

Seth: We fell into all the pits. We fell into all the holes already.

Lio: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're absolutely right. Therefore, what are we actually going to be looking at if we're trying to fight antisemitism or make any changes? Ourselves.

Naya: Ourselves. I agree with you. I agree with you.

Lio: And so that's—

Naya: But I didn't want to fall into the—I also, Dara Horn wrote an important essay. I don't recall when, but it was about—she calls this the Eicha moment, where she says that the Jewish people tend to fall into another trap, which is blaming themselves for catastrophes. They blame themselves, and this becomes pathological almost.

Lio: But only if you don't understand where it's coming from. In other words—

Naya: And why.

Lio: Yeah, and why. In other words, it's not like to say, "Oh, this could be," as you said, it could be narcissistic. "I'm the source of the world's problems and the world's solution," right? It could sound like that.

You can also say, look, you live in a system. The system needs to move to the next step. The human body starts as a child and it needs to become an adolescent. What has to happen in the middle? Puberty. You need a small group of cells—we call them hormones—to go around the body and make some changes to get to the next step.

Or a caterpillar starts as a caterpillar and then it rots. Everything that works stops working. And it needs a small group of cells—they're called imaginal cells—to start making changes and make it a butterfly.

And so it's always the same story. What's that?

Naya: Incremental, right? I understand.

Lio: No, no, no. It's incremental. And then there's a leap. There's always like a leap, right?

So what we're trying to say is that, A, let's look at ourselves, first of all. Now, if you're uncomfortable—not you personally, but if someone's uncomfortable with the idea that the world's problems are a reflection of our problems—I understand it's a problem. It's hard.

But let's play a thought game, right? A thought exercise. What if this was the case? What if everybody who's yelling, "Death to Jews" and "Gas the Jews," were actually yelling, "Help us, help us, help us. We don't know what we need, but we're suffering here and something is not working. And please, we need help."

Naya: Even Jordan Peterson came here and said—

Lio: 100%.

Naya: That's exactly what they're actually yelling.

Lio: Exactly.

Naya: "Help us, help us."

Lio: Absolutely. Someone said—I heard in another podcast now, or someone said—everybody has a hole in their heart in the shape of God, or whatever that force of love is. And people want love, but they don't know how to get it.

The world is becoming more broken, more egotistical, more individualized, more distorted because of that search for attention and meaning, because people don't have a way out. And here we are, the Jews sitting here, and it's like we have it. Our texts talk about it. And not only are we not doing it, some of us actually go against it, forget it, say we don't even need it. This is some old fairy tale. Don't even teach at a school. They go against people who practice it.

That's the level of—that's what nature has to deal with. Mommy nature, so to speak. When she's seeing the one group that can actually bring change to everything around them. Not by changing the others, but by working on themselves.

So this is where we are.

Naya: I agree. I tend to agree with you. My only kind of pause in all of this is—we started with this as well, when I said about Soloveitchik, the covenant of fate—who are we? What is our purpose? And we're here right now asking that question.

And the problem is that there isn't one answer. And if there is one answer, I'll always be suspect of anything that's orthodox, like in one way of interpreting something. So what is that answer? I don't know. Do you know what that answer is?

Seth: Well, let's say for sure that the answer is going to come from the connection, from our integration and connection. Because we can say in a nutshell, "Love your neighbor as yourself." That's the method to get to whatever this wonderful future is going to look like.

We're not naive. I mean, I guess we are naive utopians, but really we're very practical people. We're not living some bullshit communist dream or commune dream or something like that. Not even close. We tried it. It doesn't work.

So the actual answer of how it's going to happen will happen when we start connecting together. Because the kind of magic—and it would make a great movie if we could somehow figure out how to do this—the answer actually comes from the unity between us. Like, no one, each person—like the Transformers. I don't know, you're probably in Russia, I don't know, but we had this cartoon where all the different, there's like six different guys or whatever and—

Naya: Power Rangers? She knows the Power Rangers or whatever.

Seth: Of course, of course. Oh yeah, that's great. All the guys come together, make one super guy, right? Because I grew up on that.

So the Jews were 12 tribes, they were this, they were that. The whole thing in the Talmud is always Hillel and Shammai and Rav and Shmuel and this one and that one. No one person has the answer. The answer is when we connect together, it will come out of us.

The form that it will take—I mean, the answer is love, but like you said, that's bullshit and I don't believe it and anyone who says they have an answer I can put in my pocket, it's bound to—like Marxism or anything—it's bound to fail, right? That's not realistic.

Lio: I think it goes back to your question. And I think that's why it's so great that you're here. The answer lies in education and educating ourselves on that treasure that we already possess.

We are sitting on thousands of years of sages. So, Rav Kook: "Since we were ruined by unfounded hatred and the world was ruined with us, we will be rebuilt by unfounded love and the world will be rebuilt with us." Just one rabbi, right? And then you start to read the sages. Everybody's talking about the same thing. Different clothings, different forms, trying to speak to that generation about that need to unite.

Every time they just stuck to this ideal, using that framework that was left for them of some external actions—which is a whole other conversation, what those are—but every time we stuck together, things were working out. As we started to move away and go against each other, that's when all the trouble started.

So again, that's just statistical evidence, right? 3,000 years?

Seth: Yes, yes.

Lio: So again, we're saying, okay, we don't know what the answer is, but maybe, maybe history, maybe nature is rubbing our head in that bottle, right? Just to see, okay, look at that.

Now, how do you do it? It's not as simple. Set, set. Okay, love the other. That's the one great mitzvah. That's the rule. That's the klal. That includes everything. Yes, it's easy to say. There's a whole methodology. But we have to first accept it as a people. Be proud that we're sitting on this treasure and first roll our sleeves.

Instead of attacking the antisemite, first let's dig into the treasure. Let's see what we have between us. Yes, we need to keep the enemy at bay. We need to make sure we're not at each other's throats. But we have to ask the question and at least be not afraid to look at what was left to us by some really amazing people.

You can't—not you, but we have people who say, well, the Jews, religious, religion, dude—all of Western values, all of this civilization is built on ideas brought on by these people. So you can't say that they made up some Harry Potter shit in the corner and then gave the world human rights. There's a connection. You haven't seen it, right?

So we're saying there is a connection and there is a great depth and maybe we're not seeing it.

Naya: Again, I don't know what I could add other than agree. I will tell you that I wasn't in Israel prior to October 7th, but I did hear about the intense disunity. And after October 7th, I saw the Jews unite and it was so beautiful.

And I'm not Hashem's—God's secretary, definitely not—but I feel that the worst thing, the worst thing for God, is when we fight each other. It's just the biggest kind of crime that we can do is when we become, as you say, machloket—disagree, disagree, but go to Shabbat dinner together.

And it's hard to practice that because I'll tell you myself, out there on these ideological battlefields, and I look at Jews who embrace causes that harm Jews. And I'm—how can I love that Jew? How can I embrace? It's hard.

Seth: Love them first. Love the easier ones first. We'll get to the hard ones later.

Naya: But how do you practice that fully when you think that your fellow Jew is actually an enemy from within? I've heard that kind of rhetoric.

But, but, but yes. The terrible thing to say, but that silver lining for October 7th was when I witnessed—I teach at a Jewish high school. And I think a week after, the kids stayed on their own, all of them after school, and they sat in circles, embracing each other, crying with each other, singing, praying. And I remember I sat there and I thought, Hashem, are you watching? Are you watching this, Hashem? Because this is your people. This is who we are.

Lio: We know.

Can you tell us a little bit about your initiative? Because I am curious—if you are working with people, you are working with the youth—where are they in all of this? What are their thoughts on what's in the world?

Naya: It's difficult to tell you. I don't want to paint broadly, but let me for a moment, let me indulge my penchant for being more stereotypical.

It's a crisis right now because our youth are captured by this human rights morality. They believe that brown is good, white is bad, oppressor bad, oppressed good. Who is oppressed? Who is an oppressor?

They talk about something—God, said the suicidal empathy. You know this from—I think it's from the Torah. Those who are kind to the wicked will be wicked to the kind.

And I'll just give you an example. I know that we need to wrap up soon, but I'll give you this example. So I was teaching about the history of Temple Mount. And I explained to the students the Dome of the Rock, Al-Aqsa, Kotel. I explained that in the year 1967, the Jews, the Israel Jewish people, won all of Judea, Samaria, Sinai, Golan, reunified Jerusalem, and they made the decision to hand over Temple Mount to Jordan.

And then the students asked me why. And I said, well, probably for peace. But what the story now is, is that Temple Mount belongs under Jordanian jurisprudence, whereas the Kotel right now is under Israeli law governance.

And I said, let's take a look at two civilizations. I said, Israel is a Jewish country. Jordan is a Muslim country. Let's look at a value that we really love: tolerance. I said, let's see who can go to the Kotel. Anybody. Jew, non-Jew. When the non-Jew comes, they don't have to take off any of their symbols.

Let's look at the Temple Mount. Well, Temple Mount is open to non-Muslims twice a day only. And when you ascend Temple Mount—I did, I went—you have to, you must take off any visible Jewish symbols. You cannot pray there loudly. So a lot of times Jewish men will wear caps instead of kippot.

And so I left it at that. And I said, well, what do you guys think? Two civilizations, two ways to practice tolerance. And I thought, for sure, like this is a done deal. It's so easy to understand.

And the answer was, "Well, you see," they said, "we have to respect Muslim culture. And since Muslims have been oppressed by Westerners..."

And I remember standing in the class and I'm like, oh my God, so the value isn't really tolerance. That's not the real value. The real value is power. Power bad.

That's the problem I would have to identify within our generation—that everything coalesces around the concept of power. And they've been told that power is inherently evil. And we, as educators, have to reclaim this story, because Israel is a powerful country, you see. And so because Israel is powerful, they fall in that trap and think it's inherently evil.

So I said to them, okay, so that's so interesting, I said, because just a second ago we talked about tolerance. Why are we tolerant of the intolerant? That's just fascinating to me, right?

"Because they're oppressed."

Lio: Did you remind them that Muslims colonized all the Middle East?

Naya: They know this. That's the whole thing. My class begins with caliphates and how we talk about the system of the different caliphates that arrived.

But what that showed to me is that students—and this is not—students have been unfortunately really captured by this false morality that needs a realignment.

So that's what I will tell you. It's important to have the right type of educator in the room to navigate these kinds of conversations, because you want to be able to push back respectfully and say, well, when can power—do we have evidence in history of power doing good? Yeah, we actually do. Who do you think ended World War II? People with more power. That's how it happens in this world.

Lio: I think they just need a little trip to some inner city or to some refugee camp. They will feel immediately—

Naya: I understand what you're saying. But what I shared this story with you—I think it's kind of indicative of, we think that they care about tolerance, inclusivity, and diversity. I don't think those are the true values actually. I think the values are power and powerlessness. That's truly what really needs to be reclaimed.

Lio: So how do you change that for them?

Naya: So you begin—you have to begin the classes actually not with content, but with questions around morality. You have to begin first and foremost by asking the students, "Have you ever been wrong?"

There's another—speaking of ego—people don't like to admit when they're wrong. I don't like to admit when I'm wrong. It's an important exercise of humility, and to demonstrate and teach this to students. You have to first kind of have these conversations in the class. When have you ever been wrong? When has being wrong actually helped you understand how you may have misinterpreted a situation, whether it's interpersonal or global conflicts?

Then you have to talk about power, right? Like, what is power? Why do you guys think power is inherently evil? Let's discuss that, right? Have these conversations and then be able to come to conversations showing, no, actually, maybe the way of looking at the world through power and powerlessness is not a healthy way to look at it.

We have this other conversation in class: Can we punish history? What we're going through is punishment of history in many ways. The punishment of America right now for systemic racism or slavery. It's like the pendulum swings, so overcorrects that it's actually doing harm to the people who you shouldn't be harming.

So these are the conversations. But you need very trained, very educated teachers, professors in the classrooms to be able to handle those kinds of conversations, because they desperately need this right now. It's not so—they need the content, they need to have a moral kind of reassessment, realignment as you said originally.

Lio: Alignment. That's right.

What we're doing, Seth and I, we're trying to raise our kids to be, first of all, to understand what a human being is. I think that lacks—everybody at school teaches you STEM and this and that and facts that you can gather on Google.

Naya: But they do teach you what a human being is. They teach you—

Lio: No, that weird picture of what a human is. It's not—I mean, it's not rooted in the laws of nature, in reality. It's within some agenda. We get it.

Naya: And I want to say something. I don't again—I want to say an important thing. All these teachers, all these administrators in K through 12 who are practicing radical empathy, who are teaching students how to interpret the world—if I had to diagnose, I think, we said human beings are flawed. Human beings also want to do good things and they want to have a sense of purpose.

But see, when you don't have a religious society, when you become secular, you create religions out of ideas. Communism becomes a religion.

Lio: Man-made ideas.

Naya: Right.

Lio: Limited ideas.

Naya: So all of this that's happening in the classrooms where they're talking about—I've been in many, many conversations with many, many teachers from different schools where they tell me that the purpose of reading is to practice empathy. And that's why they choose books about, let's say, non-white people, because the purpose of a book is to teach how to be empathetic.

Because they don't have religion, they are doing this. They're using these texts, these ideas. They have now created their own ideas. And it's become ritualized as well.

Lio: Maybe we could say, with your permission, replace the word religion with just like a purpose. Maybe if there was a—

Naya: They want to have a purpose. Human beings want to feel like they have a purpose.

Lio: A man-made purpose, meaning, in other words, it's not aligned with what's actually happening in reality, in nature. That's really what we're saying.

And for us, just to understand, Seth and I, we're not religious people, but we have no problem talking about commandments or laws of nature in the same way. Because if you break a certain law and there's a certain consequence, you call it a mitzvah, you call it a law, it doesn't matter. If there's a certain something that applies to how we conduct ourselves in the world, I want to know how it is. I don't want to get it.

When I get in the car, I don't want to get a speeding ticket if I go above 60, so I need to know it. You could call it the mitzvah of the police or you can call it the traffic law. It doesn't matter.

How religious are you when I get in the car in Israel? I'm very religious now because if I look at the phone, it's 10,000 shekels. So I'm very religious now about this. It's true, by the way, they just passed this law.

Naya: So I just want to answer the other question you asked, which is this initiative that I co-founded with another Russian-speaking Jewish woman in Canada. It's called Stop Anti-Zionism.

And basically, our goal is to educate fellow Jews first and also allies on the dangers of anti-Zionism, on the three eras of Jew hatred. So we do a lot of education, both in schools, adult education. We just issued a declaration signed by many Jewish organizations and non-Jewish organizations declaring anti-Zionism as a form of Jew hatred, today's antisemitism.

There will be a symposium in Canada, the first-ever global symposium on anti-Zionism, bringing together global experts, thought leaders.

Because, once again, we started with this. I told you that in the early 2000s, when I went—by the way, I didn't share this part—in the early 2000s, when I experienced the anti-Zionism on my campus and I went to Jewish professionals, i.e. Hillel, they told me anti-Zionism is not a form of Jew hatred. It is political criticism. It is free speech.

And more than that, they told me that if I'm going to make a big stink, I'm going to make it worse. I'm going to create—I'm going to be the problem for the Jewish safety on campus. They told me to stay quiet, that they have it managed. It's under control.

Absolutely not. Not only did they not have it managed, they were participants in this as well.

And so I've been watching the Jewish community for the last 25 years struggling with identifying the latest form of Jew hatred in these three eras. Completely. They don't understand because it looks like politics, right? It's couched in this human rights language. It uses language from political science—apartheid, racism, Nazism.

And so they think that they are participating in some sort of weird political criticism. No, it's totalizing. It's creating a cosmic devil out of the Jews. It's yet another demonization project.

And I tell this to students or anybody who really listens, so I'm telling it to your viewers. When you say to anyone—forget the Jews—when you tell any country that you are a Nazi country, you are colonizers, you are practicing apartheid, there's nowhere to go after. That's checkmate. This is not a criticism. This is totalizing demonization because the purpose isn't "let's sit around the circle and help Israel become democratic." That's not the purpose.

The purpose of deploying those words is to demonize Israel, to delegitimize Israel. Israel, from start to finish, is demonic in the anti-Zionist era. And that's what we're trying to—we need a radical shift in the Jewish community, where they start understanding the dangers of anti-Zionism, because they don't understand themselves.

Lio: Well, you heard it here from Naya. No, I think this is important. And all those efforts to educate, I think they all add up because, A, they show that people care, that it's not about just following some, as you said originally, toeing some party line. No, there's some thinking involved and some questioning.

That's what we're trying to do here on TheJewFunction, by the way. We're trying to question a lot of the things that we were all taught by good-intentioned people. But I think as we matured, we discovered there are other laws, other aspects to the world, to the system. And we're trying to adjust accordingly.

And I think it's important to understand where you exist. What's the nature of this hatred? We hope that people will eventually—that this realignment, moral realignment will happen. And people will realize that the only evil is something inside of me. That puts me at odds with everyone, puts me first before everyone. That's that quality. And we can work together to help each other with that. Then there's like a beautiful—the whole world—in that, which we won't have time to get into, unfortunately.

Seth, do you have anything to say or to ask?

Seth: I have a quote for you. I'll put it in the chat. I went a little—usually I look for something really short. I found something that's a little longer. It's from the article "The Peace" by Baal HaSulam, Yehuda Ashlag. He was one of those sages I mentioned in the 20th century. And he wrote—among some really deep essays—he wrote, in addition to the commentary on the Book of Zohar and the Ari's Etz Chaim, he also wrote some really eye-level, if you can call it that, articles about the state of the world and free choice and peace and all that. And they're just mind-blowing.

So if you could do us the honor of reading that, and it's a little long like I said, but—

Lio: Who do you want to read? You.

Seth: I'll put it here. I'll put it in the chat.

Lio: Oh wow. It's two parts. It's long but it's not massive. It'll take probably a minute to read. If you can. Just the honor. I think it's very pertinent.

Naya: Sure.

"There is no other cure for humanity but to assume the commandment of providence to bestow upon others in order to bring contentment to the Creator in the measure of the two verses. The first is 'love your friend as yourself,' which is the attribute of the work itself. This means that the measure of work is to bestow upon others for the happiness of society should be no less than the measure imprinted in man to care for his own needs. Moreover, he should put his fellow person's needs before his own.

The other verse is, 'and you will love the Creator with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.' This is the goal that must be before everyone's eyes when laboring for one's friend's needs. This means that he labors and toils only to be liked by the Creator, as He said, 'and they do His will.'

And if you wish to listen, you will feed on the fruit of the land. For poverty and torment and exploitation will be no more in the land, and the happiness of each and every one will rise ever higher beyond measure. But as long as you refuse to assume that covenant of the work for the sake of the Creator in the fullest measure, nature and its laws will stand ready to take revenge on you. And as we have shown, it will not let go until it defeats us, and we accept its authority in whatever it commands."

Wow. Strong words. Powerful. Difficult to—I mean, it's extremely powerful, and as I was reading this I was like, how do I practice this love?

Seth: There is a small—let's start small with it. Because when you see some guy playing music on the sidewalk, if there's nobody there you usually walk past. But if there's a big crowd gathering around, then like, "What's going on over there?" Everybody wants to see what's happening.

Let's just start to build with those who agree, and slowly, slowly let's create this vibe, let's create this energy. And eventually, like you said, the ones that are really hard to love—well, we don't have to deal with them right away. Let's try and build this unity and love where we can and grow it as much as we can.

You do so—when you're doing these events like the Oxford event and the event in Canada—so in addition to all the stuff you're doing, inject the love in there. Bring that conversation somehow. Because there are probably people open to it.

Lio: Do you have children?

Naya: Yes, I have a son.

Lio: Okay. So you know nature arranged it naturally that we have that toward our kids. We're ready to take care of their needs before—put their needs before our own—and to see only the good in them and to cover all their transgressions with love, even as we reprimand them. And—

Naya: We're capable of it.

Lio: We're capable, yes. But that's a natural thing. The evolution that we were talking about originally, that next step in human development, is to do it collectively toward everyone, not just my own family.

Nature put it in me, so I won't kick my son out of the house before he's 18. I don't. And to do this, we need to band a certain way. We need to develop a deficiency. There's a whole science to it, and that's what we're saying. But our sages wrote about it. It's not some pie in the sky. It's not like, "Oh, love everyone, goodbye." No, it's clear what's the issue and where the solution is.

And all we're saying is let's at least ask the questions, as you were so kind to even entertain those ideas and to play along and do these thought experiments. I mean, all we have to do is just be a little prepared to just step out of what we think we know a little bit. And maybe there's some amazing answers that are waiting for us. That's maybe.

Thanks, Naya.

Naya: This is awesome. You guys are doing beautiful work. Really beautiful.

Seth: It was lovely to spend time with you, to hear about what you're working on. And also, it usually takes us half the show to get people to be able to even start the conversation. You came out swinging, like ready to go in.

Naya: So that was great.

Seth: Exciting for us. And we love being challenged too. So if you can think of more challenges, come challenge more. Because we want to—we understand that the solution is only going to come by the more we all find that thing between us.

Lio: And bring us to your course. We'd love to—we'll come and talk.

Naya: Okay, amazing.

Lio: If it fits. For a small fee. No, I'm kidding. No, we'd love to do it. This is our passion. We have day jobs, but we're doing it because this is the most important thing of our lives, I think.

So we appreciate when we find someone who also finds it important, who would rather do this than be teaching Russian literature.

Okay. Dr. Lekht, thank you so much for being with us, for entertaining our crazy ideas, and for really sharing your passion. It sounds like people who work with you really are lucky. They have a passionate person to work with them.

And we invite everyone to share this talk. Spread it around. More people need to hear it. Leave a comment. Rate us on Spotify, wherever. Like it. It helps bring this conversation up.

And we'll see you next week. We are TheJewFunction.

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