w/Max Mannis, Jomboy Media

Seth: Welcome to The Jew Function. This is Seth over here in Jersey. We've got Lio over there in Israel. We have a very interesting guest today who's crossing into all the worlds. Our goal is to discover all of these gems in different corners and get to the bottom of what is this thing? Who are these Jewish people? What is our role? What are all these experiences we've been going through? Is it just a fluke? Is there some story behind it? I still don't hear you, Lio.

Lio: Still don't hear me?

Seth: Now I hear you. Yeah, okay, good. Maybe turn up your gain a little bit. Is there some story? We do see a story. We do see something behind it, but what's interesting is it doesn't matter if—first of all, you need to find the map, you need to understand what the goal is, what's going on. But even if you find it, nevertheless, you still have to be the main character in the story. It's not enough to just discover it, and what we're seeing is that from week to week, all the people that we're speaking to, it's incumbent upon them, it's incumbent upon all of us, to be the main character in the story, to understand what's happening, what's going on around us, what historic, biblical, epic situation we find ourselves in, and what can we do about it? Does it have—

Lio: —to be biblical? Like, I was talking to a friend of mine, and he's like, you know, where's it going? The Islam, Muslims, the Christians, you know, where's—like, look in the Bible, they have a word for it, you know, it's Armageddon. But, you know, it doesn't have to go there. Externally, we can wage this war internally. But what does it mean? Who's open to seeing it, to hearing it?

Seth: When you say biblical, it has all these weird connotations, but, for example, if you're a baseball player—just, for example—it's clear when you show up to work, you're not going to take the ball and throw it into the stands, or you're not going to hit the ball backwards towards the umpire. There's a plan, and within that plan, all of the things are happening. If you don't know what the plan is when you show up to work...

Lio: That's... Yeah, that's a good... I think that's a good—I think we can stay on this metaphor. There are laws, right? There are rules, and you have to—there's an overarching rule, right? Your team has to score the most home runs, right? I think that's right.

Seth: Just runs. I mean, just runs. As long as I don't say holes, you know? Let me just try to keep the vernacular.

Lio: But, you know, so there's an overarching goal, right? And then...

Seth: I can't believe it. There's two people who have so little...

Lio: Hold on, hold on. We'll call Max in a second. But, you know, you have these overarching goals, and then you have these rules. If you break the rules, there's all kinds of penalties and things you can and cannot do. You can't just walk off the court and then decide—or sit down and decide you're not playing. Someone's going to take you out, right? If you're in the game, you have to play it, right? So what we're starting to see in the world today is that, A, there is some sort of a game going on. We know some of the rules. We don't know some of the other rules. So whenever we break a rule, which we haven't really learned yet, it hurts. We see that. Sometimes we have to break the rules repeatedly before we realize that we're breaking it and we're getting hurt in the process. The system kind of works—it's an analog system. The umpire is not calling it on the spot. It's like, all right, it'll come to you after a few rounds. So that's one thing that we're seeing. The other thing is that a lot of the things we thought made up the solid parts of reality are sort of breaking down. It has to do with boundaries, borders, populations, demographics, but also individually. I see culturally, mindsets, things I thought were one way are now becoming another way. Identities, all of that is such a shift, right? We're reevaluating everything that makes us who we are. And I think this guest that we have today is really, for me, also something that I would not initially associate with these two worlds. He's got one leg in the yeshiva world and another leg in the pro baseball world. He's been working in that realm. He's a lead researcher for the number-one rated baseball podcast.

Seth: Any single place you go, in excellence in the world, there's some Jew in there.

Lio: Yeah, I mean, definitely. So he's doing that with Jomboy Media, and we'll hear a little bit about what he's doing there. But he's also sort of an activist against antisemitism. So he's got this Jewishness, which is, again, something you don't see often, but you're starting to see these things mix. They seep into our world. You can't just sit on the sidelines and say, "I'm just doing my baseball thing." No, people become more nuanced, more varied. And I think these changes imply that people are starting to change their minds, and that's why reality is changing as well. It's not just a one-sided street. Things change on the outside; it forces us to change on the inside. And then, in turn, the way we view things changes, and then things change. So, very interesting time, very interesting time to ask oneself, what does it mean to be a Jew? Why is there still Jewish hatred and how do we solve it? And for that, we brought a baseball expert. So I think that without further ado, I'd like to welcome Max Manis onto The Jew Function. Max.

Max: Thank you guys for having me. I appreciated all the baseball analogies in the introduction. You guys told me before we got on the call, you said, "We know next to nothing about baseball," but then you worked in like seven baseball metaphors in the first podcast.

Seth: Called the field a court. We talked about penalties, the penalty box, I think.

Max: That's about accurate. Yeah, so that was a great introduction. Thanks a ton. So a little more background on myself. I'm from New York City. Originally, I still live here. I went to Ramaz when I was much younger, for those in the New York City yeshiva league world. I went to Heschel, if people know what that is, it's more of a pluralistic type of place. I went there for middle school and high school. I don't consider myself someone who was particularly frum at the time, but I was definitely much more religious than most of the kids in the school. Just in terms of like, I would eat non-kosher pizzas and stuff like that, and I would go on my phone on Shabbat, but that was about it. I wasn't this insane rebel. Then I went to yeshiva for two years, to TVA, to Torah B'Avodah. Totally changed my life. Couldn't recommend it more to pretty much everyone I talk to. It's in Baka, in Yerushalayim. It's very Torah B'Avodah, TVA. It's a very, very Tzioni, Dati Leumi, army/aliyah–

Lio: Did you serve in the army in Israel?

Max: I did not, no. And I get crap for it every single time I visit. I'm going back for Hanukkah, so I'm sure I'll get even more soon. I do not. They might pass a law—Twitter army fighting antisemites there.

Lio: That's good. They might pass a law now. You know, they want to recruit some of the more Orthodox segments in the population. It's great.

Max: Yeah, I know.

Lio: It's going to be a big uproar.

Max: I don't know. That's a whole other podcast. Anyways. Or is it?

Seth: Yeah.

Max: So like you guys said, baseball is among my biggest passions in the world. I have a hard time putting anything over my Jewish identity, but baseball's right—

Lio: Just so we understand, how did a guy who's almost frum, almost like an Orthodox Jew with the whole garb and everything, how do you get mixed up with baseball?

Max: I mean, can you make the... Yeah, I talk with people a lot about how I think it's interesting that there are so many—I mean, there are Jews working in everything, but there are so many Jews working in the baseball industry. So many of the biggest connections that I've been lucky enough to kind of half-stumble my way into, half—however you want to say I came to getting there was a mix of hard work and circumstance and luck and a bunch of things. But a whole bunch of the biggest connects that I have in the baseball industry are Jewish—religious, not religious in any way, shape or form. I talk with people a lot about how I think there's something there as to why baseball is very, I think, naturally appealing to people who have come from a Jewish education system and are used to sitting with something, it being grueling and annoying. There's not a lot of instant satisfaction in baseball. It's definitely a thinking man's game. There's a lot of strategy and nuance and thinking about the domino effect and the big picture. Okay, if we have this batter do this, they're going to counter by bringing in this pitcher. What's our response to that? There's just a whole bunch of intricate nuance to it that I think takes a certain type of mind to appreciate. That's one of the things that we do really well in the Jewish education system. We really drive that point home: you've got to sit with something and struggle. I remember I had teachers growing up that would say, there's no such thing as, "I'm done learning for today, I did the assignment." The biggest gedolim, the biggest sages in the world, it's impossible to ever truly be done learning, because there's always commentaries on top of commentaries on top of commentaries, opinions. I do think there is something very similar there in terms of—you always want to be one step ahead, you always want to be thinking about the bigger picture, kind of like the approach you guys are taking to this conversation of the root causes of antisemitism. Not looking at when antisemitism happens, what comes next, but more taking a step back and looking full picture. I think there's a certain type of nuanced mind that it takes to have that conversation. The strategy and intricacies and markets and everything that plays into being a diehard baseball fan—there's a lot of overlap in that Venn diagram.

Seth: In addition to—if you wanted to understand how a game turned out the way it did, there's probably so many things behind it: baseball things, athletic things, the weather, and even beyond that. I ascertained from learning a little bit about you that there's like a whole—and there was also a movie about it, which I didn't see yet—but there's the business behind it, like who's buying and selling different players and stuff. So you're watching a game, and you think it's just a game, but then there are people in suits who raised money, bought and sold this to buy that and get this player, to put that player with this player, or something like that. You see that there are so many factors that bring you to the win. The guy sitting in the stands, most of them probably just think, "Hit the ball farther, run faster, throw it more accurately," and then someone like you is watching the game and understanding the business transactions that happened to get here, what's going on with the piece of property they're trying to develop, are they going to move the stadium, how did this guy do this—just hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of data points that bring you there. Lio and I are that way about this topic, because we see hundreds and hundreds of data points that, when you understand them, it's totally obvious, like how everything is—like when you watch a game, there's so much ta'amim because you have so many different understandings and flavors.

Max: And experience, yeah. I think that my understanding of how markets work came from baseball. I didn't learn market stuff and then apply it to baseball. I learned baseball really well, and I learned how the baseball market works. Then I was like, oh, the rest of the world is like this too. But I think when it comes down to what you're talking about, analyzing all those data points, one thing I've gotten to know—a few baseball, you know, what you described as the suits and kind of the front office people, the people that move the chess pieces to make everything happen—a lot. One way that baseball separates itself from a lot of other sports is that there's a lot of parity, or randomness, I guess you could call it, in that. In the NFL or the NBA, if you take the best team in the league and have them face the worst team in the league and play them 10 times in a row, the best team is probably going to win 9 or 10 out of those 10 games. In baseball, it's feasible that they could go six and four in those 10 games because there's a lot of failure in the game of baseball. You buy a front row ticket to a LeBron James game, you're the biggest LeBron James fan in the world, you can pretty much guarantee he's probably—not going to have the best game of his career—but he'll probably at bare minimum get you like 20 points. The nature of the way baseball works is that even the best players in the world, a lot of the time, it's just not their day, and that's how the sport goes. A .300 batting average—this is the classic analogy everyone uses—means you got a hit three out of 10 times. It's not really a statistic that the in-depth baseball nerds put a lot of value in anymore, but in the old days at least, it used to be that if you got a hit three out of 10 times over the course of your whole career, you were locked to be in the Hall of Fame. You were a phenomenal baseball player. That's because there's a lot of failure. You could watch Aaron Judge, Shohei Ohtani, whichever incredible player you want to pick. You could drop an exuberant amount of money to sit front row to watch them and say, oh, I'm watching them for one game, they're going to be incredible. And they might not get a single hit that day. They might strike out four times. And yep, that just happens because that's how baseball goes. So I would say when you apply that same lens to this, again it comes down to asking yourself: what's random, what's temporary, what's sustainable in the long run—how can we make sure there aren't such big screw-ups?

Seth: Maybe it's just the nature of the game, that there's a lot of imperfection. It's really difficult.

Max: Yes, you gotta chalk some of it up to just bad luck. You know, we don't—

Lio: Seth and I, we don't really believe in bad luck. There are conditions, and you may not be aware of the conditions. So you go out there and you're not aware of the fact, for example, that you have a bad day, or you have nothing to do about it because the game is already set and you have to go play. And you can't say, hey guys, I don't feel it's my day, let's change the dates or I'll sit this one out. No, you have to play, right? You have to go up and do your thing. And life is, in a way, it's a game and it's unfolding and you have to be proactive in it. And you can't sit it out. It's happening, whether you like it or not, there's a date for the game and it's happening. But if you haven't prepared yourself properly—and that's really where it comes in, do you understand all the things that could go into it? And are you preparing yourself? That's what we're trying to understand. And I guess before we go into the other half of—the other side of the coin—I want to know, do you consider baseball to be a group game or an individual game? Because it looks a lot from the outside, for a non-baseball player or fan, like it's two guys: one is throwing a ball, one is trying to hit a ball, and every once in a while you have a bunch of guys running around just bringing the ball back. That's what it looks like to me, you know?

Max: Yeah. I would say you could make the argument that it's individual in the sense that there's not a lot of on-field collaboration and teamwork. When a player's up there batting, or pitching, there's only so much that the other players on the field can do to help them maximize the productivity of that event. For the most part, baseball—the, you know, I think a lot of people tend to overthink a lot of things in baseball and in life and make things unnecessarily complicated. There are a million aspects that go into what makes a good baseball team. But at the end of the day, what determines whether you do or don't win a game most of the time is specifically the event of when the bat hits the ball. Did the pitcher set himself up for success to get the batter out, or did the batter set himself up for success to hit the ball well? Usually whichever team wins out more of those isolated batted ball moments in the game is the team that comes out on top. Where I would push back on you is that I think when you peel back the curtain, you realize how many people it takes to make the machine run. The amount of scouting information and data and the technology that they have nowadays that teams are investing in to help their players perform at the top level—not only does that go a long way, but you still see in basically any game you watch, usually—for the most part—you'll see that players are, if they're not sitting there on the team-designated iPads in the dugout looking at pitch data ("this pitcher usually throws this pitch as the second pitch" or "if he's thrown one ball and one strike, he's probably going to put it here against left-handed hitters or right-handed hitters"), there's also a lot of word of mouth. If the first batter in the inning, when he gets back to the dugout, everyone is asking, hey, what's the pitcher throwing? So in that sense, there's a lot of collaboration and teamwork. And anyone who's a Yankees fan can definitely say that when they watched defensively this postseason, the Yankees were just an absolute mess with defense. A lot of that came from different players not necessarily playing in their best position, and there was just a lack of fluidity. So in that sense, I would say there's definitely a teamwork element to it that is undeniably valuable. Even if you don't necessarily see it the same way as in football, where one guy's throwing the ball to the other guy so they need to be on the same page. It's not necessarily that straightforward on a surface level in baseball, but I would say there's certainly a teamwork aspect that is undeniably there.

Seth: When you have these—oh, no, no.

Max: Go ahead.

Seth: When you have these aha revelations in baseball, because I could see that you probably have these moments of bubbling joy from the game, are you able to draw a connection back to things you studied, or see things in the Torah that kind of reveal themselves through the game?

Max: My first year in Yeshiva, I wrote—and we had—or I remember actually—so if you guys know the name Ezra Schwartz, he was an Israeli gap year student that was murdered by terrorists, I think it was 10 years ago, 10, 9, 10 years ago now, which is so crazy. I remember that day super vividly, just hearing the news. His brother is a friend of mine that I went to camp with for years and years. We ended up—his brother and I—going to the same program in Israel together. I remember one of the big things that they kept talking about when Ezra was killed was that he was just this huge baseball fan. Many of the things that the families invest in his memory are, like, you know, if you're a baseball player in Israel, it's kind of slim pickings in terms of the resources available to you. So they got a lot of funding and built a gorgeous field in Renana, which—you're not going to find a whole lot of baseball fields in Israel, but they were like, this is important for us to do. I was super connected to that, like, wow, this is a kid not super different from me: passionate about Judaism, passionate about baseball, went to similar camps and day schools that I went to. I knew a million—I didn't know him personally so well, I'm sure we had had a few conversations at camp and the like, but I knew a million people who knew him. I think it was when it was coming up on the yahrzeit, on Ezra's yahrzeit, the year that I was spending in Israel with a bunch of kids, including his younger brother Hillel, the yeshiva made an assignment: we want everyone in the yeshiva to claim a parsha and we want to compile a Dvar Torah about every single parsha in the Torah and kind of have that be a nice metaphor, essentially—like that's what we want to do to commemorate the yahrzeit. The parsha that I know best is Shemot, it was my Bar Mitzvah parsha coming up in a few weeks, and I've always been so fascinated by Moshe and his role in Torah and Tanakh and the Jewish picture at large. I think, again, because I'm attracted to people that are challenging and that have nuance, and that don't fit into a box. And with Moshe, you know, there are so many arguments you can make about, well, he didn't bring them into Israel. Should he really have been banished from being able to enter Israel because of one non-climactic, depressing ending to a great story?

Seth: Exactly. That's what I'm saying. Stood at the top of the mountain and died.

Max: And then it was a no-go. So in the Dvar Torah that I wrote, I wanted to connect it to baseball, for Ezra Schwartz and because it's what I know best, so it was an easy way out for me. But I wrote an analogy comparing Moshe to Barry Bonds. He was pretty unequivocally the single greatest hitter in baseball history, basically without question. If you ever scroll through his statistics page on Baseball Reference, it's the big baseball statistics database website, they always mark in bold or italics the statistics that you led the league in that year. His page, it's a joke—it's all bold, all italics. But they found out later in his career that, after he had already basically put together a Hall of Fame caliber career, he had started using steroids, which was what everyone in the sport was doing at the time. Baseball knew everything about it. The commissioner, frankly, smartly recognized, hey, baseball's dying right now, all these dudes are juiced, giant muscles, crushing home runs. Everyone likes watching home runs. It's the best thing baseball has going for it to casual fans, and those dudes saved baseball, basically. Interest in baseball was at an all time low after they skipped the 1994 World Series because of a labor disagreement between the owners and players. Baseball was in a dark point after that. All these dudes started juicing, started crushing home runs, and it saved baseball. The league basically said, hey, we should let this keep happening and just sweep it under the rug because it's great for our television numbers. Then as soon as everything became public, the league totally denied that they had any knowledge, said, no, we know nothing about this—suspensions, whatever, the whole thing. And when it came time to vote for those players into the Hall of Fame, all of the voters said, well, you did it on steroids, we can't stand by this. But they turned a blind eye to the fact that the commissioner knew everything about it, and he's in the Hall of Fame to this day. So I wrote a paper on the analogy of Barry Bonds to Moshe, and how these are two guys that unequivocally, based on their accomplishments, deserved to get to their final destination in their head. But it's not that the argument against them doesn't have any merit, it's just that when you look at the total scope and the totality of the role both of them played in the whole pantheon of Torah and of baseball, I'm of the belief that it's silly to hold them accountable for that one—

Seth: Are you saying Moses was on steroids?

Max: This is what I mean. Listen, when he hit the rock, he had to have some kind of arm strength.

Lio: So I think this is a good segue to, I mean, to really get into—as much as our fans love baseball, at least three of them do—but I think I do see a lot of parallels. And some people, I heard say, oh, baseball is like life and all that, like you have all these. And I'm sure every intricate enough human activity you take, you can find parallels to everything else. You can look at life as a game, as swimming upstream or climbing a mountain, all those things. In our case, we're trying to zero in a little bit about this whole Jewish thing because, again, it's a thing. I mean, if you're a French guy in the U.S. doing baseball, it would be curious, but that would be the end of it. There wouldn't be much to talk about. But the fact is, this Jewish identity thing just kind of—it adds another layer. And I guess the first question is, did this event that happened with your friend, was that the first major realization that Jews are persecuted, that people are out to get him? Or did you have other antisemitic experiences on a personal level before that or since?

Max: Just, I don't know if I would call it the first, like, basically all of my cousins—or not all, but the vast majority of my cousins—served in the army in some capacity. Many of them are Israeli, many of them made Aliyah. So for as long as I lived, I was raised in a very, like, that's Hilo and me household. I was raised in an environment where we love the IDF, we love Israel—fundraisers, donations, rallies, all of that. I was raised in that world 100%. And I think when you have that, it comes with a natural understanding and a little bit of Jewish trauma that reminds you—hey, it's never a fully clean slate. The world can say they've moved on from whatever atrocities they've committed to us in the past, but we can never get too comfortable. So if we want to shift the conversation to October 7th, I actually have a theory I want to run by you guys, though I’ve done zero research to back it up. But logically, in my head, it makes sense.

So when October 7th happened—it was in the middle of Shabbat, in the middle of Chag. In America, the Chag extends to the end of Sunday night. October 7th, the attacks start on Saturday morning, actually late Friday night New York time, but Saturday morning in Israel. Jews in America were pretty much in the dark. I didn't know anything was happening until the next morning in shul—a friend of mine bolts up to me and says, “We need to say Tehillim,” and I had no idea what he was talking about. He said, “We're genuinely at war.” From there, you start putting together bits and pieces of information. By the time that most of us got back on our phones, there was still a ton of shock factor, the goriness of everything, and just, “Oh my goodness, this really happened. What do we do next?” That was all very much still there.

But I have a theory: for the people that were on their phones—the non-Orthodox world, to stereotype, but generally the non-Orthodox, non-religious, whatever you want to call it—the fact that they were on their phones scrolling through social media, watching live footage of barbaric attacks, just doomscrolling all day... Imagine, every five minutes, there’s a new horrific video or story. I think the fact that those people had that experience on that day—there was trauma for everyone, but specifically having had that experience meant that for a lot of those people, the greatest shock factor of October 7th was strictly the gore and the sheer shock of what was happening in the moment.

I think for those of us who didn't get back on our phones for another 48 hours, by that point, not only was there the gore, but we had also started seeing politicians already calling for a ceasefire—or if you take it a step further, people saying, “This was justified,” “the Israelis, the Jews had it coming”—that kind of thing. So I think the initial shock for the frum world was a mix of the horror and the response to it. “Wait, all this stuff happened, and you're telling me the world's not on our side right now? You're telling me the world is saying we had it coming to us? You're saying that the world is saying this has to end right now, that Israel doesn't get to respond? The bottom line is we still have people fighting for their lives.”

Seth: What are the rules of this game if that's what people are saying?

Max: Like, am I watching the same game? What are the rules of the game if they're saying this? Are we watching the same game here? Exactly. But I think specifically for the frum community, we saw some of the gory videos—don't get me wrong, the internet still existed after October 7th, I’m not denying that—but I think not having had that incredibly traumatic experience of seeing it in real time, just “update: another death, another death, another death...” By the time we got back on our phones and we just saw the number in totality, it was shocking. But not having had the experience of the live updates, and instead getting it all at once on top of the response to it, I think meant that the frum community associated the trauma and the shock of October 7th specifically with the fact that one of the first updates we saw was, “Oh, no one in the world cares.” And for people on their phones, I think that realization came a couple of days later. So that wasn't the initial shock. When you feel no one else cares, then what happens?

Yeah. And that's the question, right? I think for all the... I don't want to say I have any positive associations with October 7th, but I remember that week downtown—like, I spend a lot of time at the Chabad house for NYU and Baruch students in downtown Manhattan, that's where I live. I'm not really in college, but that's my community. I remember there were so many rallies, fundraisers, blood donations, packages to Israel. I remember, like, the Tuesday or Wednesday, two or three days after October 7th, just getting a text in the WhatsApp chat that two NYU students who say they’re Jewish but have never had a bar mitzvah are at Chabad right now and want to get bar mitzvahed. “Can anyone please come and wrap tefillin or do whatever else it is that constitutes that?” And that was the kind of thing that I saw, and I was like, “We, the Jewish people as a whole, are more unified than they've ever been—right now, at least in that moment.”

Unfortunately, I don't know if that's necessarily the case now—as we sit here almost a year and a half later, which is crazy—but I remember thinking at the time, “We can't afford to lose this unity.” Sure, there might be natural ups and downs, I'm not saying we're all going to be like that for every single step after this, but there’s something here right now where politics didn't matter, level of observance didn't matter, wealth, connection, none of that. People dropped everything and said, “Hey, if the world isn’t going to be here for us, we have to be here for each other.” And we've been left in a position where, frankly, we don't have a choice. So it’s time to go.

Lio: Let me ask you, Max: Did you—back then, or now, a year and change later—did you connect the events themselves of the seventh, this whole crisis unfolding, with the lack of unity, or only the upshot of the event being unity?

Max: Yeah, it's a tricky question, because I remember seeing a lot of things like that. And I do think they have an element of truth to them. I don't want to totally reject this idea that Hamas kind of saw that Israeli society was very divided, and there’s the idea that, “Oh, because of that, they said, ‘OK, now is the prime time for us to attack because this is a civilization that's—” I don't want to say, definitely not on the way out, that would be an awful way to phrase it. But this is a civilization that has been more unified at other points in history, if we want to leave it at that. The reason I personally don't want to make that judgment is I think Hashem runs the world. And I think it's never in our position as a human being to say with objectivity, “Oh, Hashem did X because of Y.” I don't think we can possibly know; I think it's kind of pointless to speculate, frankly. Hashem runs the world the way He runs the world. Our position is to take God's will and be a vessel for it in this world. I truly believe that. But, yeah, I kind of balk at the idea that it was Hashem sending a message.

Lio: Hold on, hold on. Because you mentioned Hashem so many times, I have to interject. You know, we are friends, we have a lot of friends who spend a lot of time collecting quote after quote. It's one thing to say, yes, and we do agree, that I can't sit here on my level and claim to know with objectivity what's beyond the force that governs everything. However, we have a lot of wise people over the years who have attained, let's say, the finer aspect of this reality, just to keep it at eye level. And they left a lot of clues, so to speak. So I'm reading, “If Israel were one bundle, no nation or tongue would be able to govern them.” Just this little line, right? And just like this line, there are hundreds of lines that talk about Israel's unity versus lack of unity and what happens.

Seth: And we have stories—we have stories in the Bible. I think it points to something here, what you're saying, Lio, and then what Max said. On the other side, if we don't understand that—like you said, His ways are not our ways, so it's not that we're going to make a direct connection: “OK, I put on my tefillin and now my stocks are going to go up,” or “OK, I keep kosher, now there's going to be peace in the world.” We can't draw these kind of lines. But Lio, what I hear you saying is there are laws in this, and Max is a guy who studied in yeshiva and understands, with the analytical mind, how systems work and what the rules of the game are. But still, what I hear between the two of you is, there's not an agreement that if, for example, the Jews do this, then there will be peace in the world. It's not clear, even to someone who went through yeshiva, through the whole system and everything.

Lio: I agree it's not 100% clear. All I'm saying is that there are a lot of clues, and I'm asking, are we seeing the clues?

Seth: Maybe that's your thing.

Lio: But you and I, we went pogrom by pogrom, and we see how almost every single major calamity is preceded by intense Jewish disunity. Like, it's—oh, coincidence.

Seth: What I'm saying here—it's becoming clear. Max, it looks like you were about to say something.

Max: Yeah, I think you can recognize patterns without saying that there are reasons. I think you can recognize patterns without saying, “Oh, God makes this happen as a result of that.” From a military strategic perspective, yeah, maybe there is something to that, but I don't know. Are there—how do you measure unity? Is it the first batter hit—question, by the way. He comes back to the dugout and the guys—

Seth: Say, “What's he pitching today?” Are the guys just sitting in the dugout, like, “Normally, for a left-handed guy in the third inning, this is what he's going to do,” and you kind of use that to base what you're going to do on? I think what's bubbling up to the top now is it's not clear. All the Jews needed this iPad, let's say, like, “This is what the pitcher's doing, this is what's happening.” October 7th shouldn't have been a surprise—how it happens, what exactly happens, that’s surprising—but the fact that it happens is not a surprise. And what's surprising today is realizing that, amongst all the Jewish people, it's not clear. These patterns are—

Max: Not clear. Yeah. Again, I think you can recognize patterns and I think that has some objective validity, but I'm not going to sit here and argue that Jews were incredibly unified before October 7th. My guess would be that unity was on a bit of a downswing compared to what it had been before, but I don't know how you really prove that if we're all just sitting here making that assumption.

Lio: There was almost civil war in Israel—people were on the verge of war.

Max: Well, are we talking specifically about unity between Israeli Jews, or Jews elsewhere in this particular event?

Lio: We're just focusing on what happened around these—if I were—

Max: To agree with you, then what? What's the bigger point?

Lio: So, well, I would—I'll put a little pause, open parentheses, and ask you: What does it even mean to be a Jew? Because to us, it has to somehow be couched in that. It's not like some sort of a little hack to life—if you do this, then that happens, right? We're not looking for a baseball superstition, like, you spit over your shoulder, put some salt down—these things have a psychological effect, that's good, even being together helps in that way. But we're saying there's a deeper thing happening here, which is some sort of, like I said, understanding, being in harmony with greater laws of nature. So maybe it has to do with the meaning of being Jewish. What is the meaning of being Jewish in the world today? How would you explain to someone what it means to be Jewish—from out of this world, who would come in and say—we ask it all the time. What would you say? I'm curious, because maybe if we figure this—

Max: One out, we, you know, it could—First off, I would just say, I disagree with this. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think there’s an inherent assumption in that question that we need to explain ourselves to the greater world, which—

Lio: No, to ourselves.

Max: No, to ourselves? Okay, fine, well—yeah. So what I was going to say is, I think explaining it to...

Max: Ourselves—is significantly more important than explaining it to the greater world. I think to the greater world, most people are like, we want to be left alone, you know what I mean? Like, we don't have any agenda, we just want to chill, we don't want to get killed, that's it. That's our only qualification. And play baseball. Yeah. I think one of the things that I've noticed, frankly, across the board—and I can't say I have enough familiarity with other religions to say whether this is more or less than other religions—but I think one of the reasons that a lot of, whether you're talking about the biggest Haredi rabbi in Mea Shearim or the most unaffiliated Jew, half Jewish, whatever you want to call it—like, sure, let's say baseball, whoever I've met—I think one of the things that appeals about Judaism across the board to all denominations is that it's not that hard to find one or two things in it that, in a vacuum, you like. I think that's the message we should be pushing to everyone: Judaism is not here to make us miserable. I think it's a big flaw in at least modern Orthodox education that we start off hitting you over the head with the restrictions. I had a rabbi from Yeshiva who would always make this analogy: He would say, if you told someone, "Hey, come with me for a couple hours, we're going to go to a dark room where you're not allowed to talk, you're not allowed to bring your own food, if you make even the smallest noise, people are going to get upset at you, and you're not allowed to leave," you'd be like, "That sounds like it sucks. Why would I want to do that?" And then if someone tells you, "Oh, we're going to a movie,"—that's what I just described! When you change the framing and focus on the positives instead of the restrictions, it's a game changer. You're talking about two entirely different things. So I think one thing the modern Orthodox world could afford to do better is not just hitting you over the head from the jump with "this is why you can't do XYZ, and this is why it's good for you in the long run." No, start off with "Hashem loves us, Judaism is good, Israel is good, all these things." We should be in the business of trying to sell people on it, not trying to push them off as soon as they try to come in.

Lio: Okay, so hold on, I want to hold on to one thing you said—you said maybe this idea that Hashem loves us. So it's interesting, you know, in the Book of Zohar, which was written 2,000 years ago, they say specifically—and I quote—unity and unfounded love among us can lead us to be congruous with nature's system. There it is, you know? Nature's system, nature's creator is the uppermost law in nature, Hashem, right? That's just the highest force there is. You can feel it. You can be in connection with that force if you also are in love. So there are a lot of clues. We may use different language here and there, but there are a lot of clues that point to the internality of what needs to be done. As you just said, change the language, look at the internality of what it means—these commandments, these mitzvot, all these restrictions are really just supposed to apply to how we arrange ourselves to be connected better with one another. If you look a little deeper than just the external envelope, you know, kosher laws and this and that, those are actually guidelines for an internal behavior. That's what, at least that's what the sages say.

Max: When we talk about unity, though, like you use the example of the fact that Israelis were protesting in the streets for however many weeks on end. I guess in that sense, you can make the argument that, well, we were still unified in that we all think it's good to live in Israel.

Seth: A lot of us still think, again, maybe not everyone agrees on what happened.

Max: Yeah, not everybody.

Max: We go by this lifestyle. So in that sense, how un-unified were we truly? Everyone was still saying, "Hey, we still agree with the general doctrine." Everyone was still saying, "Hey, we still agree that the lifestyle this lays out for us is still a net positive."

Seth: Let me just use it because I'm having fun with the baseball analogies.

Max: The guys put on the baseball uniform.

Seth: They come to the baseball field. Everybody gets into the correct baseball position. And everything is going perfect, all the right guys. And the guy takes the bat and he throws the bat at the pitcher, and the next guy comes up—everything is right—the uniform, this, this, this. He just throws the bat at the pitcher! It's like, you can have everything, everything, everything, but what is the thing that we're doing about it? So, okay, we're on the land, yeah, okay, we're here, but now what? I think what it is, is that we have such a high standard. I think that's what it is, Max: The standard of what we're supposed to be doing is not just—is something that maybe isn't really clear yet. Because being on the land, it's like, that's got to be a foregone conclusion. After 2,000 years, we better appreciate being on the land. Okay, but now what are we supposed to be doing here? You know, I think it's important for everyone—

Max: —to understand that there's not a uniform, one-size-fits-all benchmark as to what everyone should be doing. You guys sent me a list of questions to think about kind of ahead of time before coming on this, and I thought one of the most interesting questions that I put a lot of thought into was this question you asked: If you could speak to all the Jews in the world at one time, what would you say? I remember I thought back to an analogy that one of my rabbis in Yeshiva made—Rav Elayalin, I'll give him a shout out, awesome guy—he had a real knack for appealing to these kids that can't stand just sitting in a classroom for hours and reading. He reached those kids. But I remember, he would say all the time that whenever a student would come up to him and would say, "The learning thing's not for me. I tried it, it doesn't really do much for me." He would say, "Sit with me. We'll make a consistent learning regimen of some Jewish law, some philosophy, whatever you want. We'll find something that works for you. You stick to that regimen for a month and then you come back to me in a month, and if you still say to me, 'I tried the serious learning thing for a month, it's not for me, it's not doing anything for me'—if you truly say that to me honestly after a month, I'll take you out to dinner at whatever restaurant you want in Israel." He said he's been making that offer to kids for years and years and no one's ever taken him up on that offer. I think the part of that argument that really appeals to me is that there is this sense—again, going back to what I was saying about how everyone has something they like about Judaism—that if I were to speak to all the Jews at once and just say, without telling everyone, "Hey, unify yourselves," what's a message I can give that would resonate to everyone, that would make everyone want to unify, would unify? I would literally just say: Find one or two things that you like in Judaism and do them. Do them consistently. It's not—you know, if you love davening, if davening is the thing that really speaks to you, it's not like you're going to daven every single day. Sure, maybe it becomes less exciting, maybe it becomes more formality and less of a novelty, but you're not going to dislike it. The best way to foster Jewish unity is to get everyone to buy in by finding a thing they can do, and that doesn't mean having—

Lio: —this big doctrine of, "Okay, we'll go with you, we'll go with you, we'll go with you." However, is there one thing we can put at the top? Like in baseball, right? Is the top goal runs, right?

Max: Sure.

Lio: Run back home. Okay, I'll use layman terms.

Max: You're all over it.

Lio: Okay. Now, I know it's not a baseball term, but I'm deliberately saying it this way. You have to do the thing with the ball and run back home. That's like your—it doesn't matter. Some of you are going to be a catcher, some a pitcher, someone's going to be in the field, someone's going to sit in the dugout. We all have different roles, but eventually, this is the goal, the one thing that we all agree on, right? We're asking you to take a stab at this one thing we should all agree on. What should be the one thing? And before you maybe go say Hashem, I'm saying just one notch below—

Max: Because let's even say we should agree about Hashem—

Lio: Okay, no, I'm saying, for example, someone would say Hashem—that sounds religious. Maybe I'm not a religious Jew. We talk in terms of forces in the system, but I'm saying if there's something more eye-level, as we said, something that we can all relate to, that's the thing we're after here, Seth and I. The one thing that will keep us, you know—

Max: I think you've got to make it tangible. I think I would say, have you guys delved into Chabad liturgy at all?

Lio: Look, we study Kabbalah. So Chabad studies Tanya, which is a certain aspect of it. We are a bit more hardcore. You know, Baal HaSulam.

Max: Okay, well, I'll say this. If there's one thing you need to know about the Lubavitcher Rebbe, it's that the biggest thing he provided, and the reason that he reshaped the framework of worldwide Jewry—my rabbi says this all the time, my rabbi Riviar from Yeshiva—he says the best thing about the Lubavitcher Rebbe was he gave people individualized missions. He could look at someone, spend five seconds with them, and say, "You strike me as someone who—if you do this, that's—" You know, there's this metaphor, this analogy of adding another brick in the Beit HaMikdash: if every single person does one thing, or lights their fire—another analogy—if every single person lights their fire, now we're in business. I would say that in that sense, I don't know if there's one specific task I'd tell everyone, "You have to do this task," but I would say whatever thing you find in Judaism that means a lot to you should be practical and tangible, and able to specifically benefit your community. Don't tell me, "Oh, I love matzo ball soup, I'll eat a bowl of matzo ball soup every day and that'll be how I connect to Judaism." I'm not saying just to find one thing in Jewish culture that you're kind of into—maybe at the start, maybe that's a seed for something bigger—but I truly believe that if every single Jew looked themselves in the mirror and said, "What's one thing that I already enjoy—it’s not going to take any extra work from me—one thing that I already enjoy and would like to do more that I can double down on that will be for the greater benefit of my community?" I think if every single person asked themselves that, it doesn't matter how big, how small, if everyone just felt like they were contributing one thing to their community, not only would the community benefit from everyone adding their small thing in, but everyone—

Max: —would want to be involved in the community and would want to do more.

Max: I don't think you'd find a lot of people who would say, "Well, I did my one thing, I tried out the community, the community is great, but I don't feel like participating anymore." I think the true litmus test of whether this would be successful would be: can you find a foot in the door for these people that takes you, whether you're completely unaffiliated or whatever it is, just to that entry level of, "Okay, I went to one Shabbat dinner, it inspired me"—what's one thing that I want to do that I can seriously tell you not only why I enjoy this, which is, to be clear, the reason I think it's important for you to enjoy it is I don't think—it's hard to make anything sustainable if you don't genuinely enjoy it, or at least if you don't see the long-term benefit of it. That's, again, more of a baseball front office aspect—sustainable processes are what win the long game. And I think, yeah, start off with what you like and go from there to benefiting your community. If everyone went all in on that, think of everything we could accomplish, is what I would say.

Lio: That's great, that's great. So has your answer changed? Like, this answer you just gave us, has that changed post the 7th? Or have you always felt this way about the Jewish community at large still? In other words, is there something that we should be looking into specifically post-October 7th?

Max: Or this is a good rule for life—taking care of the community. One thing that I've said for a long time is, I think just given my unique background—I went to a pluralistic high school that didn't really push, you know, like, go study for a year in yeshiva, like a lot of other high schools do. And then from there, going to a super religious place, I fully bought in. I saw the tangible ways it would impact my life. I was like, I understand why this is beneficial for me. I understand why this is a lifestyle that I want to live. But I realized from doing that, there are so few people familiar with the way the more secular, less religious Jewish world does things and the Orthodox world. There's not enough real dialogue between the two. So I've long been a believer in the fact that we need to ingratiate those two communities with each other. It's not helpful for either one to look at the other as being “the other.” So in that sense, I would say that I've always believed in the innate importance of reaching every single Jew. That's always been something that I think matters a ton.

Max: I would say what's changed after the 7th is that I think before the 7th, I would have been satisfied with an answer of, you know, like I said, if everyone just finds something they enjoy, that's great for Judaism. I think the sense of responsibility and the sense of, hey, if I don't light my candle, no one's lighting my candle for me—I've got to pull my weight here. Like I said, I eat a bowl of matzo ball soup every day. That helps me connect to Judaism. Great. That's my thing. Before October 7th, I would have said, you know what, it may not seem like a lot to some people, but that's how a lot of people connect to their Jewish roots. Knock yourself out. If that's going to be the thing, that should be your thing.

Max: I think post-October 7th, I would want to instill this level of responsibility in everyone because I think people feel valued when they have responsibility. If I had signed off on the “eat a bagel or matzo ball soup every day and let that be your connection to Judaism,” I think a lot of people would have subconsciously felt, well, I'm not really doing that much, and they're letting me off the hook. So the fact that they're cool with me not contributing that much must mean they're not really invested in me, they don't really care about me, they don't see me as being part of the long-term vision. That's why I don't even know if I would call it tough love necessarily to say that whatever everyone does needs to have a tangible impact on the community. I would just say it's practical—hey, we need everyone to pull their weight here. I don't care if you put on tefillin every single day or if you've never heard the word tefillin in your life. We're not going to win this whole thing at large without every single person pulling their weight.

Max: The reason I'm pushing you to do something that will benefit your community is half because it's for the betterment of the community, but it's for your betterment as well. I don't want you to feel like a charity case—just like, "Oh, I make challah once a week and that's my connection to Judaism." Like, sure, make your challah. You know what, make challahs, sell them every single week, donate the funds to a Jewish charity—something like that. There's a way to benefit the community at large without straying out of your comfort zone. If you strictly just go straight from that seat of, What do I enjoy and how can I make this beneficial for everyone? I think the possibilities are endless. You actually described a very beautiful state of—

Lio:—what we call in Hebrew, mutual guarantee, right? Which is, again, it's a big thing. It is a huge part of when Israel stood under the mountain, right? And they were all as one man, one heart, and caring for that whole thing. And we like to quote it and we're told to repeat it every year for Passover. But somehow, after Passover, it's kind of like, all right, we can go back to doing our own individual thing. How do you think we can keep that sensation you described, that warmness, and keep it going without being on the—what's a good baseball metaphor? The ninth inning?

Max: No, there's like a crunch time—without it being the most important part.

Lio: There's like overtime also.

Max: Oh, extra innings, extra innings.

Lio: The extra innings. It's like the end and you're tired and exhausted and about to lose. Then you come together, right? How do we do it? How do we keep it all the time? How does this become part of the game?

Max: I think what you're asking comes down to sustainability. Again, the baseball mind in me is saying, how can we minimize randomness and maximize sustainability? Maximize—okay, this isn't just going to help us win today. This is a process we truly believe in that is going to play in the long run. I feel like I'm a broken record at this point, but I do think it really has to come from enjoyment at the end of the day. I bet that I have a bunch of rabbis from yeshiva who would probably push back on me for saying that. They would say, no, you need to start with responsibility and accountability. Once people understand why we need to put up with all the restrictions, then you get to—you've got to build the tree, and then you get the fruit. I'm very much of the belief that you need the tree in order to have the fruit. One doesn't exist without the other. You need to play the long game instead of trying to get the short-term benefit.

Max: But I think you need to give people a taste of the fruit to start. The status quo—the reason that there are sky-high levels of Jews who are completely unaffiliated, who have no interest in being part of this community, the generations of intermarriage, whatever you want to call it—I think the reason a lot of those people chose the path they chose is because we, the Jewish community, kind of tell people, what a terrible pitch is it that we tell people, "Oh, the one time you should come to shul every year is Yom Kippur." I don't blame those people for coming, sitting through those services, not eating, and then being like, "I want nothing to do with this." What a terrible sales pitch. I'm not downplaying the importance of experiences like that. I'm not saying everything in Judaism is sunshine and rainbows, but I think we need to open up a bit of an entry, a pathway for people to understand that most Orthodox Jews and most people who are very invested in their Jewish identity, regardless of the level of observance, do it not just because it's what it says to do, but because they enjoy it. People wouldn't stick with it if they didn't genuinely see the benefit from it. And yet we expect people who are completely unaffiliated and have never really done this, we say, "Even though we all do this because we enjoy it, we're not going to let you taste the good part yet. You have to grind for a little bit before." And they're like, why?

Max: This is good stuff. This is really critical.

Lio: Yeah, I like it. Good locker talk, right? Do you do locker talk in baseball? Yeah. I think this is something that, for this generation, is really necessary.

Seth: Everybody is constantly—like you're talking about, scrolling and everything—we're constantly looking, "How do I fill myself? How do I fill myself?" And we're talking about something that's eternal. We're talking about this Jewish thing, for whatever it's worth. We didn't get into this conversation too much about this today, but we're talking about this ancient thing. And then you brought up this other piece, which is fundamental to the Jewish experience with the 12 tribes, and each one's got a different thing. You guys study. You guys work. You guys cook. You guys are the warriors. If each one can bring to the table the thing that he does well, that he finds enjoyment in, then we're going to find that we're part of this one giant family where everyone's taking care of all the details. And that's profound. Even though we kind of had this—what seemed like a surface-level talk—I heard a lot of very profound things here. And hopefully take that into bridging between the orthodox and the secular that you talked about and even in the baseball world, when you come across all these Jews in all different parts, people totally unaffiliated and people more, and somehow see how each of them can get more and more involved, help each other, because this Hashem thing lives through us. And I think that when two Jews, three Jews, four Jews, they all start doing this part that they enjoy and all start coming together, then this other thing will blossom between us. And I think I will also add that I—

Lio:—think, you know, as long as we agree to be all together in this game, and play the part in this game. And it's okay—even between ourselves—it's not us versus the rest of the world right now. Right now, we're just talking about our game. You know, we have these different teams or different roles, different whatever, but we're all playing the game. We're all enjoying the game. We're all enjoying the excitement and the friction, but we're not breaking the rules. We're not blowing up the game. We're going to sort of agree to stay in the game together. I think that's super important. Otherwise, there's nothing. If we allow ourselves to deal to a point where I'm willing to kill the other guy, that's not a good game. You've left the game—you forgot that we're all still members of the same group, the same family.

Max: Well, that's why I kind of pushed back before when you were talking about, oh, well, Jewish disunity was at a high—or maybe not an all-time high, but it was pretty high before October 7th with the protests. My counter-argument to that would be, sure, that's true. But we weren't massacring each other on the street.

Max: You know what I mean?

Max: There was a hell of a lot more that united us than disagreed us. Some of the best advocacy advice that I've gotten—which I thought was funny that you guys introduced me as an advocate, because that was never something I set out to be, like, I want to be an Israel advocate—it was just like, when Jews got killed, I posted on my Twitter, "Hey, I don't like when Jews get killed." And a lot of people took issue with that. I was like, well, I guess I have to die on this hill now. I guess I have to go a little all in on this. But some of the best advice that I've gotten in that regard, about arguing with anti-Semites, is people will say, listen, at the end of the day, if you use the example of a college campus, probably 2% of people on campus are vocally pro-Israel and 2% are vocally anti-Israel, pro-Palestine, whatever terminology you want to use. If you focus on the 96% of people who either don't care—if we're being honest, for the most part, most of these people are living their own lives. What do they care what's going on over there?—but whether they don't care, they're undecided, or they're being manipulated and prompted by the other side, we can do ourselves a favor. If we get the vast majority of those 96% of people on our side—which should be easy enough, just given the history and the track record, and we're not, we don't all have blind bias behind why we support Israel and why we invest in Judaism. We believe in it because there's a history, because it makes sense to us, because those are Western values, frankly, at the end of the day.

Max: I think that's one of the biggest things that has come to light from these protests, especially the ones on college campuses, is that a lot of that 96% are realizing, hmm, one of these sides is proudly flying American flags, one of them is burning them. So it doesn't take an Albert Einstein to look at that and say, which one of these people aligns with my values, generally speaking? But I think in the same sense, we could say the Jewish disunity is super high, but at the end of the day, this might sound insane to say, but the protests over the Israeli government or whatever it is—when you think about the grand scope of everything that Judaism represents—it's like we're inflating one thing to make it seem like, oh my God, Judaism as a whole is at risk because of this one tension. For the most part, we still agree it's good to live in Israel. Torah values are generally good. We believe in the innate value of every person.

Seth: With the rose-colored glasses, Lio?

Max: He's a very glass—

Seth: Yeah. No, no. I like his optimism.

Lio: It was good. Every once in a while, we get a good optimist on the show. I like it. Max, we have to wrap up, although I feel like we're just getting you started. I put a quote in the chat from Likutei Halachot. Maybe you can read the quote and then we'll close the show. We'd love to stay in touch. We'd love to have you again, maybe figure out more ways of collaborating. I feel like this is good energy to have attached to the Jewish people, so I want to keep it close. So, the link—the quote.

Max: Do you want me to read it? Yeah. The essence of the root of Arvut is extended from the reception of the Torah when all of Israel were responsible for one another. And this is because at the root of the souls of Israel, all are considered as one because they are extended from the source of unity. 100 percent. That is exactly what I'm saying, that we all come from the same seed, from Zerah Yaakov. There is so much more that unites us than what divides us. We can't let ourselves—like social media, for all the great things about it—I think the one thing I realized from spending so much time on it is it is not real life. It elevates negative voices. It enhances unpopular, polarizing opinions. We can't let ourselves get sucked into believing that represents the world at large.

Lio: 100% Max. Thanks, man. You know, I barely detach myself, but I really do have to wrap because we have other things that we have to complete before the end of this day. I feel like we're just getting started. We're just getting warmed up. We're not even out on the pitch yet. We're just getting warmed up.

Seth: It's called a field.

Lio: I'm going to get my metaphors right eventually. We're not in the rink yet. Yes, yes. We want to thank Max Manis from John Boy Media. Tune in to his podcast. We'll put a link in the description for that. Send me that link, by the way, Max, so I can put it in the chat. Please get some of his infectious good energy and find your place in the tribe. We just want everyone to find a place in this great tribe. We are certain that this will also change the attitude of the world toward us. We are absolutely certain of that, even if we don't understand all the laws and all the rules and what the Creator wants, you know that much. So thank you so much. Thank you for being with us. We're The Jew Function. Like, share, follow. You can find us everywhere—YouTube, Spotify, Facebook, TikTok, you name it. X, we're there. And we'll see you next time.

Seth: Thank you guys for having me. Bye, man.

Lio: Thank you. Bye bye.