w/ Prof. Shaul Magid #3

Lio

Hello, Seth. Hello, everyone. This is the Jew Function live after a long hiatus of not being live. We decided to jump in and be live again. And we're very happy to be here. A lot has changed. I believe when we recorded the last episode, there was still the war in Gaza. It was still officially on. Now it's formally off. Whatever that means, we'll see. But as people who follow us know, we view world events a little differently, mostly in how they push us toward or away from what we believe to be our purpose here. And by we, I don't mean Seth and I. We base it on 3,000 years of recorded Jewish history, words of Jewish sages, and even findings from modern network science. They all point to the same thing. And if you want to know more about it, you can check out the first 22 episodes of this show, where we take the viewer through a chronological overview of Jewish history alongside world history. And we're looking at patterns, patterns that shape, sorry, that appeared in Jewish history and that helped us get a better sense of our role in the system and our place in it. Because when you look at things only from where you live or you look only at one event, it's easy to ascribe different explanations to it and to get attached, maybe go politically, maybe go geographically, economically, go into all those places. But when you look at the really big picture, then suddenly a different picture emerges. And that's the one that we like to look at. And after those first 22 episodes, we also invite people here to talk about those ideas. and this is, I believe, Seth, correct me, if I'm wrong, still we're the only ones who say those things and talk to people about those things in this way. So if you like what you hear, then please subscribe and leave a comment. We're not even asking for your money. Surprising twist, but just leave a comment and subscribe and share this conversation. I think it's one worth having. What do they want to say, Seth? What's the feeling among the Jews in America these days? Are they warming up to Israel again? Or is Israel still off limits?

Seth

You know, I think I'm a little bit siloed in my books. I am following on-the-ground sources. on X for example you know just trying to weed out news commentary and just see firsthand accounts of things like everyone I think was paying attention yesterday in Times Square they were showing Hamas oh look at that they were showing you know Hamas executing Palestinians I think maybe people are paying attention to that but also yesterday was this no kings rally around the US so I think that we're still very very divided I think very very divided I think even liberal Jews who support Jews also still against you know if they hear about the peace plan it's just Trump trying to make money or it's just a business deal or whatever. I don't think that we've overcome this big divide that we were. Well, I think the whole world is getting, you know,

Lio

is continuing on this trend of polarization, right? The center is basically split into you going further right, further left, or in some cases you just do away with one side completely. I think that's the general trend around the world. And it's something that we've, I don't want to say we foresaw that actually, wiser people than us foresaw that. They were talking about a time where the rift between people would be so huge, that it would seem almost impossible to bridge. And at the same time, it's actually this kind of divide that allows you to create the best kind of peace, right? The wholeness that comes when you take two opposites that you don't think. How can these two fit? They're so, they're just opposites. And that's exactly what is that perfect, right? That satisfying match happens under certain conditions. Seems so unrealistic. So are you saying you shouldn't get our hopes up or maybe something will happen?

Seth

I'm waiting for a miracle.

Lio

Well, you know, if you're dealing with miracles, we have just a person for it. And by that, I mean that he's the I think is the only guest that has miraculously agreed to come on the show a third time. So I don't know. Yeah, it's a minor miracle right there. He's, I got to hand it to him, he's a fascinating guy, first of all, just, you know, when we first had him on the show, he was very lively, we had a great conversation, and now, you know, it's been a while since we had him, and now he's now the visiting professor of modern Jewish studies in Harvard, Harvard Divinity School, an appointment that started, by the way, before the 7th, so it's not like, oh, Harvard was looking for an interesting, Jew with some unique views on Zionism to bring in. They started before that. But it is interesting that he was appointed because he does represent a very unique voice in Jewish thought. Everybody thinks he's great, but some people say, well, does he really represent all the Jews? And we want to talk to him today about, well, his appointment to Harvard, but also the state of Jews in America, Jews in Israel, that relationship, Israel and the world, the diaspora. I have a long list of questions for him. Let's see how much we can squeeze into the time we have together. Please give a warm welcome to Professor Shaul Magid. Welcome, Shaul.

Shaul

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Leo. Thank you, Seth. Just one short correction. I'm not a visiting professor. Now I have a permanent position. I'm a professor of modern Jewish.

Lio

So you're not visiting anymore?

Shaul

I'm not visiting anymore. Okay.

Lio

So Harvard, and you know, we had David Wolpe here on the show last year.

Seth

He didn't have a lot of good things to say about Harvard at the time.

Lio

Yeah. Well, he was on the show right after he left. So he left Harvard. He wasn't happy with a lot of things. And then did you actually replace him? No, no, no.

Shaul

There's a lot of confusion about that. I was appointed at the Divinity School as a professor. David Wolpe was a one-year research fellow. He didn't have a position there. It was only a one-year position. He taught one course in the spring, I think. So his relationship with Harvard was a very, very temporary one. Got you.

Lio

Got you. Okay. So, no, I mean, I wasn't implying that it was. And so disappointment, this appointment, not disappointment, this appointment, some say is a strange one because you are and you do have an unusual voice in the landscape. You're not the typical Jewish studies, you know, Zionism and this and embrace everyone. You have a very unique voice. So what, how do you, you know, why do you think Harvard appointed you? And actually, what do you intend to do in Harvard?

Shaul

Well, I can tell you the story. I was a professor at Dartmouth. My wife, Annette Yoshio-Reed, was appointed as the Krister Stendhal Professor of Early Christianity at Harvard at the Divinity School. And they asked me if I would be willing to come for a year as a visiting professor, which I did. That was the year of October 7th. And then about halfway through that year, they asked if I would be willing to stay if they ran a very particular kind of search for me to get a permanent issue, which I agreed to do. And it really, you know, obviously the year of October 7th was a very crazy year on university campuses in general. But it really didn't have anything to do with my politics. It was really about a scholar of modern Judaism. And they thought that they wanted me to, not that they thought, they wanted me to come to teach modern Judaism. There was nobody that was teaching modern Judaism at the Divinity School at that time. And they ran a search, which took over a year. It's a very complicated process. As people that know in universities, you have to send out for many letters and evaluations and all kinds of things. So I think it got confused with October 7th and its aftermath, but the appointment really was not about that.

Lio

Fair enough. And what is the climate in Harvard these days?

Shaul

The climate in Harvard these days is actually, on the one hand, much calmer than it was two years ago, as it is in all campuses. But I think the pressure that the university has gotten from the Trump administration has really caused a lot of cutbacks, a lot of limitations, a hiring freeze for the most part, not completely. I mean, I think that the university is trying to recalibrate itself in relationship to the pressures that's being put on by the administration. And, you know, Harvard has a very, very big endowment, as people know. I mean, it's a university that's older than the country itself. So it's not that they're financially strapped, but when you have, you know, millions of dollars that somehow are taken away, you have to recalibrate and reorganize your priorities. So I think things are good. I think Alan Garber was the interim president, who's now the president, has done a good job trying to figure out how to work through this kind of difficult stage.

Lio

My question is not so much about the Trump administration specifically. I think when we all saw what came out, the fallout after October 7th and what was happening in the university, and we also had here on the show Shai Davidei from Columbia University, who got all the heat on him for standing up for Israel.

Shaul

He generated a fair amount of heat himself.

Lio

No, absolutely. There's no question. He's got that spirit. But the point was that what amazed us is the level of just general ignorance and almost lack of critical thinking on the part of many people. And I still see today, by the way. And you expect it that the universities, and this is also universities in Israel. I'm not ashamed to say it. in many places around the world, the place that should be more open, more, you know, less biased, more like, okay, what's happening here? What's happening there? What is the media doing? Almost were like, you know, eating what was coming through the mainstream media or even more concerning feeding what, you know, what the mainstream media was saying, almost that it felt like it. I know in some cases in Israel, that was the case. If you turned on channels 11, 12, 13, they were saying things, you know, that were written by professors in university, which to me is totally disturbing. You know, regardless of what I think about what's happening or not, it's weird. It's like backwards. So what about, what happened to critical thinking? What, you know, where is it nowadays?

Shaul

Well, that's a separate question and a good one. Look, I think there are two things. I think that there's a fair amount of ignorance and misinformation that are happening on all sides, whether it's being protesting the war, whether it's supporting the war, whether it's being anti-Israel, whether it's being pro-Israel, I think there is a fair amount of a lack of knowledge and critical thinking. On the other hand, I will say that many of those students who are protesting the war are actually not ignorant of the realities and the history. Many of them have taken courses in Middle Eastern studies. They've taken courses in Jewish studies. They've taken courses on the history of Zionism. I mean, you know, when I went to college, I don't know about both of you, when I went to college, there were no courses on the history of Zionism that I was aware of. There were no courses on the history of the conflict in the Middle East. But today there are in many, many places. Now, are they biases? Sure, there are biases. I mean, people are human beings. They have particular opinions. But I do think that the idea that somehow university campuses, and I can only speak of mine, I can speak of Dartmouth too, but I can speak of Harvard, to think that university campuses are bastions of bias ideologues that are basically, you know, spouting propaganda to their students. That's just simply not true. I mean, go to any course, look at any syllabus. I mean, there are certainly exceptions to that rule, but the rule is that people who are academics are doing their jobs. They're basically engaged in the exercise of the production of knowledge, and that's what we do. We, you know, we can have disagreements with each other.

Seth

Can you qualify that? Because it seems like hard to swallow what you're saying.

Shaul

I don't know, you know, I'm not sure why it's hard to swallow. Again, there are exceptions to the rule, but generally speaking, people are teaching the subjects that they've spent many, many decades researching and writing about. And one can have various kinds of views and opinions on that subject, if we're talking about this subject in particular, but we can talk about any subject. The history of racism, the history of capitalism, Marxism. I mean, there are many things out there in the world that people spend a lot of time and a lot of effort and a lot of energy researching and teaching and writing about. And to flatten it out to some bastion of some ideological agenda, I think it's really a disservice to the profession.

Lio

I think maybe what's happening, and again, I haven't been to Harvard. I didn't go to school at Harvard. But the feeling that I'm getting, sort of like this may be a zeitgeist. Maybe it's really just a feeling. It's like there's a collective maybe confusion. Maybe it's not even an intentional like, oh, let's go. It's almost like we are leading ourselves down a certain path, Maybe the path that we want to think is true or we wish would be true. And then we're creating structures to support it. And this applies to many, many areas of human endeavor. And this we see. We see we are wrong in so many instances, on so many things fundamentally. And yet we are so like wishing it weren't so. Even speaking about, for example, and again, this is not a political show, but just as an example, because it's a hot topic. the Oslo Accords and everything that was going on there for two, three decades, everybody was really wishing this thing would be real, that they were willing to ignore and a whole chunk of reality to support it. And to, you know, so it wasn't even out of malice. It was out of, out of the, they really wanted this. Everybody really wanted peace, you know, at any cost. And, and the cost was, was, was bloody. And so I'm asking if maybe you think that this applies to other areas of human studies and that we are genuinely confused. Or are you feeling kind of confident? Like we're, you know, knowledge acquisition, knowledge production is good. You know, the machines are working well. Everything is, everybody's churning out the right amount of critical thinking and the research and everything. And we're going to figure it out.

Shaul

I hear that. I mean, in some way, I wouldn't say it that way. Let's take a couple of examples right there. Let's take the example. Let's take two examples. Let's take the one example of systemic racism as as as a position within the United States and take the other example of the question of genocide. Right. So let's start with the second one. So genocide is it is a category of international law. Right. And there are certain things that are criteria in order to constitute it. We kind of know what they are. you know, Raphael Lemkin, who developed the idea, and then it became part of the, you know, part of the Geneva Convention. Whether what's happening in Gaza is genocide or not is a legitimate scholarly intellectual question. And you can have experts that can disagree about whether it is or not genocide, what's the nature of intent, how does intent work, all of those kinds of questions. So hold the position that the Gaza war is an example of genocide. One can disagree with that, but that certainly is not, by definition, an ideologically based position. It's a position that is looking at the legal parameters of what constitutes genocide, international law, and making a decision whether this or that doesn't apply. You can make the same case about Myanmar, which is happening now. I mean, there's a genocide case in Myanmar in the international court, right? So it's not that people are saying, oh, you know, Israel is going to be genocide in Gaza, and that's the only genocide that exists in the world, and that becomes the focal point of all genocide. Nobody's really saying that. Now you can come and say, you know, Omar Bartov, who's a scholar, who's a genocide studies scholar, basically has come to the conclusion that it is, and there are other people that basically say that it's not. And those two positions can exist together as in any scholarly subject or debate. You can take the same thing about systemic racism. Is the United States a systemically racist country or not? How does that work? How do you understand those kinds of questions? So that's what universities do. And to say that a university professor that has a particular viewpoint about systemic racism or capitalism or genocide is somehow engaged in some kind of propagandistic project to inculcate their students with a biased opinion. It's an understanding of how universities work.

Lio

No, no, no, you're right, right. And that's what I said. I wasn't implying it. I think Seth probably also, we're not implying that that was the case. I was rather implying a more subtle point that we maybe were just very much confused, not just about this topic, but about a lot of other

Seth

topics and we should what end is the purpose of each of these studies like if we want to identify any one point you know when we walk we go you know like one leg goes back one leg goes forward if you want to catch the leg while it's moving backwards and make a whole study about it and publish a lot of books about all this part you know about this going backwards you miss the whole context of what's happening so there's of course you know in science and we have the luxury now in this modern world that we have a snapshot of of everything you want to find out about some insect that lives at the end of some forest somewhere you could find out about it so there's a value to all of this research but we also need to zoom out when we're understanding and when we want to understand where it's going and what's the point of it to understand to get the snapshot of when the leg moves backwards it's important to understand the whole picture but it's not enough to build a worldview on just that and to and to see that in the for example media all the time because that leg is moving back in order that it will move forward again and so i think that's the for me that's what what i'm missing here is like what is the end of all of the like is the united states systemically racist well did the united states end racism i mean end slavery and is human evolution a very slow and gradual process and where are we in that process and have we done better under the conditions that are going on here where everyone's allowed to be here and you're trying to smash an african culture with a northern european culture with a south you know with a with an aztec culture all together in the same city you know are we doing good under those conditions is a different question than whether or not people have in themselves some kind of racist or xenophobic feeling because after all we're cave you know advanced cavemen and it takes a long time to to get to where we're going so

Shaul

i think that i think yeah i was saying well i i i mean it just in response to it i i think that there's there may be a kind of i don't know a fundamental disagreement i i i am not a believer in historical inevitability, and I'm not a believer in a myth of progress. I'm not saying that things aren't better now than they were before, but I have a more kind of Foucauldian notion that there is a kind of zigzag of how human civilization develops. And yes, we don't have slavery anymore, but we have horribly racist incarceration laws. In other words, there are various ways in which the racism morphs over time. And I think that it emerges and comes to the surface over time. And one of the more recent, I think, surfacing of racism in America was the election of Obama. Now, we think in a certain sense, oh, the election of Obama, how can America be a racist society? We elected an African-American president. And then 10 years later, we elected Trump, right? So it's which in a certain sense, Trump owes his presidency to Obama. Part of it is the backlash against the fact that, you know, having lived in the Midwest for 14 years when I taught at Indiana University, for many of the people in the rural Midwest, the very idea of a black president was just unfathomable. So for us, we might say, as I don't know whether we consider ourselves liberals, but, you know, American Jews say, oh, this is great progress. Right. We we we elected an African-American president for a lot of white Americans. It was a total disaster. And I think that Trump is is the beneficiary of that. So I don't you know, I don't believe in a kind of myth of progress. I believe that we are moving back and forth in all kinds of different ways. And yes, I think the systemic nature of racism that gave us slavery has not really been erased, but it's just morphed into a variety of other kinds of things. I think we saw that with Black Lives Matter. So I think that what you're saying, Seth, is exactly what historians do, right? Historians are always trying to see the back leg and the front leg. They're always trying to see the past as a way of better understanding how something that exists in the present can create a future.

Seth

That's possible. It's possible that that's what they do. That's what I think good ones would do.

Lio

Some of them, yeah. Not all of them, by the way. We met a lot that were very much insisting that the events in the past and the present and the future are not necessarily related. You know, you take an event.

Shaul

They're related in complicated ways. I don't want to draw a direct line from past to present to future, but historians are always interested in the back leg or in the front leg. In other words, they're never interested in the thing in the moment exclusively.

Lio

So I want to bring this all to, you know, to our people, because that's the focus of this show. If you, you know, these complexities exist, a lot of them exist also among Jews. And I think the relationship between Jews in America and Israel are fairly complicated these days. You write a lot about Jewish identity. We also talked about it last time. And you have an interesting sort of position in that because, on the one hand, you spent many years in Israel. You served in the military. I think you have an Israeli passport, right? You're an Israeli and all that. And yet you live in America in what you call a diaspora. And you argue for a new, you know, a new way of thinking about this whole dichotomy. That it's like either diaspora or Israel, that there may be some other things or that either Zionism or Orthodoxy, that there's maybe something new. Where, you know, has anything changed for you after October 7th? And where do you see, where do you see us, our historic trajectory as Jews? Maybe we'll, you know, zoom in on that.

Shaul

Yeah, great question. and this goes back to something that Seth said at the beginning that I want to weigh in on. I think that we can talk about Israel and the ceasefire and the war and Gaza and all of that, but I'd rather focus in on the United States, on America, American Jewry. I think the Gaza war has really broken American Jewry in half. And I think that one of the consequences of this is that this thing that was called the Zionist consensus, meaning 1970s, Norman Porharitz had this essay where he said, we are all Zionists now, post-1967, that American Jews and Zionism, well, that Zionism became a kind of sine qua non of American Jewry in all different forms, right-wing, left-wing, centrist, liberal Zionism. But there was a consensus. I think that consensus is broken. I think that consensus is over. I think that the middle has collapsed. As I think one of you said in your opening remarks, American Jews have moved to the right. American Jews have moved to the left. Those American Jews that have moved to the right in justifying the war or however they understand it, basically coming to the conclusion that it is justifiable as a response to October 7th for Israel to basically destroy the entire Gaza Strip. Now, we can talk about what that means, but that's one position. And then the other position, which is the move to the left among a lot of younger Jews, but not only younger Jews, have basically come to the conclusion that the entire project is a failure. And that whether you call it genocide or you don't call it genocide, it really kind of doesn't matter, that this destruction of Gaza was not an aberration. The destruction of Gaza was one of the possible consequences of the Zionist project. And they've decided that their Jewishness can no longer be tied to Zionism. So that becomes the kind of anti-Zionism, non-Zionism. How will you understand it? And for a lot of young American Jews, I will say, when they call themselves anti-Zionist, they're not saying that Israel has no right to exist. Some of them might be, but a lot of them are not. What they are saying is, I don't want my Jewish identity to be defined by that nationalist project that I no longer can support. It's a very different position, right? You know, Israel is a country like any other country. It's a democracy. It votes. Well, to some degree, a democracy. It And a lot of American Jews, especially younger ones, are saying, I don't want that to be the centerpiece of my Jewish identity. And that's the collapse of the consensus. And I think what the Gaza war has done, in my mind, has had an impact on American Jewry, the likes of which we haven't seen in the entire history of American Jewry. 300 years of American Jewry. Nothing has done to American Jewry what the Gaza war has done to American Jewry. And it remains to be seen what's going to happen. We don't know, right? We're still in the aftermath of that. But I think it's that profound in terms of the American Jewish experience. And it will resonate for generations of American Jews in trying to make sense of what Israel means for them as moving forward into the 21st century. What does it mean for you? Look, for me, it's a little bit more complicated because, as you said, I lived in Israel for 10 years. I have an Israeli passport. I served in the IDF. I really, in a certain sense, personally abandoned Zionism sometime in the 1980s when I served in the army. It was the experience I had serving in the West Bank that brought me to the conclusion there's something like deeply, deeply problematic about this whole thing. And again, I'm going to say...

Lio

I'm sorry, just so we're clear because maybe some viewers might be, but when you say this whole thing, you mean what? The fact that Jews should have the right to protect themselves or that the idea of protecting... Hold on. The idea that protecting oneself or surviving means that you sort of reduce yourself to a level that you disagree with. Or what does that mean? Maybe just say a few words on that, because maybe...

Shaul

What I mean by, it's not that, what I mean by is the normalization of a culture of domination. And that's what the occupation is. It is dominating in other people in order, as you said, right, in order to assure the safety of Israeli Jews, which, of course, did not work on October 7th. But we can talk about that. That, for me, for me to live as a Jew in the land of Israel, in a Jewish state, for me to do that, require, for me to do that would be to require me to dominate and deny the self-realization and self-determination of other people. I think, I don't think that that's a project that's sustainable.

Seth

So we have a very, you're touching on a very important point here. And also, I think it goes back to what I was saying about the right leg, left leg, that we look, you know, you look at the Maccabees, right? We can call them, if we don't really know too much about history, but we know enough, you know, it's a righteous fight that they fought. But that same group eventually became totally the Hasmoneans became very corrupted later. Right. Same group. So at one point, they're the righteous ones at another point. And it kind of goes to the thing that you said that without Obama, we wouldn't have a Trump, you know, and without Trump losing in 2020, he would never be as powerful as he was when he came into office this time. Right. You're talking from a beautifully idealistic place. And I think we all, the three of us anyway, would say we don't want to dominate anybody. We want to live in a world that we want to be part of something that's ruled by love, ruled by understanding, ruled by concessions towards the people we love.

Lio

Just say we want peace, just like your teacher Shlomi. We want peace. We want world peace. There's no question. so the question is how do you get there is that what you want to ask well what i'm saying is you

Seth

know what what do you do if you behave like that and everyone around you is kills you you know so then you're forced to um to take on other qualities and then of course in any situation like with the hasmonians you're gonna have there's never just one point like any point we put we pick Let's not look at it as one point Let's look at it as spectrum So if we pick this point Let's understand that there's going to be a lot to the right of it and a lot to the left of it And if we pick a point over here There's going to be a lot to the right of it and a lot to the left of it I can't be a part of that and don't have some kind of offense as we're trying to defend ourselves,

Shaul

then we'll be gone again, right? I agree with you. I think that in a certain sense, I guess I'm a kind of unreconstructed binationalist, which... Wait, define what that means. I don't know. Binationalism was a small segment within the Zionist movement in the teens and 20s of the 20th century, which basically was advocating for a Jewish Arab state. It was not in favor of a Jewish state. It was in favor of a binational state. And those people like Judah Magnus and Martin Buber and Ernst Akiva Simon and Chaim Kohn, Hans Kohn and all these people, they considered themselves Zionists. But that position is not a Zionist position anymore. If you don't believe in a Jewish state, but you believe in a binational state, I think for most Jews, you are not a Zionist.

Lio

I disagree. I don't think you're not a Zionist. I think you're living in a dream. That's the only thing. Everybody wanted, like I said, for three decades, everybody wanted to believe in two states. Everybody was stuffed with this idea. Media was actively silencing any other views against it, just so we can make that dream come true. And it not only blew up in our faces, it was never there, Shaul. The point is, if any of us spoke Arabic.

Shaul

I would say it this way. You might be right. However, the claim that a one-state solution, whatever that means, I don't really believe there's a one-state solution, but a one democratic state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, where all of those people who live there are equally citizens of a democratic state, that you could say is utopian. I hear that. I don't think that two states is any less utopian at this point. I think both alternatives are So we're left with the reality, which is, to my mind, unsustainable. And I think that October 7th should have shown that.

Lio

So I want to put geopolitics aside for a second, because by the way, there's a great book by a former Israeli officer who proposed no less than four, I forget his name right now, but four solutions. And by the way, just for the sake of our viewers as well, there isn't a single Arab nation today where nationalism trumps tribalism. tribalism still is the ruling state of mind for all Arab societies. Nationalism never made it, let alone democracy. It just doesn't exist, that concept. What does exist is Emirates. So a big democratic state for those who can deal with it. And Emirates can solve a lot of the problems. And by the way, there's a lot of voices calling for that. But let's even assume that this would happen. Okay, let's assume that we buy ourselves some peace and quiet for a while. I think the deeper question is that we're trying to get you to talk about is to what end? You talk about, okay, let's not make Israel the center of gravity for Jewish identity. It's not about Zionism or Orthodoxy. It's about something. What is it about? What I'm trying to get to is to talk about...

Seth

Where are we going with all of it?

Lio

Yeah, where are we going with this?

Shaul

Well, that's a good question. What is the purpose?

Lio

Because the whole existence... And we get to this in every show, by the way, because the whole existence of the Jewish people is supernatural. And yet, you know, one of your teachers, where the high couple says, let's get rid of the supernatural. Let's just be a good culture. Like, no, screw that. There's a hundred better cultures than us. We're clearly not the best culture out there. There's something else happening. There are very origin stories, unlike any other nation. What is going on here? To what end do we exist even as a nation? Why even bother with all the suffering?

Shaul

That's a very good question that I do not have an answer to. Oh, shit, Shao, come on. Oh, my God. However, given that, I will say that we are presently, in my view, in a very, very liquid transitional state in terms of Jewish existence, in terms of the question of Jewish existence. And what I mean by the collapse of the Zionist consensus is for the last half century, maybe even 75 years, Israel really served as a kind of centerpiece for Jewish identity that then in a certain sense became like a spiritual center that, you know, extended out only it wasn't necessarily a spiritual center for whatever it was. And I think that we are now witnessing a transitional period where that is no longer the case for a variety of reasons. Now, we can lament that. We can celebrate that. It really doesn't matter. Because Jewish existence is always contingent upon Jews creating for themselves different architects, texts, a different kind of architecture of identity and practice and belief throughout Jewish history. The Jews that were living in 6th century Babylonia were not the same as the Jews that were living in 18th century France. I mean, things move and things change, beliefs change. Jews, as one scholar of liturgy said, Jews have a very good digestive system. They're able to absorb things from the outside and digest them and create a certain kind of energy and power and force for themselves. And I think we're watching the emergence of what might be called a new diaspora. Maybe America is that place. Whether that's sustainable or not, 100 years from now, 200 years from now, we don't know. But what I'm just saying... We kind of know. No, we don't really know. No, we do. According to all of Jewish history, we know exactly what's going to happen. You know, people say that to me a lot. People say, you know, history repeats itself. I do not believe that history repeats itself. It does not repeat itself. History, there are certain trends that do, and then there are many trends that don't. So it's a very convenient thing to say, you know, history repeats itself. Therefore, everyone hates the Jews, and therefore they're going to hate the Jews.

Lio

No, no, not therefore. But the only thing we're saying, I mean, with respect to history, is that that pattern has repeated itself so many times that you can say, you know what, it's not an exact repeat. It's not the same repeat. But, man, it's a reboot, okay? It's a reboot of the same idea. Jews, you know, unwittingly, they end up at the center of the most developed society. Why? Because we are accelerants. We are like enzymes. We accelerate natural processes. They would happen even without us. But with Jews, they happen faster. So the human ego grows. With Jews, it just grows faster. That's all. It's not like we're not the worst part of society. We just help society discover the worst it can do and the best with our presence in it. That's all. We're catalysts.

Shaul

I think that, ironically, one of the most important Jewish historians of the 20th century, Salo Barone, developed an entire way of thinking that he called the resistance to the lacrimose reading of Jewish history. That is the idea that Jews were always marginalized, oppressed, persecuted, hated. And he basically, in his entire career, he was the first professor of Jewish history ever appointed in an American university at Columbia University. He basically said, actually, historically, that's not true. There were times of persecution. There were times of oppression. and then there were centuries of coexistence. Absolutely. Right? So in other words, there is a, you know, there is a Benzion Dinur, who was the first minister of education in the first Knesset, who was a professor of history, basically made this argument that's become somewhat normative within the Jewish world, which is Zion, that the line, I'm trying to get it right, that basically Zionism is the culmination of, Zionism is Jewish historiography, that all of Jewish history leads to this point of the establishment of a Jewish state, and that the establishment of the Jewish state is the solution to the problem that Jews have always dealt with, which is the problem of marginalization, de-territorialization, oppression, so on and so forth. And in a certain way, that's become known as the Jerusalem school of Jewish history, One of the great proponents of that was Bencio Netanyahu, Benjamin Netanyahu's father. And Barone is coming and saying, that does not bear the weight of historical analysis. It's a much more complicated process. You know, Jews, everything that we've produced that we call Judaism, almost everything, is the product of the diaspora. From the Talmud in Babylonia.

Lio

Because you spent the last 2,000 years there. I mean, it makes sense.

Shaul

Whatever it is. In other words, the entire creative, energetic process is the product of the diaspora.

Seth

But the thing that is the foundation for all Western civilization and is the thing that brought the concept of peace in the world, world peace, and the brotherhood of man, and you should love the other as yourself, that's all from Israel. The fact that we were in the exile after that is something else. It's from the Hebrew Bible.

Shaul

It's not that it's from Israel.

Lio

Well, I mean, they kind of met in the land of Israel, first temple, second temple, then out, right? Two strikes, third strike, you're out. It was kind of like, I think what we're saying is, whether or not this is the combination or not, it's a worthy question. I think that unlike any other culture or even nationality, that loop doesn't seem to reveal itself with other nations. You don't see the Scots moving to America, becoming part of America, living great with Americans, then somehow being spat out. It doesn't happen with the Scots or the Italians or the Irish. None of the other nations have that experience. They come in, they usually assimilate, they become part of the fabric. End of story. Never with Jews. So these anomalies are too, there are too many of them to just write them off as like, well, it happened. No, it happened hundreds of times, Shaul. How can we sit here and say, you know, it hasn't repeated itself?

Shaul

I think maybe kind of a fundamental disagreement, structural disagreement that I have with both of you is that I don't believe in the concept of uniqueness at all. I don't believe any people is unique. I don't believe any historical event is unique. I don't believe that anything is unique.

Lio

But everything is unique.

Shaul

Well, either everything is unique or nothing is unique.

Lio

Everything is unique. No, no, we say everything is unique. But what's unique about us is that we have to do something.

Shaul

That's what we're saying.

Lio

I would say what's distinctive about us.

Shaul

Uniqueness is a very dangerous road to go down. We'll go with you. There's something distinctive about the Jewish people. There's something distinctive about the Jewish experience, certainly. But that's not a unique experience. There are other experiences of other peoples that have their own distinctive qualities. And remember, you know, when we talk about, you know, human history, we're very Western-centric. We don't think about what was going on in other parts of the globe, in the Asian subcontinent, in China, in different parts of the world, where there were all kinds of other peoples that were marginalized and persecuted and exiled.

Lio

But few had such an impact as the Jews. You can't argue against it, unfortunately.

Shaul

But you know what the irony is here? I agree with you in principle. It's really not the Jews. It's a group of Jews who interpreted Judaism in a particular way, and those people are actually called Christians.

Lio

So you're saying it's the Christians and the Jews that had the impact?

Shaul

Yes. Look, here's a hypothetical. Let's say Christianity never existed, right? Let's say there was never a Jesus or that the Jesus movement never was successful, right? Would the Jews have had any impact on history?

Lio

No, I will flip the question. I will say, let's assume precisely that the Christianity and Islam are both two sides of something that has to do with Judaism. They both emerged as a reaction or a counter reaction or an expansion of the same ideas because the system of nature needed to disseminate those ideas outwardly. And it's great. Why do you need to do, you know?

Shaul

So what I'm saying when you talk about the Jews or the unique contribution of the Jews, you have to see it within the context of these two refractions of the biblical tradition.

Lio

For sure. The question I'm asking is, what is it now? Because, again, I want to lead us there. It's not a good question.

Seth

What's our goal?

Lio

What's our goal? And I'll just qualify the question. Because you could argue, well, as you said, every culture is distinctive. The Aztecs were distinctive. They contributed something. And then they disappeared. We are still clearly here. So either there's a bug in the system, which I don't believe in. It's a holistic system. Or we still have something to do that we haven't done. And the system really needs us to do. That's how we see it.

Shaul

That could be.

Lio

I don't know what that is.

Shaul

I can't say I know what that is, but I do think, look, I think here's one of the kind of interesting wrinkles. I think that, and this is true of a lot of thinkers that I've been working on, early 20th century, late 19th century thinkers who were very opposed to the Zionist project. And one of the things that they were really opposed to, because their question was the question we're actually asking now, is the notion for them of the Jews becoming kechol ha'amim, like all the nations, that is the biggest problem. Because the biggest problem with becoming like all the other nations is that you become like all the other nations. And then in a certain sense, you become like the nation that rises up and reaches an apex and then disappears. Disappears. Right. So in other words, what what for these thinkers, what kept Jews in existence was actually that they never became like all the other nations. And that was its raison d'etre. And for them, Zionism was, in a certain sense, falling into the pit of European nationalism, whereby the Jews will become like everybody else. So I'll give you an example. Martin Buber says the real beginning of the descent of ancient Israel society was in 1 Samuel 8,

Lio

when the Jews said, give us a king.

Shaul

Buber says that's the end. That's the beginning of the end for him.

Lio

I respect Buber, but I think it was a little nearsighted to think that, like Seth said, there's a reason why we also need to be exiled. You can say the end is the exile, and you write yourself about exile. There's a reason why you need to be exiled, so you can spread out and be like a good manure that you spread out. And now, when it's time to grow something, I didn't say that. That's your byline. Yeah. Listen, the first president of Israel said it. No, I'm sorry. Ezra Weitzman said it. Ezra Weitzman. Yeah, he said, yeah, Jews are like manure. Together they stink, but you spread them out, great things grow. But, you know, again, I'm going back to the sources because you studied extensively, as we have, and they all talk about a very specific role among the nations. It's not a philosophical question. This is not a, oh, the Bible ended here or the Bible ended there. No, there's a grand plan and we're part of it.

Seth

Now you can say that the goal is to bring, to make all of humanity. My house will be a house of prayer for all nations. That we will love the other as yourself. Forget about the yarmulke and the tzitzit and everything, but that all of humanity will become one family and say that's the role of the Jewish people. And let's say also that the Jewish people operate like, for example, 10 sefirot or 12 tribes or however you want to call it. You're going to have one that's very much mercy and one that's very much judgment, right? Like the 12 tribes. One's going to be the warriors and one's going to study and one's going to be business. And we can stop siloing the Jewish people, but understand that, okay, I'm Shaul Magid. I'm on the right side. I'm more about mercy. I'm more about understanding and wisdom. I need the other side as well just like in the body right I have killer cells I've got all kind I've got um uh what are the cells that everything is made out of stem cells all different kinds of things inside of me here here's where I am in the system I understand all the other parts of the system but I also understand that we're moving towards this one goal which is the brotherhood man, which is love the other as yourself. If we don't at least share that goal, it's such a clumsy

Shaul

process forward. I totally agree with you. And so I totally agree with you. And I think that one of the great contributions that the Jews have made to human civilization is being able to hold together the complex and fragile relationship between the particular and the universal. I get that. I mean, that in a certain sense is, that's its raison d'etre in a way. It was able to actually understand the concept of peoplehood, or I don't like the term peoplehood, or, you know, the Jewish people, that has this universal goal. And you're right, to some extent, Christianity focuses on the universality, at least in principle, at the expense of the particularity. But here, in a certain sense, is why I think the Zionist project problematizes that, because states are not universal. By definition, states are not universal. So that what happens when you have a state and you have borders and you have power is that the particularity that is sometimes expressed through survival, through protecting your citizens, comes at the expense of the universal. And if that universal is abandoned, the distinctive quality of the Jews disappears.

Lio

Great point. I want to counter that. Because this is great. What if, and you argue yourself also in this conversation, you said, well, we're reaching the end of an era. What if indeed the arrival of the state of Israel, because it could have arrived 500 years ago, you know, during the peak of colonial expansion or, you know, maybe before that or after that. And yet it arrived just now, the peak of human egoism where all the nations are already there and everybody's fighting. Now you have also Israel in the mix. Like everyone. Everybody's dealing with problems. We're not the only nation facing problems and facing the same existential threats you mentioned. In fact, we are like all the other nations by being also a nation, by not remaining a diaspora, but by becoming a nation, suffering the dangers of that. And maybe that is a signal that we've really reached the end of a cycle. And we now have to sort of rise up to that role that we have to do. You talk about in your writings about the importance of seeing other faces. Well, guess what? Jews are hodgepodge. You don't need to travel. I can stay in Israel and see a million faces. I'm surrounded by others who happen to be closely related to me by ideology. Like we have all the conditions. We're like a nation and still we're a microcosm of everything. What if we're really just missing the big picture here? We actually, all the conditions, the stage is set. We don't have to move the center of gravity back outside of Israel. We just have to do the thing for which we were made into a nation. And that is... Which is the thing? Go straight to the Creator. Creator is the quality of love and bestowal and caring. Do that. Show that. Be an example of that.

Seth

And even like iron sharpens iron. So even while all the criticism of the nation exists, it's great. because without criticism you you don't stay the like a rocket that's launched it's constantly adjusting to get on target so you you need the criticism from the right and the criticism from

Lio

the left and that's that's our whole history not to take it apart but to to keep all of those things

Seth

but also without the goal without the shared goal i'm going to repeat what i said the last time it's It's just clumsy. We're just going to stumble and waste so much time.

Shaul

Because in fact, we can't be like everyone. I don't think we really disagree on this point. I think we do. However, I think for that project to continue, I think that the state itself, like any state, is not going to procure a universal ethos. But Jews in the diaspora can. So if the Jews in the diaspora can maintain that kind of universal ethos without the particularism that comes with the state, and that those two things can actually work together, there's really a lot of potential. However, the argument has been that they're not working together because the whole concept from the origins of Zionism, of Shulat HaGolah, that somehow the Zionism, the national project, replaces, it supersedes the diasporic project. And that's what's being undone.

Lio

I think both are wrong because both are holding on to one side of the rope and you need both sides of everything. Just like the orthodoxy knew that on its own, it would never be able to leave Europe and come to Israel. They needed that terrible push from the Holocaust and those who had the vision to go to Israel were supposedly secular, who were leaving the right. But they were the one pushed to go and become those pioneers in Israel. And now you have Israel, you have the Israeli project, the Zionist project, whatever you want to call it. And they have the diaspora. Those two opposites need to coexist. And in fact, I'll go a step further. Even within those two camps, there's still a great deal of animosity and separation. Like we ourselves, even if you, Shaul, I guarantee even if you eliminated the state of Israel tomorrow, you close it down. You end with passive resolution. No more. All just becomes, go back to the diaspora. You would still not get, you'll get back to the state of Europe before the war. 100 Jews, 100 views, and they're not sharing the singular goal of reaching love of others. If we don't put love of others as the goal, nothing would work.

Shaul

We're in agreement. I mean, you know, in a really interesting interview, if your listeners have not heard, that Ismar Shores did with Peter Beinart on his substack. Ismar Shores was the one-time chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary for 13 years, a scholar of German Jewry, not a lefty, not a woke person, 89 years old, very much a centrist, very much a Zionist. And he said... Hold on, who did he, just so that everyone can know, who did he do the interview with? Peter Beinart, a Peter Beinart sub-stack. He did the interview with Beinart. And it was a very short interview, eight minutes, eight or nine minutes, I think. And he basically said, first of all, he defined the Gaza war as a chil Hashem. He defined it as a desecration of God's name. He didn't call it genocide. He called it a chil Hashem. It's very interesting in terms of the language that he chose. And he said that we Jews have forgotten the prophets. We have to go back and read the prophets. And there was something that was really quite powerful about that because one of the things that, and now I'm extrapolating on what he said, one of the things about the prophets is that the prophets really were anarchists. They were anti-state. They were critics of the Jewish state. They were critics of the militarism and critics of the power. And in a certain sense, they worked with the king, right? The prophet, the king had a prophet, and the prophet was always an imminent critic of the king. And what Shoresh is suggesting is that we've forgotten that universal ethos that's embedded in the prophets. Now, the prophets are very complicated, obviously, but we've kind of become Bar Kokhba Jews, that we're really interested, we think that force will solve a problem. We think that militarism will give us security or will give us a sense of well-being. We think that we can control and manage the problem of the occupation or the problem of what you do with a Jewish state where almost 50% of the people are not Jews.

Lio

First of all, it's only about 22% that are not Jews.

Shaul

No, no, I'm including the West Bank.

Lio

We control the West Bank. Okay, fine. But the point is, actually, a lot of that has changed following the war. A lot of the young soldiers who are fighting, not only soldiers, teenagers are becoming more connected to these, what you could call religious, but they're not really religious, but these root ideas, right? They don't even know what or why or what for, but people are like, you know, they're putting on tefillin, they're putting on the tzitzit. They don't know why. They don't know why they're doing this. But there's a sense that might alone is not enough, and that was always the sin that the prophets pointed at. Power is not the thing. Power is simply a way to create a space for you to do something. What are you doing with the space? That's a question.

Shaul

That's a good point. However, I would throw out as a suggestion, I don't think that in Israel, that Israel is becoming more religious. I think religion in Israel is becoming more secular.

Lio

To me, I don't care, honestly, because, you know, I hear people, I hear people, I hear interviews, Shaul, with people who are the opposite of anything you would consider religious, value-based. there were just global liberals, right? Like goodbye, 70s socialism, hello, globalization. They were all there. And they were, you know, I would say between you and me, assholes, right? Just like on a personal level, just terrible people. You know, egoists, you know, I have a friend who's, you know, an academic term. Yeah, no, I listen, I have a friend who's a, you know, he's a musician. He's like a top, you know, notch musician. He was a musician in the US. Then he moved back to Israel. is you know he plays with everyone and he spends hours uh you know in a van going from sure and you know and he tells me the stories that he hears from those from some some people in that you would think like oh these people they sing about you know together and this and that but they're like just terrible people but now now there's a shift there's a shift it's not about that religion is becoming more secular or the secularists have become more religious there's a general shift towards people are feeling there's a buzz, like something was fundamentally missing, and it somehow has to do with who we are, where we came from. It's not about losing this. As you said, it's something new, but it's not new in the sense that, oh, it's new, we'll invent some new, I'll eat pork, but it's going to be fried on a weekday. So, no, it's new in the sense that it's a new revelation, I think, of something that was buried, almost forgotten about who we are, both by the religious and by the secular. That's why it's new. It feels new, but it's not new. It never existed.

Seth

Those feelings erupt in a person also. It needs to clothe in something. So, okay, I'll put on tefillin, all right? Or I'll do something because it's just a feeling otherwise. So what has to happen is there has to be some way to clothe this. There needs to be some mechanism where it's, you know, you understand what I'm saying? Like when the feeling erupts inside of you, you need to clothe it in something, right? I'm going to become vegetarian. I'm going to start putting on tefillin. We need to find a way that everyone can clothe these in a way that expands. Is Israel becoming more religious? No, you said the... What did you say?

Shaul

I said, I don't think Israel is becoming more religious. I think religion in Israel is becoming more secular. And I can explain what I mean by that. Go ahead.

Seth

So that this clothing now becomes more integrated into the world. There has to be a new kind of clothing that happens. Like when you have a new baby in the family, you have to take on new forms of what love means. Right? So this is where we're at now. And of course, we're going to see people doing the tefillin and things like this, because this is what we know we can hold on to in the meantime. But these young people, they need a new way to clothe these feelings into the world.

Shaul

Yes. And I think that if we want to go, you know, front foot, back foot, I think the reason for that is that there was an ideological vacuum that was created in Israel in the 1970s with the demise of socialism.

Lio

Correct.

Shaul

Where socialism provided that for Israelis in the 50s and 60s. Work the land and do all these things. Right?

Lio

The kibbutz movement was the spine.

Shaul

Once you get into startup nation, globalization, when Israel becomes that kind of technocratic country, there's no ideological center that's going to hold the community together. So, you know, these people, they have houses in Karshmayau and then in Paris and in Palo Alto. They become globalized people, right? So religion is filling that vacuum.

Lio

But, you know, interestingly, it's actually a lot of those, the tech people were the ones resisting a lot of this. They were also resisting the war and the policies of the government, all that. It was actually the young people who were a bit more open, as Seth said, something was more open about them. They were neither the product of Kibbutzim socialism, nor did they see their future in the startup nation. They were really feeling that something else was calling them. And they could feel that in that embrace of the people. That feeling of the war was very palpable for people who were here. I think Jews in America are missing out a little bit if they haven't come here. during these last two years, they have an incomplete picture of what's happening here. It's like a little, it's like a little, like a boot camp in Judaism, you know, in a way. Like, you know, you want to still live in New Jersey? That's fine. But you have to, it's in a way, it kind of goes against what you're saying. I'm sorry. Even, you know, we need that leg in the diaspora to continue to, you know, to balance the leg that's doing the Zionist project. Fine. But you need, you have to, you know, suckle on the same tit. There's just no, you have to feel, you know, that source has to be there. And that source is not, by the way, it's not us, not the people. There's a, there's a really an upper force that's trying to reveal itself in the world. And we need to help it out.

Shaul

So let me give you a diasporic corollary to what you're saying. In the 1960s, during the time of the new left, when there were all these anti-war demonstrations and taking over Columbia University campus, and many people in the New Left were Jews that were involved in the New Left, there were no Pesach sedaram at the Columbia protest in 1968, right? Because the New Left Jews were secular Jews. They were first-generation, second-range, and secular Jews. What's happening now is you're having Kabbalah Shabbat at the campus protest. You're having sedaram at the campus protest. In other words, the new generation of diaspora Jews also becoming ritualized. They're also taking on Judaism as an expression of their pro-Pelestinian

Seth

Are they changing the Sidur? Are they changing everything to...

Shaul

They're doing what they're doing. They're doing what Jews always did. I mean, they're a Sidurim that... Sidur is a very interesting phenomenon that's developed over many, many centuries. So, yes, they are engaging in experimental Jewish ritual projects that is for them an expression of their Jewish religiosity.

Lio

Which is fine. We, you know, power to people. What we're after, when it's all said and done, and this is what we're doing, the Jew function and everything, is that we, unlike some, you know, we do believe in, you can call it supernatural, you can call it, I think it's super natural, right? Not supernatural. I think it's totally natural that there is a governing law, like in any closed system, you can call it whatever you want, you can call it the creator, you can call it nature. It doesn't matter. There are laws and we operate under those laws. And those laws are moving all of this in a certain direction. Now, you can resist it. You can deny it because I don't agree. I don't like it. We had a guest who was like, I don't want to be the guy who needs to lead humanity out of the darkness. I just want to be, he's like, everyday Jewishness. I like that. I'm like, we hear you. We also love to be everyday Jews. But what can you do? The system needs something. If the system needs something, the body needs hormones. There's a few cells to go and switch the body, start puberty and get you into the next level of life. You need it. There's no way. There's no way around it. So I think that what we're after is getting people to consider that there is a deeper role. Call it natural or supernatural or whatever, but there is something. And it's written in our sources. They talk about it. Everybody talks about it. You talk about it also in some places. It's there. The question is, are we ready, you think, to really study it and try to apply it? Or are we just going to treat it as a good philosophical idea? It's nice to have. It's a good conversation piece. It's a good, yeah, I want world peace and togetherness. But am I willing to actually figure out how to do it? What's stopping us from getting there? Or are we just going to talk about it philosophically on campus? Or are we actually going to do it?

Shaul

I think it's very interesting. I think that, listening to you, I think that, yes, of course, what you're saying is written in the tradition in many, many different kinds of ways. And I think there's a difference between saying, I am going to live my life as a Jew, as if that is the case, and saying that is actually the truth. I don't know whether that's the truth or not. I don't know whether this idea that the Jews have some kind of special function, I don't know whether that's true. I have to remain agnostic about that. I can say that there is a very powerful force in that that can drive a people to do incredible things. Right. Now, whether ultimately it's true metaphysically or cosmologically, I don't know. I think it's a very powerful force to motivate a people towards greatness. And I think that the Jews have done that in many, many ways. I think that part of the frame of doing that is that they were always not tethered by the political in the way that we are now. I think that the state, and it's very interesting because the early, you know, Gershom Sholem has this line in his interview with Mukherjee Tzor where he says that Zionism was about something like this. I think I'm getting it right. Zionism was about the culmination of exile and the non-Zionist knew more than the Zionist how precarious an idea that was or something like that, right? In other words, the early Zionists recognized this idea of becoming a nation state, of becoming a political entity, poses incredibly difficult challenges for the Jewish experience. Now, it could be that it was necessary. Europe fell apart. Hitler came to power. All of the things happened, right? But the precariousness of it, I think the early Zionists understood that much better than we do.

Lio

Perhaps. There's no question. I think you also like that you quote Eliezer Shved in your writings as well. He was a great guy. My friend has one of the last interviews with him, by the way.

Shaul

Yeah, he was a teacher of mine.

Lio

So I'm going to send you a friend of mine made a film during the social unrest around 2012. He went in a trailer. He put his family in an RV and drove around Israel to ask people, what do we need to do to live together as a family? And he talked to people, car mechanics from Yeruham to Eliezer Shved and people who established the Kibbutzim and everybody. And the talk with Shved is powerful. And the guy was like, you know, he's like. And one of the things that he says, and I'm also paraphrasing, it seems like we're all today paraphrasing and that's OK. It was like the Israeli nation, people, you know, the big mistake that people do is to think that something is always the end of something. But it's like the Israeli nation, the Israeli people who is about becoming. It's always about becoming people. It's a process of becoming. And that's what we're. And so if we take that, which and he says a lot of other things, which are also mind blowing. I encourage everyone to try to read, you know, read him. But if you take everything, if you take that, you know, that story, the biblical story, which is almost like a manual, if you detach it from the historic and geographic place and you look at it as a manual for becoming, it's moving in a direction. And if you look at our history, it's moving in a direction, even though this whole thing, you know, when you look at it piece by piece, it may think, oh, this is great. Let's keep that. Or this is bad. Let's get rid of that. But on the whole, there's a movement. I would encourage people, and I wonder what you think, to consider where is it going. I don't think you don't need to be a believer in anything to see that nature has a purpose for everything. You plant an orange, you get an orange. It doesn't meander around and take some ideas from applehood and grapehood, right? It becomes an orange. So what are we becoming? Maybe that will help us. Jesse, did you want to?

Seth

I was going to say that when you see Joseph's brothers sell him into slavery, if you you know make your whole thesis about that it's it's a big problem if you see where that led it's it's a whole oh now i understand why that happened you also have a situation where jacob blesses pharaoh wait jacob blesses pharaoh isn't pharaoh the guy right like there's so many complex uh things that we really need to uh and when your question before i i don't remember exactly what which is that I paraphrase you. But I don't know if I believe that thing or I don't know it's a good enough... I don't know if it's true.

Lio

I don't know if it's true, but it's a good motivator for the people. But is there anything that's true?

Seth

Like Martin Luther King, I have this dream that people should be judged on the quality of their character, not the color of their skin. I mean, is it true? We want it to be true, but is anything true really?

Lio

I mean, I'm hungry. That's true.

Shaul

But yeah, well, we don't know that. I will say I do want to say one thing that I think is worth saying. Here's my hope that this that October 7th and the war and you have to see them both together. You can't see them separate from each other. Right. The October 7th and the war creates a paradigm shift among people of Israel. And again, diaspora Jews are diaspora Jews. They're living in a different environment to recognize that the way that the state has constructed itself in the last 75 years has to change. Something has to change. In other words, I think that if there is anything that can come out of October 7th is that managing the occupation will not work. All it will do is it'll just create the ground for another October 7th. Because people that are living in that reality will eventually resist. It may take 50 years, may take two generations, they will find a way to resist you. And so I think that if we can get to this place of like, oh man, managing this thing is not going to, we have to think of a better solution to this problem, which is a problem. How do you have a Jewish state where 50, and I'm including the West Bank here, where 50, almost 50 percent of the people living under our aegis are not Jews?

Lio

That's not the question. The question, because, again, that's a political question and there are solutions to it, by the way. There are solutions. Or as Golda Meir said, there's no problem. The problem at least is that the Arabs want the Jews dead and Jews refuse to die. So that's where the root of the conflict. But I don't think that's the issue. The issue is what I'm posing to you, to your students as well, is assuming someone finds a way to maintain the peace for 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, right? Even in the Bible, the land was quiet for 30 years, 40 years, right? It's always like, what do we do in that time? What do we do in that time? Rather than saying, let's manage the occupation. You can manage it. Okay, you'll deal with the Palestinians, the Egyptians will rise. You call them the Turkish, the Iranians. It'll never end, Shaul, because it's not designed to end in this way. As you yourself said, the prophets always cautioned against that you can never rule only by the might of the arm. So the question is, what is that? And we go back to the beginning of the conversation, this maybe dream reality that we want to create, that is not maybe man-made in the sense that, oh, I have an idea today in the 20th century based on my limited experience. But maybe there's an idea that's been running in the background for 3,000 years, maybe longer, that we can get and make that. And like you said, whether it's make-believe, whether it's real, supernatural or not, maybe it's just a good affirmation. I don't care. But maybe for 3,000 years, there's an idea that's better than all the political ideas, all the geopolitical, philosophical, something that we could say, this is what it means to be Jewish. and let's do it because it will really raise us from this crazy duality.

Shaul

You know, it's funny, throughout the entire conversation, we've skirted around the language of messianism. I don't think we've used that term once, right?

Lio

No, we have not. You just ruined the, broke the street.

Shaul

No, I think that there is an idea, certainly among Zionists, Rav Kook is one of them, but many others, that this is the unfolding of the Messianic era. The Jews returning to the land of Israel, restoration, the establishment of a state, okay, set the temple aside for now. That this is actually the reparticularization and the repoliticization of a Jewish state is part of the unfolding of the Messianic era. What if, as a thought experiment, actually that is the anti-Messianic idea? And the Messianic idea would be to create a Jewish political reality that is able to absorb and embrace the universal spirit. Isaiah's vision of Jerusalem being a place, as you said, right, as the temple being a place where everybody... In other words, it's the universalism that is really the messianism. And the particularity of survival, which a nation state is primarily engaged, that is actually the anti-messianism.

Seth

Let's say that there's no light without a vessel. Let's say that there's, you know, as light excelleth from darkness. Let's say that the only way to get to the thing you're talking about is through the other way. Let's say that these two opposite things have to work together. somehow there's an emergent quality that's not this or not that you know how in evolution do we go from inanimate to vegetative how does that happen who could have predicted something like that or from vegetative to animals appearing so we're our world view is that the next degree is not just rearranging carbon you know into some better form but a wholly other kind like like a child you know, when you first fall in love, you know, when you've been sitting in third grade class, and all of a sudden Susie looks very different today than she did before, right? Some new spirit is what we're talking about. We're not talking about just rearranging the carbon. We're talking about some whole new level, which can only happen by these kind of opposite forces somehow coming together and what we want to say is that we don't need to go through the third and fourth world war in order to get there that if we can do things like this where we can push these ideas together and uh and dream big enough and and learn from all of the people you've been uh talking about and and more then we can hasten the process and go through it through our inner work instead of

Lio

being smashed on the head by i will say yeah i will say that go ahead let me just say one thing

Shaul

um i i i agree with you and one of the things that we have to overcome is the occupational hazard of becoming survivalists in other words we have to do contra to what golda me here said they want to kill us we refuse to die that's the survivalist mode that mode is not going to get us there that mode is going to enclose us in ourselves it becomes a friend enemy call schmidt zero some game us or them that is not going to get us anywhere no no i i

Lio

I agree. And I'll say even more than that. As far as I'm concerned, I don't care how they stop the thing and bias relative peace. I'm more concerned about what you do when that peace comes. I'm giving you now a decade, 10 years. How much is your tenure in Harvard? Is it five years, 10 years for life? 10 years. 10 years. Okay, good.

Shaul

I mean life. I'm 67 years old. You know, life is what it is.

Lio

Well, I wish you to 120 at least, but you know, you should suffer like the rest of us. The point is, let's say you get 10 years. How do we get people to really not get swallowed up by the politics and all the rest of it? Because it's very alluring. It's very tempting to write about and go and protest. You know, this gives you balls of blood. I'm saying, how do we get that thing to focus on the enemy of love, which is the human, that quality in me, that egoistic quality in me, which you didn't talk about in the show again, but I'm bringing it up now. Why? Because you brought up Messianic. I'm bringing egoism because it's the exact opposite. That egoism, that pleasure for me, the expense of anything and everything, whether it's intellectual pleasure, physical pleasure, it doesn't matter. This is the wedge that separates all of us. And no one else and the distinctiveness of Jews is that they were able, in spite of their nature, to rise above it and form bonds of love above that. They were the only people who were able to do it. Even non-Jews are exceptions because they're probably related to that group. That grouping is what makes it distinct. That's it. Nothing else.

Shaul

You know something? I'll tell you something. If I can get you to use the word distinct and not unique, Dayenu. Okay, okay.

Lio

Good, good, good. No, I'm going with you. I'm going with you. So here's my thing. So if we are able to convince each other, us Jews, that above all the politics and shmaltics, that we focus on that, that this is our distinctiveness, not making new AI or cherry tomatoes, but being able to actually rise above the form bonds of love. Those bonds of love... Above our differences. Above the differences. Keep the differences and then love above it, right? I don't have to like you, but I have to love you. Then these bonds of love will create a force that will then... An emergent force. That will then be able to resonate with the upper force of love. And that force of love will pull you. Im shohotcha. Will pull you. That's the Messiah that we're looking for, a force that will pull you like a magnet. Suddenly I'll have the right pole, right? That's what I'm after. Let's do that, Shaul.

Shaul

Yeah, so, I mean, I hear you. I will say that universities can play a role in that, but that's not the role of a university. The role of a university is the production of knowledge, whether it's the sciences or the social sciences or the humanities, whatever it is. Universities are in the business of researching and producing knowledge. Religious institutions, religious communities are in the business of doing more what you're talking about, using the knowledge that's created in order to – no, I'm not saying that they do. I'm saying that's their role. The role of the university is not to bring world peace. Why not? That's a worthy role. That's the only thing everyone should be working on. No, no, no, because that's not what the university – everything has its tough key, right? I mean, you know, I'm a doctor. I'm a surgeon, right? I do heart surgery.

Lio

I don't fix my car.

Shaul

So universities have a certain purpose. The purpose of universities is the production of knowledge.

Lio

Hold on. Isn't there a science of humanities somewhere there?

Shaul

Yes, but it can contribute to the larger project, but it's not the address.

Lio

That's fine. I agree. All I'm asking is to do your part. I've spent the last two decades, three decades, almost seeing universities creating separation, driving one agenda over another. Then, you know, for 20 years, it's this. And now we have to, you know, compensate. So we're going to do the opposite. No, let's look, take an honest look at what drives people. That's a scientific thing. What drives us, our human ego, pleasure at the expense of everything and everyone.

Shaul

You know, the other thing that the university does that I think contributes to this process of the production of knowledge is the concept of free speech. Universities have to protect free speech. Students have to be able to express their views, even though you may not agree with them. They don't have the right to threaten people. They don't have the right to harm people, but they do have a right to make people feel uncomfortable.

Lio

Uncomfortable is okay. I think in America, we got a little lost, right? Someone said, it's like, oh, free speech, You know, I demand new McDonald's flavor.

Shaul

If a group of people believe that what was happening in Gaza was genocide, we may not believe that. They have a right to express it.

Lio

That's okay. But if you're marching with weapons and you're breaking windows and asking to the destruction of another group, I would say...

Shaul

Okay, no, I understand. There are limits. But I think that this is part of the breakdown of what happened on the campus protests, is that the universities had to balance free speech on the one hand with a lot of pressure, governmental pressure and societal pressure on the other hand, which is saying you can't say that X is doing Y. Why not?

Lio

No, no, you can say I just felt it became repetitive and boring when there's so many other great factors.

Shaul

street protests are always that way but they were that during vietnam too that's just the nature of

Lio

them but right right i yeah i was never great on protest that we have to you know i'll give you i'll

Shaul

give you an example um sometime around march of 2024 so like in the midst of the protest movement i was talking to a very prominent conservative rabbi in new york and i said to him how do you think American Jews are going to deal with this war? How do you think they're going to deal with what they're seeing on their computer screens, right? He said, I think they're just going to turn to anti-Semitism. That's going to be their deflect. That's going to be the way of not dealing with the war. Is they going to turn to the protest movements on campuses and say this is anti-Semitic, and that's where all of the energy is going to go? And he was absolutely right. He was absolutely right.

Lio

That is true. I guess my last take on this, because we do have to close, my last take on this would be that if you can help make sure that people go and protest. No, no, no. I'm putting a little, this is just a little between you and me. They could go out and protest. There's genocide. There's no genocide. But then after the protest, you hang the keffiyeh, and then you go hug in the cafeteria. You know what? I'm buying whatever you're selling. Let people express what they think and then practice love. I want to see that.

Shaul

I'll give you an example. So I taught a course called, it had nothing to do, this was obviously scheduled before October 7th. I taught a course called Exile, Diaspora, and Trauma in the Jewish Imagination. That was the name of the course, right? In that class, I had Shabbos Kestenbaum, who you may know, right? of Shabbos Kestenbound fame, and Jewish students with keffias who were out in the campus protest, in the classroom together, arguing respectfully, disagreeing, working through the material, doing what universities do best, taking people with different views and putting them in a room together and hammering it out. Now, I don't know whether they went and had coffee together afterward, but they certainly sat in the same classroom together.

Lio

So I'm saying, so now we have a go. Now aim for coffee together later. That's it. Listen, Shao, I put a quote. I know you have maybe mixed feelings about Rav Kook, but I put a quote from Rav Kook in the chat. Okay.

Shaul

We could do another whole thing on Rav Kook. I have a lot to say about Rav Kook.

Lio

I know. I'm sure. I'm sure. And I want to talk to you about Kahana. There's a lot we didn't touch on. But it's a great quote. Do us the honor of reading it to our listeners and then we'll close if you have anything to say.

Shaul

Okay, so the quote is as follows.

Lio

Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, this is not Cook. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. It's the Baal Sula. Yeah, yeah, where's Rav Cook? How did he get in? I'm sorry, it's Baal Sula. Forget Rav Cook, his name just got mixed into this. So it was another quote I had.

Shaul

Okay, only, I'm just reading now, only when the Torah is exercised in Israel will complete peace and faithful love. Come, will people pay the love? Come, and the pure feeling of recognizing the brotherhood between people will develop. When that development is completed within us, as a degree that merits being a role model to many, all the nations will recognize it, and the blessing of peace will begin to dwell in the world. Very nice. Can I add my very, very, very short footnote?

Lio

Sure.

Shaul

Balasula was a Marxist.

Lio

Some people say that.

Shaul

I think it's pretty clear that he was.

Lio

He will say that if you said it, it means you haven't read all his writings. Because Marx only stopped at the destruction of what was, but there's no real understanding of the method of how to really work with the human ego.

Seth

He also said that you can have communism, or whatever that means, after everybody loves each other. He talks in this article here, The Nation, that if you try and do it before everyone loves each other, you're going to need bayonets in order to enforce it. Exactly. If everyone loves each other, then communism is great.

Shaul

Yeah, like in a family. And by the way, Raph Cook really was actually a socialist as well. I mean, in the same vein.

Lio

He was great also in balancing all these oppositions. He was great. We'll do a show about Raph Cook later.

Shaul

Anyway, it's always great to talk to you guys.

Lio

Same here. I told Seth it's going to be a good, you know, it's going to be great. A lot of yelling and then a hug at the end. That's just the way we like it.

Shaul

We can have virtual coffee together, yeah.

Lio

Yeah, yeah. Professor Magid. No, you know what? Now that you're in Harvard, I think maybe Seth and I will come visit. How about that?

Shaul

That sounds good.

Lio

Good. And you just get an auditorium of people to listen to us for a while.

Shaul

I will do that.

Lio

Professor Magid, what an amazing honor. the first one to come here for the third time. So either something is wrong about you or something is...

Shaul

It's one of those SNL hosting things like you're a third timer.

Lio

It's true, it's true. So really, really thank you. Good luck on your position at Harvard and continue to challenge the mainstream. I think we need it with such grace and humility and a good spirit. This is really, really what we should be exporting to the world. And we'll see everyone here next week. We should have another live next Sunday. And we'll see you all. So that's the Jew Function. Like, comment, subscribe. Please, that helps us spread the conversation. And thank you, everyone.

Shaul

Amen. Bye. Bye.