Why can't we all just get along?

Lio: What the Jews did to each other, even the Romans did not do to them.

Seth: I'm asking you, listener, is this the history of our people that you understood? Is this the story that we've been telling ourselves? A few million people can't get along on this tiny Mediterranean strip. They were terrorists. They would go and kill someone and then hide in the crowd and say, get the stab. But they came from within the people. They were terrorists who were Jews. Jews, let's get it together. That's a formula. It's so simple, it's painful. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was. All things are mortal, but the Jew. All other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?

Lio: Okay, listen, enough of that. This is a podcast, and we're not just going to try; we're going to find the solution to antisemitism. We're going to stop that right here, right now, from this stinking basement. When we get to the bottom of this, we're going to read from this mystery book, which you're not going to find out about until the end of the series, and we're going to really entertain every perspective. We're not going to say, "Oh, you can't say this, you can't say that." No, we're going to say everything because if we're not going to be able to talk about it, we're not going to be able to solve it. We're going to really grab you in the kishkes, and we're going to squeeze until we get something, right? Either a bowel movement or a solution. We want to know what happened 3,500 years ago in Babylon that started this whole mess, and we want to finish it here in 2020. That's it. The Great Revolt of Self-Inflicted Genocide.

Seth: All that has been said thus far about the cruelty of the Jews toward each other will soon be dwarfed by the horrors during the Great Revolt. While the official enemy of the Jews was the Roman legion, the most unspeakable and inhumane agonies came to the Jews at the hand of their own. The bottom line of the atrocities of the Great Revolt is, as our sages put it, the Second Temple was ruined because there was unfounded hatred in it and because of how the hatred manifested.

Lio: Yeah, well, that sounds a bit ominous. I want to stress that none of us are historians, so please don't write to us about history. We're concerned citizens. I'm Lio. This is Seth. I'm stuck in Israel. Seth is stuck in New Jersey. Are you stuck there?

Seth: I'm definitely stuck. Okay. You're enjoying it, though.

Lio: And what we're trying to do is look at our Jewish history, our shared history, Jewish and world history, and try to locate those patterns that emerge when you look at things with enough perspective. Through these patterns, extract some principles and see if those principles apply to what's happening today. I know antisemitism has not been in the headlines so much, except for the fact that now with this outbreak, already we hear voices. I'm reading from an article—get out of here, you're spreading the virus. An Orthodox Jew heard in New York, right? So we see suddenly a new focal change. Right before it was like Zionism is terrible, you're the enemy. Now it's like, oh, screw Zionism. Now, this virus, you're the reason for this virus. So, what we're trying to do is hopefully get enough people to think about it and about why things are happening, why it's easy to pinpoint all the calamities of the world on the Jews. We just happened to read about one of the worst periods in Jewish history and see how it relates to an interesting period in humanity today, find the parallels and see what we can learn from it, right? More or less?

Seth: That's what we're doing. We've seen, as the show built up over the last few weeks, this pattern again and again. We're not talking about the street antisemitism. We talked about that also. It's not like, okay, well, I can hate a Black person, I can hate a Jewish person, I could hate an Indian person. It's not just a regular "I want to hate somebody in the street because he's different from me, I'm xenophobic or something." We're talking about the more kind of sophisticated antisemitism that develops. Sophisticated is not the right word, but there's a problem, so the Jew kind of gets blamed for that problem. It's the virus, okay, blame the Jew. It's some kind of inequality in the world, blame the Jew. Whatever the thing is that erupts, if this Jew function is not serving its purpose, then the Jew becomes responsible. The world comes to the Jew with the claim that he's responsible for the problem.

Lio: Right. It's all traced back to the origin of the Jewish people as a people of ideology, founded around this unique form of connection called "love your friend as yourself." Again, not a moral code, although it's been used this way. Not a principle in ethics, but a certain form of connection. Everything in nature connects. Things always connect to make something else. We give this example: the difference between a piece of graphite, the softest material in nature, and a diamond, the hardest. Both are made of the same carbon atoms. The only difference is how they connect. One form of connection—soft, you can break it; another—so hard it can cut through everything. So, love your friend as yourself is a form of connection. It's a formula that defines a certain connection that can bring about amazing outcomes. When we're not connected in this way, we see the results. The Jews apparently were taught how to do it and are supposed to carry it to the rest of the nations. We're seeing that they're not really doing it. The hypothesis that this book, this mystery book we're reading, is making is that whenever they were doing it, they were doing great, even if for short periods of time. But when they were not, oh boy. Where are we, Lio? We're going back. It's right about the Great Siege, the Great Revolt that brought about the downfall of Jerusalem. I mean, where are we in the podcast? Right about the beginning, episode ten. Episode ten of The Jew Function. And I think today we're going to wrap up the Age of Antiquity with a bang. The destruction of the Second Temple.

Seth: After this is the modern era of the Jew, kind of. It's like this is where the storybook closes, and we go on from here.

Lio: Yeah, that's really where the Jewish people start to spread their presence. Religion begins after this. After that, we also have the birth of Christianity. Before this, there was the temple.

Seth: Service a few times a year. All these tribes who lived everywhere would come to the temple together. It was more of a lifestyle. There was that priesthood inside, and then we've been talking about the priests.

Lio: That was Woodstock. That was the love revolution of the 70s. Minus 7 as the human ego was developing alongside this connection. So they made this connection right from Abraham, and then, wow, this is happening, and all cultures alongside of them are also developing through Persia and Greece, and then we get to Rome. So these two gears are spinning. And they have this relationship together. When the Jews became mixed, and we also talked about what it means to be mixed, but when they became mixed with the governments of these developing nations, it's just to say leave the principle of unity. When they leave this principle of unity and start selling the high priesthood, then there become all these wars between them, and the whole society begins to deteriorate because that injection of unity, that injection of light, goes away. Society devolves until families are falling apart, and wars between relatives, and wars between neighbors, and every man is for himself. If you go into Costco, and you want to get the toilet paper, you're not thinking about giving the toilet paper to anyone else. If you can get the hand sanitizer and sell it on Amazon for $70, you don't even regret it because you don't even think about anybody else anymore—you're focused on your own life.

Lio: It's almost like life on two levels. And when we go down to the ground floor and start to partake in the life on that level, the politics of it, the economics of it, the social issues of it, then we're doomed, and the rest of society is doomed with us. But when we remain on the second floor and we kind of create this nice magnet, we pull everything up. That's really the premise.

Seth: Let's get in there, but let's dive in. As we said, today we're going to talk about one of the worst moments, I think.

Lio: So we're going back to four years before the Great Revolt. Looking at the seeds that were sown that would later bloom as horrific.

Seth: A great revolt, just in a few sentences. Just what is the great revolt? So, when you say that, everybody understands exactly what you're talking about. So, we're talking about before the destruction of the Second Temple, the Romans ruled the culture of the world at that moment in time, right? And who's revolting against whom?

Lio: The Great Revolt is basically this: the uprise of Jews against the Romans. That's usually your revolt against your ruler, your oppressor. It's a funny thing because both the Greeks and the Romans were okay with Jews just living their lives, but as we'll see, they're not really willing or able to. I don't know what's the reason. That's what we're trying to figure out. They're not able to just live and prosper under the rule and maybe it's meant to be this way. I don't know. But that's the code. We say the Great Revolt, the Great Siege of Jerusalem, it's coming up to 70 of the Common Era, the fall of the Second Temple.

Seth: Set the scene. So you have the High Priest, now put there by the procurator. The High Priest. Well, the Sicarii are going to come. These guys are going to come, and they don't like that the people in power are put there by the Romans. They want the pious ones. The most pious person is supposed to be this really pious person, not somebody who was put there because of some bribe or something like that. That's why I'm bringing it up. The Sicarii, an extremist fringe group of the Zealots, were cunning dagger wielders who would stab stealthily, then sneak. They would join the appalled crowd protesting the stabbing. Their first victim was none other than the High Priest, but following him, many were slain every day. In this way, the Sicarii spread such terror in the country that the fear men were in was more afraid than the calamity itself, and everybody expected death at every hour as men in war do. People could not even trust their friends. In the midst of their suspicion and guarding themselves, they were slain.

Lio: Josephus Flavius writes about it in his books, The War of the Jews. He lived at that time. So he really makes a very compelling picture. I find it's fascinating. It's exactly like today's kind of social allergy. Like, suddenly everyone's suspicious. Is he my friend or not? Can I say something, will I say the wrong thing? I'm going to get stabbed. You still see that, right? Someone says the wrong thing, everybody's just lashing at them on Twitter, you know, body shaming them. It's an interest coming from our midst. You know, it's not something—

Seth: It's very unusual. We're always used to other people coming to kill us. These are really terrorists. They would go and kill someone and then hide in the crowd. But they came from within the people. They were terrorists who were Jews, killing Jews.

Lio: By the way, I'm here in Israel. The country is headed towards forget about the fourth election, who cares about that by now? But this outbreak kind of exposed an insane level of infighting. I mean, Seth, there's violence. People are jumping on cars of Members of Parliament. The country is barely dealing with the health crisis, right? And meanwhile, people are like, you know, they're backstabbing each other. The son of the prime minister is like taking a piss at the Supreme Court. It's insane. This is us. It's like it's us. It's not some weird thing. It's us. It's not even the diaspora Jews. It's not even an outside terrorist fighting against us. It's the Jews. Jews with Israel, fighting with the Jews. I think that's so similar here because it says, like, you didn't even know who your enemy was; your neighbor was your enemy.

Lio: A few million people can't get along on this tiny strip on the Mediterranean instead of us just sitting on the beach and barbecuing.

Seth: Sharing war stories from the Second Temple.

Lio: Yeah, we're like, what is going on? Wow. It's insane. Jews, let's get it together. Let's get it together. Okay, let's keep going in the book. Okay, so this is one seed, right, that we planted. Let's jump ahead and another fine example of what people were capable of. Let's see.

Seth: Just down the page, yeah. There was another body of wicked men got together, continues Josephus, in his harrowing description of the miseries of the Jews. Under the procurator Felix, this other group of Jews was not so impure in their actions, but more wicked in their intentions, which laid waste the happy state in the city, no less than did the murderers. These people pretended to be prophets and visionaries, and they would lead the Jews into the wilderness, pretending that God would be there and show them signals of liberty. Regrettably for them, Felix, plagued by distrust and ill will, suspected that they might be starting yet another revolt. So he sent horsemen and footmen, both armed, who destroyed a great number of them.

Lio: Yeah.

Seth: So what does that sound like? What does that sound like? I don't know.

Lio: Social influencers. Come on.

Seth: Right. Everyone's like, follow me here. Follow me here. Do each one. Follow me here.

Lio: Yeah, I have the answer and, and buy a couple of sneakers while you're at it. Oh my god, my kid showed...

Seth: Me this great video of a televangelist, and he was saying, you don't have jobs, you don't have anything, but he was reminding them of where they could bring their tithing. He's like, you can walk it to our door, you can email it to us. It's like it doesn't matter if you don't have a job. People are just like, I don't care what's wrong with you at all. Just take care.

Lio: It's amazing. One of those influencers, I'm sorry, false prophets, was so successful. He got 30,000 people to like him, which is like adjusted for today's inflation is like 30 million followers or something. He got them all to like him and follow him into some part of the dark web, into the woods in those days.

Seth: Did they discover all this there, and were they more empty than they were before?

Lio: Oh, that would have been too easy. No, he convinced them to march on Jerusalem and conquer it from the Romans. It's like when you get celebrities who are like, you know, I'm gonna run for president. Why? Because I played a president in a movie. I think I can do a pretty good job. It's a delusion of the current era. I think we lost touch with reality.

Seth: Josephus compares the Jewish nation to a diseased body. He writes that when the riots over the false prophets quieted, another part was subject to an inflammation. According to Josephus, a company of deceivers and robbers got together and persuaded the Jews to revolt and exhorted them to assert their liberty, inflicting death on those who continued in obedience to the Roman government and saying that those who willingly choose slavery ought to be forced from such desired inclinations. Those who wanted to follow the Romans parted themselves into different bodies and lay in wait up and down the country, plundered the houses of the great men, slew the men themselves, and set the villages on fire till all Judea was filled with the effects of their madness. Thus, the flame was every day more and more blown up, till it came to a direct war. Even in Caesarea...

Lio: Political divisiveness that we've seen in America, I think it's still going on, right? I'm willing to burn your house just because I feel more righteous in the process, even if half my people die. That's okay. It's kind of like what's happening again, not being political, but you know, these guys are not going to pass and get... you know, we're going to get back at them. These guys are dying, and like, what is going on?

Seth: If a bill can't get passed, the bills are loaded with all kinds of things. For example, the Republicans load the bill with all kinds of things, but then the Democrats don't let the bill pass because they don't want to give a victory to the Republicans. And so it's not about what's good for the people. No, no. It's each party vying for what's good for themselves.

Lio: Both parties have a twisted ideal, a righteous ideal of how things should be, as opposed to again, because they're seeing it from the first floor. We're not seeing it from the second floor.

Seth: Right, so this whole book is like a blueprint. If we can zoom up to the second floor and look at this whole schematic that the book is putting over reality, forget about the different costumes in Rome, Persia, this guy, this city, but see the pattern that we're seeing emerge. Now from the second floor, we can really aim our destiny. We understand what forces we're working with.

Lio: I don't know if people are seeing it yet. I don't know if it's here in Israel, they're not.

Seth: Oh, you mean in reality?

Lio: I thought you meant the people in the podcast. The people in the podcast, those 12 guys. No, they're seeing it. They're seeing it. I'm talking about the people in the world. That's a big question right now. And there's this story here right before the revolt, there's another little anecdote here about Caesarea, right?

Seth: Even in Caesarea, they disputed over who owned the city, completely ignoring the fact that the Romans owned it and governed it.

Lio: I'm starting to sound like a terrible anti-Semite, but it's such a Jewish thing to do. Wait a second, you know, we're doing our thing here. Don't interfere. It's kind of, again, I'm going back to the article about antisemitism, right? The political advisor saw a film about Orthodox Jews celebrating, dancing at a wedding, whatever, in Brooklyn. And it's like what they've done is, in this video, is increasing the danger. It's a complete disregard of the laws, the regulations, all in the name of a selfish desire to celebrate. That's what he said today, right? About, you know, this is exactly like these Jews in Caesarea. They're like...

Seth: Yeah, don't mind, don't bother us with your laws. We're doing our own thing over here.

Lio: Yeah, we're going to fight about who builds this area and for whom. This is what's killing us, and this is the one thing we're not willing to talk about.

Seth: This tiny group of people has made it through all these thousands of years, right? The Greeks aren't here anymore. The Persians aren't here anymore. The Romans aren't here anymore. There were a couple of others we didn't get to, right? So there is something inside of this that there is that second floor that you talked about. There is this spark of magic in here that we can't disregard. Every time we talk about the story, every time we talk about these historical things, we have to kind of at the same time be on the second floor and be looking at the story from the second floor as well, in order to have a map for our own lives and what we're doing.

Lio: This is a hard thing to swallow. We're going to read through more examples. We can show the math, show the numbers. But at the end of the day, it's such an emotional thing. We're emotional people, and if I don't feel something that you're saying, then I tend to dismiss it.

Seth: This is our history because the generation dies and we forget we don't feel it. And we go through the same process again, but just that now we can control more governments, or now we can control Hollywood, or now we can control what, right. And then you don't get it. And then another thing, we rise and we have all of this ability to make connections and all this ability to do these things, but we don't get again what we're supposed to be doing. Because you said we are supposed to feel it. We don't feel it. You said, who out there feels it? That the main occupation of these people is supposed to be to love your neighbor as yourself. That's the occupation.

Lio: That's the occupation.

Seth: But nobody feels that it's important. And when we don't feel that it's important, and we get involved in all the governments and all the other crap, then we go back down to the first floor again.

Lio: That's the formula. It's so simple, it's painful. I'm jumping ahead.

Seth: Yeah, yeah.

Lio: We're in a time machine right now. The revolt eventually and the whole thing, those four years, they actually started in Caesarea and then they spread to Jerusalem. We just spent however many pages, five, six, seven pages, talking about how the Jews just broke each other down with all the civil wars, with killing themselves. And the Sicarii, and these ones, and these ones, until there was so much fighting at the time.

Lio: Not so easy. There's still more to do. Hold on, Seth. We're not done. It continues. It's so Jewish to extend the suffering. What Jews did to each other, even the Romans did not do to them. Josephus repeats that line. What the Jews did to each other, even the Romans did not do to them. We were our worst enemy, really. And this continues. So for four years, the province just kind of is set on fire. They keep at each other's throats. It starts in Caesarea. And just a commentary. The Maccabees, if you remember, they were fighting also. This was a war between Hellenized Jews and the militant Jews, the ones who remained faithful to the principle of unity, right? Now the fighting was only among proper Jews, like the ones who actually stayed there, and then inside of them, they have the zeal and the moderate, the ones who wanted to negotiate maybe peace with the Romans, and the ones like, no, not even that. And so the ideologies became more extreme. All hell is breaking loose. And the whole province is kind of losing it. And it continues on page...

Seth: Worse yet, the domination of the militant Zealots and Sicarii prevented any chance of moderation or negotiation with the Romans, even when the latter asked for it. They asked for it. The extremist approach not only caused more lives to be lost in battle, but made the civil war within Jerusalem far more vicious. As the city was engaged in a war on all sides, from the treacherous crowds of wicked men, concludes Josephus, the people of the city between them were like a great body torn to pieces.

Lio: This is a city of 3 million persons. It's like Chicago's size, and all involved in these crazy relationships, right, really destructive relationships. It's kind of like a marriage falling apart. And you just tear the other one through the mud and whatever. And the kids, I don't care, just give him my hand. It's that kind of attitude. I'm not saying Jews are the only ones who get divorced. I'm saying it's that...

Seth: He says the pilgrims, the refugees were inflicting barbarity. He said, even in the families, Joseph wrote, the quarrelsome temper caught hold of private families who couldn't agree with themselves. Even the ones who were dearest to one another broke through restraints with regard to one another.

Lio: Now, here's the crazy thing: people think, well, 3 million people in the city and the Romans besieging them, that's bound to kind of not work out. Not true. We have the ability to withstand a great deal of pressure.

Seth: Despite the vast number of people in Jerusalem, there should have been no shortage of food. Being a regular place of congregation, the city was well prepared for feeding very large gatherings for extended periods. Its enormous food depositories should have outlasted the ability of the Romans to maintain the siege. Yet, as Johnson writes, the Jews were irreconcilably divided; they were so engrossed in mutual destruction that they could pay no thought to the future, not even to the following day.

As a part of their all-out war, Simon and his party set a fire on those houses that were full of corn and full of grain and all their provisions. The same thing was done by Simon upon others' retreat when he attacked the city, as if they had on purpose done it to serve the Romans by destroying what the city had laid up against the siege and by thus cutting off the nerves of their own power. As a result, almost all of the corn was burnt, which would have been sufficient for a siege of many years. So they were taken by means of the famine. William Whitston, the 18th-century historian and mathematician, is also the best-known translator for the writings of Titus Flavius Josephus from the original Greek into English. In a comment on the burning of the food warehouses, Whitston concludes, nor could the Romans have taken this city had not the seditious Jews been so infatuated as to madly destroy their own food supplies. There would have been no destruction of the temple. They would have held them off. They had enough supplies.

Lio: And that's just the tip of the iceberg. The book goes into like 10 pages of just what it's like snuff videos. It's terrible stuff. I don't even know. Like, you know, we didn't want to even get into that. But after the burning of the storehouses, you get famine, you get people starting to fight with one another, not just on ideology, but now fighting over food, and then the degradation of the value of human life and human dignity, and even more carelessness for one another.

Seth: The Zealots would set up these trials and bring the rich and powerful and sentence them to death.

Lio: Crazy. Fake tribunals. They turn Jerusalem into a city without a governor.

Seth: Vast numbers of dead bodies laid in heaps. Lio, when I read this book, I couldn't believe these things. I really want our listeners to... I'm asking you, listener. Is this the history of our people that you understood? Is this the story that we've been telling ourselves? I mean, the story that I told myself was: we're the Jews, we were like these just regular whoever. I don't know why everyone just wanted to kill us. And we, each time, somehow we miraculously won because we prayed or were the chosen people or something like that. Totally different story here. Very, very human story. And very, very relevant story and very not magical, like we were saying before. Like we have a specific job to do to be engaged in love and connection. And every time that someone else came to kill us in the past, some group — the Romans, the Greeks, the Persians, whoever, the Egyptians, whoever it was — it was because we were not engaged. We broke ourselves down first. The hypothesis is starting to come together very clearly here.

Lio: Sometimes our only salvation comes in the form of some external oppressor. As even Josephus writes, women were in such distress by their internal calamities that they wished for the Romans and earnestly hoped for an external war for their delivery from their domestic miseries. It's back to today. Look at humanity, the state we're in. Suddenly, this external oppressor, the virus, comes in, makes us stop the fighting. Stop everything. There are no wars being fought right now. There's no terror being manufactured. Very little consumption. It's like a cease by some external force. But that's just such a harsh path if we don't bring that force of unity to the forefront.

Seth: There are multiple layers of stories going on here. Did you also say that there was political infighting in Israel right now? If all of a sudden some other country came to attack Israel, and the electric supply goes down or something like that, and everybody in the country needs to mobilize in order to put up new power lines, you'd probably see all the neighbors out in the street together, running power lines together from one village to the next village, delivering water.

Lio: I'm talking to a friend of mine here, and he says that he's a little close to the politics. He's saying he's so concerned because of this exact infighting that's happening right now. He's saying all of our enemies are sitting just on the borders, biding their time, waiting for the right hour. And he said it used to be that a time of war or some national crisis would bring us together, but it's not even doing that right now.

Seth: Right now. Right, so it's like what we see again and again is that when we don't do it, then more and more pressures come from the outside to push us towards having to unite. And you're saying those pressures aren't working right now.

Lio: I'm saying that's the formula. That's how nature works, it seems. And it kind of makes sense. But we're not seeing it. I mean, people are, even with all that's happening, still looking to go back to how things were. When will this thing blow over so we can go back?

Seth: Tell me where we are. We're coming basically to the destruction of the temple. The Romans are going to come.

Lio: I want to finish with this quote about Titus because that kind of sums up exactly what we wanted to say.

Seth: When Titus, the victorious Roman general, finally conquered Jerusalem, he was astounded by its fortifications. Looking from within at the towers, the walls, and the size and exactness of the bricks, he felt that he could not attribute his victory to his own military craftiness or his army's might. Instead, he said, "We have certainly had God for our assistance in this war, and it was no other than God who ejected the Jews out of their fortifications. For what could the hands of men or any machines do toward overthrowing these towers?" And the Greek sophist Philostratus asserted in his Vita Apollonii that when Helen of Judea offered Titus a victory wreath after he took the city, he refused the wreath on the grounds that there was no merit in vanquishing a people deserted by their own God.

Lio: And it continues to say that the Romans, when they saw the self-inflicted cruelty, thought, what else can it be? If you ask a Jewish person, or even a non-Jewish person, they'll say there's a force working around them, with them, but that force can turn on that group just as easily if it moves away from equivalence of form with that force, from being in resonance with it.

Seth: Lio, where are we going from here? This was episode 10. We came to the destruction of the temple.

Lio: I think we need a song in those podcasts, maybe in the middle, to make a song break just to cap your build.

Voice: They knew just a child. I learned by watching you. I need you. Show me something new.

Seth: I shouldn't end this podcast being depressed. So, where are we going here? What's happening?

Lio: First off, advice: if you've listened thus far, I recommend stopping and playing a nice song, jumping around a little, or just looking at some funny memes. Meme break, and then come back. We don't want to depress you.

Voice: We're not waiting for something to happen. We determine what will happen.

Seth: We should have a segment where we tell jokes.

Lio: In the middle of the destruction. We should. Where are we going from here?

Seth: Where are we going from here?

Lio: Why are we doing this? I'm actually hopeful because I'm scrolling through the book. Like I said, there's ten pages of terrible things and more terrible things.

Seth: We're wrapping it up here. Stick with the hope. The morbid numbers of the self-annihilation. Oh, I'm sorry. You wanted to be hopeful?

Lio: It's true. Half the people in the city perished, and we complained about the Romans. The point is, oh, by the way, sorry. We get to the raising of the temple and Titus himself said that destroying this temple should be a prime necessity in order to wipe out more completely the religion of the Jews.

Seth: He didn't want Jewish influence to be so prominent because he saw that side of the Jewish force, the ability to self-destruct. Right? And the symptoms of Jewish disunity are so powerful that anyone seeing it would just have this reaction, and we'll see more of it later on. But I think the good news is, and the hopeful note we want to end on is to say the opposite of that. Can you imagine? If Jewish disunity can bring people to do such atrocities, imagine if we read that whole book today and it said, and then they went out and they helped each other, and then they went out and they fed each other, and then they went out and saw someone who needed something and they gave it to him, and then saw their neighbor and they wanted to help their neighbor. And imagine exactly this, and then they started to feel something. And then the Romans saw how they were behaving, and the Romans said, "I want to know how to do that." And the Greeks saw how they were prospering from it, and the Greeks would teach us how you are so prosperous and create such a great life for everybody and everyone's healthy and well, and in a good mood, and confident. And how do you do that? Oh, we do it by treating each other like this and taking care of each other like this. It's like the flip side of all of this.

Lio: Yeah. When the temple was actually destroyed, finally, Rabbi Akiva, he was actually laughing, if you remember that story. And I think we'll touch on it next week. But he was actually laughing because he saw that this is actually the beginning of the great correction. It's basically the destruction of the localized form of unity, and now the process of the general unity of the whole world can begin.

Seth: And...

Lio: That's a beautiful thing. We'll talk about it, you know, the writing of the book of Zohar. And then Jews getting dispersing into the world to become agents of light, as it were. This is great. I mean, we'll start with some more gory details and go into the writing of the book that would spread the light of brotherly love. This is nice, I think. No, this is an up.

Seth: Yeah, we managed to get out of the first floor and rise to the second floor right there for...

Lio: The end of... I'll skip the quote. Don't bring us back down again. We get to it...

Seth: For anybody who wants to dive in on that, we're going to tell you the book at the end, and you'll be able to spend the whole time.

Lio: So, yes, so like us. Like us everywhere, follow us. We're not going to take you into the woods, we're going to take you into more, hopefully, more clarity out of the woods. So, like us on Facebook and Twitter at the J. We're also now on SoundCloud. You can find us. You can find us on Instagram, The Jew Function, everywhere. It's everywhere, The Jew Function. And just a reminder: The Jew Function that we're talking about is a function of unity. So if you like that, like us, join us. We're going to continue to explore it. Seth from New Jersey. Yeah, in New Jersey. I'm from the Self-Isolating in Israel. And we'll see you all next week. Take care, everyone.