#270 – David Wolpe: Judaism

David Wolpe is a Rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – Mizzen+Main: https://mizzenandmain.com and use code LEX to get $35 off – Linode: https://linode.com/lex to get $100 free credit – SimpliSafe: https://simplisafe.com/lex and use code LEX – InsideTracker: https://insidetracker.com/lex to get 20% off – Eight Sleep: https://www.eightsleep.com/lex and use code LEX to get special savings EPISODE LINKS: David’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/RabbiWolpe David’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/davidjwolpe David: The Divided Heart (book): https://amzn.to/3I5cFut Why Faith Matters (book): https://amzn.to/3i7qZrT PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: – Check out the sponsors above, it’s the best way to support this podcast – Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman – Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman – Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman – Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) – Introduction (14:57) – Who is God? (21:13) – Atheism (33:11) – Holocaust (38:45) – Evil (43:57) – Nihilism (47:42) – Judaism (56:36) – Marriage (1:00:27) – The Torah (1:04:33) – Gay marriage (1:13:40) – Super Bowl (1:21:34) – Religious texts (1:27:20) – Exodus (1:31:15) – Free will (1:35:23) – Consciousness (1:44:06) – Suffering (1:48:04) – Mortality (1:52:42) – Finding faith (2:00:26) – Israel and Palestine (2:07:44) – Advice for young people (2:11:04) – Books (2:14:45) – Meaning of life

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with Rabbi David Wolpe, someone who I have been a fan of for many years, for the kindness in his heart, the strength of his character, and the kind of friends he keeps and talks with, many of whom disagree with him but love him nevertheless, including the late Christopher Hitchens. I will have many conversations like these in the future about religion, about Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and others, looking to understand and celebrate the culture, the tradition, and the beauty of the people who practice these religions. I will, of course, not shy away from the difficult topics.

• 0:39Lex Fridman?

  I will talk both about hate and love, about war and peace. This conversation was recorded more than three weeks ago. Please allow me this time to speak on what has been on my mind. If this is not interesting to you, please skip. I totally understand. Some people asked me to say a few words on the war in Ukraine. I think my words are worth a little, but perhaps let me try. I considered doing a long solo episode on this war. I tried several times, but it is too personal for now. To give you context, I've been talking to refugees, friends, loved ones in Ukraine, in Russia, in Poland,

• 1:24Lex Fridman?

  Slovakia, Moldova, Romania, even UK, Germany, Canada, India, China, and of course, the United States. Some of them crying, or angry, or confused, or scared. I'm helping as best as I can privately, and I'm hoping to help in the future by traveling to Ukraine and Russia and celebrating the humanity and the beauty of the people in this region. This was all set up, both for Ukraine and Russia trips before 2022, including conversations with scientists, artists, athletes, leaders, and just, quote, "regular folks"

• 2:06Lex Fridman?

  who are equally, if not more fascinating to me. For now, it has become much more difficult, but I'll keep trying to find a way.

• 2:16Lex Fridman?

  I was born in the Soviet Union. My roots are both Ukrainian and Russian. And today, and until the day I die, I'm an American. I'm proud of all of this. I hope to keep celebrating the culture and the incredible human beings that make up these nations and humanity as a whole. We're all one people. We're in this together. That's how I feel about the people of these nations. Now, let me speak about those in the seats of power. I condemn all actions of leaders who play geopolitical games on the world stage disregarding the costs paid in human suffering on the scale of millions.

• 2:59Lex Fridman?

  For this reason, I condemn Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine. And I condemn many of the military interventions by the superpowers of the world, including by my country, the country I love, the United States, that after World War II has intervened in over 14 nations, with many studies finding that the United States is culpable for an unfathomable number of civilian deaths. I condemn all heads of state who needlessly wage wars, watching young men and women burn in the fires they started. I don't understand how humans can be so cruel to each other.

• 3:41Lex Fridman?

  Or rather, I understand, but I believe in a future world where this is no longer true. Let me also say a few words of what I hope to do with this podcast. I want to explore the full complexity and beauty of human nature. I believe each of us are capable of good and evil, and I want to understand how the mind and the circumstance lead one to choose the former path or the latter. And I believe conversation is one of the best ways to work toward this understanding. For that, I think I have to not only talk to the most inspiring humans in the world, but also to the most controversial. I will speak with many people who I disagree with,

• 4:24Lex Fridman?

  politicians, activists, CEOs, heads of state with very different opinions on the world. I will try hard to challenge their ideas without closing my mind to the depth and complexity of their perspective and their humanity. My presence in the same room with wildly different people will make it easy for the media and the internet to pick and choose clips and snapshots attacking me for being a shill for one side or the other. I can't defend this point, except to say that I'm a shill for no one, and that I hope you see the strength of my integrity, that I won't be influenced by any of them, no matter how rich, powerful, or charismatic they are.

• 5:08Lex Fridman?

  Like the poem "If" by Rudyard Kipling says, "If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, or walk with kings, nor lose the common touch; if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, if all men count with you, but none too much." This is a really, really important thing to me that I try to live by, that all human beings count with me the same. People have criticized me for wanting to have some of these conversations, like with Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky, and for times in the past speaking about them without the seriousness the topic deserves. For this, I would sincerely like to apologize.

• 5:49Lex Fridman?

  I'm disappointed, even ashamed, of my frequent ineloquence on these topics. I will work hard to do better. When I'm joking, it should be clear that it's a joke, and hopefully actually funny. When I'm being serious, I should speak with care and rigor. I've now done many hundreds of hours of podcast conversation. Despite my frequent failures in speaking, I hope you know where my heart is. Unfortunately, I think people will take clips of me and use them to attack me. This will happen more and more. I guess there's nothing I can do but send them my love. In the meantime, try to be a better person and a better interviewer. Let me also say that I like humor, especially dark humor.

• 6:34Lex Fridman?

  I like being silly and not taking myself seriously. I will keep taking risks with that, all with the goal of having fun and celebrating humanity at its most absurd and most beautiful. I will occasionally dress up in strange and weird outfits to celebrate the absurdity of life. I will hang out, break bread and joke with all kinds of people. I don't have to agree with them to laugh with them in order to escape for a brief moment the tension, the conflict, the hatred in the world. Humor just might save this little chaotic little civilization of ours. I love the Ukrainian people. I love the Russian people. And of course, I love my fellow Americans,

• 7:17Lex Fridman?

  Californians and Midwesterners, New Yorkers and Texans. I love humans. I love life and I want to share that love with others, with you. If I mess it up, I'm really, really sorry. I'm trying my best. I have no agenda and no one telling me what to do. I feel like the luckiest guy in the world to have all these opportunities. And I'm deeply grateful to be alive and to share that joy with other amazing people around me. Thank you for your support. For all the love you've sent my way, I will work my ass off to not disappoint you. I love you all. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.

• 8:02Lex Fridman?

  First is Mizzen and Maine, maker of my favorite performance dress shirts. Second is Linode, Linux virtual machines. Third is Simply Safe, the home security company I use. Fourth is InsideTracker, the service I use to track my biological data. And fifth is Eight Sleep, a self cooling mattress cover I sleep on. So the choice is style, Linux, safety, health or sleep. Choose wisely, my friends. And now, onto the full ad reads. As always, there's no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting. Up to you to decide whether I actually succeed. But if you skip them, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Genuinely, I do. Maybe you will as well.

• 8:46Lex Fridman?

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• 9:28Lex Fridman?

  Also true is lightweight breathable and moisture wicking. I don't know what moisture wicking is, but I'll take it. They feel great in whatever weather. I guess is what they're trying to say. Right now, if you go to MizzenMaine.com and use promo code Lex, you'll receive 35 bucks off any regular price order of $125 or more. So go to MizzenMaine.com and use our promo, our, use the promo code Lex. This episode is also brought to you by Linode Linux Virtual Machines. Why am I sweating when I mention that? I must be excited. I do really, really love Linux. I mean, it doesn't matter the flavor when it just launches up. I know I'm going to be doing some fun things when I see Linux booting up.

• 10:13Lex Fridman?

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• 10:55Lex Fridman?

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• 11:03Lex Fridman?

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• 11:48Lex Fridman?

  So SimpliSafe is by far the best. If you look on the internet, the internet agrees. Anyway, go to simplisafe.com/lex to customize your system and claim your free indoor security camera plus 20% off with interactive monitoring. Again, that's simplisafe.com/lex. This show is brought to you by InsideTracker, a service I use to track biological data. They have a bunch of plans, most of which include blood tests that give you a lot of information that you can then make decisions based on. They have algorithms that analyze your blood data, DNA data and fitness tracker data to provide you with a clear picture of what's going on inside you and offer you science-backed recommendations for positive diet and lifestyle changes.

• 12:32Lex Fridman?

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• 13:22Lex Fridman?

  This episode is also brought to you by Asleep and its Pod Pro mattress. It controls temperature with an app, is packed with sensors, and can cool down to as low as 55 degrees on each side of the bed separately. One of my favorite things in this world. When I have been working for several hours, I'm exhausted and I return to the bed and for a power nap, like 20 minutes. Sometimes I'll actually drink coffee before the power nap. Somehow, I don't know what the magic voodoo of that is, but you actually do sleep well in that power nap, but you come out energized. I think somebody told me to try that one day and I did and it worked really well.

• 14:03Lex Fridman?

  But I also just go for the power nap and just feel like the world is anew, like I'm a child reborn into the world, ready to take on all of its challenges. If I want to really maximize the enjoyability of the nap versus the sort of pure function of the nap, then I'll go with the Asleep mattress with its Pod Pro cover. Asleep currently ships within the United States of America, Canada, and the United Kingdom. That's asleep.com/lex. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast and here is my conversation with David Wolpe.

• 14:57Lex Fridman?

  Let's start with a big question. According to Judaism, who is God?

• 15:01Speaker 01

  It's difficult because Judaism, like any tradition that is thousands of years old and encompasses so many different lands and languages and thinkers, it doesn't give a single answer to even simple questions and to large questions, it certainly doesn't give a single answer. Although Judaism was responsible for introducing the monotheistic idea to the world, it doesn't mean that it's one idea. So if you take Maimonides, the greatest sage, In the Jewish tradition, medieval philosopher, he would say that God is an omnipotent, benevolent, intangible, unimaginable God. In fact, he said, you can't say what God is, only what God is not.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  Because you have to emphasize, could talk more about that. But basically, you have to emphasize the unknowability of God. You have a modern philosopher like Heschel, who says that God is a God of pathos, a God of deep feeling, which probably would make my monities shiver if he heard such a description. And if you look in the Bible, God is always regretting or having human emotions. So there are so many different kinds of depictions and ideas. And there is this tremendous tension between transcendence and imminence. That is, in the Jewish tradition, God is exquisitely close. God is imminent. In the Talmud's words, God is as close as your mouth is to your ear.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  In other words, whatever you say, God hears it. And yet, at the same time, God is unfathomably distant. Sometimes when I speak to high schoolers, I will say, in the Jewish tradition, think of it this way. When you were two years old, you had no idea what it was to be a 15 year old. Not only did you not know, but you didn't know what you didn't know. We conceive of God as being more, the distance between God and human beings is far greater than the distance between a two year old and a 15 year old. So when we speak about God, we have to acknowledge how limited we really are.

• 17:06Lex Fridman?

  So, okay, you laid out a lot of fascinating things on the table. So one, the knowability of God. Then this idea of deep feeling, which, again, can God be, operate in a space of feelings too? So not just the mouth and the ear of the senses. Can God be known? Can God be felt by this three year old in the analogy versus the teenager?

• 17:35Speaker 01

  So I will take refuge in a beautiful phrase from Martin Buber, another Jewish theologian. He said, "God cannot be expressed, God can only be addressed." In other words, you can speak to God, you can feel a sense of God, but can you begin to comprehend or know God? No. Joseph Cosby, I'm pulling in a couple of early Jewish philosophers. He said, "To know God, I would have to be God."

• 18:02Lex Fridman?

  But can we get close? Is it useful or is it a distraction to visualize things, to embody, to create, to attach to the stories some kind of visualizations in our mind? For example, gender, he versus she, things like this, or old man in the sky kind of feeling?

• 18:22Speaker 01

  So it's almost inevitable, but I think ultimately you try to transcend it. This was, this was the great, you know, we just read this actually in synagogue, the story of the golden calf. And the, the story is that human beings found it impossible to not have a visualization, because they had just come from Egypt and in the world of, of pagan worship, everything is, it's not that pagans thought that idol was actually God, but it represented visually what God was. And along comes this idea that God is actually not capable of being visualized, which is very difficult and it stretches

• 19:04Speaker 01

  the bounds of human comprehension, maybe even breaks them.

• 19:09Lex Fridman?

  So would you say that the proper way to operate as a human in relation to God is humility in that you're screwed? You're not able to basically know anything, almost anything?

• 19:23Speaker 01

  Well, the reason that you're, the salvation of this is that you can't, that you can't, I was going to say the reason you're not screwed, but then I thought somebody might be upset at a rabbi saying that. So I'm, so I didn't say it and have not said it.

• 19:37Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 19:38Speaker 01

  But, but the, the, the reason you're not is that you don't have to have a comprehension of God. You have to have a relationship to God. And those are not the same. I mean, To draw an analogy that is not far from perfect, as most analogies are, but this one especially, you have relationships with people who are mysteries to you. You're a mystery to yourself. You can live and love somebody for 50 years and they can say something that surprises you because ultimately, we are trapped in here. And when a child first says "I," we call that individuation, but what that really means is, I now know that

• 20:21Speaker 01

  I am cut off from the minds of all other children and all other people. And so you have with God, a more intimate relationship because you can believe that God is, you are known by God and you have a relationship to God despite the fact that you can't know God, just as you can't know others.

• 20:43Lex Fridman?

  And some would say, to have a good relationship, you want to be constantly surprised.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:49Lex Fridman?

  You don't want to know the thing.

• 20:50Speaker 01

  Well, the world, yes, the world that God created is constantly surprising. But, and by the way, the caveat to this, you know, when I had all these debates with Christopher Hitchens, and he would always say that God is a greater tyrant than North Korea because it continues after your death. And the idea of being known by God is after all frightening if you think, "God knows what I think," and so on, if your image of God is unloving.

• 21:12Lex Fridman?

  Can we jump to this? You had friendships and conversations with a lot of the fascinating figures of the past 20, 30 years of the great intellectuals, one of which, perhaps one of the greats, is Christopher Hitchens. What have you learned from your conversation, your friendship?

• 21:33Speaker 01

  So, there are a lot of views he held that I really did not agree with, but he was a remarkable person.

• 21:38Lex Fridman?

  That was a good line about North Korea. He was full of incredibly good lines.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  Well, one of the things I learned was you can't win a debate with Christopher Hitchens. One of the reasons you can't win is because he has this British baritone. And this ready wit that because you can't you you can't triumph over laughter. It doesn't matter if your argument is better, if your quip is better, you win.

• 22:01Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  And so I remember once we were arguing about free will and he said, well, I choose to believe in it. And everybody laughed and that was.

• 22:08Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  Despite the fact that that's not really an argument.

• 22:11Lex Fridman?

  Or like, uh, I have free will because I don't have a choice or whatever.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 22:15Lex Fridman?

  And and people should watch your conversation with him. It's great. I mean, it's a it's a kind of David versus Goliath situation. And you're quite, uh, masterful at, uh, using charisma and sweet talking.

• 22:27Speaker 01

  I also genuinely liked him. I I mean, I I spent. I spent a three hour limousine ride with him from one debate to another, from from LA to San to San Diego. And the entire time his he said, we just can't talk about religion.

• 22:44Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 22:44Speaker 01

  So we talked about literature and he gave me a long lecture about Scotch. Um, he was, he was inexhaustible. I mean, not only did he, uh, I I began, I wrote a couple of obituaries about him and one I began with the the, um, historian Keith Thomas said, there are two ways of achieving immortality. By doing things worth remembering or saying things worth remembering. And by that standard, he did both. I mean, he went all around the world to all sorts of danger zones. He knew like the best bars everywhere from Kuala Lumpur, you know, to Beirut to LA. And he could drink all night and write a 2000 word essay on the poetry of Yeats and go to sleep.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  Uh, I remember before one of our debates in Boston, he was at the bar. And he said, come have a drink. And I said, I'm gonna have a drink before I go to debate with you. What are you crazy? And he said, just have a beer. It's water. Um, so he was, uh, uh, he really was a constant inexhaustible fountain of, uh, of intrigue and interest.

• 23:50Lex Fridman?

  What kind of things, if you can remember, if you can mention, if you can admit.

• 23:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:54Lex Fridman?

  To have him enlightening you or helping you change your mind about something in this world?

• 24:01Speaker 01

  So I think, um.

• 24:03Lex Fridman?

  Unrelated to Scotch.

• 24:04Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, unrelated to Scotch. He convinced me that the idea.

• 24:12Speaker 01

  I mean, I had my doubts about it and have my doubts about it, but he convinced me through many debates, and not only he, that the idea that religion makes people better is not ipso facto wrong, but it's a much, much more complicated argument than I wished it to be.

• 24:30Lex Fridman?

  So he is, however you conceive of the term beauty, he's one of the more beautiful humans this weird little earth produced. So how do you explain the atheism combined with such a beautiful mind? So from your perspective of a man of faith, how do you think about that?

• 24:58Speaker 01

  So of the atheists that I have debated, I think about all of them somewhat differently. So I think that in some deep way, for example, Sam Harris is a religious personality. I don't even think that he would, he wouldn't like the word religious, but I don't even think that he would take issue with that. I think that he would say his is a purely material based spirituality, but I mean, his orientation towards meditation and appreciation of Buddhism, there's something deeply seeking spiritual about him. With Hitchens, I honestly,

• 25:38Speaker 01

  and I know that some of his fans will really not like this. It's not that he was any kind of closet believer, certainly not at all, but I almost feel as though he was less a passionate arguer against religion than he was, first of all, extremely upset by the forms that religion took in this world. And then, once he trained his intellectual howitzers on a target, he had so much fun inventing new arguments and attacking it.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  That I really believe he gets carried away sometimes by his own eloquence and and intellectual range. So, for example, the idea that you would call a book that religion poisons everything. I think he did that deliberately, provocatively, so that he could defend a proposition that obviously is indefensible, that it poisons everything. So, I don't know. I think he had tremendous joie de vue. That's really what, that's what sums him up. This guy loved life in all of its manifestations. And arguing against something that someone else believed was one of his greatest joys.

• 26:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, and of course, the practical aspect of that. He just saw the powerful and he challenged them with humor and so on.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 26:57Lex Fridman?

  And, you know, you could argue, perhaps, that humor is the highest form of what humanity can achieve. Like, sometimes maybe us little humans take things a little too seriously. Then sometimes we need to just laugh at it all, laugh at ourselves, and that's probably the purest form of wisdom.

• 27:12Speaker 01

  You know, Auden, the poet, said, "Among the people that I like or admire, I can find no common quality. But among those I love, I can. All of them make me laugh."

• 27:21Lex Fridman?

  There you have it. Speaking of people that make you laugh, Sam Harris, because he's actually has a really great sense of humor.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  He does.

• 27:31Lex Fridman?

  With a very cold and monotone delivery. He's another one that you had friends with, you have good conversations with. What, where's your fundamental disagreements and agreements with Sam?

• 27:45Speaker 01

  Sam believes that religion is intellectually indefensible. He really believes it, like, deep in his soul. And, and he gets angry at the idea that a proposition should be unchallenged if it offends his sense of logic.

• 28:04Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so he cannot move on until this is dealt with.

• 28:07Speaker 01

  Nope. In fact, I mean, he, you know, I did a podcast with Eric Weinstein. And then Sam did one. And Sam said, "When I heard your podcast with David Wolpe, I learned stuff about what he thinks that I never learned in my conversations with him, because I can never let him make those unfounded assertions without challenging them, and you just let them go." And I think that there was something to that, was like, he finds it hard to have a conversation about religion.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  That doesn't arouse his real ire about the harm that he thinks religion does in the world.

• 28:43Lex Fridman?

  It's more about the implementation of religion in the world as it is versus the really fundamental.

• 28:49Speaker 01

  I think he also thinks it's fundamentally intellectually shoddy and disreputable.

• 28:55Lex Fridman?

  Faith.

• 28:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, faith. I don't know how to put this. I mean, they're both capable of separating their contempt for religion from the people that they have sitting in front of them.

• 29:07Lex Fridman?

  You mean Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris?

• 29:09Speaker 01

  Yes, both of them.

• 29:10Lex Fridman?

  Okay, so let me, you mentioned Eric Wines, and people should listen to your conversation with Eric, because it's a fascinating one, it's great. It's non-standard, it just goes all over the place, and there's humor and wit. It's great. So, one interesting aspect that I also learned, perhaps not about you, but about Eric, about both, but Eric has a similar thing with Jordan Peterson, which is if you ask him, do they believe in God, I think the answer, they're not comfortable answering that question, or they might say no, but they're usually just not comfortable answering that question, but there's a kind of sense that they would like to live life, a religious life, as if God exists.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  I think that's exactly right. I think, first of all, Eric has a really deep appreciation of the Jewish tradition. I don't know Peterson, I've read his stuff, and I've reviewed his stuff and so on, but I think that Jungians are in their very approach. They believe that myth is the way the world works, and so it's not that big a leap to God, but it's still, there's still a distance there.

• 30:20Lex Fridman?

  Is it possible to have your cake and eat it too? Is it possible to have the depth?

• 30:27Lex Fridman?

  Of a religious life without believing in God. Like, how do you make sense of Eric Weinstein's devout life within the tradition? I mean, I honestly think he believes in God, but doesn't believe in God. And it's oscillating like it's a quantum mechanical system of some sort.

• 30:45Speaker 01

  Schrödinger's God. So I think that he would probably agree with what Eli Wiesel said, that a Jew can be angry at God or be disbelieving of God, but is not allowed to be indifferent to God. And I think Eric's not indifferent to God. And it's different than Christianity. I've had this conversation many times because you can be very Jewish and have deep doubts about theological questions because Judaism isn't a religion. It's a religious family. And so you're born Jewish. Like, if I said to you tomorrow, if I was Christian and I said, oh, I believe in Jesus today, and then tomorrow I didn't, I'm not Christian anymore.

• 31:29Speaker 01

  But if tomorrow I said, oh, I don't believe all this stuff, I'm still Jewish. So it's a more complicated system. Having said that, though, I think it's very hard to sustain over generations without some belief that the source of it is beyond ourselves. And in that sense, as in many others, Eric is unique.

• 31:53Lex Fridman?

  Well, he was actually making that claim that we need faith to propagate this tradition through the generations.

• 32:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:03Lex Fridman?

  So without that, the traditions crumble. It's a very interesting idea, a very interesting argument for devout faith, which is it's a thing, it's a glue that holds a tradition together. Otherwise, like, traditions fall apart.

• 32:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:19Lex Fridman?

  Because you can't have the intensity of that tradition. I mean, on the other hand, you do see tradition. I mean, Thanksgiving, one of my favorite.

• 32:27Speaker 01

  So I would say traditions that are demanding fall apart. Traditions that require turkey might not fall apart, but traditions that make demands of you that are counter-cultural or are hard, they fall apart.

• 32:41Lex Fridman?

  I think I need to introduce you to some Thanksgiving dinners that are quite demanding. Getting the family together.

• 32:48Speaker 01

  You know, there's a, first of all, I'm a vegetarian, so I'm tough to have at Thanksgiving dinner, but there's a comedian, Kathy Lansman, who one year, I heard this on the radio and it stuck with me, she said that holidays are a chance to renew your resentments afresh. You know, and that's basically what people do with their families. It's like, I'm gonna go home and fight with the uncle again this year.

• 33:10Lex Fridman?

  I apologize to take a dark turn, but you mentioned Eli Wiesel. I recently saw a picture of Eli Wiesel when he was in the camp, when he was liberated. For some reason, that hit hard. Like, you know, I've seen pictures in concentration camps of people I don't know, or whose words I haven't really felt and gone through, but for some reason, like, here's just a normal person, like a normal body.

• 33:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:41Lex Fridman?

  Um, laying there, that just, that was him.

• 33:46Speaker 01

  I've seen it. And you see, you can see his face, but at the same time, you see that this is an amazing, and I think what's so disturbing about it is exactly what you were saying, is I've seen a thousand people like this, and I know this one, and I know what he became. So what about all those other people who look exactly like him, who didn't make it out of the camp?

• 34:10Lex Fridman?

  You know, maybe it's projection, but it seemed like, this perhaps is also just combining with Man's Search for Meaning, is it seemed like it was a regular day for them in the picture. It didn't seem like, I mean, I'm not sure what I expect to see what suffering looks like, but it's almost like there's no celebration.

• 34:32Speaker 01

  I've never seen a picture of actually liberation be celebratory. It's true. It's really true.

• 34:38Lex Fridman?

  So what do you make sense, and I apologize to take a step into that moment in history, how does, how do you make sense of the Holocaust?

• 34:51Lex Fridman?

  That of Nazi Germany that such things could be committed by human beings to each other. Is it religion? Is it the thirst for power? Is it the madness of crowds somehow carrying us forward?

• 35:09Speaker 01

  I mean, for me, it's multi-causal. I don't think there's one reason. One of the things especially there has to do with the special nature of antisemitism, which is, let's put that to one side for the moment. The second is, I think human beings are fundamentally split. They are mostly good, except when put under certain pressures. My first explanation for hatreds is as follows. Go to a playground. What happens when a new kid comes on the playground? Do the other kids say, oh, let's go share our toys with the new kid? No. They say, oh, who's that stranger? And let's go get him. Because otherness is built into our genetic, I mean, we're tribal by nature.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  And we see people form tribes all the time of different kinds. I asked you before if you were a chess player. And when I was a kid and playing in tournaments, and I didn't do it for that long, and I didn't do it that well, but when I was, it was like the whole world was divided into people who could play chess and people who couldn't play chess. Which is ridiculous, if you think about it, as though that's the way you divide the world. But we, we tend to do that. And the Jews were always the identifiable other. There were Frenchmen and Jews, there were Russians and Jews, there were Germans and Jews. And the great blessing of America is that there's no identifiable other quite that way,

• 36:32Speaker 01

  is that there's all these minorities and no, there's not an American and a something. But once you have that identifiable other, and you have a long history of blaming that identifiable other for all the ills that befall you.

• 36:49Lex Fridman?

  Of course, people still do try to, for me, say, in America, they still try to form other, I mean, immigrant versus been here for a generation. There's so many ways to slice it. We still try to find ways. It's just more difficult in America because there's so many sub-tribes, hierarchies of tribes and upon tribes.

• 37:08Speaker 01

  You're absolutely right, and I was moving fast because I didn't want to get bogged down in all the very difficult. It's true, I tried.

• 37:15Lex Fridman?

  You're hoping I wouldn't mention that tribalism happens in America.

• 37:18Speaker 01

  I was skating, you know, when you're on thin ice, your safety is in your speed. So I was trying to move fast.

• 37:25Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 37:26Speaker 01

  But for most of history in Eastern and Western Europe, not obviously in Asia, but in Eastern and Western Europe, Jews were the ones who like, they're not like us. They're clearly not like us. And so, and in addition, there was, there's a peculiar quality, and I don't know, I wonder what you'll think of this explanation. There's a peculiar quality to antisemitism that is unlike any other hatred that I know of, which is Jews are both superhuman and subhuman. They're vermin, the Nazis thought of them as vermin, and yet they control the world. And there was an English scholar named Hyman Maccabee who said, "The reason that that's so is the myth that Jews killed God.

• 38:11Speaker 01

  They killed Jesus, and to kill a God, you have to be superhumanly evil. You can't just be bad, otherwise you can't kill a God." So there is some like, supercharged evil sense that people got from that about Jews that still inhers.

• 38:28Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's true. A lot of the way we formulate the other in terms of tribes is often, they're subhuman and they're here to steal our resources, like on the playground. But to be both is a fascinating construction.

• 38:45Lex Fridman?

  Do you agree with Solzhenitsyn that all of us have the capacity for evil?

• 38:50Speaker 01

  100% runs through every human heart. I have no doubt about it. And I know, as you probably do, but I probably know more both because of what I do and because I have lived a lot longer than you. I know a lot of religious leaders who people thought or think are above the human, and they are emphatically not. They're not. Some of them have done horrible things and they've used their position to do horrible things. And it's because nobody, there is no perfect saint. There's no, you know, I mean, all through history, you discover all these saintly characters that we worship, the people who actually knew them around them, some liked

• 39:33Speaker 01

  them and some didn't. People are complicated, all of us.

• 39:37Lex Fridman?

  And the tough thing is, the thing that's the toughest for me is it's not very always clear what is good and what is evil. Because certainly if you just look at history, and it's not always propaganda, I, you know, I really believe that some part of Stalin thought he was doing good legitimately. And it makes you ask a question of yourself. For those of us who want to do good in the world, am I actually doing good? And that's a really difficult question. So like in the technology sphere, for example, in this dream of creating technology that will do some good, am I actually doing good?

• 40:21Speaker 01

  So I have a question about that myself. Not about Stalin. I'm sure that Stalin thought so. Stalin does not, does not strike me from what I know of him as somebody given to a lot of self doubt. But the question with AI to me is actually, it goes back to the God question, which is if we have an appreciation of the limitations of our own intelligence.

• 40:43Speaker 01

  That we know that just like we can only hear certain things and see certain colors, how much of the world is inaccessible to us because of the way our brains are constructed. How can we possibly have any confidence that we can create things that in certain ways are far more intelligent than we are and control them the way we think is best seems to me a hubris that might end up being destructive.

• 41:13Lex Fridman?

  Definitely. Well, any sentence with the word hubris in it is going to end badly when implemented at scale. But there is also beauty. So if you approach it with humility, there is a sense, I don't want to over romanticize it, but there is a legged robot right behind you, which is hilarious. So there's a magic. I don't have kids. I would love to have kids. But there's a magic to bringing robots to life.

• 41:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 41:46Lex Fridman?

  That it feels like you are a mini god.

• 41:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:50Lex Fridman?

  Because you just breathe life into an entity that operates in this world, especially when they have legs and they move in this way. That's in the case of the four-legged robot is like a dog. That I think, I don't think I'm over romanticizing it. The feeling is like you would with a child. You just gave birth. Like, holy crap, this is a living thing. I wonder what he or she are thinking about.

• 42:16Speaker 01

  By the way, I'm not at all insensible to how remarkable it must feel to create that. I'm actually worried in part about how remarkable it feels to create that because to maintain humility and perspective when it's such a fantastic thing is what's difficult. And I think also because. Creativity is both, is both part of what it is to be human. And it's very much part of the legacy of Western civilization and the legacy of having a creator god. If you have a tradition where god is known primarily through what god creates. So, the first debate I ever had, since we talked about humor and god and creating, let me give you my one god creating joke.

• 43:00Speaker 01

  Because the first debate I ever had on religion and science was with Stephen J Gould. And it was wonderful because he had a deep interest in religion. And his interest was actually not to say religion is terrible. But, but I started with this joke and, and I think it made the debate go a little bit easier. So, the time has come when human beings can do everything that god can do. And a scientist looks up at heaven and says, "God, look, you were great in your day and we thank you for everything you did, but now we don't need you." And god says, "Really, you don't need me?" He says, "No, we can do everything you did." God says, "Everything?" And human being says, "Yeah, we can do everything." God says, "Okay, can you create a human being?" And the scientist goes, "Yeah." God says, "From dirt?" Scientist goes, "Yes."

• 43:45Speaker 01

  Says, "Okay, let me see." Scientist reaches down, scoops up some dirt, and god says, "Uh, uh, uh, get your own dirt."

• 43:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 43:51Speaker 01

  But, the idea is that a creator god impels us to create too.

• 43:56Lex Fridman?

  But, let me bring up Nietzsche.

• 43:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:59Lex Fridman?

  Who proclaimed that god is dead. Is belief in god slowly disappearing from our world, do you think? And what kind of impact does that have on society? You wrote, "That religion is not our enemy. Before the Western faiths captured the heart of our world, there was cruelty, carnage, and destruction. In the 20th century, when religion ceased to be a force of international politics, the scale of human slaughter was far beyond anything human beings have ever known. What is the world like when we take religion out of it?"

• 44:30Speaker 01

  I mean, I think Nietzsche was largely right. You know, it wasn't a statement about god, it was a statement about god's presence in the world. And I think that that's largely true, that god is not a force in...

• 44:46Speaker 01

  A lot of Western society, and I believe that if the force of nihilism has no clear counter without an idea that we're all here for a purpose, and that our lives are inherently meaningful, and that there's a God who wishes us to be better. So I worry a lot about it. And I don't think, I think that the sort of optimism that things are just going to get better and better is what one philosopher called "cut flower ethics." That is, we're still living off the morals that religion gave us, but now that they're separate from the soil that gave birth to them, I see them wilting.

• 45:28Lex Fridman?

  So this kind of optimism for the future of human civilization, you think, is in part grounded in a religious society?

• 45:36Speaker 01

  I really do believe that. I mean, it was religion that, the Greeks looked back at a golden age of the past. It was the Jews who said, "No, the golden age is in the future." Right? It's the Messiah. And I think that that idea that we're moving towards something better, which I really believe humanity can do, and absent destroying ourselves, will do. You know, I mean, I'm I'm very excited about the technology that I won't live to see. I think it's fantastic.

• 46:03Lex Fridman?

  And that excitement is a kind of religious excitement? Because there's a reason to preserve this whole thing.

• 46:08Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Because I really think, I know this sounds absurdly anthropomorphic, but I really think God is cheering us on. I feel like this is why we're here. We're here to grow in soul and to grow each other in soul.

• 46:27Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. So what do you think the world, so if we just think of this force of nihilism that's contending with the force of faith-based optimism?

• 46:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 46:42Lex Fridman?

  What do you make of the atrocities in the 20th century? Do you think at its core, it's part of human nature and has nothing to do with religion or not religion? Or do you think you can assign this kind of nihilistic view of the world?

• 46:58Speaker 01

  I think it has to do with a religion that doesn't make ethical demands. That is,

• 47:07Speaker 01

  For Stalin and for Hitler, they both had religions, but they were, in a sense, but they were religions that didn't make ethical demands for the other. I mean, 36 times, the Torah talks about the stranger. The point is, it's trying to educate people away from their natural inclination towards distrusting and disliking the other. And it's a lot of work. That's really difficult to do. But if you have the, if you have a tribal passion and not a universal ethic, then you're in trouble.

• 47:41Lex Fridman?

  Well, the Jewish tribe is a very strong tribe. So how do you make sense of this mention of the stranger versus the power of the tribe, which is the whole point, not the point, but the mechanism of tradition propagates the tribe?

• 47:56Speaker 01

  So it's both. I mean, the Torah does not start with Jews. It starts with Adam and Eve. That's a way of saying, yeah, this is going to be a story about a people. But understand that prior to a kind of people, there are people. I like, I'm a human being before I'm a Jew. And in fact, the Jewish New Year, you know, the Muslim New Year starts with Muhammad's journey and the Christian New Year starts with Jesus's birth. The Jewish New Year starts with the creation of the world. Because the idea is, yes, this is a particularist tradition, but it makes a universal statement, which is all of humanity is a child, are in the image of God, are children of God.

• 48:41Speaker 01

  I think that the idea of Judaism was to try to exemplify a certain way of making that statement over and over again. And I want to say one other thing about chosenness. That's very name dropy, but when I tell you how I got there, it won't be as name dropy. So my brother is a professor at Emory.

• 49:02Speaker 01

  And so is the Dalai Lama actually teaches at Emory, although he no longer does because he's too old to go to Emory, but for many years taught at Emory. And so my brother brought us, he's the head of the bio of the ethics center at Emory. He's a bioethicist. So he brought a bunch of students to Dharamsala to meet with the Dalai Lama. So I went to India. I was on sabbatical. Then anyway, I met my brother there and, and we had a chance to meet with the Dalai Lama. Okay, that was the name drop. So we're sitting in the, before he speaks to the students, he was speaking to us, but not because I just wanted to make it clear, not because he said, oh, I gotta talk to that rabbi. Just, we just happened to be, I happened to glom along with my brother. We sit down, the first thing he says is he points at me and says, what's this about the chosen people anyway?

• 49:46Speaker 01

  So, and he had, by the way, and he had asked that I give a lecture, which I did later to, to them, to his monks about how Jews survived in the diaspora. So it's not like he doesn't know about Judaism. He knows a lot about it. But he's just being right away with, so I said, yes, Jews believe that they were chosen for a certain mission in this world. But that doesn't mean other people weren't chosen for other sorts of things. They certainly, I mean, it seems to me that other people believe they're chosen for things too. He burst out laughing and said, yeah, we also think we're chosen. So I think it's universal.

• 50:17Lex Fridman?

  The idea is that no tribe is better than, from a

• 50:20Speaker 01

  Better? No.

• 50:21Lex Fridman?

  From a Jewish perspective, you're chosen for a thing.

• 50:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 50:27Lex Fridman?

  But that doesn't make you better.

• 50:30Speaker 01

  No. The only place where the betters came in, honestly, if I'm going to, historically, if I'm going to be honest, was not with the idea that you, but it was when Jews were small, persecuted, the way that you take this sort of psychic revenge is by saying, no, we're better than our persecutors even, you know?

• 50:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 50:50Speaker 01

  But the idea is, yeah, different people have different missions, which is, I mean, like, there was a Jewish philosopher, Franz Rosenzweig, who used to say, he didn't know very much about Islam. He used to say Judaism is the sun and Christianity was the rays of the sun. Like Judaism introduced the idea of God and Christianity brought it to the world.

• 51:09Lex Fridman?

  Could you speak to this difference? What is the difference and similarities between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam?

• 51:19Speaker 01

  The religious family part is different. And the greatest difference, which I talked about in the Eric Weinstein podcast, is that Islam and Judaism are more similar in a lot of ways than Judaism and Christianity. And the reason that that is so is Christianity, in its core, is not a religion of law. The reason it's not a religion of law is because it grew up in the Roman Empire. So law was taken care of. I mean, Jesus didn't have to create civil law because you had Roman law. Muhammad and Moses created a religion in the desert where there was no law. So you have to create a religion of law. Otherwise, you have anarchy.

• 52:02Speaker 01

  And that's why, in a lot of ways, like, there was never a separation of church and state in Islam or Judaism. That was a gift that Christianity gave the world. And it could do it because of render unto Caesar what is Caesar's. But when Moses came along, there was no Caesar. When Muhammad came along, there was no Caesar. So historically, the traditions shaped differently. But all three of them have this core, I think, the single most important statement and insight in all of human history, which is that every human being is in the image of God. And if you believe, if you really believe that, that's a transformative belief.

• 52:45Lex Fridman?

  So that means you should love, you know, thy neighbor as

• 52:50Speaker 01

  As thyself, which comes from Leviticus, comes straight from the Torah.

• 52:53Lex Fridman?

  So I don't know if you know, I've been chatting with Omar Saliman. I don't know if you know who that is. He's an Imam in Dallas, a great guy. I enjoy his interfaith dialogues that he engages in. And do you ever do that kind of talk with Christians, with Muslims?

• 53:11Speaker 01

  Yes, often, often.

• 53:12Lex Fridman?

  I mean, I do whenever I at least listen to them in the context of these kinds of conversations. There's so much love and humor and empathy and appreciation and also ability to make fun of the quirks. Of the little

• 53:28Speaker 01

  Of one's own.

• 53:29Lex Fridman?

  Of one's own communities, you know, like, so it's not, you know, necessarily the depths of the details of the traditions, but you know, these are communities and they're full of people and they're full of weird people because we're all weird. And so you, there is very particular flavors of weirdness that emerge and they can make fun of them. And in that way, they can talk about some like beautiful ideas. So I mean, I don't know, do you engage in these kinds of things? What would you learn from them?

• 54:00Speaker 01

  So one of the things I learned is exactly what you said, the personalities that you think are unique to your own community. In fact, they exist in all sorts of communities and religious communities in particular draw, I think, some interesting personalities. And also that the, especially as clergy, some of the pressures that you feel are shared. And, and it's weird, again, it has to do with that tribal association. There's almost like, there's an understanding among clergy because they have similar straight, and it's a strange role in the following way. It's one that you never escape. That is, you're

• 54:44Speaker 01

  not, you're, you're not my lawyer at the supermarket, but you are my rabbi at the supermarket. I mean, it doesn't matter why you're there. That's not an escapable role. And every religious leader is aware of that.

• 55:00Speaker 01

  That strange assumption of, of stepping into something that you can never step out of.

• 55:07Lex Fridman?

  But you're also the source where people go to, to think about the deepest question of our lives and our universe. And so that's some heavy, you know, when people are suffering, they look to you for answers.

• 55:23Speaker 01

  I mean, every privilege comes with a cost of one kind or another. The reason you get to be in that role is exactly because you get the privilege of being there at crucial moments in people's lives. I mean, the fact that I get to marry people and get to give eulogies for people and come to the hospital, that's, it's inexpressible. I have this joke with people that I know that like, when I'm sitting on the couch and it's Saturday night, I don't want to get up and go to a wedding. I really don't. I want to sit there and watch Netflix like everybody else. But when I'm actually doing the wedding, I always love it. Always, always, always.

• 56:04Speaker 01

  And, and the reason is that I don't think, I mean, yes, people go to you for answers in, in calmer conversations. Like, if you asked me now, like, what's my theory of why God allows evil? I could give you a conversation about it. But they really go for presence and comfort, not really for answers. When someone's suffering, an answer doesn't, doesn't make them unsuffer. You know, it's just, they want to know they're not alone.

• 56:30Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. To be heard and just to feel things in silence together.

• 56:35Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 56:36Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. In terms of weddings and marriage, what's the role of that call? I'm just, I need to take some notes here. What's, what's?

• 56:45Speaker 01

  The role of a rabbi?

• 56:46Lex Fridman?

  The role of marriage in, in human existence.

• 56:49Speaker 01

  It is, first of all, to teach you how to care for someone unlike you, which could be anyone you marry. And I think it's to create a home and a family.

• 57:04Lex Fridman?

  So there's a commitment to it, so care for a long time.

• 57:06Speaker 01

  Right. Exactly. And also, when, when couples come to me and they say, we don't need to be married because it really won't change how we think about ourselves and our relationship, I say to them, that's true. It might not, but it will change how everyone else looks at you.

• 57:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 57:20Speaker 01

  And because it changes how everyone else looks at you, it changes you. Because it's one thing to say, this is my partner. It's another thing to say, this is my husband. You say, this is my husband, that means we've made a real commitment to this.

• 57:34Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 57:36Lex Fridman?

  What do you, uh, do you worry that there's a dissolution of that as well in terms of, how, you know, as, as religion dissipates, like it loosens its hold on society, loosens its impact on society, do you worry about that?

• 57:51Speaker 01

  I worry about it. I do think that it is possible that we're going, rather than a dissolution, we're going through a transition. That is, different kinds of families and different configurations of families. That is, I see some of that. But I also do see, uh, it's less a dissolution of marriage than it is of the idea of commitment. And I'll give you like a simple example. When I was growing up,

• 58:19Speaker 01

  a player on a sports team was always on that team. And you rooted for the team because you knew the players for 20 years. Now, there are very good reasons, starting with Curt Flood, why, why people got free agency and they can move around and it's better for the players. I understand all that and I am not, I'm not saying, oh, they should continue. But

• 58:41Speaker 01

  just like people move jobs and they move sports teams and they change careers, they change partners. And there is, uh, there is a diminishment of the commitment to commitment that I actually think has serious societal consequences and that I am worried about.

• 59:01Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, there's a, there's a cost to that. I don't know what it is about commitment that's beautiful. Like through, because like some of the deepest friendships I have is when we've gone through some shit together.

• 59:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:12Lex Fridman?

  And so like the hard times, going through a hard times together, especially when the hard times are between the two of you, that, that if, I mean, that's always a risk. But if it, if you can find a way through, that can bond you stronger. That's the fascinating thing about human relationships.

• 59:29Speaker 01

  There's no question. And even if it doesn't keep you forever, you still have a connection that doesn't, that exists, that, so I can give you one, you said, what is it about commitment? I'll give you one, I think, beautiful answer. Someone once asked Rabbi Soloveitchuk, who is a great thinker and leader in the Orthodox Communion in the 20th century. They said, you know, I go from religion to religion. I just take what I think is beautiful in it. And his answer was that you're treating religion like a nomad. He said nomads go from place to place and they eat what they want and they move on. He says farmers stay in one place. The difference is farmers make things grow. And I think that that's true also when you think about the relationships you have.

• 1:00:14Speaker 01

  Things have grown out of the relationships that you've invested in, that you farmed, basically, that can't exist in fly by night relationships.

• 1:00:26Lex Fridman?

  Can you talk about, can we talk about the Torah?

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:00:30Lex Fridman?

  What is it? And is it the literal word of God?

• 1:00:37Lex Fridman?

  Easy questions today.

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, the Torah is the five books of Moses written in Hebrew. I, like most, I think, modern rabbis, non orthodox or non literalist rabbis will tell you that it's a product of human beings.

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  And I believe that they are inspired by God, but it's clear to me that it's a human product. And I think that people who study modern biblical criticism, it's really hard to study modern, modern, criticism is, gives a wrong impression. I would say modern scholarship on the Bible and not appreciate the fact that it, it even has levels of language. I mean, it's just like if you read today, somebody writing like Shakespeare, you would say, this isn't, it's, it's like, English has developed. It's different. It's not the English we speak today. And if you study the Bible and you know Hebrew well enough, you even see that this was written over hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years.

• 1:01:37Speaker 01

  It is a holy book and I like the idea that it is, what, what you say in Hebrew is Torah min hashamayim and not Torah mi sinai. That is, the Torah is from heaven, but it's not from Sinai. So it has its origin beyond us, but it has things in it that I think, and this is one of the, one of the things that was a huge controversy at my congregation when I started to do same sex marriages. There are some people who try to argue that the Torah does not forbid them. Whether it does or not, it seems to me, we understand things that were not understood in the ancient world about gender and sexuality. And so...

• 1:02:19Lex Fridman?

  So you think that in the scripture, in the words, you can find the kind of spirit that supports the idea of gay marriage?

• 1:02:29Speaker 01

  Well, that's yes. That's my, my argument is that you criticize the Torah by the Torah. That is, it gives you the understanding that you use to evaluate its own claims. And, and I think that Judaism, by the way, has always done that because it's clear that there are things in the Torah that the rabbis changed, altered, grew, expanded, diminished. I think that's what it is to be part of a living tradition.

• 1:02:59Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, you wrote in your book, Why Faith Matters, quote, "Walt Whitman wrote that in order for there to be a great books, there must be great readers. For a book to remain powerful through all generations, it cannot have a single meaning. Scripture, like great poetry, is not reducible to other words. That is, one cannot paraphrase, paraphrase it and capture the totality of its meaning." So how the heck do you capture the meaning of the words in scripture? Is it an ongoing process through the centuries?

• 1:03:32Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly so. It's a continual conversation of sages, scholars, readers, strugglers, seekers, mystics, visionaries, all of them making a contribution. I mean, I write a weekly Torah column for the Jerusalem Post. Now, what is there left to say? But every week, what I do is I start opening books and seeing what people say, and it starts to percolate, and you realize that you're entering this conversation that's been going on for thousands of years with, with remarkable minds and it,

• 1:04:10Speaker 01

  and it's constantly fertile in new insights. So yes, that's what it is to be part of a tradition.

• 1:04:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Why do people keep writing love poems? We should have figured out love by this point, by this point already.

• 1:04:24Speaker 01

  I use the analogy sometimes of diet books. If any diet worked, there would be one book. There'd be one book and you'd be done.

• 1:04:33Lex Fridman?

  You mentioned this fascinating story that you were part of. You were a part of several controversies in your life.

• 1:04:40Speaker 01

  I've had a few.

• 1:04:41Lex Fridman?

  So for someone who walks with grace through the fire, you sure have found yourself in a lot of fires. One of them, can you tell me the story of your views on gay marriage? The underlying principles that led you to fight this battle of defending gay marriage in the Jewish community?

• 1:05:01Speaker 01

  So I'm part of a congregation that is really politically split. And even and split not only politically, but split

• 1:05:14Speaker 01

  in terms of origin. We have a lot of Jews from the Middle East, from Iran, a lot of Persian Jews, a lot of Jews from Israel, some from Mexico, from other places, and many that grew up in LA.

• 1:05:26Lex Fridman?

  And Do you have any Russian Jews, the best?

• 1:05:28Speaker 01

  I have a few. I have a few Russian Jews, not as many as I should, but we'll work on that.

• 1:05:34Speaker 01

  But what happened was like increasingly I became uncomfortable with people who would come to me and say,

• 1:05:45Speaker 01

  this is the only kind of person I can love. It's not, it's not the same question as an intermarriage, as a Jew marrying a non-Jew, because you could find a Jew to love. You may not have found, but you could. And, and that's a whole separate question. But I would have men in my office primarily, some, a couple of women. They would say like, this is the only kind of person that I can enter into an intimate relationship with. How can it be that my religion has no room for me? And, and that was very persuasive to me. So, but I knew that it was going to be explosive in my community.

• 1:06:28Speaker 01

  When, by the way, it finally happened, it was literally on the front page of the New York and the LA Times. It was that explosive. So it was not, it was not a small controversy. And So what I did was, I started to teach classes, not that many people came about, you know, homosexuality and Jewish tradition and so on. It's funny, much, much less about lesbianism, much, I'm talking about in terms of the sources and so on. It's almost always about homosexuality. So, and then I got ready to send out a letter. And I said to my daughter, who at the time was maybe 10 or 11, she's now in her mid twenties.

• 1:07:13Speaker 01

  I said, "Look, honey, when you go to school tomorrow," or whatever it was, I said, "People might be saying bad things about your dad, and I just want you to be prepared for that." She said, "Why?" And I said, "Because I'm gonna start marrying, I'm gonna start doing same-sex marriages." And she looked at me quizzically and said, "What took you so long?" And I thought, I, really, her face was like, I said to her, "I'm gonna start marrying blond-haired people to brown-haired people." It's like she really did not understand why there was an issue. And I thought, "That's exactly why. Because I know that this is, it's generational. People are raised with it. They have it deep in there, but it's not really right. It's just not right."

• 1:07:58Lex Fridman?

  But if you could just look back to that journey, how difficult is it to make these decisions a principle? So, because you have to think about that in order to think about such decisions you yet might still have to make in the future.

• 1:08:16Speaker 01

  And I will tell you, one thing I did wrong with that, and one thing I did right. The thing I did right was I waited until, in the communities where people objected to it, I had enough people whose kids had come out.

• 1:08:32Speaker 01

  So that I had parents of kids who'd come out to refer later on other parents to so that they wouldn't feel like they were the only ones because once I announced it, as I thought would happen, a bunch of kids came out and said, you know, now the rabbi said this mom, dad, I want you to know I'm gay. And, and when the parents came to me, I could say, well, listen, you're not alone. This person also you can go to. That I did right. What I did wrong was I don't think the classes were enough and I don't think enough people were prepared. And I think part of the explosion was shock and I should have prepared even more.

• 1:09:09Lex Fridman?

  The words you used to talk about it, the way you thought about it, was it more scholarly in the Jewish tradition or did you go to the feeling?

• 1:09:21Speaker 01

  No, I went to the feeling. I said, quote, habriot, which means respect or honor for God's creations and, and caring for other human beings and understanding. It wasn't scholarly because I knew that that this, the objections were not scholarly objections. They were, and, and I, and I had some many, I had many beautiful and also painful stories as a result, some of which can be told and some of which really can't. But what I tried to impress also on people was how painful it is to not be able to tell the world, even your own parents, who you are.

• 1:10:04Speaker 01

  And your sexuality is not a trivial part of who you are. I mean, it's core to people. So it's one of the reasons why I evoke such reactions. But I, but I would say to them, the, the same reason that you're reacting so strongly tells you how strongly, you know? Anyway, it was, it was a very powerful experience and, and it, for that I have, you know?

• 1:10:30Speaker 01

  I have not, I, I feel good about it. Afterwards, I, the other thing that I again said to my daughter afterwards, after it all died down and after all the bad things were said, I told her the Churchill one said that it's exhilarating to be shot at without result, you know? If you go into a battle and you make it through and you're still okay, that's good.

• 1:10:49Lex Fridman?

  The problem is when you're in the battle, you don't know.

• 1:10:52Speaker 01

  No, you don't know.

• 1:10:53Lex Fridman?

  So how did it feel like, I mean, looking back, um, you've been, you know, uh, to use the word canceled a couple of times. Uh, I guess when you ask, when you're dealing with the most difficult of questions, how did, just as a human being, for a community that you really deeply care about, some part of it saying that you have failed?

• 1:11:14Speaker 01

  I wasn't canceled the way, like I didn't lose my job, didn't lose my home, um, but I hurt people that I cared about.

• 1:11:22Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:23Speaker 01

  And that was the hard, like I went into this, you know, to be someone who brings people together. And then I would sit there and, and do even now, like, as you're well aware, with stuff that's going on now, I sit there and people are really upset at me, uh, who I either am or used to be close to.

• 1:11:45Lex Fridman?

  Do those people in time come around? When you, when you look now, because those are real feelings in the moment and we can learn that about social media. People, especially during COVID, there's this intensity of feeling about stuff.

• 1:12:02Lex Fridman?

  And have you learned something about the passing of feeling that turns into wisdom?

• 1:12:08Speaker 01

  No question about it. The sermon I gave this Saturday was about how, you know, um, Moses came down the mountain. He saw the golden calf and he broke the tablets. If he'd sat with it for a little while, he probably wouldn't have broken the tablets. But the instant reaction is always anger. And in our age, unfortunately, the instant reaction gets put on social media forever and ever and ever. And, and by the way, once you've actually said that, it becomes harder to back down. If you keep quiet for a day or two, then. Then you can back down because you haven't put yourself out there. But once you've said, this is terrible what you've did, what you did. It's harder to write and say, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said that.

• 1:12:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so it almost becomes, I mean, I actually, it's a really powerful

• 1:12:57Lex Fridman?

  statement that the downside of saying something on the internet is that it actually pulls you into this current. You both create the current and it pulls you into it to where it's actually very hard to escape. So when two days later you feel different, there's a momentum. There's now a tribe of people that feel this way and there's a momentum with it.

• 1:13:22Speaker 01

  There's a momentum and also you don't want to betray your own tribe because then people will get upset at you. I really think that a lot of the antagonism is not so much that you don't want to give ground to the people who oppose you. It's that you don't want to break with the people who are behind you. And that's really hard.

• 1:13:40Lex Fridman?

  Can you tell the story of this recent controversy? The sermon you just gave, you went to the Super Bowl. I think a lot of people would relate to this because to me personally, I apologize to anybody who was hurt by this, the absurdity of it is deeply intense.

• 1:13:57Speaker 01

  So here's the story. The LA county mandates masking children in school and all of kids in our school are masked. And many of the parents are extremely upset about that. I will just leave that at that.

• 1:14:10Speaker 01

  I went to the Super Bowl. There were 70,000 people, Frank Luntz, whom we know, wonderful guy, gave me a ticket.

• 1:14:20Speaker 01

  And so I was at the Super Bowl. I did, I maybe saw two masks among the 70,000 people. I didn't even think about it, which was foolish on my part, no question. I took a picture of myself unmasked at the Super Bowl.

• 1:14:34Speaker 01

  And people were, I mean, many, many people thought, oh, great, wonderful. Glad you're having a good time, so on and so forth. I don't want to diminish at all the many people who said that. A lot of people were livid. They were livid and they weren't.

• 1:14:50Speaker 01

  What was, what was instructive about it was they didn't say, nobody wrote me a private note and said, you know, I think that this was a bad idea. You should have thought about this. No, they were, you're a hypocrite, you're a clown, you're an idiot. How could you do this? This is a disgrace. This is that.

• 1:15:07Lex Fridman?

  They say that publicly.

• 1:15:08Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. On, on, on my Instagram, you can still see, I left the remarks up because I really thought it was important. If I started, I only deleted the really vile comments because I thought that shouldn't stay up. But I left them up because I thought like people should see and I should remind myself what I did. And I didn't want to just delete the picture as though it didn't happen because it did happen and I did do it. And I felt terrible about that and I felt terrible that I had not, not about, I mean, the comments, believe me, weren't, weren't pleasant. I didn't like it. Nobody likes it, but I felt worse that I had hurt all these people that I'm close to. And I defended all these people who were really upset that their kids were wearing masks. And now they, their kid says, why does the rabbi have to wear a mask?

• 1:15:51Lex Fridman?

  Well, first of all, it is tough to be a rabbi. If this is, I mean, uh, the masks to me symbolize these kinds of discussions symbolize not necessarily the issues at hand, but the intensity of feeling and people are really struggling. People are in pain. They're lonely. They're, the uncertainty of it, you don't know who to trust. Everything is under question, the institutions, even the scientific institutions. And there's all these conspiracy theories flying around. You don't know who to believe and there's people just yelling at each other and politics is weaved into this whole thing in some messy way. And you're just getting, I mean, honestly, it's just like legit, simple, just frustration. Going back to marriage of just hanging out with.

• 1:16:38Lex Fridman?

  The kids and your wife, husband, just the stress is building up over time, no release. And just people want to tell you when the rabbi is not wearing a mask, even though it's at the damn Super Bowl, maybe want to comment on the Super Bowl part, which is awesome. But anyway.

• 1:16:55Speaker 01

  But it released clearly a dam of all the kinds of feelings that you're talking about.

• 1:17:00Lex Fridman?

  So how do you then write a sermon?

• 1:17:02Speaker 01

  So I, well, so what I did was I didn't answer on social media because I knew that I wouldn't be able to formulate it the way I wanted. And I was going to wait and I was going to be able to give a longer, I mean, the sermon is 15 minutes, not that long. But I wanted to be able to give a longer answer as opposed to a tweet. And so I was really, I mean, I tried to make two points during the sermon and I also I published the text of it, which I never do because I never speak from a text. I always speak from either notes or not even from notes. But this time I thought it was really important that I have a text out there too, so that people could actually look over it.

• 1:17:43Speaker 01

  And, and I just wanted to make two points, one of which was that I really feel terrible. And I did that I, all these people were hurt. And that there is this, you know, contradiction between the way I acted and the way they want me to act. And I also think, by the way, I didn't speak about this, but I also think that there are some people who just don't like the idea of a rabbi being at the Super Bowl. It's like you're supposed to be doing rabbi stuff. So I understand that too. But then.

• 1:18:11Lex Fridman?

  Well, yeah, but you know, Rabbi at the Super Bowl, I mean, you are also, I'd hate to say it, but there's, there's a rock star nature to you talking to Christopher Hitchens, contending with ideas, inspiring so many other minds. I mean, there's an educational aspect.

• 1:18:27Speaker 01

  I appreciate that.

• 1:18:28Lex Fridman?

  It's making ideas cool. I mean, that's a very powerful. That, I mean, that is also the job of a rabbi. You're not just supposed to do rabbi stuff.

• 1:18:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I didn't do so much of that, you know, at the game. So.

• 1:18:41Lex Fridman?

  I see.

• 1:18:42Speaker 01

  Nonetheless, so, but the second part of it was I said.

• 1:18:48Speaker 01

  That we have to be able to express our anger and disappointment better than this. You just have to. And in part because it doesn't get you the result that you want. I mean, when you scream at someone, that's not going to get them to realize what they did.

• 1:19:06Speaker 01

  And, and the, the most painful moment of it was this letter that I got from a Christian pastor who said, you know, I always admired the Jews so much, I can't believe they could be so cruel, and especially to a rabbi. And I thought, that's not how I want my congregation to be perceived in the world.

• 1:19:28Speaker 01

  And by the way, some of them were from my congregation, some were, many were not from my congregation, but, but, and, and I spoke about what you talked about, which is that, you know, I mentioned before that Moses broke those tablets coming down the mountain. And the Torah doesn't say what, what happened to the tablets, but the rabbis do. They say that they were carried together in the ark with the second set that was intact. And that we all have brokenness, communities and individuals, we have brokenness, and especially now. And we have to learn how to give each other space to be mistaken and broken and hurt and all of that.

• 1:20:05Lex Fridman?

  And the cool thing, when you give people that space, you, you feel better. I mean, you for caring for the community, it feels better when you show empathy and compassion and kindness on the internet. You'll actually feel better a week from now. You'll feel much worse if you make some kind of negative statement of principle on the internet. It's almost just exclusively true. So if you care about feeling good, just be kind first.

• 1:20:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:20:34Lex Fridman?

  Be empathetic first.

• 1:20:36Speaker 01

  Almost always the case, exactly so. So it's, I mean, it, it settled down a lot. The most, really the single best reaction, I, there were, there are people, and you can, again, you can go on social media, you can see all the criticisms and so on and so forth. But the single best reaction I got was from a man who came up to me right after the sermon and said, I have four words for you. And I thought, oh no.

• 1:21:07Lex Fridman?

  Nothing good comes in force.

• 1:21:08Speaker 01

  I gotta confess, I, I said, I said, what? He said, you changed my mind.

• 1:21:15Speaker 01

  And I thought, wow. And I said to him, you know, that's so, it's like, it takes so much courage to come up to somebody and say that in front of them. And I was so grateful. And the other thing that it tells me is, look, I've been the rabbi of that congregation for 25 years, and I taught 10 years before that. I've been a rabbi for a long time. I still, I still have a lot to learn.

• 1:21:34Lex Fridman?

  We talked a little bit about the difference between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Could you maybe talk about the difference between the Torah?

• 1:21:43Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:21:44Lex Fridman?

  The Bible and the Quran?

• 1:21:46Speaker 01

  So, there's, the Hebrew Bible is actually what's called a step canon. That is, there are the five books of the Torah. Then there are books of history and the prophets. So, books like Samuel, Kings, Judges, and then the prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Ezekiel, so on. And then there are what are called the writings. The writings are books like Psalms, Proverbs, Job, the Megillot, which are Esther, Daniel, all of those, all of those books, Ecclesiastes. So, in Hebrew, it's called the Tanach, Torah Nevim Ketuvim, the Torah,

• 1:22:29Speaker 01

  the prophets, and the writings. And that is the Hebrew Bible. Sometimes, that's also called the Torah, just to be confusing. But really, the Torah generally refers to the five books. Then, there is the New Testament, which the Jews don't recognize as a sacred book. They recognize it as the book of another religion. And I sometimes say to Christians, in order for them to really grasp this, Jesus has as much religious significance to Judaism as Muhammad has to Christianity. That is, Jesus, although Jewish, became the founder of another religion. And for Judaism, that's not only inasmuch as Christians and Jews have had a lot of interactions, but religiously, Jesus has no significance. Said many beautiful

• 1:23:14Speaker 01

  things, said some things I don't like so much.

• 1:23:16Lex Fridman?

  Like what?

• 1:23:18Speaker 01

  Leave your father and mother and follow me. I don't like that as a religious model.

• 1:23:22Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:23:23Speaker 01

  Now, Christians will say-

• 1:23:24Lex Fridman?

  The whole love thing is pretty good.

• 1:23:25Speaker 01

  Christians will say that I don't understand that. But that's because Christians, like Jews, interpret their texts different ways at different times. So, anyway.

• 1:23:37Speaker 01

  The Quran, which I know less well, I have read it, but I know it less well than I know the New Testament, and certainly less well, obviously, than I know the Hebrew Bible, is a very, is in some ways, a, parts of it are, I don't say this word, I say this word because I can't find a better descriptive word, but Muslims will not accept this, okay, is a takeoff on the Torah in some things. That is, it's the same stories as the Torah, but they're different. Now, Jews will say, and I being a Jew will say this, that that's because Muhammad heard those stories from Jews, and also heard Midrashim, which are rabbinic interpretations of those stories, and he wrote those down. Muslims will say, no, the Jews got it wrong, and Muhammad came along to correct the record and tell

• 1:24:22Speaker 01

  the real story.

• 1:24:23Lex Fridman?

  But they're all telling the story of the same thing.

• 1:24:28Speaker 01

  The Hebrew Bible part, the Abrahamic part, they all tell the story of the same characters, but tell them, the, obviously Christians accept the Hebrew Bible as sacred scripture, the Muslims retell many of the stories in the Bible. What is, what is common to all of them is that all of them are monotheistic faiths. Now, in Christianity, that's more complicated because of the Trinity, but as Christianity has developed over time, it clearly presents itself and thinks of itself, and is a monotheistic faith as well.

• 1:25:04Lex Fridman?

  What's the role of the word in each of these religions in the scriptures? So in terms of, so first of all, oral, the role of oral traditions, the power of the exactness of the words in the scripture, does it differ, or is it really, within the communities, it differs?

• 1:25:20Speaker 01

  It differs because in Christianity, the words are not all the words of Jesus. They're the words of Jesus's disciples. None of the books of the New Testament were written by people who met Jesus in person. So they're different, and therefore the, and also, we don't even know sometimes the original language of some of the things in the New Testament.

• 1:25:45Speaker 01

  In the Bible, and I understand in the Quran, but I'll speak for the Hebrew Bible, the idea is that that's lashon ha'kodish, that's sacred language, and Hebrew is in its, that's the language, according to the tradition, that God actually spoke to Moses, and therefore, the exact words are infinitely interpretable and meaningful.

• 1:26:05Lex Fridman?

  But the words were spoken, but written by Moses, and the same with Muhammad,

• 1:26:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:26:11Lex Fridman?

  but from memory, or no?

• 1:26:14Speaker 01

  There are different, there are different theories. I won't speak for Muhammad. You should ask. I don't want to get, I don't want to get that wrong. I don't want to get another religious tradition wrong. In Judaism, the words are written by Moses at God's dictation, basically. That's the traditional view. There are other views that I'm happy to go into if you want to, but basically, that's the traditional view.

• 1:26:32Lex Fridman?

  So it's pretty close.

• 1:26:33Speaker 01

  Right. What makes it different, what makes Judaism and Christianity different, is Christianity has an ideal life. Judaism doesn't have an ideal life. Judaism has an ideal book. So the holidays of Christianity are events in the life of God, God's birth, God's death and resurrection. In Judaism, the holidays are all events in the life of the people, like the liberation from slavery, or in the people's relationship to God, like Yom Kippur, which is a day of atonement. But there are no holidays in Judaism that are events in the life of God, because in Judaism, God doesn't have a biography. God is eternal, and God never came to earth.

• 1:27:15Lex Fridman?

  And those events carry with them traditions and rules that you're to follow.

• 1:27:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:27:21Lex Fridman?

  I mentioned on one such event in Scripture, yet another time you walked through the fire, which is with Exodus.

• 1:27:28Speaker 01

  Oh, that was the first.

• 1:27:30Lex Fridman?

  And you never forget the first.

• 1:27:33Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:27:34Lex Fridman?

  One of several controversies.

• 1:27:36Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:27:37Lex Fridman?

  You spoke 20 years ago, 21 years ago now, at Passover, and said that, quote, "The way the Bible describes the Exodus is not the way it happened, if it happened at all." So, first of all, what is Exodus?

• 1:27:52Speaker 01

  So Exodus-

• 1:27:53Lex Fridman?

  And what really happened?

• 1:27:54Speaker 01

  Exodus is the liberation of the Jews from Egypt, and it is the central story of the Jewish tradition. And as I've said numerous times in various places-

• 1:28:06Speaker 01

  I believe that it's based on a historical kernel. I think Richard Elliott Friedman may have gotten this right in his book Exodus. It may have been the Levites who left Israel. But historically, but the Bible's not a book of history. I don't believe that there were 10 plagues and a split sea and 600,000 men, which makes about 2 million people, who actually, if there were 2 million people, would stretch all the way from Israel to Egypt alone, were liberated from Egypt. And my point in that sermon was not actually to convince people that it didn't happen. My point in that sermon was to convince people that the historicity of the Exodus

• 1:28:50Speaker 01

  is not the basis of the faith of the Jewish people.

• 1:28:53Lex Fridman?

  Well, what does the word historicity mean?

• 1:28:54Speaker 01

  In other words, the factuality of it. It can be true without being factual.

• 1:28:58Lex Fridman?

  So you're not supposed to read it as fact?

• 1:29:01Speaker 01

  Well, I don't, I don't read it as fact. I don't read it as a history book. I said, look, I was talking again to a congregation that had many Iranians. I said, you experienced the truth of the Exodus in your own life. There was a regime that wanted to destroy you and you miraculously escaped before it did. And so a myth is something that may not have happened, but is always happening. And that's what I would say about the Exodus story. It's not about whether, in fact, there was a killing of the firstborn. It's about, does God deliver? Did God deliver the Jews in ancient times? Does God deliver people in modern times?

• 1:29:44Speaker 01

  And that's what the issue is. And, and to me, it's a much, the issue of faith is much deeper than the issue of fact. I wouldn't look to the Torah for my science either.

• 1:29:57Lex Fridman?

  What are the limits of science in terms of?

• 1:30:03Lex Fridman?

  What can science not tell us that the Torah can in terms of wisdom? So the historicity, the facts of things, okay. If the Torah is much more than that, is it's, like you said, myth. Myth is not something that happened, but something that is always happening. And so presumably it's interacting with the environment of the day to generate wisdom.

• 1:30:30Speaker 01

  So you can live a life by Torah. I don't think you can live a life by biology. You can live a life that is informed by the values of the tradition of Judaism. And those values, by the way, what science does is it contributes factuality to the conversation and also changes the reality around us. So when you study Talmud on your iPhone, you know, you're still, I mean, it changes the atmosphere in which you do it, but, but the wisdom and the life guidance and the connection to transcendence is something that science doesn't give.

• 1:31:15Lex Fridman?

  So if we now step into, returning to our friend Sam Harris and step into this weird place of science, and you talked about this, where the kind of the current assumption of science is it's a materialistic one. So for me, obviously, AI person, this whole mind thing is fascinating, like what the heck is going on up there? So how do you explain consciousness? How do you explain free will? Do you think, first of all, do you think we have a free will? And if so, what is it?

• 1:31:49Speaker 01

  This is where we had the debate earlier that I mentioned with Hitchens, where I think actually neither he nor the moderator understood what I was saying, which is, I'm sure, my inability to express it.

• 1:32:03Lex Fridman?

  But he was very focused and delivered on the humor.

• 1:32:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:32:08Lex Fridman?

  And the wit.

• 1:32:08Speaker 01

  Yes. But what I was trying to say is, If we're entirely biological creatures, if we didn't choose our genetics and we didn't choose our environment, then there is no space for free choice. I don't understand where it comes in. And I kept asking them that question, but didn't get an answer because I don't think there is an answer. I think if you're a thoroughgoing materialist, free will is impossible. There could be randomness, but randomness is not free will. It's randomness. I think you need a spiritual, non-material belief in order to get free will. And that's why I believe in free will.

• 1:32:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, you were talking about sort of, yeah, and actually the moderator totally missed your point about the glass of water and basically how, what's the difference. So to you, free will, because you could also, if it fits into the materialistic picture, it could be just a convenient, useful quirk.

• 1:33:05Speaker 01

  You would understand this better than I would. I don't understand how it could be a convenient quirk materialistically. I don't understand how to explain it.

• 1:33:12Lex Fridman?

  Well, no, there's, you know, if you study perception, there's all these kinds of illusions.

• 1:33:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:33:17Lex Fridman?

  We, our, our mind plays tricks on us.

• 1:33:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:33:20Lex Fridman?

  To make our life easier, more efficient, and survive better, and all those kinds of things. And so free, the, the feeling like we have a choice.

• 1:33:28Speaker 01

  Oh, that could be an illusion.

• 1:33:29Lex Fridman?

  Could be an illusion.

• 1:33:30Speaker 01

  That I understand. Right. But, but actual free choice, free will, I don't see where you get it if you're a materialist. I think you have to have a spiritual component. By the way, this, I think this is also, I think Sam would agree with this. I think he wrote about not having, not having free will. And I think if you don't have a God and you don't have a soul, that free will is a logical impossibility.

• 1:33:57Lex Fridman?

  For Sam, which is fascinating, it's not just that free will is an illusion, but the illusion of free will is an illusion, meaning there's not, we don't even experience anything like it. There's no illusion where the, like, it's not even on us to be talking about it. We're just, we are like the, the, the, the current in the river or something. You were comparing it to the glass. We are just like that glass.

• 1:34:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:34:23Lex Fridman?

  So I don't know what we're going on about with this whole free will thing. I mean, To you is the free world, the I that a young person is born with, is that somehow fundamental to religion?

• 1:34:35Speaker 01

  I think it's fundamental to Judaism. I think that the idea is that you are the custodian of your soul. And even though, I grant that there's a certain overemphasis in modern society on the individuality of the soul. That is, we are more interconnected than I think we're, we believe. Still, yeah, the I, the idea that every human being is an image of God, that, I mean, that the human being in the Torah is created singly. And again, do I really believe there was an Adam and an Eve and a Garden of Eden?

• 1:35:18Speaker 01

  No, not literally, but I think that it expresses a deep truth about human life.

• 1:35:24Lex Fridman?

  And tied into this is the subjective experience of things which we call consciousness?

• 1:35:28Speaker 01

  I mean, this is the most fascinating and inexplicable discussion. And again, this is a discussion I've had, I have privilege to have with Daniel Dennett, and could not make any, as you can imagine, any headway on my, but he was delightful and brilliant to talk to. For me, consciousness is a real thing. I don't know if it is, I mean, I kind of like the panpsychist's view, that there's an element of consciousness in everything, that that's constitutive of reality. But I don't, I'm not wedded to it.

• 1:36:11Speaker 01

  But I think that it exists in different degrees in all sentient creatures. I think that anybody who has a pet knows that they have some kind of consciousness.

• 1:36:22Lex Fridman?

  Except cats.

• 1:36:23Speaker 01

  I'm not gonna, since I don't have cats or dogs, I'm not going to.

• 1:36:28Lex Fridman?

  This is another reason people would be outraged.

• 1:36:30Speaker 01

  And I happen to be, well, I happen to be allergic to both, but I'm very fond of animals. The thing that so perplexes me about this, and is the denial of the reality of consciousness from people who are fully aware that they're conscious. I don't know how you divest yourself of the most present quality of being a person in your discussions about what it is to be a person.

• 1:36:58Lex Fridman?

  We just don't really have a good sense of the alternative. And so you can kind of divest yourself in that way. Well, maybe everything is like this. Maybe we're trying, we're overdramatizing this whole thing. And would like every, everybody, every, it seems like every living thing, perhaps everything, period, thinks that it's the center of the universe.

• 1:37:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:37:19Lex Fridman?

  And so here we are telling ourselves these dramatic, big stories about us being special and so on. And maybe we need to have a little bit more humility, both about the uncertainty and about our place in the whole.

• 1:37:31Speaker 01

  Any statement you make about something like consciousness has, I think, a sort of equal level of humility. You're saying that you know, we don't have it is as, not you, Lex, but you person saying we don't have it is as intellectually arrogant as my saying we do. So I think for me, humility comes in, in admitting that we really, really have just the tiniest part of the puzzle. And, and, and as you get older, at least my experience has been not that you get more answers, but that you just see a bigger puzzle.

• 1:38:05Lex Fridman?

  So to me, there is less, so the questions are fascinating, but there's also an engineering practical question. And perhaps

• 1:38:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:38:13Lex Fridman?

  I'll ask you a religious one too, on this point, to return back to robots. So how to engineer consciousness? Or I'll just even ask you a very simple question, which is when you have robots that exhibit the capacity to suffer.

• 1:38:35Lex Fridman?

  I found in myself as a human, when I see that, I, I feel something.

• 1:38:40Speaker 01

  Exhibit the capacity to suffer, or they exhibit behaviors that evoke in you a sense that they are suffering? Those aren't the same things.

• 1:38:48Lex Fridman?

  From my, from an observation perspective, they sure as heck seem similar.

• 1:38:53Speaker 01

  You think they're feeling pain?

• 1:38:54Lex Fridman?

  I don't know what the, I'm observing pain.

• 1:39:00Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:39:01Lex Fridman?

  It's like when I watch a movie and there's people on screen, some of them are dressed like Batman.

• 1:39:08Speaker 01

  But I, but you can make the distinction, like if I have a doll and I bend the doll over and it makes a sad face. I know that that doll is not actually in pain, even though I am observing pain. So the question, what's that?

• 1:39:24Lex Fridman?

  What the question is, when the doll

• 1:39:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:28Lex Fridman?

  becomes able to remember things about you, David.

• 1:39:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:39:33Lex Fridman?

  About the experiences you shared.

• 1:39:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:39:35Lex Fridman?

  It is able to speak.

• 1:39:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:39:39Lex Fridman?

  And make you feel like there's an actual relationship.

• 1:39:42Speaker 01

  So that's what I'm asking is, at what point do you believe that the, I, and I know that this is an impossible question, but at what point do you believe that there is a consciousness in there? As opposed to just an extraordinary, I mean, like when I play chess against a computer.

• 1:40:00Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:00Speaker 01

  And it beats me. I'm embarrassed, even though the computer doesn't, I don't think the computer is going, ah, you idiot. But it feels that way.

• 1:40:11Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:11Speaker 01

  But there is some part of me that says, okay, I know that this computer doesn't actually know who I am or care who I am. It just knows how to move the pieces. So at what point do you, I mean, you're giving me instances, it speaks, it does this, it does this. But at what point does that for you cross the threshold into it's actually a sentient being?

• 1:40:31Lex Fridman?

  I think the question is whether there is a threshold that could be crossed.

• 1:40:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:40:34Lex Fridman?

  That's one question. And I can answer this because I think it's different from person to person, but the chess engine is not at all trying to,

• 1:40:44Lex Fridman?

  to cross that threshold. Let's just start there. And, and to me, the personalization, which is what's the difference? Like a, a friend that you meet, you've shared all these memories. The way they look at you will convey, and the things they say will convey that they've shared those memories with you. They'll be able to speak in a shared humor and the language. But really the memories is the big one of having gone through things together. I think I would have more and more trouble, for example, turning off a system.

• 1:41:24Lex Fridman?

  That I have been through things with.

• 1:41:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:41:28Lex Fridman?

  Like, and by turning off, I mean, delete all of its memory.

• 1:41:31Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:41:32Lex Fridman?

  If me and the toaster have gone through a bunch of dramatic events and that toaster remembers. There's a certain level to where like, it's just me and the toaster in this together at this point. And just to talk about sentience, I don't know, but you know.

• 1:41:49Speaker 01

  I don't know. It's according to the scripture, can't live by bread alone.

• 1:41:54Speaker 01

  But I would, I mean, I know that, I know that there's no way to, there's no way to determine this, but it's still about what you feel.

• 1:42:02Lex Fridman?

  Yes, but isn't that what human relations are also, though?

• 1:42:06Speaker 01

  Yes, but.

• 1:42:07Lex Fridman?

  We make each other feel.

• 1:42:08Speaker 01

  It's true, but it's true that I have the assumption that you feel somewhat like I do. I mean, obviously I don't, you know, and that could be illusion and I don't know. And, and I know that you don't feel exactly as I do.

• 1:42:25Speaker 01

  But I think we have a long, at least to me, we have a long way to go before the detached part of our brains. That is, the objective evaluating part, as opposed to the emotive, it feels this way part, believe that that machine has consciousness.

• 1:42:41Lex Fridman?

  I think it's at least, without arriving in conclusion, it's at least possible that one day we will look back and realize that we have yet, once again, formed another tribe. And that scripture all along had in it the, the ability for humans and robots to have a deep, meaningful connection. And that through the robot, the, the life that enters the body of another robot, what's the difference between a biological body and a mechanical one? And then we will see that the fundamental thing is about the, whatever you want to call it, sentience, whatever can permeate an object, that was, that was the thing all along.

• 1:43:25Speaker 01

  So I, I mean.

• 1:43:28Lex Fridman?

  And then you'll get canceled one more time.

• 1:43:30Speaker 01

  Because I denied it. I was gonna say.

• 1:43:32Lex Fridman?

  You'll eventually.

• 1:43:34Speaker 01

  Oh, I see, because I'll preach, I'll preach to the robots.

• 1:43:36Lex Fridman?

  I'm hoping.

• 1:43:37Speaker 01

  I'm, I, look, I, first of all, depends how quickly you do it and how much longer I have to live.

• 1:43:46Speaker 01

  I resisted tremendously, but I am also enough of a student of history to know that my instinctive resistance has nothing to do with whether it will come about. I have a hard time believing it. We'll see.

• 1:44:07Lex Fridman?

  Can I ask you about this? Maybe you can educate me. I tend to believe that you mentioned suffering, that there is a connection between consciousness and suffering, that suffering is a fundamental part, the capacity to suffer is the fundamental part of being human.

• 1:44:22Speaker 01

  I mean, look, when you're not conscious, you don't suffer. You know, we've had operations where we've been put under anesthetic. We're not conscious and we don't suffer during the operation. If we were conscious, we would. But there's also, I mean, there's a non-physical suffering that is very much tied to consciousness. I can think of things right now that will cause me suffering, like pain that I've caused or pain that other people I care about have felt or so on. So I don't see how, I think that way, I think it's equally true of joy. Joy is also a product of consciousness.

• 1:45:00Lex Fridman?

  All tied in in some beautiful messy way with memory and so on, that we can re-experience it when we recall the memories. But why is there suffering? You mentioned evil. Why is there evil in the world? You can tell stories about this. Why is there suffering? Why is there evil in the world if there's a God that cares for us?

• 1:45:21Speaker 01

  Let's assume for a minute that everything was a primitive robot. There would be no suffering, but there would also be no growth. And that implies choices. Like, one of the things that I've said that...

• 1:45:39Speaker 01

  I know, I know why it hurts people and I don't mean it quite the way that, but I will say it nonetheless, is the Holocaust presents the exact same theological question as somebody who gets shot on the streets of a city in Los Angeles, which is, God, why do you allow some people to do bad things to other people? It's on an unimaginable scale, but it's the same question. And the answer has to be, you either allow people that free will or you don't. You can't say, as God, I'm gonna have, let everybody have free will, but not Nazis. Nazis don't get free will. Because Cambodians, they can kill each other. Rwandans kill each other, but, but the Nazis don't get to do that.

• 1:46:24Speaker 01

  So, that's one part, piece of, of the puzzle. And, and what makes it unfathomable is when you're actually faced with suffering, these kinds of explanations are obscene. They just are. You can't, I mean, when somebody is actually suffering, oh, the rabbi said God gave people free will, that's just awful. But there is a second piece to this also, which is that there is natural suffering, like children born with diseases, or earthquakes, or volcanoes, or whatever.

• 1:46:56Speaker 01

  And, and here my argument is that in some ways, suffering has to be random in the world. Because

• 1:47:04Speaker 01

  when people say, why do bad things happen to good people? Well, if only good things happen to good people, everybody would be good. But it would, it would have no moral content. The only way you can be good and it have moral content is say, I know that I can live a really good life and have really terrible things happen to me nonetheless. So, it feels to me like it has to be a randomly. Now that means, by the way, that I've been incredibly lucky. I don't have a good life because I was good. I have a good life because I was lucky. And that implies not that I should feel guilty about it, but that I have a tremendous responsibility as a result to other people who aren't so lucky.

• 1:47:44Lex Fridman?

  Tremendous responsibility to study the lessons of history, to tell the stories of those who are less lucky and to draw enough wisdom from them so that we have less cruelty and suffering in the world, or have new kinds that get us to improve even more.

• 1:48:00Speaker 01

  That's right. Exactly. That we suffer better.

• 1:48:03Lex Fridman?

  Suffer better. For a lot of people, mortality is one of the very unfortunate versions of suffering, which is that the ride ends in this realm, whatever, whatever it is. What do you think of mortality? Is it something you think about? Is it something you fear? What do you think happens?

• 1:48:26Speaker 01

  I don't fear it. I don't fear it. First of all, I would say, when I was in high school, I think my father actually encouraged me to read this book. I read Ernest Becker's Denial of Death, which I found and still find to be one of the most profound works I've ever come across. And he convinced me that a lot of what our society is about are ways that we avoid encountering our own mortality. Our physicality, I mean, among the points he makes, and I'm not quoting him at all directly, is like, why does everything about our physical body make us so uncomfortable? Everything that comes out of you, other than

• 1:49:09Speaker 01

  tears, is either mildly or very disgusting. Why? Why does that have to be? Why are sex and eating and all the things that are physical surrounded with so much symbolism? I mean, what are table manners, really? They're like, we're not eating like animals because we're not eating like animals. And sex obviously has more symbolism around it than anything. And his answer is, anything that reminds you that you're a physical body, because that's what dies. Your body dies. It decays. It dies. It gets eaten by worms. That you don't want to think about, so you deny it. I think that part of religion is a confrontation with your own mortality.

• 1:49:47Speaker 01

  But also a certain transcendence of it because the idea is something about you is eternal. What exactly, I don't know. And you asked, what do I think happens after we die? So I don't know any better than anyone else does, but I will, I'll say two things about it. One is that every image of what it's like is foolish. Like Mark Twain has, I think in Letters from Earth, he says, we're going to lie on greenfields and listen to harp music, which you wouldn't want to do for five minutes while you're alive, but you think you'll be happy for the rest of eternity doing it after you die. So I don't know, this world was a surprise, so why shouldn't the next world be a surprise? I have no idea.

• 1:50:29Speaker 01

  But I really like this parable that's told by a guy in, in a book on death and mourning, by a rabbi in a book on death and mourning about twins in a womb. He says, and one of them believes that there's a life outside and the other one doesn't. He says, the one who doesn't says, look, this is the only world we've ever seen, the only world we've ever known, why do you think there's something out there? He says, now imagine the one who believes is born. Back in the womb, his brother is mourning a death, but outside, everybody's celebrating a birth, he said, and that's what it's like when you die. And I love that image.

• 1:51:06Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, the grass is always greener. It's the new, the new step, but the eternity thing is an interesting one. It's yet another concept that I feel humans are fully inequipped to comprehend. Is eternity fundamental somehow to all of these discussions?

• 1:51:21Speaker 01

  I think it is, well, partly because God is supposed to be eternal. And, and therefore it moves the mind in that direction, even though it is completely unfathomable.

• 1:51:32Speaker 01

  You know?

• 1:51:32Lex Fridman?

  Because sometimes I would say eternity, you said on a green field, sometimes a moment, like a truly joyful moment, feels like an eternity, the intensity of it. Maybe eternity is more about stopping time versus extending time indefinitely. And it's something that we just totally can't comprehend, us silly humans.

• 1:51:54Speaker 01

  All I would say is the, the older you get, the more you're struck by the fact that time does not freeze.

• 1:52:03Speaker 01

  You know, people will sometimes say to me, you you you haven't aged a day. And then I'll look at an old picture of myself. And I'll say, that was very kind of you, but that's not true. It's not true. So, yeah, I mean, I love the idea of, you know, we turn to seeing eternity in a grain of sand was how Blake put it. I love that notion. But when you talk about life after death, I really, I think that in some ways, my fundamental faith isn't is in human beings, that this doesn't all disappear, that there's something about people that transcends this world.

• 1:52:42Lex Fridman?

  You mentioned Ernest Becker in high school and the mal of death. Maybe you can mention if you still see truth and wisdom and some of its, some of this idea. But in general, can you go all the way back and tell some of the fascinating story of how you found faith?

• 1:53:00Speaker 01

  When I was in high school, I was a really pretty ardent atheist. And I loved Bertrand Russell, who was, for my money, with all due respect to all the the very, very capable people that we've talked about earlier, he's the best atheist pound for pound. That there was, and a remarkably witty and lucid writer. And I was totally in his thrall. And I would, I would read every book by Russell I could get my hands on. And the reason that I did, I have this theory that why do adolescent boys like Mr. Spock and like Sherlock Holmes?

• 1:53:42Speaker 01

  I think it's because when you hit puberty, for a lot of us, there's so much discomfort with our bodies that we like the idea that we're just brains. I really think so. That's, I had that experience. It's like, I want to just be a thinking machine. I don't want to be a body because my body was making me so uncomfortable. I had all these urges and inclinations that I couldn't control. So Russell was perfect. And my father, who was a rabbi, did the very wise thing of buying me some of Bertrand Russell's books, which was his way of saying, I'm not afraid of him.

• 1:54:16Speaker 01

  And actually, there was another rabbi, I was at, I was at summer camp and I was sitting on the porch of the, I remember exactly, and I was reading Bertrand Russell and this guy came up to me, he said, what are you reading? I was maybe sixteen or seventeen, and I said, Bertrand Russell, I was spoiling for a fight. And he said, I'm glad you're reading him. I said, really, why? He goes, how old are you, David? And I said, whatever, I was sixteen, seventeen. He said, well, I'd rather you grow out of him than grow into him. And you know what? He was actually right, because when I started to read about Russell's life, I realized that all of that rationality didn't shield him.

• 1:54:55Speaker 01

  He had an incredibly messy life, multiple marriages, endless infidelities, family members he didn't speak to, didn't speak to him, his, by the way, was raised by his grandparents because his parents had died, and like, really not a happy, or, I mean, a remarkable life, but not a happy one. And so I started to like, believe that maybe it was possible, that people who had faith were not just stupid and needed crutches, but, but saw something deeper than, than Russell did. And the more people that I met that were like that, it's funny, because I always thought, okay, my father is a rabbi, that's great, but nobody else.

• 1:55:39Speaker 01

  And, and I think what happened to me was, it was not a logical decision to come to faith. It was a sort of opening of my heart. It's like, this world is way much more than my mind can capture. And, and I've kind of felt my way to God. And in the moments, my faith, you know, there was a rabbi named Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, he said he was a moon man, his faith waxed and waned. So sometimes I have more, sometimes less. But in my feelinger moments is when I have more.

• 1:56:12Lex Fridman?

  So with your heart open.

• 1:56:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:14Lex Fridman?

  What would you say in your feeling your moments is the most beautiful part about Judaism and your faith?

• 1:56:25Speaker 01

  I think the most beautiful part about Judaism is that even though it is filled with humor and wit, it takes life and it takes the soul seriously. It really believes that this matters and that we matter and what we do matters. And I think that that's incredibly important and especially in a, in a world in which young people feel so much like they don't matter, that's an unbelievably powerful message. I mean, you know, it's, you don't, I, I want to say like almost to every, to every, uh, young woman under thirty on TikTok, you don't matter because you're beautiful.

• 1:57:09Speaker 01

  That's not why you matter. I hope you know that. You matter because you have a soul. And to every young man who's like nihilistic and doesn't think and just thinks that if they make enough money, their life will be fine. I want to say the same thing, which is really, that's not, ultimately you matter because you're in the image of God and, and Judaism really deeply, deeply believes and preaches that. And I think that that's a message that has so much to say to the world. It's like you have to take people's souls seriously and for all of the difficulty in figuring out all these social questions and what they mean, I just don't want to dismiss

• 1:57:50Speaker 01

  people because I disagree with them politically or socially or culturally because I think they matter.

• 1:57:58Lex Fridman?

  So ultimately Judaism has a wealth.

• 1:58:03Lex Fridman?

  Of meaning.

• 1:58:04Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:58:05Lex Fridman?

  For.

• 1:58:07Speaker 01

  I.

• 1:58:07Lex Fridman?

  For human mind.

• 1:58:07Speaker 01

  I really believe that it does. I really do. Um, and, and it's meaning, and I want to emphasize this, is not political. The deepest meaning of Judaism is not political.

• 1:58:22Lex Fridman?

  Well, there is, we put politics on top of everything.

• 1:58:25Speaker 01

  Exactly. But that's why I want to emphasize it. The deepest meaning is on a soul level. It's not on a, on a voting level.

• 1:58:31Lex Fridman?

  Well, that combined with the humor, it's clear to me that Christopher Hitchens should have been a Jew.

• 1:58:36Speaker 01

  He was. He actually was. He discovered that in his 30s, that his mother was Jewish.

• 1:58:42Lex Fridman?

  That's fascinating.

• 1:58:42Speaker 01

  Yep. He actually, he has a beautiful essay about it, discovering in his 30s that his mother was Jewish. Yep. Um, so, so remarkably enough, he actually was Jewish. His autobiography, Hitch 22, is a great read. And I just want to say, like, what you discover there, I don't know if I'm giving too much away by telling the story of this boy.

• 1:59:03Lex Fridman?

  It's a spoiler alert.

• 1:59:03Speaker 01

  What you discover there is that his mother ran away with a minister or a priest, and they died in what seemed like was a suicide pact. And so, I read it, unfortunately, after he passed away, but I would have wanted to ask him, do you think that has anything to do maybe with the hostility towards religion?

• 1:59:21Lex Fridman?

  We are only human.

• 1:59:22Speaker 01

  My father, I mean, both my parents, but my father, who is a rabbi, was such a wonderful, warm, and loving man. So I associate a religious figure, you know, with real goodness.

• 1:59:33Lex Fridman?

  And I'm sorry to return to a darker, darker topic, but I really wanted to ask you this. Um, for the current events, for a recent event, I mentioned Dallas. What lessons do you draw from the Dallas synagogue hostage incident?

• 1:59:51Speaker 01

  Well, the week after that, we had active shooter training in my synagogues. And one of the things I drew was that security for synagogues is important. And the second is that the reality of antisemitism.

• 2:00:06Speaker 01

  Which I had thought had waned when I first began my rabbinate, I thought it's not going to be such a big issue. It is like an evergreen issue and Jews and all people of goodwill have to take this really seriously because it has devastating consequences. And if the world doesn't know that, then it just hasn't been paying attention.

• 2:00:26Lex Fridman?

  So there's antisemitism at a scale of human to human, but there's also, like you mentioned, politics get mixed up into things, nations get mixed into into things. Impossible to answer, but I have to ask.

• 2:00:41Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:00:43Lex Fridman?

  What do you think about the long running saga of Israel and Palestine? Will we ever see peace in that part of the Middle East?

• 2:00:51Speaker 01

  Well, since I'm an optimist about human.

• 2:00:56Speaker 01

  Look, I, I mean, I have many, many thoughts about, I'm a very, very strong supporter of Israel. And, and I also feel really for the plight of the Palestinians. I think that they're, you know, this is, this is a clash of legitimate narratives that is impossible to exactly split the difference of. However,

• 2:01:23Speaker 01

  I know that Israel has made peace with Egypt, has made peace with Jordan, has made peace now with other Arab nations.

• 2:01:31Speaker 01

  I don't believe that Israel is unwilling to make peace. And so I think that as difficult as it will be for the Palestinians to come to grips with the fact that the Jewish state is not leaving and is legitimately here as opposed to, we can't get rid of it now, but we will get rid of it one day.

• 2:01:51Speaker 01

  If that comes to be, and I believe that it will, I think not only that there would be peace, but I think that those two peoples together could probably do remarkable things in the world.

• 2:02:03Lex Fridman?

  Do you think the source of it is politics? Is it religious ideas? And to flip it, what is the way out? Is it geopolitics? Is it, you know, interfaith discourse and collaboration? Or is it simply the human, like, love?

• 2:02:28Speaker 01

  So I think that I'm not sure that I could give one answer to that, but I will give a piece of an answer. Why did the Abraham Accords happen? The main reason that they happened was because economics overrode ideology. And I actually am hopeful that that's in the end what will happen. That people will say, you know what? We could have such a better life if we put aside the ideological animosities and just created this different kind of Middle East together. I went to Dubai to watch the World Chess Championship because I really wanted to see Magnus Carlsen play. I thought, you're alive when you have such a remarkable world champion.

• 2:03:13Speaker 01

  Go see him play. So I actually took myself to Dubai.

• 2:03:16Lex Fridman?

  That's amazing.

• 2:03:17Speaker 01

  For the last couple of games that I watched. And so I wasn't so much, I mean, it's not that I'm uninterested in Dubai, but I really, I went there for the chess thing. The expo was also on at the same time. And I saw here's this amazing place. I came back. This guy I know who lived in Dubai for several years and works in the Middle East said to me, what did you think of it? And I said, it was nice, it was Dubai. It was like very, you know, very polished, very sophisticated, very clean, very, no crime and so on. But it was like, you know, kind of like Las Vegas in the Middle East without the gambling or something like that. And he said, you know, and he totally changed my perspective in a couple of sentences. He said, I know it seems like that when you come from Los Angeles. He said, but fly there from Yemen or from Riyadh and it is a miracle.

• 2:04:01Speaker 01

  And I thought, oh, my God, you're right. It's like what human beings can do if they just put aside their ideological shackles is remarkable. And I'm hopeful that one day that'll happen.

• 2:04:14Lex Fridman?

  Economics allows for a higher quality of life. You no longer, it's the playground analogy you've you said earlier. If there's more resources to play with.

• 2:04:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:04:25Lex Fridman?

  Unfortunately, us humans are more willing to play with others.

• 2:04:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:29Lex Fridman?

  And maybe that is the solution. And maybe, I mean, for me, from a technology perspective, innovation, engineering

• 2:04:38Lex Fridman?

  helps make everybody's life better. And over that, once people's lives become better, they start to be, have more time to be empathetic and hear.

• 2:04:49Speaker 01

  And they have more to lose. When you have more to lose, it actually makes you, I think, countries are less willing to go to war when they have more to lose. And families want peace when they have, when it's good at home. So I think there's an element of that as well.

• 2:05:06Lex Fridman?

  And some of it, again, taking us back to the other aspect of our conversation is how we're conducting ourselves in conversation online and so on. Because I think actually, I'm a big fan of the idea of social media that is a way for us to connect together. I think there's a lot of really strong ideas how to do that well. And clearly, the initial attempts that kind of just open it up wide. Some of the lesser aspects of human nature can take over. When combined with different forces like advertisements and virality and all those kinds of things. But overall, I love the honesty of the mess of it being presented before us on social media.

• 2:05:50Lex Fridman?

  I, part of me, maybe because I don't participate it, like if somebody is being mean to me or being aggressive and these kinds of things. I enjoy it because it's it's human nature.

• 2:06:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:06:04Lex Fridman?

  But I enjoy it because I don't respond. I think if I responded, I would get pulled into this human nature and then it's not fun. But I, I love the, like, I'll, I'll talk to people. In fact, I still visit Clubhouse. I don't know if you know what that is.

• 2:06:16Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:06:17Lex Fridman?

  Oh, right. That's why actually when I.

• 2:06:19Speaker 01

  I think that's how we first met.

• 2:06:20Lex Fridman?

  Well, yeah, well, I was such a fanboy. Actually, when I first heard you and I was like, I can't believe I get. David, but the Israel Palestine topic was something that was very deeply in a heated way discussed on Clubhouse. Race relations is a thing that was really heatedly discussed. And I now go to Clubhouse to practice Russian. And there, in Russian, the heated discussion is on basically any topic. As meaningless or meaningful as you want in the heat of it. Just people just screaming and then calming down and going through the full process.

• 2:07:02Lex Fridman?

  And that, that too is beautiful because that emotion is there. And if it is allowed to have a voice, I think ultimately it's, it leads to healing. So that, that felt really healthy if you learn how to do that at scale.

• 2:07:17Speaker 01

  Social media, I, I wish that it were not as algorithmically biased towards conflict. I don't think that that's healthy, but I do. I, I think it brings a lot of blessings into people's lives if they use it wisely. You know, it can, like anything else, it can be awful. But, but it can't, I, I've connected to all sorts of people that I never would have known. And that's been wonderful. So.

• 2:07:44Lex Fridman?

  Let me ask you the big question of advice. What advice would you give to young people today? That are maybe high school, college, thinking about career, thinking about life they can be proud of?

• 2:07:59Speaker 01

  So the first thing that I would say is that life is longer than you think it is. Even though I understand the impulse to be in a rush, you will have many unfoldings, more even than people of my generation did.

• 2:08:15Lex Fridman?

  Unfoldings, this is a funny word. It's a beautiful word.

• 2:08:18Speaker 01

  It's, but it feels that way. It's like different aspects of your life will come, will, will show you different possibilities that you don't imagine at the moment. And, and I think the second thing that I would say is.

• 2:08:37Speaker 01

  I know that this is a very old fashioned, but I would say, don't, if to the extent that you can read, don't just, and not just on social media, read books. Learn things that will give you a broader context for your life than just today, or yesterday, or the day before. And, and I suppose the other thing that I would say is

• 2:09:08Speaker 01

  that to the extent that you can, try to develop your own internal metric of both what matters and what is good. Because you will be exposed to more voices than any generation in history telling you that that's good, or this is good. They're called influences, influencers, but what they are is voices telling you what you should think and what you should believe. And so have some internal space where you, where you'll be able to say, for example, I know this person is doing that and it looks great, but that's not me.

• 2:09:45Lex Fridman?

  You have a community of people that

• 2:09:50Lex Fridman?

  speak to you with a lot of passion. And do you still have that voice in your own, in the privacy of your own mind, that you're able to ignore, like for a moment, just be with yourself?

• 2:10:05Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 2:10:05Lex Fridman?

  Think what is right?

• 2:10:07Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And I think it's partly because I grew up without that. I mean, I grew up with a lot of space in my life. And so I had chance to develop that voice. That's why I think it's harder for kids today than it was for me. I mean, I grew up when there were three channels. There was three, six and 10. There was ABC, CBS and NBC. And, and that was it. And you spent your evening, you know, playing board games or reading or whatever. And there was a lot of space. And we played football in the street and you went on your bike in the morning and nobody worried about you. And you came home at night and everybody assumed you were fine. And, and so I really feel, and also I went into a religious tradition where I feel like I, I have the opportunity to judge myself by bigger metrics.

• 2:10:52Speaker 01

  And it's still hard. I don't want to, it's not like, oh, it's, I, you know, I wear impenetrable armor. It's still hard. So how much harder for kids today when they don't have that?

• 2:11:05Lex Fridman?

  You mentioned books. Is there Bertrand Russell and Denial of Death by Ernest Becker? Is there books that pop into mind that like had an impact on you?

• 2:11:16Speaker 01

  My favorite novel is Middlemarch.

• 2:11:19Lex Fridman?

  Middlemarch?

• 2:11:19Speaker 01

  Middlemarch. I remember like I was listening to a podcast. I was listening to one of your podcasts where you said where where your guest said the two greatest novels of the 19th century were were Brothers Karamazov and what was the other one he mentioned? I don't remember.

• 2:11:34Lex Fridman?

  Dostoevsky as well or no?

• 2:11:35Speaker 01

  I think I.

• 2:11:36Lex Fridman?

  Was it both Dostoevsky?

• 2:11:37Speaker 01

  I might have been. I don't remember. Maybe the but anyway, but I would say Middlemarch is up there. Middlemarch like presents an entire world and it's written by a woman, Mary Ann Evans, who took the pen name George Eliot, who you feel Virginia Woolf said it's the only English novel written for grownups. You feel the genius in her sentences, like the pressure of her intellect in her sentences. It's a it's a wonderful, wonderful book. I love it.

• 2:12:06Lex Fridman?

  Pressure of her intellect.

• 2:12:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, you really do.

• 2:12:11Speaker 01

  I also love I love Saul Bellow, especially Herzog, but but it's a very different kind of of thinking person's novel. I read a lot of mysteries and a lot of other kinds of fiction and literature, but in terms in terms of the books that most you mentioned one of them, which is Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning.

• 2:12:34Speaker 01

  And I also really, really love Heschel's The Sabbath. I think it's a beautiful book. Very it's very short book, just as Frankl's book is.

• 2:12:42Lex Fridman?

  What do you take from the Man's Search for Meaning? What do you take of a human being in the worst conditions, being able to

• 2:12:53Lex Fridman?

  non dramatically?

• 2:12:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:12:55Lex Fridman?

  Find little joys, find find beauty.

• 2:13:00Speaker 01

  It's it's what I said before about Judaism's advice to to younger people is that it mattered. If you believe that something matters, you have enormous resilience. It's meaninglessness that is the greatest threat to a decent life. When people are like deeply depressed, whether it is chemical depression or what they feel like is this is all meaningless.

• 2:13:23Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:24Speaker 01

  And and meaning now, obviously.

• 2:13:29Speaker 01

  Chemical depression calls in part for chemical means, but

• 2:13:34Speaker 01

  but meaning is the great antidote.

• 2:13:38Speaker 01

  We can talk about what kind of meaning. I mean, there are kinds of meanings that are awful, but but meaning is the great antidote to to a sense that life is just nihilistic and purposeless and and to that destructiveness that I think is too common.

• 2:13:56Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so maybe maybe heroic action in Nazi Germany, in the Holocaust, in the camps, is the even not the action, but just the realization that every life matters.

• 2:14:09Speaker 01

  So here's this really wonderful story that Hugo Grin, who was a who was a rabbi in England, died, I don't know, like 15, 20 years ago, used to tell, he grew up in Auschwitz. He was a child there and he was with his father and it was Hanukkah. And you're supposed to light the candles and his father took the margarine ration and used it as the oil to light the Hanukkah candles. And Hugo said was scandalized and he said, that's our food. And his father said, what we have learned, my son, is you can live for three weeks without food, you can live for three days without water, but you can't live for three minutes without hope.

• 2:14:49Lex Fridman?

  Well, hope, let me ask you, you said meaning. What's the meaning of this whole thing? What's the meaning of life? You're the perfect person to ask this question.

• 2:15:01Speaker 01

  Rabbi David Wolken. I believe the meaning of life is for human beings to grow in soul. That's why we're here and you can do that in infinite numbers of ways, but you're supposed to return your soul like more burnished and beautiful than you got it. I mean, it's going to have, you know, some nicks and cuts.

• 2:15:21Speaker 01

  But that's what it means to deepen and grow it and you do that, you do that.

• 2:15:28Speaker 01

  More than anything else, you do that by learning how to love. I mean, that's the principal way I think that you do it.

• 2:15:34Lex Fridman?

  You know, it's interesting because for a human, the relationship, if you're a man of faith, is with God. But it feels like love is so ritually part of human society, that it's not just love of God, it's love of each other.

• 2:15:52Speaker 01

  Right, yep. There's no question about the idea. I mean, in Judaism, that was actually the great innovation of the monotheistic idea. In pagan societies, it was all about how you treated the gods. Montheism said, no, God cares how you treat each other. So it's, in fact, the mystics used the same kind of word in Hebrew, divakut, which means clinging, that is used about Adam and Eve. About, it says, therefore, a man will leave his father and mother, and davak with his wife. And davak means cling. So there is an analogy there, absolutely.

• 2:16:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I kind of, I kind of think of human civilization is that, there's that movie March of the Penguins, and they're all huddling together in the cold. This is, this is fundamentally human. Is there's this, just this darkness all around us of uncertainty, of cruelty, of just, we're, we're, it's, it seems like everything is so fragile. And we're just kind of all huddling together for warmth.

• 2:16:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:16:56Lex Fridman?

  And that's all we got is each other. So we started with the, the big question of what is God? Ended with what is meaning. Rabbi Wobbe, I've been a huge, as I've told you, huge, huge fan of you for a long time. It's such an honor that you talked to me today.

• 2:17:14Speaker 01

  I am really so happy to be here, and thank you so much for the conversation.

• 2:17:17Lex Fridman?

  Thanks for listening to this conversation with David Wobbe. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from David himself. The only whole heart is a broken one because it lets the light in. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.