What if Being a Stranger Is Actually Your Superpower? | Better in Person

Angela Buchdahl was the first Asian American to be ordained as a rabbi, and now she is among the most influential rabbis in the world. She and Stephen Dubner talk about boundary-crossing, the aftermath of October 7, and whether you can be a good Jew without believing in God. If you'd like to see the video version of Better in Person, you can watch it on YouTube or Apple Podcasts.

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

• 0:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  This episode of Better in Person is presented by ChatGPT. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Download the new ChatGPT desktop app today.

• 0:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner. The bonus episode you are about to hear is an interview with Angela Bookdal, who is one of the most unusual and interesting rabbis you are likely to meet. This interview comes from a new video talk show we're making called Better in Person. You can watch it on the Freakonomics YouTube channel or on Apple Podcasts. But we also like to put out this audio version in case your eyes are busy and you only want to use your ears. As always, thanks for listening.

• 0:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  Let's just pretend we're friends having a conversation.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  Great.

• 0:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  And maybe by the end, we will be friends.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  You never know. I'm open to the possibility.

• 0:53Speaker 01

  Me too, absolutely.

• 0:59Speaker 02

  This is Better in Person with Stephen Dubner and Angela Bookdal.

• 1:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  If you are a faith leader of any kind, being open to possibility is part of the job description. Angela Bookdal has taken that openness a bit further, and it has brought her much more attention than most faith leaders will ever receive. Here she is as a clue on Jeopardy.

• 1:20Speaker 03

  Korea-born Angela Bookdal is the first Asian American to be ordained a cantor, as well as this leader of a Jewish congregation.

• 1:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  Ben. What is Rabbi?

• 1:29Speaker 03

  You got it.

• 1:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  Bookdal is at Central Synagogue in New York City. Her services are streamed globally. And after the October 7th attacks in Israel, she got a lot of attention for rejecting a binary way of thinking about the crisis. And now Bookdal is a New York Times bestselling author. Her memoir is called Heart of a Stranger, An Unlikely Rabbi's Story of Faith, Identity, and Belonging. So I really love your book. I think it's

• 1:55Speaker 01

  I appreciate that. Thank you.

• 1:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's really well-written. I mean, I know that I know that it began as sort of one book and became a different one over time. Took a long time, right? Four or five years, I guess?

• 2:07Speaker 01

  It took me four years to write it because it's hard to find time to write in my with my day job.

• 2:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's also very concise. So for people who haven't read it, you tell the story of your life, which is a really amazing story, in really short chapters, which I appreciate because, you know.

• 2:21Speaker 01

  Our attention spans are short.

• 2:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  And you've become, I mean, I think it's probably not an exaggeration to say you're the most famous rabbi in the world at the moment, which is something worth talking about because that recognition and fame has had a lot of ramifications, some good and some, you know, really difficult. But let's start with the autobiography. Like, we could literally talk about you and your family story for many hours because it's pretty fascinating, going back to 14th century royalty.

• 2:50Speaker 01

  King Sejong the Great. Yeah, that's true.

• 2:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  So give us the thumbnail and we'll fill in some details as we go.

• 2:56Speaker 01

  So I won't start in the 14th century. I'll just start a few generations back. You know, I think that my story is one of boundary crossing. I was born a biracial child in an ethno-national state.

• 3:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  Korea.

• 3:09Speaker 01

  Korea. And so from the very beginning of my life, there was a certain way that I recognized I wasn't like everybody else. And then I moved to the United States when I was about five years old.

• 3:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  We should say your father is American and Jewish.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  My father is American and Jewish, my mother a Korean Buddhist to this day.

• 3:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  I love your mother so much. I really do.

• 3:28Speaker 01

  She's an incredible character in this story, as well as my life. She really lived through those hard things. I think if you have a parent who lived through a war, like, the ones who come out of it alive, they have a certain kind of fortitude.

• 3:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  And exile, forced exile.

• 3:42Speaker 01

  And forced exile. So and that, you know, my mother wasn't actually even born in Korea herself. She was born under Japanese occupation in Japan. So the beginning of her life was already a boundary crossing at a young age, as was mine. And I came to the States. Now Tacoma is, in some ways, a random place for a biracial Korean kid to end up, Jewish. But it was already my Warnock side, my Jewish side's home for three generations. So I was already

• 4:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  They built the synagogue or created the community?

• 4:11Speaker 01

  They helped found the community. It was an incredibly small but tight-knit Jewish community. So I grew up, even though my family didn't look like any other Jewish family in our 300-family synagogue, I was a Warnock. And I saw my grandfather's picture on the wall in an AZA basketball uniform. And I felt like, okay, I have Yehes here. Like, I'm connected and I have deep roots. So I was welcomed.

• 4:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  But the weirdest thing about you, if you don't mind me saying, is how deeply you wanted to be a rabbi from the time you were very young. I mean,

• 4:43Speaker 01

  Someone said to me, you call this the unlikely story of a rabbi. And they said, I read your story. And I was like, it was so likely. You were singing to God when you were eight and leading your sister in prayers when you were a kid. And there was something about that that actually felt deeply ordained. You know, Jews don't call it a calling so much, but I do feel that I was pulled to this in a way that felt like it was beyond my control. Like, it was just, it was just all I wanted to do.

• 5:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah. Do you still love it?

• 5:10Speaker 01

  I love it. I love it. I actually, I'm on sabbatical and I miss being at services on Friday nights. I absolutely love it.

• 5:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  Can I ask about the hard parts of being a rabbi? I mean, I always, I just think about the death, all the death, that you're offering a lot of condolences to a lot of different people in different circumstances.

• 5:25Speaker 01

  I mean, here's the interesting thing about doing funerals and being close to death. It is, it is very difficult and there's a lot of sadness and sometimes there's tragedy. But there is also, in every death, a huge amount of awe. And that awe, it gives me a glimpse of the world beyond, in a way, that actually makes me want to live my life here better and more meaningfully. It just puts what's important into sharp focus every time I do a funeral.

• 5:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  You describe being a rabbi as being in the business of awe, in the awe business.

• 5:58Speaker 01

  I'm in the awe business.

• 5:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  Which I really love. I don't know if I believe it. I love it because.

• 6:03Speaker 01

  Oh, do I need to convince you that I'm in the awe business?

• 6:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  A little bit, a little bit.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  Okay. Well, let me put it in more scientific terms. So Dacher Keltner, who's a scientist out at Berkeley, he wrote a book on awe. He studied awe in 26 different countries across thousands of people. So this is not just awe for Jews or awe for Americans. This is awe across geography and time and space.

• 6:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  Can you define awe?

• 6:24Speaker 01

  I would say maybe it is touching and experiencing something that is vast and beyond your comprehension.

• 6:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  Dacher Keltner's research identified eight reliable catalysts for awe. Nature, intellectual epiphany, art and visual design, spiritual experience, birth and death, music, collective effervescence, and, number one, moral beauty.

• 6:51Speaker 01

  Moral beauty, this encounter of the kind of extraordinary acts that normal human beings do, that is what I'm witnessing regularly and lifting up. I mean, and there were a lot of stories of moral beauty that were coming out of Israel, for example, of like selflessness, generosity, kindness, bravery, courage, that were, those were the stories that I wanted to emphasize because we are caught up in the muck of the worst part of humankind. And the media wants to emphasize the worst aspects of human nature. And they exist. You can find evil in lots of corners and with all peoples.

• 7:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  But we've gotten better at bringing it to the forefront.

• 7:28Speaker 01

  We have. And for some reason, that stuff is what's contagious. But I think that my job is to, is to call to mind that what I see all the time, over and over, with normal people, is acts of moral beauty every day. So human beings are the greatest source of awe that we have in the world.

• 7:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  So I really love your book. I think you're a great teacher.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 7:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  I really do. You've been a good speaker, a good writer, a good leader, et cetera. People are attracted to you for good reasons. You've also come to prominence because you're unusual, because you're a female Asian American rabbi, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm curious how your recognition or fame has affected not just your life, but your family's life.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  I would say the fame part is hard in that the more visible the platform, the more you're targeted. And I've seen that, like, everything from Central Synagogue literally being targeted for attacks to my being called in for hostage negotiations because that is unfortunately the world we live in today. So I feel that the weight of that immensely.

• 8:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah. So let's talk about that Coleville, Texas event. This was, as you described in the book, an armed gunman breaks or is invited into a synagogue in Texas and ends up taking people hostage.

• 8:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, not invited in as a stranger who looked like he was coming in from the cold. And the rabbi invited him in. What he actually was, was a British citizen, originally a Pakistani Muslim who had moved to England. And in England, there is a chief rabbi. And he had grown up on these antisemitic tropes that Jews have enormous influence, power, conspiratorial connections, and basically imagined that the chief rabbi of America could make a few phone calls and get Afia Siddiqui, who he called his sister, but she's really a cause celebre in the Pakistani Muslim community, known as Lady Al Qaeda. And she's a kind of a notorious terrorist who was sitting in a prison in Texas.

• 9:24Speaker 01

  So the reason he picked Coleville, which is not the center of Jewish life, is because it was the synagogue that was the closest to this federal prison. So he figured if he ended up taking Jews captive in Coleville, that he could call the, quote, "chief rabbi of America."

• 9:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  Which he decided was you, based on you having been to the White House a couple times.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  Based on a Google internet search. And maybe because I had just been a Jeopardy question like two weeks before. Who knows why the algorithm put me at the top of his list for rabbi to call? But he believed that I could make a few phone calls and get this woman brought to that synagogue.

• 10:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah. So the end of the story is a relatively happy one, which is that none of the hostages were harmed. The rabbi, Charlie, was Charlie, what's his last name?

• 10:09Speaker 01

  Citron Walker. I was very struck by Charlie Citron Walker after this incident. He ended up being on a lot of news media, which I avoided, actually, because I really felt like, first of all, this was his story. I was a side player in this, so I didn't do any TV interviews and I wanted to remain quiet. He was asked, are you going to go back into the synagogue again? Because, you know, that standoff was 10 hours in the synagogue. And he said, of course, I'm going back this week. He said, that's what Jews do. We go back in. And I thought about this deep sense that, like, we choose life. There's this saying, it's like, I've said before, you, life and death choose life. Now, that seems so obvious unless you've actually been challenged and faced with death.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  Then you realize what courage it takes to choose life. And Charlie was like, of course, I'm going back in. And he faced his own death, literally for 10 hours, sitting there with a man holding a gun to his head. And he said, of course, I'm going back.

• 11:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  Charlie was smart and heroic.

• 11:09Speaker 01

  Yes, he really was.

• 11:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  And the guy, who you call a gunman, you might call him a terrorist, whatever, he ends up getting killed in the incident, right? So none of the hostages were killed. But still, when I think about, you know, fame. Many people, I think, think of fame as a pretty good thing and pursue it, even on some small level. And yet, almost all the people I've known who've become famous, truly famous, like over the years, I've written about a bunch, spent time with some, I've never known one who didn't have a really terrible either stalker or threats. It just comes with the territory. So to me, when I think about you, you're a rabbi in New York, prominent rabbi in New York, but then you get thrust into this and you get the call from the guy.

• 11:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now you've got the FBI on the other line and so on. I think about that as being kind of the cost of being prominent or being famous. And being Jewish and a rabbi is yet another layer on top of that. How do you, I mean, did you pull back from your activities? Are you worried about being prominent and recognized? Do you, what's your strategy for thinking that through? And I don't mean to ask a question that if you were asking me, I would say, let's not talk about it because it feels like it might be better left unsaid. But I'm curious how you manage that.

• 12:27Speaker 01

  You know, I, it's difficult, but I, and I never have pursued fame for its sake. I have a message that I want to share and I've always felt like I want to get this out to a widest audience as possible. I feel like this is what I'm called to do. I feel the weight and the pain of it. I actually would like to be more anonymous when I'm walking in the street. I don't like to dress up all the time. I don't like, I don't like being recognized. And so like I, I do feel that there is a certain tension that I constantly feel around this. But if I were to pull back, in some ways, it allows a small group of haters to win. If I'm pulling back, then I'm not choosing life.

• 13:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, you were attacked again for not signing a petition condemning Zohran Mamdani when he was running for mayor of New York, an election which he won. And I was thinking about like, if you, if you were not so prominent, would it have been noticed that your name was not on that petition?

• 13:27Speaker 01

  No, of course not.

• 13:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  But part of the reason that I made a decision that I was never signing any letters, and I made that several years ago, is because I saw the way that even when I agreed with a letter, and I usually agree with 90% of a letter, not 100% of a letter. But even when I agreed with the issue and wanted to kind of lend my voice, I saw the way that my name would be pulled out of the list of a thousand rabbis or whatever it would be, I would be the face of the, of the article. And whatever like little tiny bit of that letter I didn't agree with, that would be the thing that would be emphasized the most. And then I became the face of it. I essentially watched the way that my name was being manipulated and used out of my control. And I will tell you, these letters, while there is, I understand the impulse to want to sign,

• 14:10Speaker 01

  there is a kind of herd mentality that I think is not necessarily good. And people said, oh, but a thousand rabbis signed this letter. How could you be the only one that doesn't know? And I said, well, do you know there were a thousand rabbis that also signed a starvation in Gaza letter in August? These letters are a dime a dozen. People have no idea. These letters are happening all the time. Some of them just get a lot more prominent. There's actually a pressure cooker that happens against rabbis for these letters. That like, once you see a certain number of names, you feel pressured to sign them. And then that letter was actually used and cited by Cuomo in the debate itself. And I thought to myself, is this what we want rabbis to be? To be reduced to a pawn in a electoral debate? That's exactly why you do not sign letters.

• 14:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  Are there instances though, where your notoriety, fame, whatever you want to call it, have been a great help to you, things that you've been able to accomplish because of it? You got to write the book you wanted to write, to be honest, right? If you didn't have this position, you may not have been able to write this kind of book, which is a book that's not just about you, but it's about what you feel are the essential components of Judaism itself, yeah?

• 15:18Speaker 01

  I think the fact that I have a community that has been growing and that has this platform is the reason that I was given the opportunity to share this message more widely in a book. And I feel very grateful that that's an opportunity.

• 15:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  It feels crazy to me, especially as the kid that grew up and nobody saw me or recognized me as Jewish, or many didn't, or denied it, to now be able to be one of the spokespeople for the Jewish community. And I feel the privilege of that and the responsibility of it.

• 15:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  This episode of Better in Person is presented by ChatGPT. ChatGPT work moves beyond answers into getting real work done. It's a new experience in ChatGPT for bigger multi-step projects across web, mobile and desktop. You can give ChatGPT work a goal and have it gather context, choose an approach, create the output and continue iterating, all while you stay in control. It can help turn messy inputs into useful outputs like briefs, spreadsheets, dashboards, presentations, prototypes, landing pages and workflows. You can even ask ChatGPT work to take on entire workflows with a single request. Here's an example. It can turn customer research into a campaign brief,

• 16:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  use that brief to create marketing assets and adapt those assets for different markets, carrying context through every step. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Download the new ChatGPT desktop app today.

• 16:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  Let's talk about Israel for a minute. So in the last few years, in some quarters, the very word has become a curse word. I mean, I think it's as simple as that. There are, there are people who, when they learn that someone is Jewish or has family in Israel, or when they think about Israelis, they say it's an evil people. It's a very high pronounced form of antisemitism on some levels and it's, it's other things on other levels. It's complicated. I think we all recognize that. How can you, from your position, sort of explain that to the world? Easy question, of course, but do your best.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  Israel is a country that since its inception has been under attack. I think people have a hard time separating out a government from a country and the people itself and a nation.

• 17:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  They have a harder time with Israel than with most other countries.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  That's right, that's right. Because I certainly find that people have no trouble critiquing or even saying, I completely disagree with what our government is doing. And might even say it's immoral, but they would never say therefore all Americans are immoral or therefore the country doesn't have a right to exist. It seems that Israel is the only country for whom the government is indistinguishable from the entire people. So if you do not like the actions of the government, then there is a sense that that entire people is, is immoral or wrong.

• 18:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  What's, what's your position on, let's, let's take Gaza and Israel first. I realize politics is not your realm, but you're politically adjacent, let's call it. So let's say you were asked to come over and be a member of some, let's say, a permanent commission to figure out what's the most equitable way to deal with what's going on now, to create a future that will provide as much goodwill for as many people there as possible. What are your first three points there?

• 18:49Speaker 01

  I want to see a Palestinian state. I want to see, in the same way that because I'm a Zionist, I deeply believe that, that Jews have a right to self-determination in their land. I actually also must believe that Palestinians have a right to self-determination. They need to live with dignity and peace and security. I know we feel extremely far away from the possibility of a two-state solution. But I want to see steps that move us in that possible direction.

• 19:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  Where would you propose that that state be? Because for anyone who knows the history of the region, even just the last 40 or 50 years, there have been many proposals, agreements even, to have a two-state solution that then end up being torpedoed.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  I think that, you know, there's obviously been a complete breakdown in trust. And right now, even Israelis who five years ago would have thought that a two-state solution was possible, right now, none of them feel it's possible. But everyone is traumatized. There has to be some deradicalization that needs to happen. But we have seen this happen in countries that we thought it was not possible.

• 19:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Northern Ireland.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  Look at, look at what's happened in Northern Ireland and places like Germany, which has now become one of the greatest allies of Israel. Like, who would have thought that when we came out of the war? So I never give up on peoples. Like, we think like, that's not possible. There are a certain kind of people. I don't believe that. I think people in particular circumstances behave when they are in fear or under occupation. They will behave in different ways than they will when they can live in security and peace. I actually think that the vast majority want that. I also think that we need to make sure that Hamas is not in charge. So I think that it's very important that people distinguish between Hamas and no longer allow them to be in charge of the Gaza Strip and create a different Palestinian leadership that can be.

• 20:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  Let's pretend there is a total recalibration, just for kicks. And it's the creation of a new era. And I say, you know, Angela Bookdahl, you are a really interesting, smart, compassionate Jewish leader. And I think it's a good time for the world to understand what Judaism is and what it's not. Okay? You describe it in the book as a wisdom literature, really. And there are many wisdom literatures out there that are revered, but they're not typically attached to a living population in the same way that Judaism is. So what's your best pitch?

• 21:04Speaker 01

  Well, it's not maybe a surprise that it's connected to the title of this book, The Heart of a Stranger. And Jews have always been a small, tiny minority. We have, in many ways, existed as the counterculture for whatever is the, the predominant culture. That word Hebrew literally means to, to cross over, to be a boundary crosser. Because to be a Hebrew is to know what it feels like to be a stranger. And that's the story of 400 years of us as slaves in Egypt. It's the story of us 2,000 years historically as a diaspora people living in countries where we were more or less at home, but never fully of the place. And I think that the lesson there is not just that this is what Jews experience, but it's actually the human experience.

• 21:47Speaker 01

  I'm realizing now that we're living in a time and day where I, I feel the way the Asian community in America feels, that they have been misunderstood and hated post-pandemic in a way that we didn't really realize. I think that we understand we still have a real race issue in our country that has not been fully resolved or dealt with. And you could go through every minority group and the ways that they feel and immigrants right now in this country. But you know that white Christian men also feel like strangers right now, and they feel misunderstood and marginalized in this country right now. So the heart of a stranger is a human experience. What I think Judaism has to offer is a blueprint for taking that experience

• 22:30Speaker 01

  and making that into your superpower of empathy, of creativity, of resilience, of grit. This is what Jews have had to do because we've always been that stranger. And instead, we are seeing ways that people who take that heart of a stranger want to build higher walls, push people more out, demonize the other side even more. And actually, this is the message I think that we want to say. No, we want to do the exact opposite. We want to say, you feel like a stranger, so do I. Let that be the first point of human connection between us.

• 22:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  Nice. Do you believe in God?

• 23:02Speaker 01

  I do, but not in the traditional biblical notion of a sort of supernatural God that's vengeful, that like chooses who's going to live and who's going to die. Not in that kind of a way. I think, though, that there is room for understanding God in a lot of different ways, even biblically. Maybe my favorite name for God in the Bible, there are dozens and dozens of names for God in the Torah. One of them is when Moses directly asks God, "What is your name?" And God says, "Ehieh, Asher Ehieh." "I will be what I will be." That's almost like an invitation to say, "What do you need this larger force to be in the world? I will be that for you."

• 23:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  So I know a lot of Jews who are very proud, historical, even scholarly-ish Jews, who don't believe in God at all and find it not inconsistent with the tradition because it's an old tradition, there are many branches on the tree. Tell me if that's the case. I mean, if I were to just ask you the basic question, can you be a Jew, a good Jew even, without believing in God? And if the answer is yes, or even if the answer is no, are there other religions where that's viable?

• 24:12Speaker 01

  100% no. Many good Jews who don't, either don't believe in God or who are not sure that they believe.

• 24:22Speaker 01

  You know that Judaism is both a religion and it's a peoplehood.

• 24:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  Let's talk about that.

• 24:27Speaker 01

  Which is confusing to a lot of people. But if you just think about it just being the tribe that you're born into and a kind of peoplehood, there are a lot of ways that people understand that their obligation is not necessarily to God, but to a people and to a history and to their ancestors. And that's a real thing. In some ways, it's not that dissimilar from the Korean culture in which there is ancestor worship. And what you are beholden to are to those who've come before you. But I also think that the distinction here is not just that you can be a Jew through kind of cultural peoplehood. But I also know that so much of even the religiousness of Judaism is about what do you do, not even what do you believe.

• 25:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  So how about the Sabbath? Everybody's familiar with the concept of a Sabbath. How does Judaism conceive of it? How has it kind of reverberated out into the world over time?

• 25:19Speaker 01

  Well, you say everyone thinks of a Sabbath, but I would say Judaism, that might be the greatest idea that Jews brought to the world. Because there was a time before the Torah that people just worked every day, all day long. They had to grow their food, do whatever they did. They labored every day. And it actually was a radical idea. That no, we are not here on earth only just to work and create and produce every single day of our lives, like the saint. Actually, you can sanctify time by setting it apart and making it different. And one day a week, you should stop working and laboring and creating and producing. You just get to be. That's the whole point of it. That's the point of it all. And that was a radical idea. And by the way, it wasn't just for Jews, it was for everyone.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  It included our animals, people who worked with us. Everyone should have a Sabbath. We've lost sight of the fact that there is a reason that we're here that is beyond just production. And especially in a very capitalist society, which I'm not against capitalism. It's just that that can't be the be-all, end-all of our existence.

• 26:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  I want you to say more about sanctifying time, which you just mentioned. I remember there's a book by Abraham Joshua Heschel called The Sabbath. Where if I recall correctly, and I probably don't, he described how the Sabbath represents not the earth moving through time, but rather time going across the earth. So how do you learn to think about time differently? Whether one wants to specifically sanctify it, like you just said, or just treat it like the valuable thing that it is? How do you do that?

• 26:54Speaker 01

  The way you sanctify time, it's easy and it's hard. You literally have to set it apart as different than all of the time. So the ways that Jews have done that traditionally is we say, "We don't run errands, we don't use money, we don't use electricity, we're not on our phones." These are the ways that these laws have evolved. It began with the idea that we don't do malacha, we don't do work. But imagine that you really would unplug from all the things that feel like work in your day. And I just think if we took even just an electronics Sabbath. So my husband and I decided more like 20 years ago that we were going to be more observant of Shabbat than we were either of us growing up. And we said no phones to our kids. And we have a Shabbat community that has, in some ways, saved my Jewish family

• 27:37Speaker 01

  and saved my life and created kind of this tight-knit community of people.

• 27:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  You're a rabbi, it sounds like you would have already had that going, no?

• 27:45Speaker 01

  You know, one of the occupational hazards of being a rabbi is you work on the Sabbath, right? But I would say that for me, Friday night, when I'm leading services, it doesn't feel like work. I am more in the flow, leading services, than any other time of my week.

• 27:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, now I want to be a rabbi as well. But one thing that strikes me about Judaism, one thing that appeals to me about the tradition, one thing that I really liked about your book, is that Jewish thinking is really allergic to binary thinking. You know, you think about the phrase, "Turn it and turn it for everything is in it," right? If you look at something from enough angles, you'll not only learn more, but you'll feel differently about the thing. You won't be as... So can you just talk about how to get less dug in on the binary thinking that we habituate toward and to try to be a little bit more considerate, to turn things more? Do you have any advice for that?

• 28:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I'm sure you've heard the expression, "Two Jews..."

• 28:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  Three opinions.

• 28:41Speaker 01

  Three opinions, right? So what's interesting is like, if that joke is about the fact that Jews are very opinionated and always disagree with each other...

• 28:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's just say argumentative.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  Why isn't it two Jews, two opinions? What is the third opinion? And actually, I would say this is about breaking out of the binary. And you break out of the binary when you are willing to engage with the person that you think is your opposite. And when you are in conversation with them, and in Judaism, this is called havruta, you actually are always supposed to study Jewish texts with a partner. So you could say, "That's two people, so you've got two opinions." No. When you are in true havruta and you are sparring with someone, you are sharpening your thinking and you get to another idea that you could not have gotten to on your own. And to me, this is the genius of Judaism. It's like the fact that you can get to a third opinion, which you could not get to by yourself. You can only get to if you're willing to actually engage the binary.

• 29:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so that's in a study...

• 29:37Speaker 01

  And move beyond it.

• 29:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  So that's in like a study situation where you've chosen to be kind of allies?

• 29:42Speaker 01

  But it's politics also, it's really, like, it's in every realm.

• 29:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, how do you... But I don't see a lot of evidence of people wanting to bring a third opinion into the room right now. I don't see a lot of illustrations of it. If I look at DC, if I look at just the way that most people are now in their circles, I think we all have these personal circles where we feel comfortable and where it's a respite from everything else. But everything else, all the stuff that's public or even a little bit public, it feels more like we're in a lockdown binary mode, so...

• 30:15Speaker 01

  Well, that's what you said. You just said that when we're comfortable, we can do it. And I think part of the problem is right now, it doesn't just feel like it's a difference of opinion, it feels existentially threatening. We are in a place of such fear and such demonization. The polarization has become so extreme that actually engaging with the other side feels like engaging with the enemy in some way. And I think that that's what we have to work against in this environment right now, is that we have to understand that that other side, even if it feels like it is our enemy, we have to engage because we can't move forward by pulling the country farther apart.

• 30:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  But how? Because like, I mean, one version of reducing all of Judaism to one line is when Hillel, a couple thousand years ago, whatever, was asked, you know, standing on one foot, what would you say is the message? And he'd say, "Love your neighbor as yourself," right? Is that what Hillel said?

• 31:04Speaker 01

  He said, "What is hateful to you, do not do to others. All the rest is commentary."

• 31:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  Right, so commentary, we can comment forever, and we do. I mean, that's what we do. But if you know that what is hateful to someone else should be hateful to yourself, or if you know that the person sitting across from you, you shouldn't hate, I feel like the commentary that we've been working on for the past couple thousand years hasn't produced the sort of interpersonal or political peace that we're all after. So I'm not asking you to solve the history of the world's problems here.

• 31:36Speaker 01

  No, but I mean, I do think that maybe one of the things we can start with is maybe the first conversation you have with your enemy is not the thing that is your biggest problem. Maybe actually you begin with something that is a little bit of a safer ground, or you just get to know each other as human beings, right? Sports is great.

• 31:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  Weather.

• 31:51Speaker 01

  But I mean, I think that part of the breakdown of what we see in America is that we've lost those third spaces where people who had ideological differences could actually meet. I look, social clubs, churches, synagogues, bowling groups. These were places where people across ideological difference would meet just as human beings. It's harder to demonize someone if you've actually just bowled together. Or if you, in my community, we have people across the spectrum. And when we pray together and sing together and serve meals to people who are homeless together, guess what? We don't have to talk about the hardest thing first. I just know you're a decent human being. Because we served a meal together to someone who was hungry. Now we could talk about the harder thing, where at least kind of start with a starting place, that you're a good person, that you want good things for people.

• 32:35Speaker 01

  And if I can start with that, then we can have a harder conversation. But people have decided already that, no, you're just a bad person.

• 32:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah. You know what I really like about you? I think you make people want to be better people.

• 32:48Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you.

• 32:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's a good thing. That was such a good conversation. Thank you for bringing your whole badass self to it. You are a badass, you just are.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 32:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  You really are. Thank you so much. Rabbi Angela Bookdahl, everybody.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 33:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  Remember, this interview comes from our new video talk show, Better in Person, which you can watch on the Freakonomics YouTube channel or on Apple Podcasts. Let us know what you think. Our email is [email protected]. We will be back soon with a regular episode of Freakonomics Radio. Until then, take care of yourself, and if you can, someone else, too.

• 33:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  Congratulations, that's really great. Sure. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Yeah, sure.

• 33:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh, me? It was a hair issue?

• 33:40Speaker 01

  Well, that's the adjustment.

• 33:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'm just gonna shave it. I'm going crew. Was that my wife? Ellen, was that you? That's a yes when you hear laughter from the other room.

• 34:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  Thanks again to ChatGPT for sponsoring today's episode of Better in Person. ChatGPT can help teams move from goals to real outcomes. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Download the new ChatGPT desktop app today.