5: Rabbi Wolpe - “So a Rabbi and an atheist walk into a podcast...”
| “So a Rabbi and an atheist walk into a podcast...” | |
| |
| Information | |
|---|---|
| Guest | Rabbi Wolpe |
| Length | 01:44:41 |
| Release Date | 31 August 2019 |
| YouTube Date | 18 September 2019 |
| Apple Podcasts | Listen |
| Links | |
| YouTube | Watch |
| Portal Blog | Read |
| All Episodes Episode Highlights | |
Beyond New Atheism: is a constructive adult relationship possible between atheism and religion?
On this episode of The Portal, Eric hosts leading conservative rabbi David Wolpe and explores the possibilities for, and problems with, a new synthesis of atheism and religion in our modern era that avoids special pleading. The two discuss what everyone might be getting wrong about the divide between religion and rationality by focusing on the existence or nonexistence of god(s). Eric starts off with a gambit by asking the Rabbi what the question of god's existence might be crowding out, and the conversation goes from there to unusual places (e.g. "Was Seinfeld secretly a course in Talmudic law with a laugh track?").
Participants[edit]
Eric Weinstein: Twitter, Youtube
Rabbi David Wolpe: Sinai Temple, Facebook, Twitter
Sponsors[edit]
Skillshare: https://www.skillshare.com/portal
ExpressVPN: https://www.expressvpn.com/portal
Netsuite: https://www.netsuite.com/portal
Transcript[edit]
00:00:09
Eric Weinstein: Welcome, you found The Portal. I'm your host, Eric Weinstein, and I'm here today with my guest, David Wolpe, who is the Rabbi of Sinai Temple here in Los Angeles. David is often thought to be one of the most influential rabbis currently in the United States, has been named so by Newsweek, and finds himself in various lists of important rabbis. Welcome to The Portal, David. Thank you.
00:00:33
Rabbi David Wolpe: Happy to be here.
00:00:35
Eric Weinstein: So you and I probably met in Belgrade, Serbia.
00:00:40
Rabbi David Wolpe: Yes, exactly.
00:00:41
Eric Weinstein: And we shared a bus ride, and that bus ride has been on my mind in a way that it probably hasn't been playing through your mind. But I wondered if we might begin this podcast by deciding that we would avoid certain well-worn tropes. I don't want to get into this "God exists or doesn't he."
00:01:01
Rabbi David Wolpe: Right.
00:01:03
Eric Weinstein: And the question that I want to begin with is, for our listeners who have been searching for some kind of spiritual outlet but are also frustrated with being very analytic, intellectual, and fact-oriented, what is that God-versus-no-God conversation crowding out that needs to be more present in the public dialogue?
00:01:27
Rabbi David Wolpe: That is a wonderful question. And I think that what the public dialogue really needs very desperately is how do you create community and interdependence that people take seriously and is lifelong in the absence of some particular kind of transcendent belief. And I think that that's the most valuable thing that religion gives its adherents. And it's even more valuable in some ways than personal meaning because you and I both know that religion used to think it had a monopoly on the possibility of personal meaning. But a lot of people live their lives without a religious sense and would not say that their lives are meaningless. But they do need community, and community, especially in such an atomized age and especially in modern America, is very hard to create and to find. And this transcendent, shared transcendent idea gives you community, but in that absence, I don't know how you construct it. But that doesn't mean there isn't a way; we need to learn how to do that. Or at least to start talking about it. And one of the things that I would hope is that people in religious communities and people outside of religious community could talk about that and how to do it without letting specific beliefs wreck the conversation.
00:03:05
Eric Weinstein: So this is always tricky for me because we have these various concepts to try to keep our religion and our scientific beliefs separate.
00:03:15
Rabbi David Wolpe: Right.
00:03:16
Eric Weinstein: We have questions about, should I abstract what was previously concrete so that it remains relevant in my current life? And there always feels to be a bit of a cheat in all of this, yet if we don't make these kinds of cheats or half-measures or accommodations, we find a very uncomfortable outcome, which is that most of these religions had their ancient texts written well before we had as much detail as we currently do about the scientific world. And we're happiest where they were abstract, and we're most troubled where they were concrete.
00:03:51
Rabbi David Wolpe: It's true. Look, there's a lot of passages in my own tradition that I explain exactly the way you do, which is this is the creation of an ancient culture. And there are things about it that we have grown beyond. And I don't have a problem saying that, although many of my co-religionists would hate the idea that a rabbi would say that, but I don't have a problem saying that. However, the result of adherence to things that I find objectionable, I find admirable. In other words, there are communities who believe things—let's forget Judaism for a minute, forget my own community—there are other communities that believe things that I think are objectively either untrue or just wild or even I can't imagine how someone could believe that, and yet they lead admirable lives and have admirable communities and have values that I think most of us would share; there may be add-ons that we wouldn't. But they managed to do that. And so the question is, is it possible to create responsible, interdependent communities without those kinds of beliefs? I don't think we've answered that question yet. But I think it's becoming more and more urgent.
00:05:23
Eric Weinstein: So I think we should just say something a little bit about our own intellectual backgrounds. Now, I think the last time we were together in Serbia, I let you know that I really identify as an atheist, and what's more, my family has somehow been atheistic for four or five generations, yet always with Jews marrying other Jews and keeping Jewish traditions going. And I shared with you a mystery in my life, which is that of all of the five or six rabbis that I've gotten to know well enough to ask the question, "Do you believe in the God of the Old Testament, as is literally talked about?" none of them—Reform, Conservative, or even Orthodox—believe that that character actually exists.
00:06:13
Rabbi David Wolpe: So there are at least two things to say, but I'll start with two. One is for those of your listeners who are Christian or who grew up with no belief but in a Christian—not in a Jewish—context, this may be a mystery that I can unravel: how someone could be a fifth-generation Jewish atheist. Because Judaism is not a religion. Christianity is a religion in the sense that if tomorrow I believe in Jesus, I'm Christian; if the day after I don't, I'm not. But tomorrow, if I say to you, "You know, Eric, all those things I said on the podcast, I don't believe any of them anymore," I'm still Jewish. And that's because Judaism is a category that doesn't exist in modern America. I would use the word tribe, but tribe has negative connotations today. So let me say, Jews are...
00:07:05
Eric Weinstein: On this podcast—
00:07:06
Rabbi David Wolpe: Not on this podcast?
00:07:07
Eric Weinstein: No, adaptive tribal behavior is normal. So we make a distinction between adaptive and maladaptive.
00:07:13
Rabbi David Wolpe: I'm going to say nonetheless, to avoid any misunderstanding, that it's a religious family. You're born into a family, and in the same way that you're born into Judaism. Unless you choose another family, you're part of that family. And so Jews have, for a long time, without leaving and going to another religion—at which point they're effectively written out of the Jewish—forget what Jewish law says—they're effectively written out of the Jewish community. They've said, "Look, I don't believe this, that, or the other thing," and they're still Jewish. So that's why Jewish atheist is not... In fact, I will tell you a story. Several years ago, I had to give, through someone that I knew—doesn't matter how I got there—I was supposed to give a blessing at Carl Reiner's 90th birthday party. So I get up, and I start to give a blessing, and somebody calls out from the audience, "Why is there a rabbi here? Ryan is an atheist." So he—
00:08:20
Eric Weinstein: Said Mel Brooks?
00:08:21
Rabbi David Wolpe: Now it could have been, but it wasn't actually. He runs up to the stage, stands next to me, and says, "I'm not an atheist. I'm a Jewish atheist, and that's different." And he's right, because there is a culture to it. Adherence to Christianity doesn't have that kind of comprehensive culture, which makes—and here are the advantages and disadvantages—it makes Christianity much more portable because you can keep your culture in every way. So you can go to the Congo, you can have a completely different culture, but if you believe in Jesus, my work here is done. But Judaism, especially because of Jewish law, has many more cultural implications. And therefore, the advantage of Christianity is that it's portable. The advantage of Judaism is that it's familial. So when the Soviet Union was persecuting Jews back in the '70s and '80s, they were persecuting Christians too. But there was no worldwide Christian movement to save Christians. But there was a worldwide Jewish movement to save Jews because there was that sense of familial connection.
00:09:27
Eric Weinstein: I've always wondered why we put up with Christian persecution.
00:09:30
Rabbi David Wolpe: Well, I think that part of the reason is because there isn't that "Oh my God, that's my brother or sister being persecuted" on the part of Christians. Whereas for Jews, there is this adaptive tribal behavior. So both systems have their strengths and weaknesses, but they are different.
00:09:51
Eric Weinstein: Well, and then there's the very weird aspect that I believe that, in large measure, what we are as Jews rides on a Christmas substrate. That if you think about Christianity as, like, one of our two main spin-offs,
00:10:08
Rabbi David Wolpe: Right, yeah.
00:10:09
Eric Weinstein: then American Judaism really, in some sense, benefits by riding on the substrate that its spin-off developed and being something of a counterweight but also showing some sort of relationship to that. Is that a fair—
00:10:24
Rabbi David Wolpe: I think that's perfectly fair, and I think that, look, Christianity gave to the world what Judaism and Islam could not. And I have an explanation for why that is: the invaluable gift—among many other things—I mean, I don't mean to restrict Christianity's cultural contributions to this, but among many other things, it gave the separation of church and state.
00:11:04
Eric Weinstein: And that's huge. And Jews couldn't have done it, and Muslims couldn't have done it. And the reason I believe this—my theory, but it sounds really sound—is Christianity arose in the Roman Empire. So civil law—
00:11:05
Rabbi David Wolpe: Literally,
00:11:06
Eric Weinstein: Yes,
00:11:06
Rabbi David Wolpe: "Render unto Caesar."
00:11:07
Eric Weinstein: Exactly, the civil law was taken care of. But if you're creating religion as Mohammed and Moses did in the desert, you need civil law and religious law alike. So Islam and Judaism didn't make that distinction between civil and religious law. Christianity had to because he grew up in Rome. And so that gift that has been given us has been given us by Christians.
00:11:33
Eric Weinstein: Well, and so you immediately get to a very dangerous and also very interesting area, which is the unbundling of a religion. So when you ask a question about what is a religion, and you say, well, it's a certain amount of it is faith, a certain amount of it has to do with technical explanations for the world around you, a certain amount of it has to do with law, and you can break that up into civil and criminal. Another thing that we were dancing around is that Judaism is effectively a breeding protocol. There's a very strange moment when you sign up for 23andMe, and you spit into the tube, and it gives you a result that tells you how Jewish you are.
00:12:14
Rabbi David Wolpe: I know.
00:12:15
Eric Weinstein: You know, I have Chinese friends who hold up their results that say, "Look, I'm 128th Jewish." Likewise for me, I was almost—I just didn't anticipate being told that I was plus 98% Jewish as part of my genetic information.
00:12:35
Rabbi David Wolpe: I know.
00:12:35
Eric Weinstein: Okay, so you start to bundle all of these things together. And then you have this very weird question. This goes back to a little bit of Sam Harris's struggle where he says not all religions are created equal. We have a very uncomfortable treatment of religion where we pretend not to unbundle them because we don't want to be judgmental.
00:12:56
Rabbi David Wolpe: Right.
00:12:56
Eric Weinstein: But you can qualitatively say this: this religion has a legal structure, this one doesn't.
00:13:02
Rabbi David Wolpe: Right.
00:13:02
Eric Weinstein: This legal structure is attenuated. In Judaism, the way that we get out of this law—I mean, let's be honest about some problems that we have—Deuteronomy says something like, if somebody says, "Worship ancestors that are not known to our fathers," set upon him with a stone.
00:13:22
Rabbi David Wolpe: Yeah, there are some harsh things in the Hebrew Bible.
00:13:24
Eric Weinstein: Well, right. And it's been very important. And I struggle with how to say this. I always find a biological analogy with regulated expression. There are certain portions of the Jewish code that it's important that we not run in modern times. It's not clear that that ever ran; so far as I know, the Jewish stonings of apostates—
00:13:46
Rabbi David Wolpe: Right.
00:13:47
Eric Weinstein: But the way we get out of it, as we say, as long as the temple isn't built, we can't convene the religious courts that would mete out the punishment, and therefore nobody's actually going to get prosecuted or something like that.
00:13:57
Rabbi David Wolpe: So, yeah. Well, when you say "we," not you and I, that's the way a very traditional understanding might get out of it. Some things, by the way, were already effectively eliminated by the rabbis of the Talmud.
00:14:15
Eric Weinstein: By an Oral Torah as well as a written Torah?
00:14:18
Rabbi David Wolpe: An Oral Torah as well as a written Torah.
00:14:19
Eric Weinstein: Can you say what an Oral Torah is because that might not be clear?
00:14:21
Rabbi David Wolpe: You can be a Jewish literalist, but you can't be a Jewish fundamentalist because a fundamentalist, by definition, thinks all the answers are in a plain reading of the text. And Judaism never believed in a plain reading of the text. It always said the Torah means—the Torah here being the Hebrew Bible—the Torah means what the rabbis say the Torah means, and sometimes their readings sound to us very forced, very creative, very open and expansive, sometimes restrictive, depending. But no rabbi will ever say, when you come to them, "Just go home, the answers are all in the Torah." It's in the tradition. So Judaism is an exegetical tradition, and therefore a lot of things over time get interpreted out of the tradition, and that's legitimate. That's not considered like, "How could you make that move? That's not okay." It's a legal tradition, and therefore things get changed along the way. Now, like any legal tradition, it has elastic boundaries, but they snap. Unlike rabbis who would call themselves on the right wing of Orthodoxy, what I would say is maternity is a snap with the tradition. And so there are things that I don't believe intellectually—honestly, I can say that the tradition endorses—but I nonetheless endorse them. And the best example that I can give is gay marriage. I know that some of my colleagues have tried to read gay marriage into the sources; I think it's forced beyond what you can actually legitimately try, no matter how acrobatic your exegetical skills. My answer is that we see the world differently, and we shouldn't deny that we see the world differently. And the question is, how do you create a modern Judaism that is authentically modern, not just that is in full fidelity to sources that, as you say, have to be unbundled?
00:16:33
Eric Weinstein: So, just because I've never actually uttered the word "exegetical," you want to talk about...
00:16:38
Rabbi David Wolpe: Exegetical is basically interpretive, so to do exegesis is to interpret the text. So I will give you an example. The Torah says that you should not do Mila ha on Shabbat, on the Sabbath, and then it never tells you what Mila ha is. So the rabbis had to decide what it is you're not allowed to do on the Sabbath, and they come up with all sorts of rules—doesn't matter how they get there. But the point is, no text is self-explanatory.
00:16:39
Eric Weinstein: Well, so this is one of the—geez, there's so many different ways to go from this point. One of the differences that I like to point to between religions has to do with claims in another spin-off, which is Islam, that the Quran is its own exegesis.
00:17:28
Rabbi David Wolpe: Right.
00:17:29
Eric Weinstein: And therefore, interpretation somehow pollutes the purity of the text. Now, there are different schools within Islam—I think four main schools of jurisprudence, or maybe there are more, I don't know. But is that a major difference between these two traditions?
00:17:46
Rabbi David Wolpe: I would say I don't want to pronounce on Islam. I would say to the extent that any tradition says that a text does not have to be interpreted, Judaism would take issue with that.
00:18:00
Eric Weinstein: That there is no way out of interpretation?
00:18:02
Rabbi David Wolpe: There is no way out of interpretation of any text. It doesn't matter how elaborate, how long,
00:18:08
Eric Weinstein: and how literal?
00:18:09
Rabbi David Wolpe: And how literal—no—because even the most literal text, I mean, the Ten Commandments, "Thou shalt not murder." What is murder? How can you say that's self-explanatory? It's not. I mean, murder is, you know...
00:18:27
Eric Weinstein: Right. So I guess, for me, one of the problems that I have traditionally had with, like, the Sam Harris school of interpretation—
00:18:35
Rabbi David Wolpe: Yes.
00:18:36
Eric Weinstein: is that there is a hidden assumption, which is that the literal interpretation of text, as if such a thing existed, holds pride of place.
00:18:46
Rabbi David Wolpe: Right.
00:18:46
Eric Weinstein: Because it is, in some sense, the minimally distant from the text. Therefore, one should interpret any organization by its texts with the minimal distortion from interpretation, whereas my belief is any structure—and in some ways, the U.S. plays this role with the Constitution being akin to our Written Torah and the rabbis being the Supreme Court, in that they constantly have to interpret the document—I find it very strange that we would be so caught up in the text of the document, given that we have to have ways of living with things that age.
00:19:33
Rabbi David Wolpe: Well, my argument, among many others, with Sam was always that if you're going to judge a religion, you have to judge it by how it's lived, not by the literal word in the text, because it's what a religion produces, as opposed to what it says, that matters. And therefore, if you want to have an argument about whether religion is good for the world based on what it produces, okay. If you want to have an argument about whether this or that verse is objectionable, don't think that you've actually scored any major points—at least to my way of thinking—against religion if you find objectionable verses. I can think of a lot of things, for example, that my parents said over the years that were objectionable; they were wonderful parents. So it depends whether you want to take a tradition at its best or at its worst. And I understand why, if you're arguing against it, it's advantageous to take it at its worst. But that's not the best way to argue against it.
00:20:40
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. I think that what I get out of it is that we have to look at ways of limiting the damage that comes from the explicit text that these religions have, in some sense, aged out of—or I would like to think that they had—that because the desire to return to something pure, and let's just call it the purification impulse where you say, you know, we have problems in the system, and the reason that we have problems is that we've strayed.
00:21:13
Rabbi David Wolpe: Yes.
00:21:13
Eric Weinstein: So let us go back to the actual literal words and try—try our best to implement them as literal computer code that is our obligation to compile.
00:21:26
Rabbi David Wolpe: I could not agree with you more. Lots of things came to mind as you said that, which is, among other things, that the word "revolution" has both meanings. It means to change everything. It also means to come around again in a circle. And what purists almost always discover is that human structures are much harder to overhaul than they suspected at the beginning. And also, I thought of a beautiful quote from William Stafford, who's a poet, about this danger. He said, "If you purify the pond, the water lilies die." And I always thought there are—you know, this was Burke's insight—human institutions grow for lots of reasons, and nobody has a comprehensive enough intellect to understand if you radically change them, what all the implications of that change will be. So you have to change carefully, not without contempt for everything that has come before you.
00:22:28
Eric Weinstein: Did you know Rabbi Ben-Zion Gold?
00:22:32
Rabbi David Wolpe: I knew him a little bit, yeah.
00:22:33
Eric Weinstein: He worshiped and studied in Boston. Yeah. So I tried to get married with Shlomo Sternberg, the mathematician in the Harvard Math Department, officiating, but because he was very Orthodox, he said, "I don't think I can do this. Let me send you to a friend." Ben-Zion Gold gave us the task of rewriting the marriage contract, the ketubah, and we rewrote it the first time, and he said, "What is this?" He says, "This is like a poem to each other. This is a marriage contract taken seriously." So we went back to the original text, and we tried to make the minimal number of distortions and said, "What, like, you're living thousands of years ago? This doesn't have any of the modernity." We tried then to do something that was contractual but honored modernity. He says, "Oh, now you've watered it down." I said, "Rabbi, this is the third time we've put a lot of work into this. And with all due respect, you're really pissing me off by not appreciating how difficult this task is." And he looked at me and said, "Well, it took you long enough." And I said, "What do you mean?" And he said, "Now you're coming to understand you wanted to get married in the Orthodox version of the religion because you, as an atheist, have no idea how this is done, and so you want to do it right." What he said to me then was, he said, "When you're part of a 5000-year tradition, you have to realize that there's no way of being Orthodox; you can't stay true to the text because times have changed too much. And that every single version of Judaism is a version of 'make your own Judaism' because that was the phrase I was using to make fun of the sort of Reform impulse." Do you think he was onto something?
00:24:17
Rabbi David Wolpe: Oh, I think there's no question about it in my mind. There was a beautiful essay many years ago by Gerson Cohen, who is a historian and was the chancellor of the seminary, called "The Blessings of Assimilation." And he says the rabbis say, "Why did the Jews deserve to be liberated from Egypt? Because they didn't change their names, they didn't change their dress, and they didn't change their language." And then Cohen starts to talk about actually what Jews did throughout history. He said, in terms of names, the names in the Bible like Moses and Aaron and Pincus and Hosni—they're all Egyptian names. They're actually not Jewish names or Hebrew names. He said, in terms of dress, Jews have dressed in every way that the cultures around them have dressed; Jews in Arab lands dressed like Arabs, Jews in European lands dressed like Europeans. He said, in terms of language, Jews have written literature in every language. The Talmud, which is the foundational work after the Bible in Judaism, wasn't written in Hebrew; it was written in Aramaic because they lived in Babylonia. And so, yes, I mean, there is no way to be—the only way to be true to the sources is to change. The question is how much change, and that's where the real nub of modern religion comes: how much can you change? And still, not only—
00:25:39
Eric Weinstein: Claim a continuity?
00:25:40
Rabbi David Wolpe: Yes, exactly. And also, how much can you change and still transmit it generation to generation? That's a question that the modern world has created. Can liberal religion transmit itself? And I don't think we've answered that question.
00:25:55
Eric Weinstein: Why? I think I'm very disappointed in the clergy and the rabbis. I have a crazy theory, and I want to know what you think of it, whether it's so cop—
00:26:07
Rabbi David Wolpe: I like crazy theories.
00:26:08
Eric Weinstein: It could be so commonly known that you think, "You think that's crazy? Everybody knows that." At some point, I became convinced that Seinfeld, the show, was one of the greatest innovations in modern Judaism. And my reasoning was that what it was actually was not Jewish humor played with ethnically ambiguous people, but it was actually Talmudic humor; it was legal humor. And each show, you know, there's this discussion of, like, "Is re-gifting ethical to re-gift?" So I picked one show at random, and I said, "I bet I can find whatever this topic is in the Talmud." And I picked the show where there's an argument about double-dipping a chip into some salsa because, after you take a bite, you've touched it with your mouth, and now you're dipping it again. Sure enough, I go to the Talmud; there's two rabbis eating hummus, one with a leaf and the other with his hands. And the guy who's using the leaf as an implement says, "Tell me, Rabbi, when are you going to stop feeding me your saliva?" you know, like, and the other guy says, "Oh, tell me, Rabbi Akiva"—whatever his name was—"when are you going to stop feeding me your filth?"
00:27:26
Rabbi David Wolpe: With the leaf?
00:27:28
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. And this interchange proved to me that what was really going on was we were mining the more difficult parts of Judaism and figuring out a way of making this commercially viable to get into mainstream distribution channels. When the rabbis didn't pick up on how effective this is for exploring the ancient text that nobody has time for anymore, I thought it was an amazing missed opportunity. Where are you guys? Why are you not making technology in these new distribution channels?
00:28:12
Rabbi David Wolpe: Why are we not using the media in particular? Or why aren't we giving more sermons about Seinfeld?
00:28:16
Eric Weinstein: Why aren't you figuring out how to use mass culture as the substrate for transmitting the stuff that is—I mean, what's special about Judaism is lost when you don't have time for it, right? And I always get irritated when I go to shul, and they say—like, if particularly Reform synagogues—they say, "We Jews do this for this reason," what they're really saying is, "You’ve forgotten what it means to be Jewish because you don't have enough time. So let me remind you what we once did when this was a focus in your life."
00:28:21
Rabbi David Wolpe: Yes.
00:28:43
Eric Weinstein: You guys are not making effective use of mass media to do cutting-edge.
00:28:57
Rabbi David Wolpe: You may well be right. That's why I'm on the podcast, trying to make effective use of mass media.
00:29:03
Eric Weinstein: Come back when we're bigger.
00:29:04
Rabbi David Wolpe: Right? Exactly. As often as you want. It's very hard.
00:29:11
Eric Weinstein: Are you serious about that? Because I would love to do a Seinfeld episode with you to get this ball rolling. So—
00:29:18
Rabbi David Wolpe: Absolutely.
00:29:19
Eric Weinstein: All right, we'll do one—
00:29:19
Rabbi David Wolpe: I'm on board. All right, um, it's really hard to grab people's attention for serious. I mean, some people in my congregation will do serious study. Some of them will relate to Jewish events or whatever. But yes, it is difficult. Once you've taken away the idea that all of this is a system that God insists that you do, to bring a counter-cultural religious tradition to people and to have them invest in it takes a lot of work. And I'm perfectly willing to say that part of it is rabbinic failure, but I also think there's a huge social and cultural tide that we're trying to swim against. Well?
00:30:09
Eric Weinstein: This gets into a very weird topic, but you'd be the right guy to talk about it with. There are ways in which the absence of overt religious bigotry has, in my opinion, attenuated at least our group, that somehow the concept of the Tiger Mom is now much more of an Asian concept than it is a Jewish concept. But 50 years ago, you had parents pushing their kids really hard to achieve. And under the surface was always this issue: if you don't, if you're not 50% better at least than your competition because of your name, because of your background, you're going to suffer.
00:30:58
Rabbi David Wolpe: Yes.
00:30:59
Eric Weinstein: Now that we've gotten rid of that, I have the sense that we really don't have that same vitality.
00:31:05
Rabbi David Wolpe: Well, it's partly a general cultural thing. You know, I don't know how many years ago Philip Rieff wrote about the triumph of the therapeutic. Now parents—many parents—don't feel that they should push their kids, you know, they should—that idea of a parent, that ideal of a parent that's somebody who pushes their child, I think is frowned on in culture generally. That's one thing. The second is that there are dangers to acceptance, as you pointed out, as there are dangers to non-acceptance. And while I would not—never say—and I think people say this, but if they thought about it more carefully, I think they wouldn't—I would never say that Judaism has survived because of persecution because they're forgetting all those other people that were persecuted and disappeared to history. So it's not that we're here because we were persecuted. We would be many, many more had we not been persecuted. There is something about feeling the pressure of "you have to prove yourself because you are a member of this or that group" that does absolutely contribute to a drive to excellence. I think there's no question about that. And Jews don't feel that the way they once did. But I think that it's part of a larger complex of how much Jews feel themselves part of an identifiable group that they take pride in and love. So this is—in Hebrew, there's a concept called "avot Israel," which means love of your people. And that, generally, is in the world that, for example, my daughter grows up in; that's frowned upon, the idea that you should love your people. That's thought of as negative; you should love all people and no people specially, and that's to the detriment, I think, of any minority keeping its—
00:32:58
Eric Weinstein: I don't actually get this. So my sense is that you don't get this either. And maybe that would be something we could explore. So let me give you my version of this, and—
00:33:06
Rabbi David Wolpe: Please.
00:33:07
Eric Weinstein: you give me my grade on a report card. If you love multiculturalism, you have to understand that multiculturalism is built on culturalism.
00:33:18
Rabbi David Wolpe: Yes.
00:33:18
Eric Weinstein: And culturalism is built on exclusion with some amount of permeability. So what I always hear when somebody says multiculturalism is painting with a lot of distinct pigments, and what has come to be the meaning of multiculturalism is, "Let's mix all the paint together and get the most beautiful rainbow paint possible." And, in fact, it doesn't look anything like rainbow paint once you do this. And then, in part, we are responsible for caring about our own culture so that there is something special to bring to the potluck, and what concerns me is when I see somebody who's going abroad as, let's say, an American, and they're, like, trying to be infinitely open to everything, I always think of that as being very selfish, which is you're not bringing what people want, which is your American background. I mean, I travel with a harmonica. I play American music on it. And it's not because I'm not fascinated by the other cultures; I actually do this because that's my—that's my legitimate introduction to say, "I came with something that you're interested in, and I really want to find out about, you know, what's going on with Ganesh or whatever." Am I off?
00:34:39
Rabbi David Wolpe: No, I think that that's—I mean, I would put that on a banner. I think that that's so incredibly important. What Jonathan Sacks—Rabbi Sacks—calls the dignity of difference, which was the title of one of his books. I think that all these cultures rise or fall on that if you don't believe that your culture doesn't have to be better. That's why I always say when people ask me about Judaism, I always tell them, "I'm—it's not my job to argue its superiority. It's my job to argue its excellence." If you don't think that your culture is excellent and has things that everyone could learn from, then I think, first of all, I think that that's sad. But also, I think then you're left with this indistinguishable stew, as you said, that loses what is unique about all these cultures. So, yes, I believe, however, that what multiculturalism has also become is "only these cultures have the right to be heard," and "those cultures don't as much because, historically, those cultures have been heard more than mine." And so there is that also to contend with because it is true that some cultures have been heard far more than others.
00:35:58
Eric Weinstein: We are a noisy culture.
00:36:00
Rabbi David Wolpe: Yes, and we are a noisy culture. There's no question about that.
00:36:03
Eric Weinstein: No question about—
00:36:03
Rabbi David Wolpe: As my friend Joseph Epstein says, "Jews don't listen; they wait." I thought that was—I know.
00:36:11
Eric Weinstein: That hurts.
00:36:13
Rabbi David Wolpe: Yes, we're very verbal as a culture, no question about it. But I also think we are part of the constituent creators of Western civilization, and we have something to say.
00:36:26
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is one of the—I do feel that one of the ways we get into trouble as a culture is that we are seen as an impurity. And going back to this question about what some cultures do well, some cultures do poorly—like, for example, I would say that Jewish food, not our—
00:36:44
Rabbi David Wolpe: Not our strongest.
00:36:45
Eric Weinstein: Not our strongest.
00:36:46
Rabbi David Wolpe: We're not French.
00:36:47
Eric Weinstein: Right.
00:36:47
Rabbi David Wolpe: That's true.
00:36:50
Eric Weinstein: We have this tradition in our family where we put two drops of water into the wine, into the kiddush cup of wine, for the Friday night Sabbath meal. And there was always a question of why this ritual. What I always liked about it was we have an impulse towards purity that is—must be gotten rid of, in my opinion—because life is impure, and if you start to try to purify yourself overly much, like in an OCD kind of a way, you end up tearing at your own flesh, and you do real damage. Learning that a certain amount of impurity has a strengthening effect is something that I associate with that ritual. And I was curious if you have feelings about teachings like that, that we need to export. Is that an important teaching from our tradition?
00:37:44
Rabbi David Wolpe: I think that it is. I mean, you can make biological analogies to that, too, about diversity.
00:37:51
Eric Weinstein: Hybrid vigor.
00:37:52
Rabbi David Wolpe: Right, exactly. I also understand that—let's change the language of purity for a second. I hope that this still captures what you mean. Fanaticism of all varieties carries danger. I don't want to say is automatically dangerous.
00:38:15
Eric Weinstein: No, you stated it perfectly: "carries danger."
00:38:17
Rabbi David Wolpe: Because I remember like this: there's a wonderful story about Isaac Stern, the violinist who, after a concert, a woman came up to him and said, "I would do anything to play like you would." And he said, "Oh, really? Would you practice 20 years, 12 hours a day to play like I would? Because that's what I did." Like, the world does depend on certain kinds of fanaticism. People who are exceptional athletes and exceptional scholars and exceptional musicians—many of them have a single-minded devotion. So I wouldn't want to say, "Let's wipe out all extremism." But culturally, it's tremendously dangerous. So—
00:38:53
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. So let me ask you: assume that I don't have the time budget—
00:39:03
Rabbi David Wolpe: Right.
00:39:04
Eric Weinstein: and I don't have the belief budget needed to sustain an older version of my culture and my tradition because one of the things that I want to talk about here is that I'm using religion, in part, to stand in for the need to stand up for our traditions, to maintain them.
00:39:21
Rabbi David Wolpe: Yes.
00:39:22
Eric Weinstein: But not to become sort of jingoistic about it. So assume that I don't have the same budget, and I'm also living in a very multicultural world. What guidance can you give me for the maintenance of a complicated, beautiful, intricate tradition that needs—that has historically needed more time and belief than I can afford?
00:39:44
Rabbi David Wolpe: So what I want to start off with—and I don't know how much time this takes—is that the indispensable quality to maintain any tradition is knowledge. You have to know something about it. And honestly, knowledge is more easily available now than it ever was about anything. So I think that if you care about a tradition, at least you ought to be able to educate yourself to the basics of it. And having done that, then you can, I think—like with everything else—you can give it a piece of your time and attention that is serious and devoted. Because, unlike—focused attention is our greatest resource. And if you can give the tradition a little bit of that, so I tell people all the time, you know, if you say a blessing before you eat, that's a very powerful thing. And if you make sure you always do that, that becomes part of your life and part of your ability to stop and think before you put something in your mouth about your place in the universe, your gratitude that it's there—all those kinds of things. So there are little things that you can do.
00:41:01
Eric Weinstein: But an even more powerful version of that, for me, is the Shehecheyanu.
00:41:06
Rabbi David Wolpe: Right.
00:41:07
Eric Weinstein: Do you want to say a little bit about how that functions in our tradition?
00:41:10
Rabbi David Wolpe: The Shehecheyanu is a prayer that you say when something is new or unprecedented or a special moment.
00:41:16
Eric Weinstein: Or the first time in the yearly cycle?
00:41:17
Rabbi David Wolpe: In your life, the first time in the yearly cycle that you eat a fruit or wear a garment or any of those sorts of things, and it's an expression of what it is: it thanks—thanks God for sustaining you and allowing you to reach that moment. And I think expressions of gratitude are something that religion does very well.
00:41:37
Eric Weinstein: But the reason I pick that is that you—we, in our tradition—set a bit in our brain that says, "If I'm doing something for the first time in the yearly cycle, make a note of it," or—and what I find is that if I were to do that without thanking God at all for this, that would be a tremendous service to remembering, like, beginner's mindset or "I've made it through another cycle" or "how sweet is a pomegranate?"
00:42:08
Rabbi David Wolpe: Yes.
00:42:10
Eric Weinstein: Can we export this stuff?
00:42:11
Rabbi David Wolpe: So, well, this goes back to the very beginning of the podcast, which is: can you sustain these kinds of rituals and awarenesses without the belief on which they—with which they were created? That is, can you say the Shehecheyanu if you don't believe that you're thanking God?
00:42:34
Eric Weinstein: I do.
00:42:34
Rabbi David Wolpe: And I—yeah, okay. So maybe that is possible; maybe it is possible to create a ritual structure that is not theistic. I suppose that people do that with things like yoga and meditation. But in a Jewish way, is it possible to do that? Now, there have been secular humanist versions of Judaism, but I don't think that they've caught on.
00:42:57
Eric Weinstein: Well, I don't think they work. I mean, my family came a bit from this tradition of the Workmen's Circle, which is to try to take social justice and labor and make that the replacement for God, which is kind of a weird idea.
00:43:11
Rabbi David Wolpe: Yes, it is.
00:43:13
Eric Weinstein: But I guess the way I look at it is I don't think there's anything weird about going to a movie that is not literally true. Like, people talk about Star Wars all the time.
00:43:26
Rabbi David Wolpe: Yes.
00:43:27
Eric Weinstein: Presumably, they know that there is no Yoda.
00:43:30
Rabbi David Wolpe: Well, I think of—I don't remember what scholar of myth gave this definition—but I think of some of the things in the Bible, like the story of Adam and Eve, the way this scholar defined myth. He said a myth is something that is not factual but is always true. And I think there's a lot in religion that is not factual but is always true.
00:43:52
Eric Weinstein: So let's talk about the belief part of this. Why does belief animate this?
00:43:59
Rabbi David Wolpe: Because the sense that you're doing something that is either commanded by—or if you want to originate it below rather than above—or aligns you with the creator of the universe is much more powerful than the belief that "I'm doing this because it helps my self-awareness."
00:44:19
Eric Weinstein: I'll tell you the part of it that I think we really get wrong, and this is a point of view that maybe I'll be scolded for. We have this concept in Judaism of intergenerational transfer.
00:44:35
Rabbi David Wolpe: Yes.
00:44:36
Eric Weinstein: And we explicitly call it out, and we say, "l'dor vador," from generation to generation. My belief is that it is irrational to be perfectly atheistic for the following reason: it may be somatically rational—that is, most of the body's cells in our body are going to die. They have no infinite future. In fact, if they start to think they have an infinite future, we call it cancer.
00:45:02
Rabbi David Wolpe: Right.
00:45:04
Eric Weinstein: The only exception to that is our germline, our eggs, and what creates our sperm. And these things have an immortality plan. They can pass from generation to generation and carry the information. My belief about religion is that it solves a very important problem, which is, in biology, for every other species, soma and germ are tied together. That is, if I'm thirsty, I know that I need to get water. But thirst is a proximate; the ultimate is staving off dehydration. Yeah. The great danger in human beings is that hunger and starvation or arousal and reproduction—you can disconnect all of these things, and then soma starts to take over, and it says, "Maybe the purpose of life is to be happy," and every time I hear somebody say the purpose of life is to be happy, something important in me struggles because I hate—I just—it's like I'm dying inside; I really feel terrible about it. This idea of caring about intergenerational transfer is the basis of a society. There's no way one generation could build this.
00:46:18
Rabbi David Wolpe: Right.
00:46:19
Eric Weinstein: And this is what religion stops us from doing. It stops us from thinking that the purpose of life is to be happy. It connects us to intergenerational purpose. And so, rather than just thinking about myself somatically, I think about being part of a lineage and a history that goes on after my death. There's nothing that stops me from waking up and saying, "Wait, if the purpose of life is to be happy, you know, maybe I'm Jonas Salk, but maybe I'm Jeffrey Dahmer; I could be anything that makes me happy." This is a way of making sure that doesn't happen—that soma doesn't betray germ. Is that really the, like—
00:46:59
Rabbi David Wolpe: I think that's—well, I would say the idea that religion’s obligation is intergenerational, to pass generations and future generations, is true and powerful, and the way you described it is beautiful. The one—I don’t want to say caveat—the one addition is that you also have a vertical as well as a horizontal responsibility, that is to transcendence. To, I would say, your soul beyond your cell line—that part of the purpose of life is to grow in soul—that there is something that you, as an individual, you have a responsibility to lead a certain kind of life because your life is a gift. And that's a responsibility to other human beings, but it’s also just a responsibility by virtue of the fact that you've been given this life to live. So—
00:47:59
Eric Weinstein: From whom?
00:48:00
Rabbi David Wolpe: Well, I would say from God.
00:48:02
Eric Weinstein: But I would say you're cheating.
00:48:05
Rabbi David Wolpe: What if I'm right? Am I still cheating?
00:48:08
Eric Weinstein: Well, no, I just—well, look, I'm happy to get into my own theories about God. But my point is to be able to work with multiple assumptions.
00:48:21
Rabbi David Wolpe: Without—if you bracket that assumption—then yes, I would say what religion does—I had talked also about creating community—
00:48:28
Eric Weinstein: Right.
00:48:28
Rabbi David Wolpe: that is creating community with—but it also creates community with the past and with the future. You know, look, this is a wonderful line of Chesterton's. He said, "Tradition is the democracy of the dead," that if everybody who ever lived got to vote, they would vote for tradition. And you're expressing that in a different way. That is that we owe a responsibility to all the generations preceding us and also to transmit to the generations following us as if we're taking and handing the baton because we don't see ourselves as an isolated creation. Instead, as you said, we're part of a chain.
00:49:06
Eric Weinstein: Well, so let me go a little bit further with this. My claim is that, just as Chomsky has said that we may have a pre-existing sort of capacity for grammar that allows language, this is a facility that we are given with birth as virtue of being human. I would claim that there's something like a Chomsky pre-grammar of religious belief that no matter how atheistic we make claim to be, I mean, there was one time that—two times I prayed to God, one I don't discuss, but the other when my wife was pregnant with our first child—I found myself praying to God that my child would inherit my learning disabilities because I did not think I would be able to relate to my own child, and because I actually believe that all of those disabilities are the most profound genetic gift that I was given. But it was a gift in disguise.
00:50:10
Rabbi David Wolpe: Right.
00:50:11
Eric Weinstein: And I said, "Why am I praying to something I don't believe in?" you know, and this is another version of "there are no atheists in the foxholes." Do I carry, in your opinion, a biological predisposition towards religious thought?
00:50:29
Rabbi David Wolpe: So I think that that is very likely. I think that's what—and by the way, people have different gifts, in the sense that there are Mozarts of religious predisposition; they have never doubted God, they feel God constantly, fully, and then there are others who have less of a predisposition. So I would say yes. I also think, by the way, that your idea that your disability is your gift is a profoundly religious idea. There's a beautiful poem from—I think it's God—it talks about God and to sharpen sudden on some prayers. It's a gauntlet with a gift in it. And I want to say Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but I don't think it's Barrett Browning; somebody in your audience will Google it and know. And that notion that the challenges that you have are things that are given to you in order to climb higher—I think that that also is—I don't know if it's an inbuilt religious notion, but I think, in some ways, it probably is because people often recur to that when something bad happens, that "I'm going to find a way," you know. I—one of my books was called "Making Loss Matter," the same thing. It's not—I wouldn't choose this, but having been given this, now I have to figure out how to use it to climb higher than I would have had I not been given this disability. So yes, I think that—I think that it is—let me put it this way: I think that your theory has a better chance of being right than Chomsky's. That is, it's more likely that we have a natural religious inclination than that we have a...
00:51:54
Eric Weinstein: ...aren't chosen for other kinds of missions and things in the world. And he laughed, and he said, "Yes, the Tibetans think we're chosen too." And so the other part of this is, I think every people has this sense that they're special. But that's a good thing. That's not a bad thing.
00:56:18
Eric Weinstein: I was just talking with a Black acquaintance—comedian—over at the Comedy Store who said hi to me in a bar, and he was talking about struggling with being Black and the crime and some of the negative parts of the tradition. And I was able to say, "Do you realize that I've always been in awe of your community?" And then I went through with some detail because I've actually been fascinated by the idea of—you know, partially because our own tradition focuses so much on slavery, then Blacks embrace the Jewish idea of Moses in the whole Exodus. And so I started going into Black intellectual achievement. And I think there's something about being curated by somebody outside of yourself. It's why we valued de Tocqueville as a common commentator on the American scene. We need to be seen by others and not just promoting ourselves.
00:57:20
Rabbi David Wolpe: Right, I think that that's exactly right.
00:57:22
Eric Weinstein: So one of the things I wanted to talk about is the loss of insularity. And one of my most dangerous theories, which is the first shiksa effect. Okay?
00:57:35
Rabbi David Wolpe: Yeah.
00:57:35
Eric Weinstein: So I want to tell two jokes.
00:57:37
Rabbi David Wolpe: Okay.
00:57:37
Eric Weinstein: One—the Jews—so these are internal Jewish—one is negative against the Jews, one is positive for the Jews.
00:57:43
Rabbi David Wolpe: Okay.
00:57:44
Eric Weinstein: Okay. So one joke is, "Why did God create the goyim, that is, the non-Jews?"
00:57:52
Rabbi David Wolpe: Because...
00:57:53
Eric Weinstein: "Somebody had to pay retail." Oh, come on, you know that; you're pretending that you don't.
00:57:57
Rabbi David Wolpe: Alright.
00:57:58
Eric Weinstein: The other joke is, "What's the only problem with Jewish cooking? 72 hours later, you're hungry again." Right? So, in the first case, the idea is we're the smart guys; we'll always pay wholesale, right? As we know somebody, we know how to get.
00:58:10
Rabbi David Wolpe: Well, there's also an antisemitic trope about Jews and money buried in that joke.
00:58:14
Eric Weinstein: Yep.
00:58:14
Rabbi David Wolpe: Yeah.
00:58:16
Eric Weinstein: Right, and then the other one, you know, points out that our food is too heavy because we always were worried that we had nutritional issues, and you might as well get as much fat in people because you never know if your next meal is going to be interrupted. Now, the first shiksa effect has to do with the first time an insular group is visited by somebody bringing in somebody from outside, and so all of the very potent knowledge—and this could be the Parsis in India, it could be the Mafia, it could be the Freemasons—that the danger of internally held knowledge suddenly having some sort of a periscope in starts to attenuate. And so, for example, my wife's family were Jews of Calcutta. I think the first time there was an intermarriage, the parent says, "I'm going to sit shiva; that is, I'm going to treat this child as if she's dead to me." But very quickly that erodes because it's the second person to come into a family or the third doesn't have the same effect. Because all of that hyper-insular stuff gets lost almost instantly. And I think there's both something super positive about that because the insularity causes a kind of danger towards jingoism.
00:59:46
Rabbi David Wolpe: Right.
00:59:46
Eric Weinstein: But there's also something sad about that, which is that some of that was the most powerful knowledge that the community possessed. Any thoughts?
00:59:53
Rabbi David Wolpe: This is an eternal struggle, and I'm not sure that it is a reconcilable struggle between the integrity and depth of a community that knows each other, relies on each other, cares about each other, and can transmit for generations to generations and the community that, at the same time, carries that virus of insularity, of superiority, you know, all that stuff. I mean, I think sometimes when I talk to students about this exact thing—I don't use the first shiksa as an example—but I talk about when I tell them that it has to do all with Crest toothpaste when I was a kid.
01:00:45
Eric Weinstein: Wait, wait, wait, what?
01:00:46
Rabbi David Wolpe: I'll tell you. Okay, my mother told us that Crest was the best toothpaste, and when I used to go to other kids' houses, and they would use, like, Colgate or one of the really unserious toothpastes—
01:00:59
Eric Weinstein: I have the same—
01:01:00
Rabbi David Wolpe: Like Pepsodent.
01:01:01
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:01:01
Rabbi David Wolpe: I would think, "What's the matter with these people? Don't they know?"
01:01:04
Eric Weinstein: Aquafresh—don't get me started.
01:01:05
Rabbi David Wolpe: Aquafresh, oh my God. But with a little green strip—but the day that I realized—
01:01:12
Eric Weinstein: There goes my endorsement.
01:01:13
Rabbi David Wolpe: And I almost remember it—that you could use Tom's toothpaste or whatever, and you could be as smart and as caring and as intelligent and as learned as my parents, something changed about my world forever.
01:01:28
Eric Weinstein: With Crest toothpaste?
01:01:29
Rabbi David Wolpe: With Crest toothpaste, because as soon as you know that, actually, everything I do is not the only way to do it or the only right way to do it, it opens up the possibility that everything you know is wrong. And all of modern culture is this balance between what do I know that's really right and worth preserving and what have I learned from all these other wonderful people and cultures and exposure and so on that should change, and it's for anybody who cares about tradition, it is a constant daily dilemma that doesn't have any clear resolution.
01:02:03
Eric Weinstein: I felt this way with—who was it?—Allan Sherman and Tom Lehrer.
01:02:10
Rabbi David Wolpe: Right.
01:02:10
Eric Weinstein: Allan Sherman, eh. Tom Lehrer was really important to me. I mean, those songs and the lyrics and the cleverness.
01:02:18
Rabbi David Wolpe: I loved Allan Sherman too, but okay.
01:02:21
Eric Weinstein: Oh, really?
01:02:20
Rabbi David Wolpe: Yeah, I did.
01:02:21
Eric Weinstein: Well, I was with you on Crest, and—
01:02:23
Rabbi David Wolpe: Yeah.
01:02:24
Eric Weinstein: Well, when I first went to India, I think I was 19 or 20. And it was a profound experience. And my first introduction—I actually was going through Karachi—and I asked—I had to use the restroom, and I got shown to a room that had no resemblance to a restroom that I understood; there was no toilet, there was no paper, and I progressively—and then went to Bombay—I realized I didn't know how to eat with my fingers properly. I didn't know any of the customs. I realized I was being sent back to infanthood.
01:03:00
Rabbi David Wolpe: Right.
01:03:01
Eric Weinstein: And that the experience that you could do everything differently was a shock.
01:03:08
Rabbi David Wolpe: Yeah, it is a shock. And that people are as happy as—you know—kind as everything that this—I mean, that's one of the advantages of the modern world, the post-imperialist world that is really important—is that the automatic assumption of the superiority of a culture can no longer be maintained the way that it was unthinkingly even 50 years ago, you know, and that's a good thing.
01:03:41
Eric Weinstein: Well, it is a good thing, but it's also not a good thing.
01:03:43
Rabbi David Wolpe: But it's also a problematic thing.
01:03:44
Eric Weinstein: So can we talk about this from our perspective? Because one of the things that's driving me crazy—yeah—at the moment, 2019, is self-hating Jews have been a thing. It's a very tough road to hoe if you're Jewish, and there's always this temptation to turn on the group.
01:04:06
Rabbi David Wolpe: Yes.
01:04:06
Eric Weinstein: I am seeing that same thing become self-hating Christians, self-hating Americans, self-hating Europe.
01:04:13
Rabbi David Wolpe: No question about it.
01:04:14
Eric Weinstein: And no one can figure out how to say, "You know what, I'm not necessarily against anybody else, but this culture is my responsibility." And it would be a little bit weird if Italians didn't think Italian food was amazing.
01:04:30
Rabbi David Wolpe: Yes, I think that we have to learn how to use the "but" without invalidating everything that came before it, by which I mean you have to be able to say, "Western civilization has done"—but Europe, America—"so terrible things, cruel things, unspeakable things, violence, and all sorts of ways." But it also gave the world its greatest benefits, its greatest blessings. The end of slavery happened in Western civilization, not in Eastern civilizations—on and on and on and on. And you have to be able to mean both. The problem is that everybody seems to align on one side of the "but" or on the other—that is, they're either entirely devoted to the critique, or they're entirely devoted to the boosterism—and you have to be able to hold both ends of the pole. You have to be able to say, "Look, America does horrible things sometimes, and that's real, but on the other hand, look at what America brings to the world and has brought to the world."
01:05:33
Eric Weinstein: But where did this polarization come from? I mean, like, all we do is we struggle, and we weigh things, and then it's so—I'm about to swear, and I'm going to stop myself—and it's so simplistic.
01:05:46
Rabbi David Wolpe: Yes, we do not live in the age of nuance. We live in, you know, the age of Twitter debate.
01:05:56
Eric Weinstein: I'm going to disagree with this.
01:05:57
Rabbi David Wolpe: Okay.
01:05:57
Eric Weinstein: I think we do live in the age of nuance. It's not—it's not that—it's the structures that used to support nuance, where you could trust that that structure could hold a perimeter, have broken down. So, for example, I used to read The Economist for nuance.
01:06:18
Rabbi David Wolpe: Right.
01:06:18
Eric Weinstein: Institutionally, it seems to be under fire. Now humans that used to work for The Economist are, you know, sipping their cognac, saying, "Wow, this is really gone to hell in a handbasket." But it's the institutional pressures; the pressures on institutions are different from the pressures on the autonomous individual if you're lucky enough.
01:06:39
Rabbi David Wolpe: Right.
01:06:40
Eric Weinstein: To have your own source of income or to have your own wealth—and you don't have to primarily work through things that are, you know, incorporated in some sense—you can have nuance. It's now the sense-making channels, and I'm going to specifically single out, like, the news organs, the political parties, the universities that have seen this unbelievable crashing and burning, going from problematic institutions that probably had bigotries and prejudices and biases to lost—I mean, just embarrassingly lost structures that can't remember why they exist. They realize that they're unfair. I feel like they're monks wearing hair shirts, flagellating themselves for their imperfections.
01:07:31
Rabbi David Wolpe: Well, I think that part of that—and this would be no surprise to you—is in the age of instant response, people are gun-shy about straying from the orthodoxy of their team. Because it's one thing if you're going to write an article and you're going to get some letters and some people will be upset, but it's another thing if you're going to get slammed on Twitter and in social media, and people are going to write Facebook posts about you—you get scared.
01:08:02
Eric Weinstein: Okay, but let's—
01:08:03
Rabbi David Wolpe: And therefore, people don't venture out of their circle. And so, if you're on one side of the divide, you don't say anything nice about the people on the other side of the divide.
01:08:13
Eric Weinstein: You—but let's talk about what's really one of our best features as a culture, which is the courage to stand alone.
01:08:20
Rabbi David Wolpe: Yeah.
01:08:21
Eric Weinstein: Now, one of the weird things—and so I just came from San Francisco where I was at The Kitchen, which is a congregation of kind of experimental Judaism—and one of the things that I love in Judaism is when you're in the standing prayer, you take your time to say your standing prayer, and you don't necessarily sit down all at once. Yeah, so you've always got some people who take longer than everybody else who are just standing—literally standing alone.
01:08:51
Rabbi David Wolpe: Yep.
01:08:51
Eric Weinstein: And I always thought, "What a great aspect to have this be normal—to stand alone." Now, I bring that up because I was thinking recently about the weird fact that I know all of the names of the senators who opposed the Patriot Act in the wake of 9/11. Right? Because they're all named Feingold. Russ Feingold was the only guy to vote against the Patriot Act when it was passed because the country was in a fever to do something to take away people's rights. And one guy said no, right? I don't remember anybody's name on the other side of that vote. Right. There's something about standing alone, which is—I think—speaks to our best impulses.
01:09:40
Rabbi David Wolpe: Yes, I mean, I certainly understand that the indispensable quality to lead a good life is courage. And that courage is hard. And you see it on display every single day when, in Twitter—which is a universe that you and I both inhabit—and Facebook and other places, the—
01:10:09
Eric Weinstein: I should warn you, apparently, I suck, I'm an idiot, and I totally don't get it.
01:10:12
Rabbi David Wolpe: Exactly, there you go. To say something that is against the orthodoxy of the side that you have up to then identified with—
01:10:21
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
01:10:22
Rabbi David Wolpe: is—I'm, you know—I probably, like you, get attacked from the left and the right. And I have people all the time who tell me that I'm clearly a conservative, and other people tell me that I'm clearly a liberal because, actually, I vary, and my reaction is different, right? Like the different things—so it's very—but it's very hard. It's really very hard. And I remember—after the same-sex marriage thing—I remember saying to my daughter something really wonderful that Churchill said after the Boer War. He said, "It's exhilarating to be shot at without result," which I thought was great. And I said, "You see all these people who were angry at me, and all of them wrote bad things about me or said bad things about me—"
01:11:11
Eric Weinstein: Because you came out for—
01:11:12
Rabbi David Wolpe: Because I came out for same-sex marriage. And I said I would start to do same-sex marriages, and a lot of members of my congregation and elsewhere—they were—it was such a big controversy. It was literally on the front page of The New York and the LA Times—that's how big a deal it was. There were a lot of attacks, and some of them were very vicious, as you can imagine. But I wanted her to see that it was okay to say things that people—I said, "The people who love me still love me, and the people who hate me still hate me. And some of them may be moved into one category or the other. But in the end, you know, it's not the—"
01:11:48
Eric Weinstein: How fast is this normalized? I remember—I remember that it was—
01:11:52
Rabbi David Wolpe: It took a while.
01:11:53
Eric Weinstein: I think, to be honest—
01:11:54
Rabbi David Wolpe: Oh, you're talking about gay marriage.
01:11:55
Eric Weinstein: Well, I'm—
01:11:56
Rabbi David Wolpe: Incredibly fast.
01:11:57
Eric Weinstein: I don't even call it gay marriage.
01:11:58
Rabbi David Wolpe: Or whatever it is.
01:11:59
Eric Weinstein: Whatever it is, but like—
01:12:01
Rabbi David Wolpe: The fastest I've ever seen.
01:12:02
Eric Weinstein: Six years ago, I heard a man say the word "husband" for the first time about his partner. And I thought, "Oh, I didn't know how that resolved. How would the words even be assigned?"
01:12:12
Rabbi David Wolpe: Right.
01:12:13
Eric Weinstein: Now it's the most normal thing in the world. And the other odd part about it—the other one that went that fast was smoking. It was like no progress, no progress—or progress.
01:12:22
Rabbi David Wolpe: Yes.
01:12:22
Eric Weinstein: You can't smoke in a bar. I mean, like—people, right? Okay.
01:12:26
Rabbi David Wolpe: Those are the two fastest structural changes that I—
01:12:29
Eric Weinstein: Well, but it makes me wonder how many of these things really just require one penguin to jump into the water and find out that there's no leopard seal that can take it before there's a mass exodus. I think right now nobody believes in The New York Times or Fox or CNN—we know that they're all compromised.
01:12:51
Rabbi David Wolpe: Yes.
01:12:52
Eric Weinstein: And we also know that, for example, the Democratic and Republican parties are worthless. They're standing in the way of our future. And what we don't know is how to get out of these—we're in a straitjacket imposed by people we didn't elect, didn't choose, that are not functioning according to the best aspects of those traditions. I mean, I haven't—I was a critic of The New York Times in the '80s; it's something different now. It's—and these things are not wholesome, they're not ours, and we need to get rid of them, and part of what The Portal is is a search for a way out. If I don't like either political party, if I don't like any of my sense-making organs for journalism, how do I escape this?
01:13:38
Rabbi David Wolpe: I don't—look—I have been a registered independent most of my life for exactly the reasons you express: I didn't think that either one sufficiently represented what I thought about the world for me to be one or the other, and that is even truer today than it has ever been in my lifetime. And I would say that the amplification of this kind of conversation and the kind of conversations that you have with the people in your world and circle—that's—hopefully that will start to spread out. It was in the late 1980s that the first article was written by Andrew Sullivan about same-sex marriage. So that's an incredibly fast social—that was the first time it was mentioned—a very fast social change. This could—I mean, the structures are clearly under stress. I don't know how fast things collapse. I mean, the night before the Soviet Union went away, everybody thought it was going to last forever. So maybe there are structures inside of the states that people think will be ever-enduring that will transform before our eyes as a result of The Portal. The Portal will give them a new—
01:13:39
Eric Weinstein: Inshallah, Rabbi, inshallah.
01:13:52
Rabbi David Wolpe: Will give them a new way to be, or "Be'ezrat Hashem," as we say on our side of the—yes, yeah, exactly. I think it's good. I like that—I look—a half of my congregation, maybe more, is from Iran.
01:15:10
Eric Weinstein: Right.
01:15:10
Rabbi David Wolpe: And so "inshallah" is a very common—
01:15:12
Eric Weinstein: Well, can we talk about our weird similarity with Islam? Because I think both you and I have commented on this—aside from the part that is, like, crazy, murderous, anti-feminist, etc., etc.—I just love it there, right? Like, I'm very Islamic-philic: the strength of the community, the warmth, the food, the generosity, the discomfort with direct depictions of the Divine—I mean, there's tremendous homology between Jews and Muslims. In fact, I think they opened up a kosher deli in Harvard Square, and all of my Muslim friends were eating at the kosher because halal was close enough to kosher.
01:16:06
Rabbi David Wolpe: It is agonizing. It's agonizing because, first of all, Jews and Christians have reached a rapprochement that would have been unimaginable in previous generations. And so one can hope that the same thing would happen with Islam and Judaism. Right now, so much of the focus is political, which is also a problem in general. You know, when people have nothing—no cultures in common—all the talk turns to politics, and politics swallows everything. And because America doesn't have a common culture anymore—nobody watches the same shows or reads the same books or listens to the same music—this—
01:16:51
Eric Weinstein: Sort of that "Game of Thrones" thing was pretty big.
01:16:54
Rabbi David Wolpe: It was pretty big, but my guess—it was pretty big—it even there.
01:16:59
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:16:59
Rabbi David Wolpe: It wasn't big like, you know—
01:17:01
Eric Weinstein: Like Walter Cronkite.
01:17:02
Rabbi David Wolpe: Exactly. So everything becomes politics, and when politics starts to swallow everything, including relations between religions, it—I don't want to say it poisons it, but it poisons it.
01:17:14
Eric Weinstein: Well, I've been looking to humor in music, and I want you to check out my favorite band.
01:17:20
Rabbi David Wolpe: Okay.
01:17:20
Eric Weinstein: My favorite band is a band called The Kominas.
01:17:23
Rabbi David Wolpe: Alright.
01:17:24
Eric Weinstein: I think they're out of Boston. And I think the word "kominas" means, like, bastards—like the "momsers," you know.
01:17:30
Rabbi David Wolpe: Yeah.
01:17:31
Eric Weinstein: And they are a bunch of—I think Muslim graduate students formed something like this—and they started off doing Islamio-punk. So they had a song called "Suicide Bomb the Gap," and they had another song called "Sharia Law in the USA," and their album was "Wild Nights in Guantanamo Bay." They were so funny and witty, and they were actually doing super dangerous—
01:18:01
Rabbi David Wolpe: It sounds like it.
01:18:02
Eric Weinstein: Right—like, if you perform this stuff in Lahore or someplace, you know, it's no joke. But because they were, you know, they were clearly, like, witty and introspective and playing with the dangerous stuff and doing it in public, I felt this instant connection. I think that they've told me that they're not happy with me—or I'm sure it's they don't know me—or because I hang around with Sam Harris. But I'm looking to boost the signal of all of these people who are willing to struggle in public.
01:18:32
Rabbi David Wolpe: Yes, because that's what you need. And you, as you said, you need those lone voices—I still have in my head, about 10 years ago, we had a bunch of scholars from around the world, religion scholars; they were graduate students and some professors who came to a service at the synagogue. And afterwards, a guy from Pakistan said to me, "You know, I—I've never been in a synagogue. I had no idea what Jews were like. You're completely different from everything I learned growing up, and the service is different, and everything is different. And I should just—do me one favor: when you go home, tell people." And he said, "No one will believe me."
01:19:10
Eric Weinstein: No one.
01:19:11
Rabbi David Wolpe: And I thought, "No one will believe you." I mean, what do you do with it?
01:19:14
Eric Weinstein: We got to—we got to do something better with this. I used to travel in the Islamic world openly as a Jew. And I can tell you, I was treated so incredibly well.
01:19:25
Rabbi David Wolpe: I believe it.
01:19:25
Eric Weinstein: I always was concerned that this was a stupid way of making a statement, and I would not do this now—I don't think I would do it today. Only one place I ever encountered open antisemitism was in Cargill, on the border between India and Pakistan, where it’s said that if every Muslim would simply dump one bucket of water on the state of Israel, it would soon be washed to the sea or something like this. So I did very often have the experience of somebody saying, "I'd never met a Jew before, and I had a completely different idea of who you would be." There is the aspect in return, which is I don't know what we do about the problem with some portion of Islam having become cancerous and being spread—
01:20:15
Rabbi David Wolpe: Yes.
01:20:15
Eric Weinstein: through this internal network and so much that is wonderful, wholesome, and decent co-traveling with this sort of jihadist impulse. You know, look, we have our own crazies.
01:20:31
Rabbi David Wolpe: It's true, but it seems like, in terms of a threat to the world, this is right now the preeminent—
01:20:39
Eric Weinstein: Well, we got to be able to talk—we look—we have to be able to discuss this, and the thing that I found—I would say my friend group has probably, at its maximum, was about 30% Muslim—and the thing that changed my thinking about Islam and Judaism, it began with a lunch. And there were three couples: one Jewish, which I was part of; one Muslim, where we'd fixed them up; and then one mixed, where we had also fixed them up—one Jew, one Muslim—so the subject of Islam and terror came up. And the table split straight down the middle with respect to whether there was a connection between Islam and terror, with Jews on one side and Muslims on the other, and the Jews were all saying, "This is a terrible blood libel that Muslims have been tarred with," and the Muslims said, "What the hell is your problem, Jews? This is a serious problem in our community, and you better wake up to the fact that this is something you have to be able to talk about." And it was very strange because we were each doing the work of the other community.
01:21:49
Rabbi David Wolpe: Very interesting. I have not had that problem because, as I said, given that so many of my members grew up in Iran, they have no problem talking about what their perception is. And they consider Iran, in particular, to be the great rogue state and the leadership of Iran to be as dangerous as virtually anything in the world—although many of them, not all, but many of them have a lot of confidence in, or at least a lot of affection for, the people and think that they're very different from their government.
01:22:25
Eric Weinstein: Well, that's certainly—that is the case. But the other issue with Iran—let's be honest—is that Persians are one of the most accomplished people on the face of the earth. They are excellent game players, and they are a force to be reckoned with. And so there's a certain kind of respect that one has to have for Iran as a major intellectual, cultural, and military powerhouse. And so part of the fear of Iran comes out of a reverence for Persian culture. What I—what I want to do is to try to get out of this black-and-white thinking so that we are actually able to talk about different problems of these communities and to say, "Here's what—here's what's good. Here's what's bad." For example, one of the things that I think you and I both struggle with is how to talk about the need that you and I may feel to support Israel, you know, in the context of being somewhat open about Israel's various failings and brutalisms of a community that it should not and does not wish to be occupied.
01:23:40
Rabbi David Wolpe: Right. It's very hard to talk about Israel these days in any kind of sophisticated way because the camps are so—as you said—that they're so polarized, and the stakes for the sides are so high. Yeah, that kind of political conversation gets overwhelmed by the loudest voices on each side of the conversation, and it's just—it's very hard—and invariably, it doesn't take place in a vacuum. I mean, look, even the Israel-Palestinian issue doesn't take place in a vacuum. It's part of a much larger picture of the Middle East in general, and—
01:24:31
Eric Weinstein: Talk about the Ottoman-Palestinian issue.
01:24:33
Rabbi David Wolpe: Yeah, exactly.
01:24:34
Eric Weinstein: And the Jordanian-Palestinian issue.
01:24:35
Rabbi David Wolpe: That's right, I know, which is really important. And also because what people don't realize—and Matti Friedman, who is a journalist in Israel and an author of several really fine books, talks about this a lot—is that half of Israel's population comes from the Middle East. We think of it as sort of Europe sitting in the Middle East, but it's not. The culture is from the Middle East, the music is from the Middle East, the food is from the Middle East. And so it's actually, in some ways—he says this to be a little provocative, but it's somewhat true—it's partly a creation of the Arab states who, after all, expelled their Jews who ran Israel. And so there's this larger mosaic of a struggle all through the Middle East about what kind of culture will be created there that makes it not so easy to just talk about, "These people are good, and these people are bad." It's—as you said—these conversations require more time and thought and nuance than we generally give them.
01:25:37
Eric Weinstein: Well, but I guess one of the things that really concerns me—and maybe I can do this first with the U.S. and then take the same lens and put it on Israel—or let's start with the U.S., Britain, and then Israel—I am a huge fan of all three of these countries. Part of being attached to these cultures is being able to talk about the act—you use the word "paskudnyak," right—but no, the just, like, the dirty, disgusting things that each of these cultures have done—and including, in the U.S. context, my family was not treated well by our country during the McCarthy era—for the—you know—Jews were going for far-left stuff.
01:26:24
Rabbi David Wolpe: Right.
01:26:25
Eric Weinstein: Some of it dipped into communism, and the anti-com—you know—I'm weirdly against communism and against anti-communism; I view them as twin scourges. With all my knowledge of this country and all of its crimes and all of its lapses and its failure to live up to its own ideals and the transgressions of the Dulles brothers—all this stuff—I love this country. And it's not the love of a child for a perfect, idealized parent before teenage years set that straight. It's a mature love, saying, "I know what a nation is, and I know that they have to lie, and I know that they have terrible periods in their histories, and all told, this is—this is really an important and fantastic place." That's how I feel about England. I mean, God knows those people were brutal.
01:27:17
Rabbi David Wolpe: Yes.
01:27:18
Eric Weinstein: In the colonial era as to all sorts of people, but it's not—you know—you see these people in Hong Kong—yeah—you know, waving British flags.
01:27:26
Rabbi David Wolpe: That's right.
01:27:26
Eric Weinstein: You know, with Chinese faces, and you realize it's a much more complicated situation—that in Bombay, where my wife is from, you know, you get into conversations with people, and it's very, like, "Here's the good stuff we got from the Brits, here's the bad stuff." This is the same for me with Israel. I don't want to have to say, "Hey, you know, we're so moral, we're so wonderful, we've done everything perfectly," because we haven't.
01:27:50
Rabbi David Wolpe: Right.
01:27:50
Eric Weinstein: But it doesn't negate the need to support this state. I don't understand why it is that I'm in some situation where people say, "Well, don't you realize that they've done this, that, and the other horrible thing? So you know, you should be against them."
01:28:04
Rabbi David Wolpe: Right, yes. Well, I mean, this—I would say if there's one underlying theme that has run through the—I don't know how long we've been podcasting, but how—
01:28:16
Eric Weinstein: Forty years, Rabbi.
01:28:17
Rabbi David Wolpe: It seems like it is. But just like in the desert, every single day has been meaningful. But if there's one theme, it is the rejection of absolutism and simplicity for complexity and the willingness to hold two sides and say they're both valid. And that's what I think we have lost increasingly in this culture: that everybody—everybody is a crusader—for the black and the white and not for all the shades in between, which is really where all of us live for most of our lives; we just don't apply it to the great issues, but we need to.
01:29:05
Eric Weinstein: Alright, I got two more topics, and then I'll let you out.
01:29:07
Rabbi David Wolpe: Okay.
01:29:08
Eric Weinstein: Okay. First one is kind of a dangerous one, which is that I'm watching the Holocaust survivors in my life dwindle to a handful, and mostly they were children.
01:29:21
Rabbi David Wolpe: Right.
01:29:22
Eric Weinstein: Children during the period.
01:29:23
Rabbi David Wolpe: Yeah.
01:29:24
Eric Weinstein: I am increasingly convinced that we are wasting the twilight of living memory of the Holocaust by not approaching Germany and offering a much deeper reconciliation than we have today—that, in some sense, we got bound up—we Jews got bound up in German culture—obviously, Yiddish language is Middle High German infused with it.
01:29:55
Rabbi David Wolpe: Yes.
01:29:55
Eric Weinstein: We benefited a great deal from Germanic and Teutonic thinking, and they benefited a great deal, right, from having us as a community attached to them.
01:30:05
Rabbi David Wolpe: No question.
01:30:06
Eric Weinstein: We were, in some sense, may have been too similar and caused some problem because if you think about the German contributions in the 1700s, 1800s—
01:30:16
Rabbi David Wolpe: Yeah.
01:30:17
Eric Weinstein: Incomparable.
01:30:18
Rabbi David Wolpe: Yes.
01:30:20
Eric Weinstein: Should we be using this time before the last who remember this period to come up with a deeper reconciliation between the two cultures?
01:30:30
Rabbi David Wolpe: I'm not sure what that would look like—if you would—
01:30:34
Eric Weinstein: Oh, for example, you know, klezmer—the Jewish jazz.
01:30:37
Rabbi David Wolpe: Yes.
01:30:38
Eric Weinstein: Died out pretty much as a tiny canon of recorded material, and it got revitalized because Germans were willing to pay for modern—
01:30:50
Rabbi David Wolpe: Right, so what—but what would it mean? I mean, what are we not doing that we should do? We should encourage Jews to travel to Germany? We should—I mean, there's a pretty close relationship of Germany and Israel, for example.
01:31:04
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, I'm talking a more personal relationship. I feel very weird about—
01:31:10
Rabbi David Wolpe: Right.
01:31:10
Eric Weinstein: about the connection. I still don't feel—I drive a Volkswagen; I don't feel really comfortable with it.
01:31:17
Rabbi David Wolpe: Right.
01:31:17
Eric Weinstein: I mean, there's some sort of ceremonial, ritualistic thing of letting young German—I worried about the German guilt and the whole migration crisis, where Germans are still saying, "We are not Nazis."
01:31:30
Rabbi David Wolpe: Right.
01:31:30
Eric Weinstein: And I'm looking at these people and saying, "You know, you're maybe something problematic in the cultural lineage—yes—but don't overdo the guilt because that's going to snap back."
01:31:39
Rabbi David Wolpe: I do remember, years ago, I went to Germany as part of a delegation of Jewish leaders with—from the Konrad Adenauer Foundation—and it was an amazing trip. And I don't know if they still do that, but I just—I think that you're up against a deeper problem, which is that Americans in general—American Jews also—don't connect to any foreign country particularly. We are so—I had a group this past—about, I don't know, three, four months ago—Frank Luntz brought a group from NYU Abu Dhabi. So there were students from all over the world, and most of them from the Middle East. They brought them to the synagogue, and I spoke to them about a range of issues. And one of them said to me, "What makes America—what's America's greatest blessing or its greatest gift?" And I said, "That's easy: Canada, Mexico, ocean, ocean." I said, "More than anything else—because think of where you live and how you have all these different—you know—"
01:32:42
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
01:32:42
Rabbi David Wolpe: competing colors around you—I said, "We have to really—I mean, yes, we once had a war with Mexico, but we have two countries on our border that pose absolutely no threat to us—immigration aside, I'm talking about threat, threat, and military threat—"
01:32:56
Eric Weinstein: Amassed right on the border.
01:33:00
Rabbi David Wolpe: And the oceans have never attacked us.
01:33:01
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
01:33:02
Rabbi David Wolpe: Except once in "Jaws"—that was it. So the isolation—that's why Americans don't speak foreign languages, that's why we don't generally know foreign countries very well—and that, I think, is part of the reason why we haven't come to know Germany better. I think it's more to do with that even than with a cultural reluctance to do it.
01:33:24
Eric Weinstein: I'm convinced that if we don't get to know Germany better, as you say, we will not come to understand ourselves because a lot of our history was bound up, and I believe that a guilty Germany is a danger to the planet and that we are enough to release modern Germans from some of the horror of the guilt because it wasn't them, the—
01:33:46
Rabbi David Wolpe: No modern German is guilty—I mean, unless maybe they're in their 90s, but—
01:33:52
Eric Weinstein: That's what I'm saying—the last of them.
01:33:54
Rabbi David Wolpe: Yeah, but anybody under—I guess 80—I don't know; I'd have to do the exact—
01:33:59
Eric Weinstein: The reason it's on my mind is—I suppose—yeah, I had thought that I might open the podcast with a cousin I'd never met—Eva Kor, who was a Mengele twin who forgave Mengele.
01:34:09
Rabbi David Wolpe: Wow.
01:34:09
Eric Weinstein: And I just spoke to her, and she said, "Yeah, I'll do it when I come back," right? And then she went to Auschwitz for her annual pilgrimage, and she died in Poland on the trip.
01:34:19
Rabbi David Wolpe: Wow.
01:34:19
Eric Weinstein: So I'm—it's very much on my mind.
01:34:22
Rabbi David Wolpe: Right? I will be there, actually, this year—I'm doing the March of the Living in March or April, right after—
01:34:28
Eric Weinstein: I don't think I could do it.
01:34:29
Rabbi David Wolpe: I'm going to do it this year—have never done it—so... And what's the second issue?
01:34:33
Eric Weinstein: The last question.
01:34:34
Rabbi David Wolpe: The last? Yes.
01:34:36
Eric Weinstein: Let me imagine that we were able to learn our own source code in physics—mm hmm—so that after this—whatever this final theory might be—
01:34:47
Rabbi David Wolpe: Yeah.
01:34:49
Eric Weinstein: there was no reason to keep searching mathematically for a more complete theory. How would that affect, potentially, your relationship to Judaism? And can you conceive of what the kind of shape and nature of such a theory would be, scientifically, so that we stopped asking for further refinements and to push further?
01:35:12
Rabbi David Wolpe: So I think, first of all, for me to talk to you about what a final theory in physics would look like is a presumption that all your listeners just must be cracking up at.
01:35:24
Eric Weinstein: We are both in the transcendence business, sir.
01:35:27
Rabbi David Wolpe: But I mean—I like—I always liked the Robert Jastrow image, which you may know, that he said, "When physicists, you know, climb that final mountain, they're going to find God looking at them from the other side." I know you're rolling your eyes—I don't know if people listening can see that—I always liked it. I liked the image—come on—a little poetry in your physics. I'm sure you can—I have no doubt about that. I think that the—I have—I don't believe that it's possible, and I'll tell you why I say that. I have a deep and abiding faith in the limitations of the human mind. And by that, I don't mean that we can't do astonishing things, but part—when I ask people sometimes, this is how you can tell if you're religious: "Is there a mystery at the heart of the world? Not a puzzle, but a mystery—because a puzzle you can figure out, but a mystery is, in principle, unfigureoutable?"
01:36:26
Eric Weinstein: Sort of what I'm asking.
01:36:27
Rabbi David Wolpe: And I really believe that there is a mystery at the heart of the universe—not a puzzle—so that we won't ever have the kind of final theory that you're talking about because the world is created by something infinitely greater than anything we can imagine. When I have to talk about God to high school kids, for example, and I tell them, "Look, I have—I have no idea what God is. I have no idea." I said, "Think of it this way: when you were two years old, could you ever imagine what a 14-year-old is? Not only could you not have imagined it, but you couldn't have imagined what it is that you can't imagine." So I assume that whatever is out there—that whatever is ultimate—is so far beyond anything that I or any human being can conceive of that—I think our fate is to always search and be more and more and more comprehensive but never to achieve the kind of finality that you are—that is suggested by your question.
01:37:26
Eric Weinstein: That's really weird to me. I'll give you two examples of why it doesn't work.
01:37:31
Rabbi David Wolpe: Okay.
01:37:31
Eric Weinstein: For me.
01:37:32
Rabbi David Wolpe: Yes.
01:37:32
Eric Weinstein: I'm not saying you're wrong. The first is the number of different phenomena that were encompassed by Maxwell's equations. I can really write Maxwell's equations in a modern context in one line; it doesn't require four different equations. And all of that stuff about X-rays and UV and visible light and magnetism and electricity—it's all subsumed in this one damn equation. Okay, so there are these condensations where you realize that it's much simpler than you ever imagined. So one—I think you're discounting the amount of unification—the idea that every living thing is predicated on 20 amino acids and four nucleotides, so far as we know, or that everything that you see out there is just up quarks, down quarks, electrons, or whatever we use to stick them together. It looks very varied, but the set is very small. The other thing I might say is imagine that you begin in a neighborhood, and you're exploring the planet, and every time you walk in a direction, you find new, wondrous, magical things you've never seen before.
01:38:38
Rabbi David Wolpe: Yeah.
01:38:38
Eric Weinstein: You will incorrectly infer that if you keep walking, it will always be thus, and there—you won't see the age of intercontinental exploration come to a close. I think you've discounted both of those things.
01:38:52
Rabbi David Wolpe: Well, what I would say to you is, 500 years ago, you were in the position of that two-year-old; you couldn't imagine what you couldn't imagine. The Maxwell's equations would answer—or that—I mean, look, I think about—I think about when I was a kid, and we used to think we're going to travel around on jetpacks—if I had said to—no—"You won't travel around on jetpacks, but you will hold all of human knowledge in your pocket," I would say, "You're crazy; that couldn't be." And yet now we do. I have a great deal of faith in the unfathomable—I think that you're making the opposite mistake because we have figured out so much as compared to 1000 years ago, we are therefore close to the end. And what I think is, with every discovery, you will discover vast realms of ignorance that you haven't yet even begun to tap that will make the idea of a final theory—a comprehensive theory—
01:39:51
Eric Weinstein: You're mistaking what a final theory is. There's a question about going down towards the foundations, and there's a question about going up towards the consequences—I will agree that if we go down towards the foundations, that tells us nothing about all the different ways we might arrange what we learn at the foundations to create emergence.
01:40:13
Rabbi David Wolpe: So what are you asking me about—how I envision a final theory? I bet it's math that would—that would be mathematical, that it would be—
01:40:23
Eric Weinstein: Presumably, you know, we've been trying to come up with a theory of everything.
01:40:26
Rabbi David Wolpe: Yeah, right.
01:40:27
Eric Weinstein: When you hear the words "theory of everything," I mean, I always think that the physicists who travel in that have never thought through the question of "assume that you actually—you know—that the dog caught the car."
01:40:39
Rabbi David Wolpe: Yes.
01:40:40
Eric Weinstein: Would you have any idea of what that would even look like? Because to say this is complete—does it have no beginning? You say "unmoved mover"—like, there's no boundary condition? Maybe—give you an idea of how crazy this is—let me give you my version of God since you've given me some indication of yours. Okay, guys—I believe that God starts off being a boundary condition, being a design constraint, completely inanimate, nonsentient. And the reason that I don't like the thing about "get to the highest peak, and you reach the end, and God is there" is that it mistakes the magic that I think might happen, which is we're worrying right now about artificial intelligence—we don't realize that we are the artificial intelligence that arose in the system—and if Darwinian theory is true, right—
01:41:33
Rabbi David Wolpe: Right.
01:41:33
Eric Weinstein: This bubbled up emergently.
01:41:35
Rabbi David Wolpe: Right.
01:41:36
Eric Weinstein: And then when we learn our own source code, is that what effectively creates a meaningful version of God because it started out inanimate, and that we are that which will animate it because we are that which arose emergently within the system?
01:41:51
Rabbi David Wolpe: So I don't know—I mean, I'm tempted to repair to the Asimov story where the Supreme Intelligence, you know, after it reaches its combination, spits out a message, and the message says, "Let there be light." I don't remember the name of the story—I remember reading it as a kid—but I think when the dog catches the car, it will discover that it doesn't entirely understand what the car is. But I don't know—I mean, it's so far beyond what I am capable of understanding about the shape of the theory as it exists now, never mind what the final theory would be, that I can only—I can only take refuge in theological speculations. I don't have physics or mathematical speculation, and the theological speculation is—as in the quote—to quote one of the great church fathers, Aquinas, that we're like—we're emptying the ocean with a teaspoon.
01:43:02
Eric Weinstein: Well, you know, the part that I can agree with you is when people ask me, "What's your best guess as to the meaning of life?" I always think it's a trap. But the sentence I come up with that makes sure you don't spill out into any easy answer is, "The meaning of life for me is the struggle to impart meaning to meaning." And that way, if you've decided that life is meaningless or you say that you really know what the meaning of life absolutely is, you failed because you're no longer struggling.
01:43:32
Rabbi David Wolpe: Right?
01:43:32
Eric Weinstein: And so everything that you're talking about speaks of the struggle which animates us and keeps us vital.
01:43:39
Rabbi David Wolpe: That is a beautiful sentence on which to end.
01:43:41
Eric Weinstein: Well, Rabbi Wolpe, thank you for joining us here. And we return you now back through The Portal. You've been enjoying it with Rabbi Wolpe of Temple Sinai in Los Angeles. Be well.