Hello everyone and welcome back to People You Want to Know podcast.

Today's episode truly introduces you to a people you want to know.

And if you don't know him?

What are you?

Doing I'm chatting with the author of Next Stop and Rabbi Benjamin Resnick.

First we need to talk about his book Next Stop because it genuinely fucked me up.

But like, in a good way.

Next Stop is a haunting and imaginative debut novel set in the near future where Israel suddenly vanishes into a black hole, an event that triggers a wave of bizarre anomalies across the globe.

As these quote UN quote juholes emerge and reality begins to fracture, Jewish communities worldwide face escalating anti-Semitism and containment.

In an unnamed American city, Ethan, a writer, and Ella, a photojournalist with her young son Michael, form a fragile, hopeful family amidst increasing chaos.

Ella documents the transformation of their world from vanished air travel to mass displacement, while Jews are corralled into a militarized zone known as the Pale that's monitored by drones, robotic dogs, and armed guards.

Ultimately, some Jews remain in this unnamed American city, and some Jews go underground into the subway trains, where they aspire to find a better future.

And to find out what happens, you got to read the book.

I'm not giving any spoilers.

Despite being so dystopian and traumatic at some deep epigenetic level, the book remains deeply human.

It's a story about memories, survival, and finding joy in life's darkest moments.

It's also about the bond of family.

And you'll hear me ask Ben in the episode about which Jews he thought were better off in the book, the ones that stayed in the named American city or the ones that went into the subway.

And I think this is what's so jarring and almost a little defeatist about Jewish history is there isn't always a rhyme or reason as to who got to live on and who did not.

A lot of it was just luck and some might say God.

Ben has got to be one of my favorite guests that I've ever had on the podcast.

But we did get to chat a lot, 1 on one before and after we recorded.

And we just have a bond.

Like, what can I say?

We share a lot of viewpoints and I really like how he weaves the humanities and literature into delivering his points.

A not so well known fact about me is I'm kind of a reading and literature snob.

Although I'm English as a second language, I actually skipped a grade in English class in high school because I was so good at reading and analyzing books.

In school, we called it explication.

It was like this process where you analyze motifs, themes, characters of the book and you looked at the prose.

And I was always very good at digging through that stuff, and I could instantly tell that Ben is also really well versed in those kinds of things, so I could learn from him.

So this is your warning?

This episode is a little bit of a nerd sesh, and it will require you to use Brain Juice.

There was one thing that I didn't have a chance to ask Ben about his book, which is that there is a motif in the book about paper airplanes.

The characters throw paper airplanes together almost as an act of defiance or freedom.

And I wondered why paper airplanes and what they're supposed to represent.

If you have read the book I would love to from you what you think that's about.

Anyway, this episode obviously discusses Bens book and his life story.

We also talk about religion, the meaning of life and why bad things have to happen to us and what we make of that.

Just a casual little light hearted conversation.

I will be completely honest with you, I'm not really drawn to interviewing rabbis on my podcast.

The only rabbis that I've had are ones that I find genuinely interesting and or they have something really unique about them.

I find that a lot of rabbis speak in cliches, but this is absolutely not the case with Ben.

Ben is the kind of rabbi I could ask questions to all day and he will come up with the most creative ways to answer them and reference fascinating historical texts that I have never heard of before.

This is something that Ben and I also talked offline about that I want to make into either a full-fledged podcast episode or some kind of bigger discussion.

And it's the idea that creativity is not really rewarded for rabbis.

Many rabbis are expected to just deliver a sermon.

The congregation leads the prayers with the same tunes they've always been sung in, and the machine of the synagogue keeps moving in the way it always has.

And I often hear especially Habad rabbis just lean on the classic, like, just do more mitzvahs or get a mezuzah.

It's.

Almost like a crutch.

For not knowing how to answer your question.

But rabbis are uniquely positioned to help us think bigger, think new, expand our horizons.

And so I'm just not willing to take the do more mitzvahs as the answer.

And that's what I think we need more of in Judaism right now.

We need almost like more invention.

Jake Cohen, who we heard from a few weeks ago, once said that you don't need a therapist, you need a rabbi.

And I can really get behind this idea because there's so much wisdom and clarity that rabbis can offer that therapist simply can't.

And in this conversation with Ben, you hear me receive that wisdom and that clarity in a way that I think is really beautiful.

And it reminded me of the important role of a rabbi in our lives, and even more so, the important role of a good rabbi in our lives.

I left feeling so energized after our conversation.

I learned so many new things and got so many new ideas.

It was truly amazing.

Please enjoy this episode.

Hello Ben, Welcome to PEOPLE.

Do you Want to Know podcast?

How's it going today?

It's going great.

Thank you so much for having me.

I've been really eager to speak with you.

I enjoyed your book.

I use the word enjoy with a little bit of pause.

Because how can one say that you enjoy a dystopian book that absolutely gutted you?

But there was something about it that I just adore.

And without further ado, I want to ask you to tell us a little bit about it yourself.

What do you do and how did you get there?

Thank you so much for the kind words about the book.

Before I get into sort of who I am, I'll say one of the most gratifying things for me as a writer is that people consistently do say they enjoy the book.

I think sometimes when you I tell people what the book is about, about a violent anti-Semitic hysteria and an American city, I think the presumption is that it could be this horrible, grim slog and the book doesn't really feel that way, or at least that's not usually how people experience it.

I think people experience it as being a quick read.

It has a likeness to it, even though the material is very heavy.

And so I think I often hear the people enjoy it and I think enjoying it.

It's very gratifying for me to hear that on some level people that on many levels people enjoy the book, even though it's, you know, unquestionably has some difficult subject matter.

So I'm a bed Resnick.

I'm a rabbi.

You know, a lot of times people ask me how the rabbi and the novel writing thing works and how I decided to write a novel after being a rabbi for so many years.

It's really how I decided to be a rabbi after wanting to write novels for so many years.

It's a little bit always embarrassing for me to say, but wanting to be a writer and specifically wanting to write fiction and novels is like one of the first things I can remember wanting from the age that I like knew that was a thing, which was a very early age.

Like I, I this I don't know how it is dawned on me from like a very early age.

This is like a thing someone could do as a job.

I wanted to do it.

So I've been working seriously towards that goal.

Well, in some ways my entire life.

But I've been sort of writing in a very serious, disciplined way since I was in college.

So since the sunset of my childhood, the dawn of my adulthood, whenever you think people actually become adults.

And it was only a little bit later that I decided that I wanted to go into the rabbinate, which is work that I also find profoundly meaningful and very different in many, many different ways from my work as a writer.

There's overlap there too, but it's a very different part of my personality I feel like that I use when I'm working as a rabbi.

You know, I'll add that I think storytelling is key to the role of a rabbi.

And if you look at the rabbis that made a difference in Jewish life throughout history, it's really rabbis that were able to write and write compellingly as well as rabbis that could tell stories compellingly.

So both in speech and in writing, they had to captivate people through the mode of storytelling.

Yeah, absolutely.

The late great Amos owes and his daughter Tanya owes Salzburg Burger wrote not so long ago a book called Jews in Words, which begins with the really startling and amazing sort of little aphorism.

The Judaism is not a bloodline, but a text line.

I think there is sort of a great deal of truth to that statement.

And I think that the storytelling is a Jewish activity is one of the primary things that has kept us together as Jews for thousands of years and I think will keep us together as Jews for, you know, thousands of more years.

I, I believe it almost with I can't prove that that's the case, but I could believe that almost with perfect faith.

You know, I think rabbis are storytellers in all kinds of different ways.

I'll also add that the kind of storytelling that I do when I'm say on Bhima, giving a sermon feels to me to be very distinct from what I'm doing when I'm writing a novel in in all kinds of ways.

I think the most important way that those things are distinct is, is at least they feel distinct to me is when you're giving a sermon, you're really not trying to be original.

I don't think.

I, I mean, you're trying to be an authentic voice of the tradition.

So in the same way that, you know, a musician might play a piece by Bach, and part of the musician's job is to play the piece in a way that will be maximally effective and, and, you know, Pierce the ear.

And so that's, I think that's sort of how I think about what it is to give a sermon.

I'm sort of trying to be an instrument for the tradition and an authentic 1 and share the tradition in a way that people can hear.

I think with fiction writing, there's at least the illusion that you're trying to be original.

I mean, not to get into a whole thing about whether or not there's ever really, I mean, all stories have been told before and there's a whole sort of cottage industry and academia about whether or not anything can really be original or you're just saying things other people have said.

I think all of that's very, very interesting.

But when I sit down before a blank screen, at least in my own head, I'm trying to say something, you know, new and trying to be trying to invent something.

So that feels like a very different mode of of storytelling.

Let's dig into your book next stop.

You've got this dystopian and at the same time kind of nostalgic book that you wrote before October 7th and it was published after October 7th.

And it's this eerie feeling where it's almost like in some way a prophecy for the aftermath of the anti-Semitism and the hate that we saw towards Jews after this event.

Since it was published after October 7th, did you make any changes?

To the book or it was published exactly as is and you?

Just happened to write it this way.

Yeah, everyone asks that question.

And by the way, you mentioned to me in the green room that you had thought about this podcast before October 7th and then and then started it after.

So you and I had can compare notes about what that's like.

So the book landed on my editor's desk on October 2nd, 2023, which is something that is strange and disquieting to me on some level.

And I'm processing it.

I've been processing it for over almost a year now.

And like, I'm still more than a year now and I'm still processing it the book.

So there was an editorial process after October 7th, but the book did not change in any substantive ways because of October 7th.

All of the major plot points were in place and the book, you know, like in any editorial process, the, you know, the book changes in some ways, but not in it didn't change at all because of October 7th and it didn't change in major, major ways, even through the editorial process.

One thing, and this is sort of an inside baseball thing about novel writing that some people don't know.

I, I think is especially when you're talking about like a debut novel, you know, unless, I mean, unless the writer has some other, you know, as a celebrity for some other kind of reason.

And there's some real reason why an editor or a publishing house wants to take on an author.

Unless, and that's not the case for me, I'm I'm a relatively anonymous writer, editors expect the book to be, you know, mostly done, like most editors are not going to take on.

Absent some other kinds of considerations, most editors are not going to usually take on debut novels that need, you know, a massive overhaul.

So all of which is to say, the book is substantively the same as it was before October 7th, So it has not changed.

Something that I've been thinking about post October 7th especially, and a theme that is raised in your book as well, is which Jews were better off?

Because you've got in the plot line of the book these Jews that despite the anti-Semitism and the persecution they experienced in your world, in your American city, there were some Jews that stayed in that American city.

And then there were other Jews that went underground into the subway to flee the persecution.

But what they would?

Meet their underground is kind of unknown and then.

And I also think to the times of the Roman Empire about the Zealots and the Pharisee Jews and the question of, you know, the Zealots are always viewed as these heroes that committed suicide because they were refusing to live under Roman persecution.

But we can't say in good conscience that they're the Jews that were better off because they no longer exist, right?

But descendants of the Pharisee Jews do because they chose to survive even under the most atrocious conditions in your book.

This is not an exact parallel, but I think you understand where I'm leading.

Which Jews do you think we're better off?

It's a great question.

I think in the world of the book, the situation for the Jews who sort of remain behind in the above ground world.

And again, I mean, I don't know how much we're doing spoilers or whatever, but the book, it's just, but, you know, it's a work of speculative fiction.

And there's this sort of mysterious underground reality that Jews have the option of sort of entering as they flee.

My sense of the world above ground is that throughout the book it it becomes increasingly sort of cataclysmically bad.

You know, I suppose I think if that staying behind is the wrong decision, you know, it's only possible.

But, but in terms of the arc of Jewish history, it's usually only possible to say that retrospectively.

I mean, you can look back at, you know, Jews who chose to stay in any number of places.

And the Jews who chose to stay too long often met terrible fates.

I mean, but I wouldn't blame them for those.

I think it's very hard to blame them for those choices.

I think this is true in a variety of ways, not only in terms of anti-Semitism, but in terms of all kinds of societal disruptions.

I think it's it's very hard to know to get one's bearings in a situation where, you know, the ground is sort of constantly shifting underneath your feet and things are changing.

And I think when we look at the past and look at the choices people make in those kinds of situations, I think it's it's important to sort of look very charitably on those people and think, gosh, I mean, it's, it's when the world is falling down around you, it's hard to know exactly, exactly how to respond and to what extent the world really is falling down and to what descent.

It's not.

I mean, it's very hard to know that in the moment.

So I suppose in the world of the book, I think the Jews who flee probably have a better shot.

But I think that that's not totally clear to anyone living in the world of the book, even to the Jews who flee.

I mean, again, not to give away too much about the end, but like, even what happens when they go underground is not so clearly wonderful, I think it's fair to say.

And there's this rabbinic concept of like in decision making, rabbis will often say that when you have a maybe and you have a for sure option, you should always go with the for sure option as opposed to the maybe.

And that doesn't always work because then you can have, you know, the Plato's cave where you've got your for sure, but you're stuck in a cave for your whole life.

And I like the way your book creates this ambiguity because ultimately the right decision is the one that you can live with.

And that's the decision that Jews ought to make for ourselves in a time when we have a maybe in a for sure.

And both are difficult.

Yeah.

No, I mean, I think that's interesting.

I it's fascinating that you mentioned Plato's cave because and there's no way that I don't know that readers would pick up on this in the book, or maybe they would, I don't know.

But in my head as I was writing the book.

So there's AI think a very important idea that comes out in ancient rabbinic Midrash and it comes out in a few different places.

Probably the most famous place is there's a Madrash about in the episode in Brasheet where Avraham and Sarah are visited by these three angels who they don't.

Maybe they know their angels, maybe they don't, and they're going to fetch them a young lamb for the meal.

And the lamb doesn't want to be part of the meal.

The lamb runs away and runs down into a cave, which in the midrash is Marata Machpelah with a cave that Avraham is going to purchase as a burial cave.

And the midrash is used to explain why Avraham wanted that particular cave.

And the reason is he chases this little animal down in there.

And when he's down in there, he's deep in The Cave.

He sees this window that looks out into the Garden of Eden.

You know, my professors of midrash illuminated for me that this is probably a very conscious rabbinic reworking of Plato's cave allegory.

Because remember in the in the Plato's cave, right, the the person living down The Cave sees these shadows on the wall and thinks they're real.

But then the philosopher who is illuminated goes up into the light, and up into the light is where you find truth and illumination for the rabbinic mind.

And I think this influences Jewish culture in very, very profound ways.

You actually find truth by sinking down into the depth, by going deep, rather than going up into the light, by going deep down into the dark.

That's where you find true illumination.

And there's other midrashim about that, about rabbis hiding from the Romans in caves.

And the ancient Jewish Mystics called themselves your day Merkava, those who descend into the chariot.

And I think a lot of world religious traditions think about religious illumination as ascent.

The ancient rabbis seem to think about Jewish illumination as descent.

Descent into the into the depths of the earth.

Descent into the self, perhaps?

Which is why perhaps Jews invented psychoanalysis, right?

And so part of the book, a big part of the book, at least my guide, one of my guiding metaphors for the book was that, and part of the reason why you need to go down the subway is because there's, there's illumination to be found in there.

So it's interesting that you, I don't know if you, I don't, it's interesting that you mention that.

People don't usually mention that to me in the context of the book, but it was totally in my mind as I was working.

That's awesome.

I think it also ties to the fact that Judaism is about how we live our life today.

It's not about the future, it's about the now.

And that's why we have to descend and not ascend, because Judaism is about living the life we have today and making the most of it.

And what comes next is unknown, right?

Judaism doesn't talk about the afterlife nearly as much as many of the other monotheistic religions do.

So that absolutely tracks for me.

Pivoting a little bit, I'm curious to know in writing your book, where do you draw the line between horror and hope?

You know what I want to talk about.

Also I'll add.

As a little.

Tangent Jewish storytelling, to me, is fundamentally different from non Jewish storytelling, and here's why.

Non Jewish storytelling always looks for a closure and a happy ending and like a linear sequence of time, right?

We move forward in time until we reach the end.

All folklore's storytelling has, you know, the protagonist and then the plot line and then the climax and then the end and the resolution.

That's what we crave also as humans.

But this is absolutely not how Jewish storytelling works.

This is definitely not how the Torah works.

The concept of time is fundamentally warped in the Torah, where you have we jump from the beginning to somewhere in the end and then to the middle.

And you know, some things don't have an ending at all.

Like even how the Torah ends it, it's a very kind of lackluster ending.

There's not some big resolution or big finish line.

Talk to me about your philosophy around that for the book.

That was beautifully said.

I think you, I think you were totally right.

Everything you just said deep really resonates for me in terms of how I think about the difference between Jewish storytelling and other forms of storytelling.

I'll say two things about that, one related to the book and one sort of just kind of related to how I think about this and like sort of the history of ideas.

The book is, I think, fairly elliptical.

As a writer, I am pretty allergic to exposition.

Like I, I don't know if you're like a Star Wars fan.

I'm not such a Star Wars fan.

Actually, part of the reason is that they have those big long, you know, chain of letters at, you know, at the beginning, you know, and here's all of this stuff and here's where we are.

And I might say, if you're a filmmaker dealing in a visual medium and you need to have like 5 pages of text before the movie starts, maybe you started the movie like at the wrong at the wrong place.

I mean like I so well always say is like, I'm not a fan of exposition.

And I think that the book itself is fairly elliptical.

That was important to me.

Actually.

The paperback just came out and it has like a little interview with me in the back where someone asked the person putting together asked a somewhat similar version of this question.

And I said there what I'll version what I'll say here, which is that I don't want to be cryptic for the sake of being cryptic.

But I think I, I personally have like a higher tolerance than the average bear for sort of unexplained and sort of mysterious gestural storytelling.

And I do.

And this, I said this in the interview there, and I'll say it here too.

I do think that is sort of a natively Jewish approach to storytelling.

So in terms of why I think that elliptical storytelling is sort of a saliently Jewish, a lot of my thinking about this has been shaped by a German Jewish philologist in the mid century named Eric Arbach who wrote a really influential book called Mimesis, the Representation of Reality in Western Literature.

And he does a lot of the things in that book.

But one thing that he does is, and one of the major things that he does is sort of set up these two typologies of storytelling.

1 is the Greek method and one is the Jewish method.

In the 1st chapter of that book, which is called Odysseus Scar, He sort of starts to develop these two typologies.

And his two texts that he looks at and compares are this episode in the Odyssey where Odysseus comes home and Akidat Yitzhak, The Binding of Isaac, which we're going to read in a few weeks at the High Holidays.

The way he presents Odysseus's homecoming is he sort of demonstrates that it is basically this paragon of clarity.

It's called Odysseus's scar because Odysseus is recognized by this scar he has on his leg by his old nursemaid.

And in the in the context of him coming home, like we get all of this exposition about what everybody is thinking and, and what exactly is going on.

The effect, he argues, is to present reality as this kind of clear, crystal clear tableau, or that what literature does is present reality as like a sort of a jeweled, a clear jeweled creation to be observed and explored.

By the way, the Odyssey is certainly one of the greatest things in world literature.

Also, one of the greatest stories ever told in world literature is The Binding of Isaac, which unfolds I think over 22 verses, which includes these vast ambiguities.

Sometime later, how much time later God tested Avraham on why and said go to this place, what place?

Where are they going, Right?

And these sort of vast pregnant silences, you know, where?

Yitzhak asked his father, here's the wood and here's the knife.

But where is the lamb?

And he says, you know, God will provide for the lamb.

And the two walked on together.

Well, I mean, what were they thinking?

I mean, gosh, who knows, right?

And what Auerbach argues is that what the ambiguities in the story of the Binding of Isaac invite and actually demand our interpretation, which is to say midrash, which is to say in order to understand the story and in order to understand the truth of the story, we need to dig very, very, very deep.

And when you dig deep, and when different people dig deep over thousands of years, lo and behold, people dig up different things.

And so that the story as a vessel for truth becomes sort of ever generative and and regenerative, which is what I think your storytelling is all about.

And the fuel that drives, I think that constant regeneration is the elliptical, the withholding nature of the text.

If the text wasn't withholding, it wouldn't excite the imagination in the same way.

It might excite the imagination in a different way, right, in a Greek way, but it wouldn't excite the imagination.

I don't think in as Jewish of a way, but I think generally speaking, people expect and should expect hearing a sermon and knowing, OK, here's the two or three things that the rabbi wants me to take away from this.

I think a novel is not the same.

I think in a novel, I think being elliptical as a choice is can be very, very, very powerful.

And it's more demanding.

It demands something of you.

It demands you to become an active participant in what you just consumed, which is the part that always interests me now that it's been almost a year since you've published the book and you've LED a community through what is undeniably a highly, unprecedented, highly challenging time for the Jewish people.

What are your reflections and what message do you hope to leave for the Jewish community today?

And that's such a great question.

As both a writer and as a rabbi, I think about it all the time.

So I don't take a step back and go in the not so way back machine, but go back in time to, you know, November, December 2023, January 2024, when I was in the process of doing final revisions for the book.

And of course, I was leading also a community in the immediate aftermath of October 7th.

And my wife is a journalist.

Her name is Felissa Kramer and she's the editor in chief of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

She's been a journalist her whole career.

She hasn't always covered the Jews, but now she covers the Jews and she did on October 7th as well.

My wife and I have never been particularly careful about what we say around our children.

Now our older son is going into fifth grade and our younger son is going into second grade.

So they are a couple years younger then right after October 7th.

And when you're with your spouse, I mean, you bet, what do you talk about?

You talk about your days and you talk about your work.

And because both my wife and I in different ways were basically thinking and talking about October 7th and it's aftermath all the time.

You know, there were very few conversations that we had that didn't on some level touch on horrific, horrific things happening in the Jewish world.

I mean, she was covering it.

And as a rabbi, I was sort of deeply processing it with, you know, my community.

And of course I was also editing my book, which is all about anti-Semitism.

And really they were like very few conversations we had that were not sort of deeply, deeply inflected by all of this stuff.

And I remember at about February, I think probably I was really acutely upset one night and I think I woke my wife up, which is probably not a good move, but I think I woke my wife up.

And I said, Felissa, do you think that the kids know that Daddy thinks being Jewish is the best thing in the world?

I mean, I don't know the best thing in the world.

There are one other wonderful things to be in the world.

But like, and I do, I feel that way that it's just such an extraordinary blessing to be in the world as a Jew.

And I, I felt that way my entire life.

And I continue to feel that way.

And I continue to feel that way in the immediate aftermath of October 7th.

I did.

And I was sort of, I was really acutely upset that I, I was afraid, afraid that my children didn't know this, that like they thought says, you know, all, all mom and dad talk about is sort of all of these horrible things happening to the Jews.

Like, do they think that it's this horrible curse?

And my wife, who I think was just sort of basically asleep, was like, why?

They're fine.

She's more practical than I am ANYWAYS and less, less given to dark nights of the soul than I am.

She said, you know, no, they're fine.

I think they're fine.

But I was unconvinced.

And shortly thereafter or immediately thereafter, but at some point thereafter, I actually gave a sermon where I shared this story.

I forgot exactly in what context.

And I had a, a congregant came up to me after shul.

Her name is Gloria Horowitz.

She's a, a dear, dear friend of mine.

She's also a novelist herself.

She wrote a, a wonderful book called Leia's Journey, which won the National George Book Award, I think in 1978 or 79.

She's in her 90s.

And she came up to me and she held my hand and she said, Ben, I'm sure they know.

And that was extremely moving to me.

So you asked the question what I want people to know and what I want them to take away from the book.

I don't know if those are exactly the same thing.

I want people in my community and the Jews in my life to know that.

I think, in my opinion anyways, being Jewish and being a part of our people is an extraordinary, extraordinary privilege that includes it.

Does that yes, does include some horrible parts of our history and includes challenges, but that that those things in no way exhaust what Jewish experience and Jewish being is about and through all of the challenges, you know, that we experience as Jews, I think not for one minute should we lose sight of the fact that it's an incredible blessing to move through the world as a Jew and I that's what I want.

That's what I want my children to know and that's what I want my community to know.

And I think it's important that they know that in in in a real way.

I mean, I've said this a lot over the last year, but in some ways the book is basically a long footnote to the Haggadah, which includes the line, not only one shall come to destroy us, rather in every generation they'll come to destroy us.

And Haqqadashi enemy Adam, God will save us from their hands.

But also, if you look back at the rabbinic discussions about how the Seder was supposed to function, the whole point of the Seder is to give the kids what modern educators would call provocations.

You know, something that excites them to ask a question.

Why are we leaning back?

Why are we?

Why are we washing twice, right?

It's to do all of these weird things in order to stimulate the children such that they should be awake and so that they should ask questions so that you can indoctrinate them, basically.

And what are you going to indoctrinate them?

You're going to indoctrinate them with the basic rabbinic understanding of the Jewish story.

Kids, you should know that one day someone is going to come and try to destroy you, right?

Ella shebhol dorva dorum de malenu, la coloteno.

Every generation that's going to happen.

That's the promise.

And the fact that we sing that, at least in my family, in like a jaunty tune, you know?

Oh, kids, come listen to this really, really terrifying story.

I mean, that is, that is a heavy aspect of what it means to be a Jew.

You know, all things being equal, I would rather my kids hear it from me than they learn about it, you know, like from the world.

I would like to frame that difficult kind of reality for them as best, as best as I can.

But that's heavy.

I mean, I that's a heavy thing.

I want to react to this by saying that even though you and I are talking here today for the first time, it's just kind of amazing for me to hear from somebody who thinks about things in such a similar way.

Like, it's just bizarre to me that you and I have overlapping thoughts, like, to this extent, starting with The Cave.

And now when people ask me, you know, what message I want to leave, I always say that the biggest gift on earth to you is if you were born a Jew, which is very similar to the message that you want to leave as well.

Yeah, And in my life, I have a lot of we can call it microaggressions, we can call it encounters with people who genuinely do hate us.

I'd like to think that one of my strengths and why this podcast has been successful is because I'm able to speak to people in a calm way and just persuade them relentlessly with facts and get them to come around and have those difficult conversations.

And no matter how hard and frustrating it is, the immediate thought I always have is, thank you, God, for giving me the privilege of doing that job.

Like, how lucky am I that there's someone out there who believe that I of all people have that capability.

I always feel very grateful, and it's just incredible to me that you and I have such a similar message to the world now.

One of the things that has always been a big mystery to me is I understood that in rabbinic thought, even when the world was created, there's this belief that wherever we have something good, we also unfortunately have a bad kind of counteracting.

Even in the best moments, we we have to have something bad.

And what I never understood is.

Why do we have to have something bad?

Like why is it that when something good is created, there's always like a negative counterbalance immediately entered into the world?

Yeah, that's a pretty good question.

I think you're 100% right that that is how the rabbi's understand creation and humanity and that it's we're basically a mixed bag.

I mean, which is a significant.

I don't know if it's a departure because we came first or or we came around at the same time as the ancient Christians, depending on how you understand Jewish historiography.

But you know, ultimately, at least after Augustine, you know, Christians, the, the concept of original sin is sort of a guiding, I think, aspect of Christian, Christian anthropology and and Christian theology, the rabbi's sort of version of that.

There are rabbinic statements that allude to original sin as well.

But the basic rabbinic idea is that we have a yezer Atovan yezer ara, right?

We have a, we have a good impulse and a bad impulse.

And then the, and that we are basically a mess.

I mean, but not only a mess.

I mean, we, we are, we're, we're for a mixed bag.

And that's sort of what the whole drama of the High Holidays is about and that the whole drama of a life is about is that we have an evil impulse and we have a good impulse and we're supposed to try to choose good.

And look, God gave us the Torah and the meets vote to help us.

I mean, one of the most fascinating theological ideas anywhere in the kind of official Jewish Canon is the, you know, sort of the image, pretty famous image associated with Isaac Gloria of the kind of the broken vessels.

And that creation was this act of destruction where God pours these light light into into these vessels.

And the vessels can't contain the light and so they shatter, which is why the world is all mixed up.

So there's divine light, but there's also these shards of these vessels which are demonic and dark and have evil powers.

And we and our job is to put the light back together more or less to put to rebuild the original kind of divine wholeness.

And that's what we do.

And as Jews.

And that that's the point of doing the meets vote.

That's the sort of the classic Lurianic view of all of this.

OK, but why though?

And this is your question.

So why did the vessels have to shatter in the 1st place?

I mean, why not just create a nice world?

And Luria's answer, and of course you could push him on this and say, but but why?

But Lauria's answer is, is quite remarkable.

And he says that even in primordial Ansof, which is Hebrew for unending, which is his sort of term for primordial divine reality, you know, before creation, even in primordial ansof, there were these slight, he calls them Deneem, which for him means these slight imperfections.

There was something that was like a, it was like a single fly, like in the ointment, so to speak.

And the reason why creation has to happen and the reason why the vessels shatter is because God had to work stuff out, basically.

For God's self, I mean, doesn't even make sense.

Talk about divinity had to had to sort of somehow purge itself of its own imperfections.

And so and Luria says this sort of very directly.

So the shattering of the vessels and sort of the analogous primordial sin of the human being when they eat from from the tree that they're not supposed to eat from.

That's actually not in the Lurianic view, a departure from God's, but it's actually an active imitatio day.

I mean, we are because we're created in the image of divine reality and divine reality itself has something that it needs to work out.

So it's, it's quite extraordinary.

Now, the whole drama of the cosmos is actually a drama of Chuva, right?

That we all have to, none of us are perfect, and we have to work together to sort of try to reassemble a primordial wholeness that perhaps never even really existed, which I think is quite beautiful.

That's a very comforting thought.

It's like.

I didn't fuck it up.

It was fucked up before me.

I don't know.

This is also a tangent and I don't know if it'll make into the final cut, but you can decide.

One of the things that the Kabbalists talk about a lot, not not just the Kabbalists, but in the medieval world, they talk about the world is like a mirror of divine reality and modern people, when we think of a mirror, we think of something that pretty much perfectly reflects what we're looking at.

I mean, this is not true in the medieval world.

So in the medieval world, mirrors are not made out of glass.

That's like sprayed with some sort of I don't know how they make mirrors now, but mirrors were made from polished metal and polished metal.

If you think about that can get requires great, great care to keep it reflective and to give a non distorted image any little scratch, any scuff, which is of course very easy to do for a thin piece of polished metal is going to create a significantly distorted image.

So when they say the world is a mirror of divine reality, what they really probably mean is that we only get sort of a blurry, messed up image of divine reality because basically the mirror is very, very fragile.

And maybe we didn't take care of it well enough and maybe we dinged it up.

And a mirror is not something that provides a crystal clear image in the medieval imagination and or in the medieval kind of reality.

And so when they use that term, they likely have something very different in mind than when we think about, you know, it's like in a mirror.

A mirror is something that's very unclear.

I love that.

Tell me then, how can people connect with you and learn more about your work?

So I'm pretty easy to get in touch with if you don't know me at all.

My favorite way for you to get to know me would be either come check us out at the Pelham Jewish Center or if you're around New York, or buy my book.

You can get to know writers somewhat by reading their books and my books available wherever you can buy books.

I'm also very easy to e-mail.

You can find my e-mail on on the website of the synagogue, the Pelham jewishcenter.org.

I do respond to almost all of my emails.

I don't get so many that I can't respond.

And I would love to hear from anyone either about my work as a novelist or about anything we've talked about today or about the podcast.

I'd love to connect.

If you have a book club or if you have any kind of thing like that, give me a shout.

Awesome.

And I have one final question for you.

It's one that I ask every single guest.

Who would you like to nominate for people?

Do you want to know?

Oh, that's such a great question.

I'll nominate a couple of amazing writer friends.

One is an Israeli novelist and short story writer named Edo Geffen who wrote Jerusalem Beach and Mrs.

Lillian Bloom's Cloud Factory.

He's just a wonderful, wonderful, thoughtful person and a brilliant writer.

Another writer friend of mine who is is just brilliant is Elise Albert.

She wrote an amazed, She wrote several amazing books.

The one which is just forever burned into my mind is a book she wrote called Afterbirth, which I describe as Portnoy's Complaint, but about postpartum depression.

And it is just riotously funny and amazing and at least is awesome.

And then on the rabbinic side, I would I One of my dearest friends from rabbinical school is Rabbi Mia Simmering, and she is one of the Jewish chaplains on Rikers Island.

And her work is incredible and fascinating and extremely challenging and something that I think a lot of people don't know that much about.

These are fantastic nominations.

Thank you so much for doing this.

I love this conversation.

My pleasure.

Thank you so much.

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