David Wolpe is a Rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
8:05 - Who is God?
14:22 - Atheism
26:20 - Holocaust
31:53 - Evil
37:06 - Nihilism
40:51 - Judaism
49:45 - Marriage
53:36 - The Torah
57:41 - Gay marriage
1:06:48 - Super Bowl
1:14:43 - Religious texts
1:20:29 - Exodus
1:24:23 - Free will
1:28:32 - Consciousness
1:37:15 - Suffering
1:41:13 - Mortality
1:45:51 - Finding faith
1:53:34 - Israel and Palestine
2:00:53 - Advice for young people
2:04:13 - Books
2:07:54 - Meaning of life

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The following is a conversation with Rabbi David Wolpe, someone who I have been a fan of for many years, for the kindness in his heart, the strength of his character, and the kind of friends he keeps and talks with, many of whom disagree with him but love him nevertheless, including the late Christopher Hitchens.

I will have many conversations like these in the future about religion, about Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and others, looking to understand and celebrate the culture, the tradition, and the beauty of the people who practice these religions.

I will of course not shy away from the difficult topics.

I will talk both about hate and love, about war and peace.

This conversation was recorded more than 3 weeks ago.

Please allow me this time to speak on what has been on my mind.

If this is not interesting to you, please skip.

Some people asked me to say a few words on the war in Ukraine.

I think my words are worth little, but perhaps let me try.

I considered doing a long solo episode on this war.

I tried several times, but it is too personal for now.

To give you context, I've been talking to refugees, friends, loved ones in Ukraine, in Russia, in Poland, Slovakia, Moldova, Romania, even UK, Germany, Canada, India, China, and of course the United States.

Some of them crying or angry or confused or scared.

I'm helping as best as I can privately and I'm hoping to help in the future by traveling to Ukraine and Russia and celebrating the humanity and the beauty of the people in this region.

This was all set up both for Ukraine and Russia trips before 2022, including conversations with scientists, artists, athletes, leaders, and just, quote, regular folks who are equally, if not more, fascinating to me.

For now, it has become much more difficult, but I'll keep trying to find a way.

And today, and until the day I die, I am an American.

I hope to keep celebrating the culture and the incredible human beings that make up these nations and humanity as a whole.

That's how I feel about the people of these nations.

Now, let me speak about those in the seats of power.

I condemn all actions of leaders who play geopolitical games on the world stage disregarding the costs paid in human suffering on the scale of millions.

For this reason, I condemn Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

And I condemn many of the military interventions by the superpowers of the world, including by my country, the country I love, the United States, that after World War II has intervened in over 40 nations, with many studies finding that the United States is culpable for an unfathomable number of civilian deaths.

I condemn all heads of state who needlessly wage wars, watching young men and women burn in the fires they started.

I don't understand how humans can be so cruel to each other.

Or rather, I understand, but I believe in a future world where this is no longer true.

Let me also say a few words of what I hope to do with this podcast.

I want to explore the full complexity and beauty of human nature.

I believe each of us are capable of good and evil, and I want to understand how the mind and the circumstance lead 1 to choose the former path or the latter.

And I believe conversation is 1 of the best ways to work toward this understanding.

For that, I think I have to not only talk to the most inspiring humans in the world, but also to the most controversial.

I will speak with many people who I disagree with.

Politicians, activists, CEOs, heads of state, with very different opinions on the world.

I will try hard to challenge their ideas without Closing my mind to the depth and complexity of their perspective and their humanity My presence in the same room with Wildly different people will make it easy for the media and the internet to pick and choose clips and snapshots attacking me for being a shill for 1 side or the other.

I can't defend this point, except to say that I'm a shill for no 1, and that I hope you see the strength of my integrity, that I won't be influenced by any of them, no matter how rich, powerful, or charismatic they are.

Like the poem, If, by Roger Kipling says, if you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, or walk with kings, or lose the common touch, If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, if all men count with you, but none too much." This is a really, really important thing to me that I try to live by, that all human beings count with me the same.

People have criticized me for wanting to have some of these conversations, like with Vladimir Putin and Vladimir Zelensky, and for times in the past speaking about them without the seriousness the topic deserves.

For this, I would sincerely like to apologize.

I'm disappointed, even ashamed, of my frequent ineloquence on these topics.

When I'm joking, it should be clear that it's a joke, and hopefully actually funny.

When I'm being serious, I should speak with care and rigor.

I've now done many hundreds of hours of podcast conversation.

Despite my frequent failures in speaking, I hope you know where my heart is.

Unfortunately, I think people will take clips of me and use them to attack me.

I guess there's nothing I can do but send them my love.

In the meantime, try to be a better person and a better interviewer.

Let me also say that I like humor, especially dark humor.

I like being silly and not taking myself seriously.

I will keep taking risks with that, all with the goal of having fun and celebrating humanity at its most absurd and most beautiful.

I will occasionally dress up in strange and weird outfits to celebrate the absurdity of life.

I will hang out, bake bread and joke with all kinds of people.

I don't have to agree with them to laugh with them, in order to escape for a brief moment the tension, the conflict, the hatred in the world.

Humor just might save this little chaotic little civilization of ours.

And of course, I love my fellow Americans, Californians and Midwesterners, New Yorkers and Texans.

I love humans, I love life, and I want to share that love with others, with you.

If I messed it up, I'm really, really sorry.

I have no agenda and no 1 telling me what to do.

I feel like the luckiest guy in the world to have all these opportunities.

And I'm deeply grateful to be alive and to share that joy with other amazing people around me.

For all the love you've sent my way, I will work my ass off to not disappoint you.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, here's my conversation with David Welpy.

It's difficult because Judaism, like any tradition that is thousands of years old and encompasses so many different lands and languages and thinkers, it doesn't give a single answer to even simple questions and to large questions, it certainly doesn't give a single answer.

Although Judaism was responsible for introducing the monotheistic idea to the world, it doesn't mean that it's 1 idea.

So if you take Maimonides, the greatest sage in the Jewish tradition, medieval philosopher, he would say that God is an omnipotent, benevolent, intangible, unimaginable God.

In fact, he said you can't say what God is, only what God is not, because you have to emphasize, could talk more about that, but basically you have to emphasize the unknowability of God.

You have a modern philosopher like Heschel, who says that God is a God of pathos, a God of deep feeling, which probably would make Maimonides shiver if he heard such a description.

And if you look in the Bible, God is always regretting or having human emotions.

So there are so many different kinds of depictions and ideas, and there is this tremendous tension between transcendence and imminence.

That is, in the Jewish tradition, God is exquisitely close, God is imminent.

In the Talmud's words, God is as close as your mouth is to your ear.

In other words, whatever you say, God hears it.

And yet at the same time, God is unfathomably distant.

Sometimes when I speak to high schoolers, I will say, in the Jewish tradition, think of it this way, when you were 2 years old, you had no idea what it was to be a 15-year-old.

Not only did you not know, but you didn't know what you didn't know.

We conceive of God as being more, the distance between God and human beings is far greater than the distance between a two-year-old and a 15-year-old.

So when we speak about God, we have to acknowledge how limited we really are.

So, okay, you laid out a lot of fascinating things on the table.

Then this idea of deep feeling, which again, can God be operating the space of feelings too?

So not just the mouth and the ear of the senses.

Can God be felt by this 3 year old, in the analogy, versus the teenager?

So I will take refuge in a beautiful phrase from Martin Buber, another Jewish theologian.

He said, God cannot be expressed, God can only be addressed.

In other words, you can speak to God, you can feel a sense of God, but can you begin to comprehend or know God?

Yosef Caspi, I'm pulling in a couple of early Jewish philosophers, he said, to know God, I would have to be God.

But can we get close, is it useful or is it a distraction to visualize things, to embody, to create, to attach to the stories some kind of visualizations in our mind.

For example, gender, he versus she, things like this, or old man in the sky kind of feeling.

So it's almost inevitable, but I think ultimately you try to transcend it.

This was the great, you know, we just read this actually in synagogue, the story of the golden calf.

And The story is that human beings found it impossible to not have a visualization because they had just come from Egypt and in the world of pagan worship, everything is, it's not that pagans thought that idol was actually God, but it represented visually what God was.

And along comes this idea that God is actually not capable of being visualized, which is very difficult and it stretches the bounds of human comprehension, maybe even breaks them.

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

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

But the reason you're not is that you don't have to have a comprehension of God.

I mean, To draw an analogy that is not far from perfect as most analogies are, but this 1 especially, you have relationships with people who are mysteries to you.

You can live and love somebody for 50 years and they can say something that surprises you because ultimately we are trapped in here.

And when a child first says I, we call that individuation.

But what that really means is I now know that I am cut off from the minds of all other children and all other people.

And so you have with God a more intimate relationship because you can believe that God is, you are known by God and you have a relationship to God despite the fact that you can't know God just as you can't know others.

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

Well, the world, yes, The world that God created is constantly surprising.

But, and by the way, the caveat to this, you know, when I had all these debates with Christopher Hitchens, and he would always say that God is a greater tyrant than North Korea because it continues after your death.

And the idea of being known by God is, after all, frightening if you think God knows what I think and so on, if your image of God is unloving.

Can we jump to this, you had friendships and conversations with a lot of the fascinating figures of the past 20, 30 years of the great intellectuals, 1 of which, perhaps 1 of the greats, is Christopher Hitchens.

What have you learned from your conversation, your friendship?

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

Well, 1 of the things I learned was you can't win a debate with Christopher Hitchens.

1 of the reasons you can't win is because he has this British baritone and this ready wit that, you can't triumph over laughter.

It doesn't matter if your argument is better.

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

And everybody laughed and that was, despite the fact that that's not really an argument.

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

And people should watch your conversation with him, it's great.

I mean, it's a kind of David versus Goliath situation, and you're quite masterful at using charisma and sweet-talking Christopher Hitchens.

I mean, I spent a three-hour limousine ride with him from 1 debate to another, from LA to San Diego, and the entire time he said, we just can't talk about religion.

So we talked about literature and he gave me a long lecture about Scotch.

I mean, not only did he, I began, I wrote a couple of obituaries about him.

And when I began with the, the, historian Keith Thomas said there are 2 ways of achieving immortality by doing things worth remembering or saying things worth remembering.

I mean, he went all around the world to all sorts of danger zones.

He knew like the best bars everywhere from Kuala Lumpur, you know, to Beirut, to LA.

And he could drink all night and write a 2000 word essay on the poetry of Yeats and go to sleep.

I remember before 1 of our debates in Boston, he was at the bar and he said, come have a drink.

And I said, I'm not gonna have a drink before I go to debate with you.

And he said, just have a beer, it's water.

So he was, he really was a constant, inexhaustible fountain of intrigue and interest.

of things, if you can remember, if you can mention, if you can admit, to have him enlightening you or helping you change your mind about something in this world?

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

So he is, however you conceive of the term,

He's 1 of the more beautiful humans, this weird little earth produced.

So how do you explain the atheism combined with such a beautiful mind?

So from your perspective of a man of faith, how do you think about that?

So of the atheists that I have debated, I think about all of them somewhat differently.

So I think that in some deep way, for example, Sam Harris is a religious personality.

I don't even think that he would, he wouldn't like the word religious, but I don't even think that he would take issue with that.

I think that he would say his is a purely material based spirituality, but I mean, his orientation towards meditation and appreciation of Buddhism, there's something deeply seeking spiritual about him.

With Hitchens, I honestly, and I know that some of his fans will really not like this.

It's not that he was any kind of closet believer, certainly not at all.

But I almost feel as though he was less a passionate arguer against religion than he was, first of all, extremely upset by the forms that religion took in this world.

And then once he trained his intellectual howitzers on a target, he had so much fun inventing new arguments and attacking it that I really believe he gets carried away sometimes by his own eloquence and intellectual range.

So for example, the idea that you would call a book that religion poisons everything.

I think he did that deliberately, provocatively, so that he could defend a proposition that obviously is indefensible, that it poisons everything.

So I don't know, I think he had tremendous joie de vivre.

That's really what, that's what sums him up.

This guy loved life in all of its manifestations and arguing against something that someone else believed was 1 of his greatest joys.

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

And you could argue, perhaps, that humor is the highest form of what humanity can achieve.

Like sometimes maybe us little humans take things a little too seriously, then sometimes we need to just laugh at it all, laugh at ourselves, and that's probably the purest form of wisdom.

You know, Auden, the poet, said, "'Among the people that I like or admire, "'I can find no common quality, "'but among those I love, I can.

"'All of them make me laugh.'" There you have it.

Speaking of people that make you laugh, Sam Harris.

Because he actually has a really great sense of humor.

He's another 1 that you had, you're friends with, you have good conversations with.

Where's your fundamental disagreements and agreements with Sam?

Sam believes that religion is intellectually indefensible.

He really believes it, like deep in his soul.

And he gets angry at the idea that a proposition should be unchallenged if it offends his sense of logic.

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

Nope, In fact, I mean, I did a podcast with Eric Weinstein.

And Sam said, when I heard your podcast with David Wolpe, I learned stuff about what he thinks that I never learned in my conversations with him because I can never let him make those unfounded assertions without challenging them, and you just let them go.

And I think that there was something too that was like, he finds it hard to have a conversation about religion that doesn't arouse his real ire about the harm that he thinks religion does in the world.

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

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

I mean, they're both capable of separating their contempt for religion from the people that they have sitting in front of them.

You mean Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris?

Okay, so let me, you mentioned Eric Weinstein, people should listen to your conversation with Eric, as it's a fascinating 1, it's great.

It's non-standard, it just goes all over the place in this humor and wit, it's great.

So 1 interesting aspect that I also learned, perhaps not about you, but about Eric, well about both, but Eric has a similar thing as with Jordan Peterson, which is if you ask them, do they believe in God, I think the answer, they're not comfortable answering that question, or they might say no, but they're usually just not comfortable answering that question, but there's a kind of sense that they would like to live life, a religious life, as if God exists.

I think, first of all, Eric has a really deep appreciation of the Jewish tradition.

I don't know, Peterson, I've read his stuff and I've reviewed his stuff and so on, but I think that Jungians are in their very approach.

They believe that myth is the way the world works, and so it's not that big a leap to God, but it's still, there's still a distance there.

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

Is it possible to have the depth of a religious life without believing in God?

Like how do you make sense of Eric Weinstein's devout life within the tradition?

I mean, I honestly think he believes in God, but doesn't believe in God.

And it's oscillating like it's a quantum mechanical system of some sort.

So I think that he would probably agree with what Elie Wiesel said, that a Jew can be angry at God or be disbelieving of God, but is not allowed to be indifferent to God.

And I think Eric's not indifferent to God.

I've had this conversation many times because you can be very Jewish and have deep doubts about theological questions because Judaism isn't a religion, it's a religious family, and so you're born Jewish.

Like if I said to you tomorrow, if I was Christian and I said, oh, I believe in Jesus today and then tomorrow I didn't, I'm not Christian anymore.

But if tomorrow I said, oh, I don't believe all this stuff, I'm still Jewish.

Having said that though, I think it's very hard to sustain over generations without some belief that the source of it is beyond ourselves.

And in that sense, as in many others, Eric is unique.

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

It's a very interesting idea and a very interesting argument for devout faith, which is it's a glue that holds a tradition together, otherwise, like, traditions fall apart.

So you can't have the intensity of that tradition.

I mean, on the other hand, you do see tradition, I mean, Thanksgiving, 1 of my favorite holidays.

So I would say traditions that are demanding fall apart.

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

I think I need to introduce you to some Thanksgiving dinners that are quite demanding.

First of all, I'm a vegetarian, so I'm tough to have at Thanksgiving dinner.

But there's a comedian named Kathy Lansman, who 1 year I heard this on the radio and it stuck with me.

She said that holidays are a chance to renew your resentments afresh.

You know, and that's basically what people do with their families.

It's like, I'm gonna go home and fight with the uncle again this year.

I apologize to take a dark turn, but you mentioned Elie Wiesel.

I recently saw a picture of Elie Wiesel when he was in the camp, when he was liberated.

Like, you know, I've seen pictures in concentration camps of people I don't know, or whose words I haven't really felt and gone through.

But for some reason, like here's just a normal person, like

It's, and you see, you can see his face, but at the same time, you see that this is an amazing, and I think what's so disturbing about it is exactly what you were saying, is I've seen a thousand people like this, and I know this 1, and I know what he became, so what about all those other people who look exactly like him, who didn't make it out of the camp.

You know, maybe it's projection, but it seemed like, this perhaps is also just combining with Mance's search for meaning, is it seemed like it was a regular day for them, in

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David Wolpe: Judaism | Lex Fridman Podcast #270