Yehuda: Hi everyone. Welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show from the Shalom Hartman Institute creating better conversations about the essential issues facing Jewish life. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer, and we’re recording on July 13th, 2025 from Jerusalem.

You’re probably familiar by now with the term “Trump derangement syndrome.” One of the most recent popular uses of the term came from Bari Weiss over at the Free Press in a confession she made earlier this year. I’m the first to admit that I was a sufferer of what conservatives at the time would’ve called “TDS: Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

The term actually was coined by conservatives originally about liberal opposition to then President Bush over 20 years ago, “Bush Derangement Syndrome,” and it’s now used derogatorily to describe those who oppose President Trump reflexively, that is to say, on all fronts, on all issues, and hysterically. And I suppose it’s opposed to opposing the president substantively or with good reasons or calmly.

Weiss, among others, wants to argue that reasonable people don’t fall into such syndromes. They agree on some fronts with policies of the president and disagree on others. It’s only the deranged, in this period of polarization, who insist on sounding an alarm, perhaps it’s them, those folks would argue, who are exacerbating the polarization.

I find the use of the term “Trump Derangement Syndrome” to be really disturbing more than the alleged behavior itself. To suggest that your political opponents, especially those who are most consistent in their opposition, are deranged, is to pathologize your opponents. It’s to treat opposition and conflict as rooted in disturbance or even disease. I also find it wildly inconsistent, maybe even hypocritical.

You wanna take a few minutes and read what these same people who have been arguing about Trump Derangement Syndrome have to say about the candidacy of Zohran Mamdani to become mayor of New York City—a topic I promise we will cover on a future episode—and you’ll find the exact same symptoms of Trump derangement syndrome expressed against Mamdani. Truthfully, that was the case against President Obama for all eight years of the turbulent, violent opposition to his presidency, which in many ways gave rise to the Trump presidency.

So, no, the term “derangement” as applied to one political opponent is no way to conduct or construct healthy political disagreement in a democracy. It’s rather a good way to delegitimize your opponents to treat them as fundamentally unwell, and then to, by using this name, invite them to scream back at you, “No, I’m not deranged,” which, in turn, you will allow to confirm your suspicions of their derangement.

This is the stuff which turns political disagreement into toxic polarization. The refusal to engage with critics in any way where you learn from their criticism, but rather to treat them as the foolish or even the wicked who are meant to be destroyed.

If you’re a regular of the show, you know about my well-worn concerns about hyper-partisanship and polarization. I feel like I was early in on this. I argued in The Forward, back in, I think 2016, that partisanship in America was the biggest existential threat facing American Jews. I feel this has been born out with the fact that amidst a horrifying rise in antisemitism, we now have no collective capacity to respond to it because of the overpowering, partisan political differences we have effectively embraced as American Jews.

At the same time, there’s reason to be skeptical about blanket opposition to all expressions of partisanship and polarization. On some issues, it’s really hard to find middle ground; only some measure of principled opposition across difference. Sometimes a definitive resolution one way or another, not a compromise between them, but a definitive choice of one side or another on a divisive issue is gonna be the right way forward.

On other issues, which when we stake out moral positions, we know in historical retrospect that when moderates tried to bridge difference between strong moral views, they oftentimes enabled moral failures to continue. That’s the essential argument that Martin Luther King makes in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” where he indicts the white moderates at the time for refusing to embrace his strategy of non-violence. Insisting on a less assertive approach to addressing the civil rights injustices at the time. King’s argument suggests, no, this isn’t a disagreement between these, and these are the words that living God, there’s a moral imperative on one side of the argument, and any attempt to try to bridge that difference loses out on the moral truth.

In some cases, the turn to civility or the appeal to moderation is an attempt to shut down opposition. Oftentimes that of marginalized groups who often find their grievances met with tone policing. Sometimes it’s just healthy in a democracy for powerful differences to shape our public conversation more than it is important for us to have some myth of unity predicated in the belief that more unites us than divides us.

In other words, the conversation about polarization itself—not just the phenomenon of polarization, but the conversation about it—is risky and is fraught. How you diagnose a problem and how you treat it can say as much about your values as the very decision to consider it a problem. As we’ll discuss today, not every problem even has a solution.

I am back in Israel for a short trip. As you know, we canceled most of our programs here this summer, but I’m grateful to be here for a shorter version of our rabbis program, for those rabbis that were able to make it and to spend time with my colleagues on some important planning work.

But I’m arriving again into a country whose divisions, it’s fair to say, are simmering everywhere, not just below the surface. The issue of Haredi non-participation in military service is angering and exhausting to many Israelis. Nearly two years into this war, a vast majority of Israelis are appealing to their government to do what it needs to do to bring the hostages home. The media outlets are at war with each other on how to cover the carnage and Gaza. The divisions in the society do not brook easy compromise. And as is the case in America, we do ourselves no favors by talking about these divisions either in pathologizing our opponents, or making light of the substantive issues that are coming to the surface. There is only so much of “we are one; let’s stand together” that a society that manages real difference can handle.

So I’m joined to discuss all of this and what it means for rational and reasonable politics that demand of us a better way of thinking about dispute and disagreement in how we move past them by former Ambassador Daniel Taub, an Israeli diplomat, international lawyer, writer of British origin, at least that’s what it says in the Wikipedia page, I think you’ll hear that, who served as Israel’s ambassador to the United Kingdom from 2011 to 2015. Also served as the Director of Strategy and planning at the Yad Hanadiv Foundation in Jerusalem until 2021. And the prompt for our conversation is his new book Beyond Dispute: Rediscovering the Jewish Art of Constructive Disagreement, published this year.

Thank you Daniel for being on the show today. As you know, I have a soft spot for diplomats in my life. I recently interviewed my dad. I’ve interviewed Tal Becker. So you join a long, auspicious list of diplomats.

Daniel: That’s a great group.

Yehuda: It’s a good group. I wanna start with the state of debate here in Israel. Where is this… how do you see… you’re talking about in your work, you, you worked as a diplomat, which is fundamentally about brooking difference, or at least finding ways to live with them. And you’re writing about a constructive disagreement as opposed to violent conflict. Where do you think this society is around its major debates? Where are the central anchors of debate and conflict in this society? And, and as we’ll get to, which of them do you think are actually possible to resolve?

Daniel: So it’s great to be with you, Yehuda. I, I have to say, I had doubts. My publisher here is a UK publisher, and I had slight doubts about pitching Israel or Jews as any kind of example in the world of constructive difference, I mean, you look at us and we don’t necessarily seem to…

Yehuda: We don’t model it.

Daniel: We don’t necessarily seem to be a model, at first sight. And I, and actually in the book I quote Abraham Joshua Heschel and you know, who’s had this wonderful description of the Jewish people as a messenger who has forgotten his message. And in a sense, one of the points is that we are sitting on a sort of repository of insights that I think are, are fascinating.

I think, you know, one of the things that was so striking to me was to, to revisit our historic DNA, rabbinic DNA, in relation to argument and discover how many echoes it has of contemporary conflict management theory and social psychology. And the reason I suggest is that it arose against the background of a social crisis that was, in many ways, very similar to the social crisis that we’re facing today. You know, the, the causes may have been different. We’re not talking about a destruction of a temple or an exile, but we are talking about loss of authoritative truth, loss of centers of social capital. We’re talking about factionalization, we’re talking about echo chambers and so on, and those sorts of echoes. And so maybe some of those responses are similar.

I actually think that if you dig down into Israeli society for all of that, there are some vestiges of that DNA that we need to draw strength from and amplify. And I think the most obvious one at the moment is actually kids who come back from serving in the front and they go through a sort of dissonance. What is happening in this society? You know, we have been in a tank together, religious, secular, right wing, left wing, and so on, and we have been able to have those conversations and, and where are the tanks? Where are the foxholes in Israeli society that can enable us to have those, and as in many countries, as I’m showing in the United States, you know, the, the loudest isn’t necessarily representative of what is going on in the core of the core.

And there are a couple of things that I pick up on in Israeli society. First of all, one of the foxholes that we have in Israeli society, and you’ll have seen it on your visits here, are our miklatim, our bomb shelters. And you will have conversations taking place within bomb shelters. People who are living in buildings together aren’t chosen by their ideological criteria and some of those conversations or those co-cooperations, but there’s something else that I think you have to be sensitive to pick up on, and maybe I’m overstating it, but I draw strength from it, I’ve noticed that in conversations between people who don’t know each other well, there’s a, a slight pause at the start of the conversation, and I think that pause is a moment where somebody is thinking, I don’t know if this person I’m speaking to is related to a hostage family. I don’t know if they’ve got a kid on the front line. I don’t know if they’ve been evacuated from the North or the south.

And I think there’s something holy in that pause, if you like, that there is a recognition that if I had a story that was similar to their story, maybe I would be entering into this conversation from a different place. So I think these conversations are rare. I think they are very often away from the public eye, but I think just generally, really good conversations are rare actually. And, and that’s why it’s, it’s a call of our time to think about how we can identify them and amplify them.

Yehuda: Yeah, so it’s interesting, I, I asked you about the nodes of conflict and you went to the, a more, a much more optimistic representation, which is actually, we can take for granted that there are serious nodes of conflict in the society, but we have windows of time when we’re capable of actually seeing a cross difference and talking, which sounds a little bit like an optimistic view if all we need to do is basically widen those windows or make them more accessible.

And I’ll give you an example that actually echoes with what you were talking about in the tank, which is, and I’ve heard this from a lot of people, that if you jump from the massive political upheaval of the year 2023 until October 7th, around the judicial reform and people taken to the streets, that there was a narrative among returning soldiers who said, I just fought alongside the very people I was protesting against. I don’t want to go back to those protests. Right, that’s a good example of, when I actually spend time invested in something together with my political opponents, and sometimes that’s at war. Sometimes it’s in a bomb shelter. Sometimes it’s just an interpersonal conversation, then I’ve humanized my opponent, right? Which is the core of what we’re talking about.

But I guess what I’m worried about is, it doesn’t mean that judicial reform went away. It doesn’t mean that issues that really divide the society have gone away. And you may wind up in a weird dynamic where you’ve now humanized your opponents, but you’ve exacerbated the issues because you haven’t, you’ve lost the momentum and the, the anger that you need to actually start addressing them.

Daniel: I think that’s absolutely right. First of all, just to add a little bit of nuance to the point that you made, I think, you know, obviously not everybody is in the tanks, and one of the things that you do see, you see, for example, within the national religious camp, you see quite a lot of young people suddenly finding that they identify emotionally more with their secular comrades than they do, for example, with the ultra-Orthodox, who traditionally they might have felt more close to because they come from the world of Torah study. So unfortunately it’s not, you know, there’s not a simple abundance mentality here. Sometimes that sense of closeness comes…

Yehuda: Comes at a cost.

Daniel: Yeah, comes at a cost. I think you’re absolutely right and you are right to focus on it in your, in your opening remarks. Your dad will have told you, you know that in times of crisis, the speech writers already tell you that, always tell you that what you need is a really good speech and, and a good conversation is not an answer to every ill in society. There are fundamental inequities, there are fundamental power inequalities. And actually, not only is a, a conversation, not only an… not an answer, sometimes it can come across as a sort of plaster.

You know, I, I’ve been involved in a number of dialogue groups with different tribes in Israeli society, and generally it is the elites, if you want to call them that, that feel that we only need to understand each other’s narratives. And then you have the disadvantaged populations who are saying, well, you might feel better, but I’m still going back home to my disadvantaged environment and we haven’t moved forward. And a good conversation is a tool in a functioning society, but I think it would be a mistake to start thinking that if only we had the right conversations that will address all of the power inequities or other inequities that we have to deal with.

Yehuda: Yeah, I say a quote a lot from Linda Zayer at the University of Chicago called against civility, and she doesn’t really mean that we should have less civility in society. What she means is that appeals to civility in times of social difference are oftentimes efforts to repress the viewpoints of the marginalized. It’s oftentimes deployed by men against women, and it, it correlates to something we know, which is if somebody’s genuinely mad at you, if you say to them, calm down—good luck. Right? They’re not saying… they’re not, they’re not expressing their viewpoint with anger because they think that their anger is unjustified. It’s not a question of tone. They’re actually angry at you. And telling them to calm down is basically saying what you care about isn’t that important.

So where are we allowed to… those of us who care about humanizing across difference, where are we not only allowed, but where we have to even cultivate or, or hold ourselves back to give room for people to be angry. There’s so much to be angry here about.

Daniel: So, so I’m not advocating civility. It would be foolish to be an Israeli who sets himself up as an advocate of civility. You know, with my British genes, I’m obviously sympathetic to civility. My, my argument here is that when we are engaged in this process that we think is an actual argument. There are ways that we can be doing it better. Argument is one of the tools a society has, and sadly for all of the reasons that you are saying derangement syndrome and, and all of us have our own version of the derangement and so on.

If we think it’s worth, you know, sometimes when I teach in negotiation training seminars, I’ll ask people to raise their hands to the height that reflects how much of their professional time they spend in something that they would call a negotiation. And it’s usually up to like 60, 70%. And then I say, and how much wen you go home to your wife and kids and the hands of course shoot up right into the sky. And then I’ll ask ’em, this is the kicker, how much time have you spent thinking about how productive that is and how you could do it better? And that’s the bit that’s missing.

And I think we have an actual toolkit and, and the toolkit, and this is when we do difficult conversation labs. this is the thing that is so hard for people. It doesn’t start by looking across the table. It starts by looking inwards. It starts by recognizing that, for example, maybe, and it sounds counterintuitive to people, but maybe it’s because my identity is not sufficiently grounded, that I’m not able to actually fully take on board. Maybe I need to actually strengthen, have a more robust identity to explore that space between my identity and my positions. We tend to think our positions are a part of us, but if we could explore that little room for maneuver between us and our positions, that will make us, but that’s, that’s something that needs to be cultivated. It’s something that needs to be learned. And I think, I think we miss.

The other thing that I would say, I, I think’s particularly important at the moment. This is not an argument to grant legitimacy to every other position, ’cause quite clearly there are positions that fall outside the realm of legitimate debate and there are a lot of people, particularly as you know very well, you know, American colleges trying to figure out what the grounds for cancellation are and so on.

And here I actually think the traditional Jewish approach, as I understand it, is quite helpful. You know, the thrust of the tradition. It’s very welcoming. It’s about calling in and not calling out. You know, the rabbis would say there’s 70 faces to the Torah, but that of course doesn’t mean that they can’t be a 71st face of the Torah that shouldn’t be listened to. And if you look through the Talmud and you try and find out what were the grounds for excluding somebody from the study hall, almost always it was not the content of their position. Almost always it was the fact that they didn’t buy into the process of the debate. There actually wasn’t a grounds on which you could continue that.

And I find that a really helpful compass. You know, to me it suggests that if you are engaged in a a painful social debate about vaccinations or about climate change, you should probably stretch your intellectual heart to hear things that are uncomfortable to you until the point that somebody indicates that there is no kind of scientific or other evidence that would persuade them to change your mind.

Because in that case, again, something else that I’m sure your dad is familiar with, there’s a saying amongst diplomats, you can change my opinion, but you can’t change my instructions. If you find yourself up against somebody else’s instructions, and they can be sort of tribal instructions, then you’re probably best to invest your energies elsewhere.

Yehuda: So I wanna come back to the negotiation question in a second, ’cause I think there is a certain, different kind of intractability that’s taken root in Israeli society around the possibility of peace. I wanna return to that. I did find compelling in your book when you talked about the need to fortify one’s own identity precisely to be the kind of person who can be in spaces of disagreement and negotiation.

I, this was a big part of my experience growing up. I was in environments as a teenager that were very, very trying, pluralistic Jewish environments, sometimes in non-Jewish environments where I had to kind of be a serious Jew in order to be able to figure out who I was. And I was aware of it at the time of like, I need to figure out who I am in these spaces. Otherwise, you’re in the wind, right? You say you’re negotiating, but actually you’re just lost, right?

Daniel: I’m torn on that, I have to say, and I’d actually love to hear what you think about it because in one way, Israel has, has an advantage, a structural advantage over let’s say North America, but it’s one I’m in very much two minds about.

And that is we have effectively at least four parallel independent school systems. Which means that every child grows up to some great degree at the center of their own identity. And on the one hand, I think that that is a source of strength. People in a sense know who they are, and it’s not just a source of strength, in a sense, it’s a, it’s a necessity for Israeli society because Israel, of course, is the place where after 2000 years, very, very different notions of what our survival mechanism should be, came back and had to navigate in the same space and so on.

On the other hand, that creates a sort of set of, of hermetic, you know, echo chambers, that in itself is a sort of problem. So, you know…

Yehuda: It’s worse actually. It’s not just on the individual level. It becomes, then, the tribal sense of identity. It’s not just like, okay, well we’re gonna isolate against the other groups. It’s actually, each of them have a plausible narrative that they’re gonna win, and people tend to be less willing to negotiate with others when they think that they can win.

Daniel: So it’s interesting, I, I would’ve framed it slightly differently and maybe they both lead to the same place, but everybody sees themself as the victim in this story, and it doesn’t matter how powerful you are. Your narrative actually actually placed your grievance right, as it were.

I just wanna say a reason, and just to dig down into a little bit about the importance of the robustness of identity. One of the things that brought brought it home [00:22:00] to me. I was involved in the development of a online course, which is now actually being taught in. In pretty much all Israeli universities and colleges about the difference in the Israeli society and it’s quite a technological course.

So I was looking into different techniques for using tech in education, and one of the places I looked into was the Center for Educational Technology in Israel, and they have a series of courses where the kids… the school kids have avatars. And the avatars go off into museums together, and they explore and do projects together. And then they, and then, you know, they, they, and they talked about the evaluation that they, they’d done on these programs, and they said, surprisingly, it has an advantage that they never expected.

And the advantage was that it made it much easier for teachers to critique their students because it’s one thing to say to your student, I saw you were not participating in that lesson, but the moment that you say to your student, I saw your avatar wasn’t participating in that lesson, it actually is far less impinging, and much more acceptable. And in a sense, I think that’s the kind of model that we are aspiring for.

I see it as being very Talmudic because our avatars are the rabbinical positions on the page and we have the space and we can move around between them. But I think just generally to recognize is… one of the things that we generally don’t recognize, that our relationship with our positions.

There are times when we feel closer to our positions and there’s times when we actually, you know, feel more distant from them depending on who we’ve just spoken to. Yeah, and, and I think that sadly, the. Forums in which we conduct our debates, silence that very important space and don’t allow us to focus on it.

Yehuda: So let’s dig a little bit deeper then into that dynamic between one’s identity, one’s positions, and the intractability of conflict. Post the Second Intifada, post the failure of Oslo, and the critique that is pretty widespread, it’s a hard critique for me to, to live with personally, that the diplomats and the mediators who saw the bridge ability of these conflicts never took as seriously the depth of identity that would’ve held the Israelis and Palestinians from genuinely being able to cross difference.

In fact, in your book, you give an example, which I’ve heard from multiple places, that when the negotiations would stop between Israelis and Palestinians, you said the Syrians wouldn’t talk to you when you did those negotiations, Israelis and Palestinians, the minute they stopped the negotiations, they still smoked cigarettes together, drank coffee, talked about their families,, which suggests that they were able to do something that their people were basically not capable of doing.

What I’ve observed, not scientifically, is that over that 20 year period of time, the intensification of both Israeli and Palestinian identity has taken place. Both countries, I’ve, we started noticing Stephanie and I both societies, not countries. Both societies have become more religious over that period of time. Both of them have become more insular, and as a result, that depth of identity has now made greater intractability.

What is, and, and when you add on the layer, and I think you’re right, that the strongest expressions of identity are oftentimes rooted in grievance, right, the sense of being aggrieved by the other, it further disincentivizes your ability to say, listen, my viewpoints are just an avatar of my identity. What do you need to do? I mean, really, what do we need to do when we’re talking about the depth of that kind of conflict rooted in deep identity and in grievance, it’s, it’s not gonna be read the Talmud. What do you have to do to help people to get to a place where they’re willing to subordinat some of that instinct that says, by negotiating, I’m compromising my identity. What do you need to give them to get them to that other place?

Daniel: So just to point out the obvious, that’s a question about negotiation. It’s not a question about a conversation necessarily, but it’s a critical conversation for Israeli society. And as with conversations, not every conversation can be had at every moment, and you know, in the same way, you need to feel confident in your identity, you need to feel confident in your life, you need to have a sense of security.

And you know, one of the dissonances between I think many Israelis and critics outside of Israel is they are expecting Israelis to have feelings that are basically superhuman at a time that it’s very, very difficult. Not only because we’re still on the receiving end of attacks, not only because our kids are still on the front line, but also because we are effectively still locked into October the 7th. And so we find ourselves in this extraordinary trap where we really know that we need peace and we really know that we can’t have peace, and that is the trap that we feel that we are in at the moment. I think that many, many Israelis feel that we’re in at the moment.

I think one of the things that Israeli history does show is how quickly some of these things can change. I mean, the example that everybody brings, but it’s, it’s not, the only example is, you know, Sadat coming to Jerusalem. And you, you are talking about a gaping wound of thousands killed and so on, and something changing dramatically in Israeli society.

And by the way, I think it’s worth pointing out, you know, not just the Abraham Accords, but the, we tend to take for granted the, the peace with Egypt and the peace with Jordan, but the resilience of those peace treaties, you know, during the Arab Spring and everything that’s gone on since then does sort of suggest that maybe it’s much harder to reach peace than we would like, but maybe once you reach it, those peace agreements are much more resilient than you might fear.

So I think there are, to take it back to the negotiations, one of the points that I make. The book, and it’s something that I take, you know, I was, I was very involved in our negotiations with the Palestinians and with the Syrians, as you mentioned, I had very little to do with our peace of negotiations with the Egyptians and the Jordanians. My wife thinks that I’m the world’s expert in failed negotiations.

Yehuda: Yeah, it is a, it’s a long list.

Daniel: But, you know, I’m, I mean, good company there too. But I point out that most classic books on negotiation theory point out that an international negotiation is really three negotiations in one. It’s the negotiation between me and you across the table, and then on each side of the table, you know, I’m sitting here, the person from the Ministry of Finance next to me wants to know how much it’s gonna cost. The guy from the Ministry of Defense wants to know what he’s gonna do to the security balance and so on. So that’s the negotiation along the table. And then at a certain stage, if you make progress, you actually have to sell this deal to the people that send you, and that’s the negotiation behind the table. So across, along, behind.

And I suppose my personal takeaway from the negotiation room is that there is a fourth dynamic which takes place inside each of the negotiators. And that’s a negotiation between the past and the future, between the grandparents and the grandchildren. And in a sense, the goal of the negotiators on both sides is to make those voices of the grandchildren as compelling as possible.

But I think if I was to try and find a connection to the approach that I’m trying to suggest and that challenge, I think that to the extent you can root this engagement with the other side in something that is authentic element of your tribal family tradition, it makes you feel like you are not being a traitor; you are actually channeling something that’s authentic.

That, by the way, is one of the reasons why, you know, I was involved in a track of peace negotiations that were called the Culture of Peace Negotiations. And we brought in legal experts and, and media experts and educational experts and so on. And I said, where are our religious leaders? And actually that was one of the few things that the Israelis, the Palestinians, and the American mediators all agreed, you know, if you open the door to the right kind of religious leaders, you’ll end up letting in the wrong kind of religious leaders. And I was saying, look, it’s in the room already.

So I, I think that’s one of the things that, by the way, has changed for the better. I think if you look at the spectrum of people that are concerned about these issues and reaching out to them, and I know you’re involved in some of these projects, I also have some involvement, you have people who find that those tribal imperatives are pushing them together and not necessarily driving them apart.

Yehuda: I think what’s always troubled me about the Sadat coming to Jerusalem example is that, first of all, I think it has left an an image in the Israelis’ minds of like, they will come around, and when they do the courageous thing, ’cause that was a courageous thing more for Sadat than it was for Israel. We don’t tell the story of after having this horrific war in 1973, which Israel arguably wins, but really it just avoids losing, then Begin gets on the plane and flies to Cairo. That’s not the story. It’s—Sadat comes to Jerusalem.

And as a result, one problem with that is that I wonder whether it’s still in the Israeli mindset of—when the Palestinians come to their senses and they come to us and say, we are done, then we’re willing to do this, and that’s impossible.

But the larger issue is not really just about Israelis and Palestinians. It’s about how do you construct either in the negotiation framework or just in the human conversational context, how do you make possible the kind of vulnerability that happens with a true human encounter across difference when there are intractable power differences between the two parties.

The reason we like the stories in the Talmud so much is because we don’t know about the power dynamics between them. And in fact, when we have Talmudic stories where there are power differentials. They’re awful. Rabbi Gamliel banishes Rabbi Joshua from the study house and becomes ashamed for it. Right? Those are the bad stories of the rabbinic tradition, and they’re all there. We don’t talk about them as much. But how do you actually get past that power dynamic to do the kind of humanization across difference that you’re talking about?

Daniel: So maybe I’ll start by saying that it doesn’t bother me that we’re selective about what we take from our tradition. Because I think sometimes, that selection, it shows a direction of travel.

You know, when I was in London, the British Prime Minister and a lot of other officials made a big deal about celebrating the Balfour Declaration. And as you can imagine, I had a number of people in the pro-Israel community saying, why are you allowing to get away with this? Don’t you remember the White Paper? Don’t you remember other things that Britain did over the years? I said, look, if they have chosen to write in their history that that is the important value, I am…

Yehdua: I’ll take it.

Daniel: Yeah. I’m very happy to go ahead with that. And I think, as we said before, this is not a, a solution to addressing power struggles, which need to be readressed in their way. Hopefully a good conversation can help people get on side and, and develop good strategies. But it is interesting to see how Jewish tradition, maybe retroactively, tries to empower the quieter voices, the smaller voices, the unheard voices against the…

I mean, there’s an interesting thing, I talk quite a lot about how the importance of storytelling in, in good conversations. But also if you think about the relationship between Halakha and Aggadah, law and, and the less legal parts of the Jewish tradition, one is sometimes a critical commentary on the other. So for example, according to Jewish law, the oldest will take a double helping and be the leader. It’s hard to find an example in Jewish tradition where he was the oldest that actually took over the reigns. You know, there are all sorts of things like that. I think the problem is not so much that we are incapable of hearing voices of the other side. I think the problem is largely that we don’t have channels in which those voices get heard.

I have to say the, the book’s had some very nice feedback, but the, the thing that was most moving to me was somebody sent me a screenshot of a Palestinian bloggers Instagram post where he took a couple of pages of the book that spoke to him and it there, there’s something that’s deeply, I think there’s another thing that’s also helpful here, which is, I have a suspicion, it’s something that you do probably consciously on this podcast, which is, if you’re having a conversation with somebody that you disagree with, there are fairly well trodden tracks that you can have that conversation and then it’s not gonna be a particular value, right? So you have to work out quite hard, where is the potential for value? Where can you actually steer this to where there’s a potential for a, a learning conversation, for growth.

Of all of the track two projects that I was involved in, the one that led to the deepest relationships with people on the other side was one that said, we are not going to focus on the substance of the permanent status issues. We’re gonna focus on process issues, ’cause actually there we can find ourselves on the same side of the table and that doesn’t mean we’re not gonna be discussing heavy duty issues at the, you know, at the coffee breaks and so on.

And I found that there’s an interesting piece of research in the states that suggests that political discussions on sports channels are more productive than political discussions on political channels. I don’t know whether sports discussions on political channels are more effective and so on. But it makes sense to me. It makes sense that if we can slightly sidestep or slightly put to one side, those tough deal breaker issues, then we can find the room for, for progress and maneuver.

Yehuda: Yeah, I, you referenced the podcast and I’ll say, you know, we’re doing this for, for five years now.

Daniel: Congratulations.

Yehuda: We started during the pandemic, during the lockdown, and we changed the tagline just this past year to make it about creating better conversations. And there is precisely that dynamic taking place of, well, I really wanna talk to my guests as we’re talking now. This is like a little bit of removing the fourth wall, right? I really do wanna have a conversation with my guests and there are times when I find that I feel strongly enough about the issue and my guests disagree, that it is more, it’s important for me, for my listeners to hear the viewpoint that I’m staking out and then to not let it devolve into an argument. Because although that exists in the media world, and it’s actually very popular arguing in the media world, first of all, very rarely is it a cross difference. It’s oftentimes among people who share one side and then they’re arguing and bantering on the basis of a number of shared assumptions. But at a certain point it’s not that useful to be arguing.

Daniel: Although just, just to clarify this, sometimes I actually find, this is something you see in Israeli media. If you’re having a panel, you need to have a representative for each of the tribes and it pretty much locks in each representative into what it is they’re gonna have to say.

But I was at a conference not long ago where they did something slightly different and they actually had each panel as an intra-tribal panel and all of a sudden to hear people debating the differences of opinion within the Arab sector, within the ultra-Orthodox sector and so on. There was something that was incredible.

First of all, I mean, I used to, as a kid, I used to edit for novelists, and I remember one detective-novel-writer giving me a trick that he used in writing his novels. He says, look, if I have a secondary character and I wanna make them more interesting to the reader, the trick is you have to give them a dilemma, right? And then all of a sudden somebody gets drawn in. And I think if you can do that within sectors that you tend to regard as monolithic. That is one way, one way of drawing people in.

Yehuda: One piece of work we did for a number of years, which we’ve temporarily discontinued, I hope we’ll come back to it, is, we, we ran an international theology conference for a long time where we had an equal number of Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians who would come together for about a week. And part of the pioneering piece of this work, which David Hartman really introduced was he basically introduced chevruta methodology to these encounters. It wasn’t position papers. It was, let me bring sources for my tradition. We pick the same topic. So here’s Christian sources, Muslim sources, Jewish sources, led by a scholar from that tradition and brought the chevruta method in. It was very life-changing for a lot of, especially the non-Jewish participants.

Daniel: I believe it.

Yehuda: But my colleague, Peter Pettit is a professor at, at Muhlenberg and a wonderful scholar, a friend of the institute. He led this effort to do what he called kind of the “inner circle” and the “outer circle,” where, if it was Jewish sources being presented, the first respondents in the plenary would be Jews. Because A, you wanted to eliminate the monolithic sense. We all stand together in this reading of the text. And B, you wanted them to be able to get what they needed to say out before it became open for discussion by people of other faiths where you could never fully tell whether they were asking questions rooted in curiosity or criticism.

And I found that that was a such an interesting methodology for getting at what we’re talking about because not every encounter across difference can operate with the same kind of epistemological humility, openness to the others. We carry so much that’s loaded here. So to give people permission to hold that which is loaded makes possible really different conversations.

Daniel: So there’s so much that’s in there. There’s a beautiful phrase that Jonathan Saks uses, which resonates very much with Jews outside Israel and in a different way with Jews inside Israel. He talks about cultural bilingualism. How we have to speak the language of our culture, and then we need to speak our broader societal language, and how the tension between the two in a sense is a constructive tension.

I think that’s a brilliant methodological thing. I think it’s an also, it’s a very Jewish methodological thing. I mean, the thing that my Christian friends have a, a hard time with, you know, is that the bible, that, that if it falls to the floor, we pick up and kiss, you know, that I was given as a five-year-old, has the text of the Bible and around it is just people shouting at each other.

And, and you know, that notion of holding, I actually think also in a sense, I’m sure it happens in other traditions as well, but there’s a Jewish sensibility that you grow up. If you, if you learn the verse, “Noah which was righteous in his generation,” and in your first year of school you’ll learn, that means he was, wouldn’t have been righteous in another generation, or he was particularly righteous in his generation, and you’re not asked to decide between the two of us; you just hold those, you know,

Like you do, name any Jewish custom, from eating carpas on Seder night to holding your fingers up to the candle at Havdalah. And there will be a dozen explanations and you just live in holding that. I don’t know. I know nothing about physics, but I do wonder if that makes it a little bit easier to think about light being a wave and a particle at the same time, or Schrodinger’s cat as being alive and dead. There’s something about… I don’t need to live in binaries. I’m actually quite happy to hold all those differences as far as I can.

Yehuda: It reads like for you, this is a spiritual commitment. It is not merely a description of Jewish tradition. It’s not merely the mining of Jewish tradition to say something that feels politically important. It feels fundamentally spiritual in nature, and I’m, I’m curious how that lives for you as a religious Jew, how, how it informs your consciousness of what it means to be religious.

Daniel: So I’ll come back to the spiritual. I would say, before it’s spiritual, I would say it’s definitely a moral commitment, and I think that one of the things that characterizes the Jewish approach to argument is that it’s not simply an intellectual exercise, it’s a moral exercise, and it’s very striking to me that if you look in the Mishnah and you look at the characteristics for studying Torah, it’s this bizarre amalgam of intellectual qualities that you would expect to find in a professor’s CV, but it’s matched with the ability to learn with humility, to bring your sources, to study with joy, and and so on.

And I think it comes from this notion of argument as being something that, you know, is an interpersonal exercise. The rabbinic notion, the argument for the sake of heaven, basically says, it’s not me that’s for the sake of heaven, it’s not you for the sake of heaven, it’s the argument that’s for the sake of heaven. But we can’t create it without me, and we can’t create it without you. So in a sense, our job is to clear the channels of communication as much as we can, you know, to, and that is a personal, moral exercise. And so for me, that is a very important part of this.

I would say that, you know, if you wanna take it in the spiritual direction, in the same way as in a sense, the radical change 2000 years ago was to move from thinking of truth as being a sort of top down thunderbolt to being a collaborative building exercise. I think my approach to spirituality comes from the same place, that it is something that grows up from the ground, and that it’s to do with creating environments that give you those momentary glimpses of something that you probably wouldn’t be able to feel unless you’d put in that work.

Yehuda: So in the Jewish calendar, we’re sitting right now, we’re recording today on the 17th of Tammuz, which inaugurates a three week period of time before the ninth of Av, the kind of black day on the Jewish calendar on which the two temples were destroyed, as well as many other cataclysms of Jewish history. It kind of is like a black hole of Jewish suffering on the ninth of Av, and we’re right in that period of time.

The rabbis described that the reason ultimately the second temple was destroyed was because of baseless hatred. In many ways, your book is acknowledging that the rabbinic response to baseless hatred was, and this is my thesis of my, of my teacher, Shaye Cohen, back in the eighties, they replaced the conflict that was sectarian with conflict that was domesticated. We, they didn’t try to eliminate conflict. They tried to bring it into the Beit Midrash.

Your book very much reads like a second temple repair book, right? There is, however, a First Temple destruction, that also takes place, which was about moral and political failings of the Jewish people. And what feels so hard right now is that, and listen, I, my whole institution is premised on, on these texts on Hillel and Shammai, on the, the oven of Achnai, and, and you know, this whole culture of these and these of the living God. There’s a part of me that says, the problem here for the future of Israel is not about reconciling our internal conflicts with one another. It’s not about talking better, it’s about major moral catastrophes.

The catastrophe in Gaza. The major challenges within Israeli society where percentages of the population are just not carrying their own weight, where it’s not a society that is fundamentally premised on caring for the widow and the orphan. Those things which the prophets argue, not what the rabbis say, the prophets argue are the thing that brings about the destruction. How do we hold that, also, in a moment like this? Those of us that gravitate towards the baseless hatred conversation in this period of time.

Daniel: So I am, I’m an Israeli citizen. I have five sons who have spent most, if not all of the last two years serving in the Army. I have connections with hostage families. I have Palestinian friends. I can’t argue with, and you know, my work in Yad Hanadiv, the Rothschild Foundation, exposed me to, to some tremendous inequities in Israeli society. I sometimes say I did things in the right order. It’s much easier to be an ambassador for your country before you really know your country and so on.

And so, all of those things I feel deeply, as you can imagine, you know, in other parts of my life they’re projects or issues that exercise me a lot and, and trouble me. And this book is not really about them. And I think it’s, it’s relevant that the impetus for the book was Israel of October the sixth, not Israel of October the seventh. And since then, you know, but I also think that unless we find it within us to be able to have these better conversations, we’re gonna have a hard time addressing those issues as well. And it can be within our camp.

So if I go abroad and I speak about Israel, it’s almost unusual for people to take me aside at the end of the tour, and say, what do we do with our, about our kids? We can’t speak to them. They’re demonstrating for the other side or whatever. And alongside all of the challenges that that we have to face, that’s another challenge that I think is pretty critical. And I think actually, actually, there are some fairly tangible lessons that we can learn from this.

First of all, we shouldn’t learn how to take these conversations online. Yeah, the family’s WhatsApp group or Seder night is not always the best time to have that conversation. The second thing that we don’t do enough, I don’t think we tell the stories that shaped our thinking. And I could imagine a conversation within a family where maybe a young person would get a sense for the first time what it means to grow up in a house where there was always a packed suitcase under one of the bed. An older person would get a sense of what it’s like to be in a college dorm where your roommate is phoning home to Lebanon or Gaza every night to find out what’s happening in their family. And that might not help in terms of the prescription, but I think there’s something about enlarging the hearts that’s very important.

And the other thing that I think we need to think about within our organizations, within our families, is, what would a learning conversation be like? You know, if we were to recognize that our positions in a way are a work in progress, what would be the data points? What would be the experts? That we could both draw strength. Okay, some will be closer to your starting point. Some will be closer to my starting point.

You know, I was looking for a translation of the word chavruta, and the best I came up with was Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize winning economist who talked about his disagreements with a different social scientist, Gary Klein, and they decided to do a series of experiments to test which of them was right and they called it adversarial collaboration. And what a rich starting point to say that we are going to actually enter into this learning process and so on. So I think those are things that are, they’re not solutions, you know, they’re not going to bring about the correct answer, but it’s gonna be very difficult to get there unless we improve that quality of conversation as well.

Yehuda: Yeah. I mean that’s, I, I’ll ask you one last question and… but that’s where my cards are, which is, when we talk about this kind of humanizing conversation and bridging difference, adversarial collaboration, all of those things as an antidote for some of our societal problems, it’s going to run a ground or be treated as an extracurricular activity when it’s not brought into conversation with addressing societal injustice, it will always look to those who are focused on injustice as being the sideshow.

But if we can find a way to kind of create that theory, that our capacity at building the muscle of adversarial collaboration is precisely the means by which we’re gonna be able to address injustices, then you not only have a better chance of addressing those injustices eventually, but you have a better chance of building a bigger channel of people who are committed to that project.

So I’ll just, I’ll end with this one programmatic idea or activity that you wanna see happen that if you could snap your fingers and brought, you know, the kind of resources to the table or something you want specifically for Jewish organizations to do on the basis of the theory that you’re advancing or for the state of Israel to do, what would it be?

Daniel: So, I’m gonna be very Jewish and suggest three because it’s really hard to, and, and that’s being selective, first of all. I think there’s a lot that we could do in the way that we conduct our institutional organizational issue conversations. And the first thing I would suggest is that we should, we should be a little bit more Mishnaic in keeping track of the opinions that we disagree with.

You know, there’s something Judaic, again, I just quoted Kahneman and he advises, you know, fortune 500 companies to keep decision journals. He says you’ve got wise people around the room and you know, at the end of the day, the only thing you remember is the bottom line. But there are opinions, there are thoughts. They might not be valuable today, but they’ll be valuable tomorrow. And I think it sends an important message that there is space for all of these and in the chronological imagination that can maybe be.

The second thing is, of all of the tools that the rabbis give, there’s only one that they say will bring redemption, and the one that will bring redemption is being open about your sources. Actually going into a conversation and admitting, you know, I’m not coming in here alone. I’m coming in here as the composite of all the influences that I’ve, you know, that, that have affected me. And I think we need to be a lot more open about that.

You know, there’s a, a well-known Israeli journalist called Amit Segel who veers to the right and he often appears on radio broadcast with Amnon Abramovich, who veers to the left. And in, once in a moment of sort of self-reflection, he said, you know, if Amnon had grown up on a West Bank settlement like I did, and I’d grown up in a left wing kibbutz like he did, we’d still be having the same arguments. We’d just be on the other side.

And I think there is some… okay, we footnote our articles. But actually entering our conversations and saying, I just wanna share with you, yeah, this is the world that I’m coming from.

And then the last thing, it’s not a replacement for having the difficult conversations, but we should find those areas where we can sit on the same side of the table. Even if we are, you know, Van Jones, the CNN journalist had a surprising friendship with Newt Gingrich. I would say, you know, he’s a Democrat, etc. And Newt Gingrich said, you know, your 90% enemy can be your 10% friend, and so on.

You know, there’s a, a quite well-known story about, Shimon Peres and King Hussain of Jordan, who were invited by Viscount Mishcon for a sort of a track two meeting, you know, and to make peace. And at the end of the meeting he said, you can’t go home. You guys have to wash up together. And it was literally the notion that they are standing at the sink, rolling up their sleeves. And I do think that even where we are, or especially where we are at odds.

You know, there are so many obvious social needs. There are only so many worthy causes we can support. There are so many learning opportunities that we can engage in that we shouldn’t allow these very core, very real differences to have a veto over those experiences that can actually shape and build our relationship.

Yehuda: Thanks so much for coming on the show.

Daniel: Really a pleasure. Thank you.