Educating in the Shadow of Grief Transcript

Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Yehuda: Hi everyone. Welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show from the Shalom Hartman Institute, creating better conversations about the essential questions facing Jewish life. I’m Yehuda Kurzer, and we’re recording on Wednesday, January 29th, 2025.

Aner Shapira, Ariel Reich, Shahar Friedman, Dvir Barzani, Ben Zussman, Oriya Ayimalk Goshen, Almkan Tarfe, Rabbi Avi Goldberg, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Yuval Shoham.

I’m sure you, our listeners, know some of these names. If you’re a regular listener to this podcast, you definitely know Hersh and Yuval’s names. We’ve dedicated episodes to them, and I’ve interviewed their parents here on the podcast. All these men I’ve listed are Israeli men who have been killed in the past 15 months, some fighting in the war, and some murdered by Hamas following their abduction.

And all of them hold in common another thing. They are all alumni and or faculty of a single high school, Himmelfarb, a religious Zionist high school in Jerusalem in the Bayit Vegan neighborhood, sitting just beneath and in the shadow of Mount Herzl, the military cemetery where now so many of its former students have found their final resting place.

Tragedy is especially a long, stretched out tragedy like this ongoing war. They have so many layers to them, borrowing down from the immediate cost to victims and their families, to all the deeper implications that such losses have for communities and societies. And the Himmelfarb tragedy demonstrates this well.

At the heart of a religious Zionist school like Himmelfarb is a commitment to national service, and especially military service. Religious Zionism considers service to the state, and the responsibility to defend the state, as not merely a secular nationalist obligation, but as a religious obligation as well. Himmelfarb, like other religious Zionist institutions and communities, sends a disproportionate number of students into combat. And throughout the war, the casualties in battle have hit the minority religious Zionist sector of Israeli society in an outsized way.

Once you consider that nearly half of Israeli 18 year olds do not serve in the army at all, factoring in the nearly 20% Palestinian Israeli minority, the ultra-Orthodox community, and the wide number of physical, mental, and social disqualifications for service, you begin to realize that a community like Religious Zionists is carrying a massive burden on behalf of the state. You layer onto that all of the complexity that comes with that responsibility, which is laid in not just with civic obligation, but theological meaning, and there’s a lot to unpack.

You know, our rabbinic tradition does not valorize martyrdom as a primary or preferred religious choice the way that early Christianity did. We have martyrs in Jewish history who sanctified God’s name with their deaths amidst periods of persecution. But our legal traditions make clear that we should strive to make as many concessions as possible to try to commit to life before committing to this kind of sacred death.

I sometimes think that the urgency behind the rise of the State of Israel, the sense of sacrifice that animated its story from the beginning, the inescapability of violence, all of this has made for a new kind of tragic and sacred martyrdom that becomes something of a norm in times of war. I’m saying this without, God forbid, passing judgment on anyone, but I’ve heard several eulogies for soldiers during this war by grieving parents, and they’ve included some version of an acknowledgment of the necessity of these deaths for our people’s long term survival, some measure of the acceptance of the sacrifices they and their families have to make for love of country. It echoes with the famous deathbed line by the early Zionist warrior, Joseph Trumpledore, “it’s good to die for our country,” which became an essential emblem in the ensuing battles for Israel’s establishment.

Later, in one of the country’s most famous, iconic, formative poems, Natan Alterman writes of the loss of Israel’s young people as the cruelly ironic silver platter on which the state was given to the people. I heard a young Israeli woman this year who lost so many of her friends in the war try and fail to read that poem aloud at a public gathering. It felt too real to her. It imagined a sacrifice, which is a reality that I think she both deeply understood and yet couldn’t speak of out loud. So layers in this story include religion and nationalism and sacrifice and courage, but also community.

There’s a story out this week, actually, by Deborah Danan at JTA, which also profiles the Himmelfarb School, and she describes the interwoven connection among Himmelfarb alumni across graduating classes and often in the same synagogues and neighborhoods, such that the death of a former student sends shockwaves of recognition across generations of relationships.

She quotes, “The parent of a former student who rushes to her son’s yearbook every time there’s an announcement of a military death, especially of a soldier from Jerusalem, just to check on whether he is a Himmelfarbnik around the same age as her kid.” You could easily mistake Israel’s military power for that of a massive country, and if so doing, you would miss that its military largely consists of a bunch of tightly knit social networks, and these deaths hit really hard.

Jeremy Stavisky was the long time principal of Himmelfarb for over 20 years and returned to the classroom several years ago. He has endured all of these deaths of former students and colleagues as well as suffering the tragic death of his son in law, Yinon Fleishman, in combat in the north. You can see him at all of these funerals and shivas. I heard him speak at the Shoham funeral when I was in Israel last month. We do not know each other, but throughout this war and beforehand I have admired him from afar, and he has made me think a lot about what it means to be an educator as a lifelong commitment to one’s students, what it means to educate towards life, which is the heart of Torah, and also sit alongside one’s students in their death.

We also share some key biographical data. We’re both alumni of Yeshivat Har Etzion in Israel and of Columbia University. It’s worth pointing out as well that I think the Hartman High Schools and Himmelfarb are long time friendly rivals. Maybe it always wasn’t so friendly. I think we often draw on the same networks and families as each other, and I’d like to think that our schools work together in raising the bar. In principle, religious Zionist education in Jerusalem in the heart and the soul of the Jewish state. Jeremy, thank you for being with me on the podcast today.

I’m going to start with an impossible question. I’d love for you to start by telling us a little bit about this year for you, what it has felt like personally throughout this war and what it has been for you as an educator, as you have had a front row seat throughout all of this tragedy.

Jeremy: Yehuda, thank you for allowing me to speak and to collect my thoughts. It was quite a year and nobody knows where we’re going to, so I feel that we have to be very careful about conclusions. And I differentiate between my personal loss, my son in law was a teacher at Hartman, Yinon Fleishman. He was really a talmid chacham, and he was starting his Ph.D. at Tel Aviv University in modern Zionist history. And he was just a lovely, lovely person. He made my daughter very happy. He left her with a little boy who just turned two now. So there’s the family realm.

And I think it’s very important to separate. I think nobody feels the sorrow like the family. And I know that Yinon’s parents have it much rougher than I do. And then there are the students, all of whom I was their principal. Ariel Reich, I was supposed to, actually two days before he was killed in Gaza, he was a captain in the tank corps. Two days before he was killed, he sent me a WhatsApp asking if I can marry him, officiate at his wedding.

So the students are like sons, and I’m very careful with that. I, the kids, the students have parents. I’m not their father, but I’m their teacher, and we sort of build these relationships, which I think is one of the most lovely thing about Himmelfarb, is that we see it sort of as a role for life. So, many of the teachers will officiate at their students’ weddings.

And in fact, what the war has done is it’s brought back many students, students who haven’t seen for years will call now, and students who were wounded. And students who I didn’t know so well when they were in high school because it’s a big high school and all of a sudden you get a chance to really know them when they’re in the hospital with shrapnel or, or even worse, we have two or three or four who are very close to not making it.

So I’d say it as the following: On the one hand, we’re proud of our students. In the Jewish state, regardless of one’s political inclinations, it seems that many people will just be happy to get rid of us. And there’s no one else to go except for us. If we want to have a Jewish state, if we want the Zionist enterprise to survive, then we’re going to need an army and people are going to get killed in the army. And if we won’t make that sacrifice, then we won’t have a Jewish state. And in one sense, we’re proud that our students are there and they understand their obligation.

On the other hand, it’s all this young life that is not to be. It’s what they could have been. You know, they’re so young. I was thinking, my son in law, Yinon, he was 31 years old. He wrote a master’s thesis. He was married. He had this child. They’re so young. They’re 20 years old. They’re 22 years old. They’re 24 years old. And, you know, I say, what would have been of them? And it’s that just terrible sense of loss. That there was life here. There was potential here. And just one day, it disappeared. So the feelings, as you can imagine, are very mixed all the time.

Yehuda: What do you think is it is about… I know you’re a humble person, so I’m going to put you on the spot here. What is it about you, what is it about Himmelfarb, what is it about this period in their lives that makes students who you said you’ve lost touch with over the years want to reach out again?

And I guess I’m fascinated by it, just as a Jewish educator myself, a person who gets the power of the kind of work that we do. But you’re seeing a kind of window into that, born of crisis, that might help other Jewish educators to think about what that, what you do to create those kind of relationships, where somebody would say, I haven’t spoken to you in years, but will you come visit me in the hospital?

Jeremy: When I was a young teacher, you know, I thought, is anybody listening at all? You know, we’re just sort of barraging it in the kids lives. And are we needed? Do they take us seriously? But as the years have, have, have gone on, I sort of asked myself, maybe they take us too seriously.

Young people, and I, as a young man, I needed people I could look up to. I tell my students, you have to find a couple of people in your life, which you can look up to. You can ask questions. You don’t always have to agree with them, but people, you can say hu ish, he’s a man. He’s, he’s a man worthy of imitating, not copying, not being him, but being like him.

And when the graduates who, you know, they’re not kids anymore, they’re young men, when they see something worthy, they try to catch it, they try to connect to it, they try to be part of it, they want to touch something which is real. So in a way, you know, everybody thinks that we’re in this crazy world where everybody’s interested in junk and in all kinds of stuff you can do and play on the internet.

And paradoxically, I feel that since there’s so much garbage out there, when the kids see something which is real, they want to be part of it. And we try to expose them to something which we think is real: Real people, real thought, meaning. Meaning is a big thing. I started to re-read Man in Search of Meaning by Viktor Frankl. It’s really, I started to read it. I read it like 30 years ago before we started the Poland trips. And I went back to it during the war. And, you know, he talks about, he talks about meaning.

When I was in high school, once my father said to me, you know, Jeremy, he called me Jeremy. If you want to be happy, you need two things in your life. You need love and you need work. And that’s what Freud said. And then I heard it from Rav Lichtenstein at Yeshivat Har Etzion, which was very interesting. And when something Rav Lichtenstein and Yeshivat Har Etzion and my father said were the same, I said, okay, there’s really, this is something serious.

Yehuda: There’s something there.

Jeremy: Right. There’s something there. And I think that these connections between adults and young people, the connection between the young people amongst themselves, they’re very tight-knitted. They’re very close. They call each other, achi, brother. Israelis use that term, but, but there’s that feeling of a bigger community.

But when they’re, when people live with people, they can love and be loved. And when people can do something meaningful with their life, I think it’s a much better way to live and I think people are happier that way. So, I think that they, that many of the students, you know, we’re not always successful and sometimes it doesn’t work with kids, but many of the students feel that we have something to give which they want to take.

Yehuda: Mm. You know, when you described the, at the opening about teachers sometimes wondering, is anybody listening? The nice thing about that feeling is that it keeps you humble, right? If you believe that nobody’s actually listening, then listen, you could be wrong, you could be right, you don’t really ever know.

The scary thing about the second possibility, which is that our young people are craving real meaning, and I see this in our work all the time too. We run a teen program now that has hundreds and hundreds of kids come to learn essential, hard issues in Jewish life, and it’s precisely, it’s like, not fun, our program. They make it fun, but they’re actually there for the meaning.

But there’s something very scary about it, because then you know that you’re in the business of influencing people to make really difficult choices that can have terrible consequences for them. And I will say in my most cynical moments, it terrifies me that we politicians and education systems and all these things make decisions that require the sacrifice of young people to actualize them, and it helps that those young people have unformed frontal lobes so that they tolerate more risk, and it helps that they don’t have a choice.

That’s what Alterman’s poem was basically about, is, look, we’re going to fight in your army, but we’re the ones who are enduring the sacrifice. But it does make the whole question of education a little scary of what happens when we educate people into a commitment to sacrifice, and they ultimately have to undertake that sacrifice that we ourselves are going to suffer from, but not in the same way that we do.

I’m wondering whether how you think about that as an educator has come to the place of realizing that people will actually listen to you, even if it comes, ultimately, at immense cost.

Jeremy: I’ve asked that question many times. What right do we have to educate the way we do? And I have a couple of answers. First of all, I think the teachers in the school are not asking the students to do anything they did not do. I remember when I was inducted into the Tank Corps, 1982 and the war broke out and I think my parents could have provided a very comfortable life for me in the United States. I know that my parents were very upset and I think they had this terrible burden, you know, we decided to move here and now our kid can get killed. And I remember I told my parents, no, now it’s my decision. This is something I believe in.

And not everybody who goes to Himmelfarb has to be in a combat unit. There are students who should not be in combat units. We tell everyone that they have to do some kind of service. It doesn’t even have to be army service. It could be national service. People cannot live in a society and not give to that society. That’s a very bad way to live. People who live only for themselves, I think, are not, it’s not only doing the wrong thing, I think they turn out to be very miserable people.

You know, people who only think about themselves are really, are really sad people. So we asked them to do something which we did. Now I mean, Rav Avi Goldberg, who was the rabbi of our school. And he was a graduate of the school, which was one of the lovely things. I was his principal when he was in 11th and 12th grade. And then he came back after being in Shlichut in Memphis. So he’s one of the ten. It’s really, it’s really a terrible thing because he was married and he left eight orphans. So we’re not asking them something we didn’t do.

And of course, there is a law in the state of Israel. People are supposed to go to the army when they’re 18 years old. And if it’s not, if it’s not right for someone, then we, you know, we encourage them to do something else and to serve in another way. But I think it’s right for adults to tell people that they have to have a meaningful life.

Now, meaningful does not have to mean, God forbid, to join the army and, and we don’t want more of that. But meaningful means that sometimes you sacrifice something for a better good. And any country that wants to exist has to be at that point, especially if you’re in the Middle East, right? It’s a tough environment.

Yehuda: I went back and found an article that Donniel Hartman had written, maybe in 2008, I think it was, around a different Gaza incursion where he was responding to the fact that there had been a shift at that time in Israeli society away from the tov lamut be’ad artzeinu approach, it’s good to die for our land, and the phrase that was emerging then was tov lichiot be’ad artzeinu, it’s good to live for our country, and it was incurring a lot of backlash from folks, especially in the religious Zionist community, who insisted on the language of sacrifice as opposed to this language of kind of self actualization.

Donniel was arguing, no, actually, we kind of, a society needs both. I wonder if you’ve seen… what trends you’ve seen among your students over the past 20 years, and I would guess not knowing this up front that post October 7th, if there was ever a dip in that sense of what we need to do, that it made a big comeback among young people of a sense of responsibility that we are the generation that is going to do what our grandparents did in ’73 and in ’67.

I’m curious how that dynamic has played out in your school, whether there have been waves of the willingness to engage in not just sacrifice for the country, but to tolerate the risk of the ultimate sacrifice. And whether you’ve seen any kind of pulling away from that over a number of years.

Jeremy: I think the analysis about Israeli society or analysis is correct. I mean, there was sort of a wave and people had this hope or this naive feeling that maybe we could be like this nice, country in Northern Europe or something, and that we really don’t need wars. And I think in Himmelfarb, people always knew they have to go.

And it’s interesting because we don’t put an emphasis on it as teachers. We don’t bring people to convince them. It just sort of became part of the ethos of the school. I mean, Memorial Day is very powerful in Himmelfarb. And all the graduates come. So you have hundreds of graduates who were in the army at the time. They come in uniform.

But it doesn’t come with this… I’m always amazed at how lovely some of these tough fighters are. I’m telling you, they’re the most lovely, sensitive young men. I have kids who’ve been in terrible battles in the last year and a half. And then they come and they sit in my living room with their wives. And they’re like the most naive kids. And they ask, the women, so, what do you want and how is it going to be and they’re just so lovely and they’re so not macho and they’re not tough.

So I really feel it’s a different kinds of soldier. These, some of these combat strong soldiers are very delicate human beings, which I think is an amazing compliment to many soldiers in the IDF. It doesn’t always work that way.

And I do teach the Parashot in Deuteronomy in Devarim about the Milchama. It’s important for me to talk about it. And to talk about how the Torah is afraid that war is going to damage our soul. That you have to be very careful when we discuss, about, how war allows you to, to kill, or killing becomes a mitzvah, and how you have to be so careful that you don’t bring that back home.

And we talk about those who the Torah says, at least in the milchemet reshut, in certain kinds of wars, may not have to go out and fight. And we talk about, I talk about fear in combat. Almost everybody’s fearful in combat. And I talk about overcoming fear. And what do you do when you cannot overcome the fear?

But in that sense, we talk about it, but we don’t talk about it in a way which would remind us of regimes we don’t even want to discuss on this podcast.

Yehuda: Yeah. Speaking of a delicate question, you know, I’m sure that you, like every Israeli, has opinions about the war, about the choices in the war, about the government fighting this war. It’s hard not to wake up one morning and say, even if you support the legitimacy of the war, you don’t, you oppose this particular decision or that decision.

On the other hand, I’ve heard from close friends In the religious Zionist community who have said they cannot express their views about the war in the presence of other families who have kids fighting in the war out of a sense that it will come across as implying that they are that their children are risking their lives for a mistake.

So there’s a very delicate dance around this, and I’m curious how that, I’m sure in the classroom, you don’t share your political opinions about the war, but I am curious how those considerations influence how you educate, knowing that on one hand, people have to feel that they are in service of something noble.

And right, even if you harbor, and again I don’t know what your views are, even if you harbor any particular ambivalence about what’s happening that’s actually making these kids less safe because of the political considerations.

Jeremy: I think one of the things which we, one of the words which is used in Himmelfarb so much is morkav, morkav, morkav, complex, complex, complex. You know, and even when I bring the political issues into the classroom, I tell them, these are really tough choices. And as a school, we usually vie for some kind of center. I mean, our philosophy is a philosophy of center. We want our kids to grow up and understand that even if they have their own point of view, nobody holds all the truth. And it’s very delicate. It’s delicate during times of war. Wars are very messy. There are no clean wars. People always make mistakes in wars. I know so many young men who were killed because somebody made a mistake, right?

As I told Rav Shlomi Daninu, who is now the principal of Himmelfarb, he said, you know, we make a mistake in the school and we do something wrong, we apologize to the kid or to the parent or the teacher or whoever we have to apologize to and that’s it. And a soldier, you know, shoots three centimeters in the wrong way and he kills his friend. Wars are very scary and there are no clean wars, so there are always going to be mistakes.

Now, is somebody responsible for the terrible conflict with the Palestinians? Can we say that if we would have done what the right has done, our problems would have been resolved? Or what the left has done, our problems have been resolved? You know, I was in Jerusalem, I was principal after the Oslo Accords, you know, I thought they were a great idea. And then the bombs started to blow up. And I remember, we would count the kids. Because a bomb would blow up, 10 minutes from the school and we didn’t know if we have kids on the bus or not. And, you know, that’s not a very good way to make peace.

But I also realized how far and how the cultural differences are. Israel is a democracy and it’s always in danger and there’s so many issues here, but it is a democracy. And all the countries around us are not democracies. And I remember Hamas taking over Gaza and throwing the Fatah people off the roofs. And those are our enemies. So in that sense, I feel that we have really evil enemies. I think that this jihadist philosophy, which as far as I’m concerned, goes back to Moloch. It goes back to the ancient need to sacrifice children. It’s still there. Human sacrifice is there. Because the way I look at it, they don’t care if they’d have 20,000, or 40,000, or 60,000 dead. Everything is justified for this jihad… I don’t even know what their goal is. The goal is to destroy the state of Israel.

So let me put it this way. There’s always the big story and then there’s the details. I’m completely confident in the Zionist story. That’s the big story. From the partition in ’48, through ’67, through the Oslo Accords, I believe that the Jews have a right to be in the State of Israel, and I believe that the Palestinians had many, many chances to reach accommodations with us, which would have been very good for them.

The details are always very messy because Israel has made its mistakes and Israel still makes its mistakes, and the politics, like everywhere, are just disgusting and impossible. And sometimes you question the decisions… So I always have to hold the big picture. And then the details are complicated. And when they’re discussed in class and we discuss these issues in class, my job is to allow the kids to express their views, on all these humanitarian issues. And as a teacher, you know, I want a kid to think a little bit differently, either way, at the end of the class.

Yehuda: Yeah. Back in February 2023 when we were witnessing a very different crisis in the state of Israel during the protests against the government’s judicial reform, you spoke out at those protests. I think, I’m curious, I want to ask you about the decision to do so given your commitment to complexity.

I’m sure that was a hard decision, but I want to quote something that you said then, which was, “There’s a profound question and a religious quandary here. Whether Judaism is oriented towards mercy and pity and peace, or whether Judaism is tough and doesn’t want compromises but the absolute truth. There are people in the religious Zionist movement today whose language is very militant, and they’re proud of it. They say, we’re fighting for our rights and our Torah. That is not the Judaism in which I want to live. That approach worries and saddens me intensely. Sometimes I feel we’re even influenced by Muslim fundamentalists. We take that language and create a fundamentalist language of our own. And that saddens me very much because I don’t think any good comes from that.”

First of all, I like your Judaism, so I’m with you. That’s not a comment about the war, although you can imagine somebody saying that. about the war. So I’m curious, both the decision to speak out in that way, to know that you’re publicly taking a stand against some of the values in your own community, but also the decision to not then use that language about the fighting of the war, which would come across as a very different kind of political statement amidst the war.

Jeremy: Okay, so let me start with the second one. I think that the pogrom, and it was a pogrom, it was not a holocaust, but it was a pogrom on October 7th, it was just a pogrom, it set the stage to right and wrong. And I think it’s very important to set the stage as adults, as educators, as rabbis. I think we have to be very clear in saying that we’re on the right side and they were on the wrong side. I mean, to come and murder children is being on the wrong side. To kidnap 80 year old people is on the wrong side.

So, and I know, I know what it, I think I know what it is to be someone who doesn’t like Hamas in Gaza or to be gay in Gaza or to… right? They just shoot you. So there is a question of good and bad, and, and that has to be put on the table. It does not mean that Jews never do bad things. Jews can do bad things. Jews can. But that’s the general context.

And one of the things that disturbed me about national, religious Zionism in Israel is that I, as I think people in the Hartman Institute, believe that there has to be some kind of integration of Jewish values and modern Western values. What upsets me tremendously, and that’s why I spoke out when I spoke out, is this tendency within modern religious Zionism to sort of try to return to some kind of biblical Judaism. And to erase 2,000 years of oral law. And to disregard all the wonderful things that Western civilization has brought us. The ability to live. I mean, life before modern democracies and before rational revolutions, life was just terrible.

As I tell the kids in my class, I say, you realize that 200 years ago, only three of you would be in the class. All the rest of you would be working because that was before, before modern democracy said that every kid has a chance to go to school. And I’m not talking about the lifespan and, and whatnot.

And what upsets me tremendously is that people think that if they, I guess, push the religious community to some kind of utopian religion, which is completely detached from the world we know and to try to return to a world in which kings had absolute power and women had no power and children had no power, nd that somehow, that is what God wants. That was what really upset me and still upsets me.

And I think one of the things which, one, one of the important things about the Hartman High School and, and by the way, we have very close working relationships with the Hartman High School. They have, they have, they have wonderful, it’s, they have a wonderful staff and, and wonderful people and, and I just. You know, Yinon’s students, they were so lovely. After, after he was killed, they came to, to know, to the Shiva. And they were just so lovely. And the school is so wonderful with my daughter.

But—it’s not a dirty word to say that we’re modern. Being modern does not mean only bad things. Being modern is wonderful because it allows us, it allows so many people to live a fuller life. And I think that’s what God wants. So that’s what pushed me then. But, you know, every issue has its place and its time, and everything is so dynamic and you have to know what to say when.

Yehuda: I guess I feel, and I know you feel this too, but I feel that the sense of urgency about the battle for the soul of religious Zionism is even more acute today than it’s ever been. It’s not, the judicial reform was I think the way it was done was disastrous, but you now have the political party in Israel that bears the name of religious Zionism, advocates for ideas that are, they could be well described as modern, but they feel so deeply contrary to the ethos of Rav Kook. Even the ethos of religious Zionist leaders from the 1950s and 60s and 70s, where the goal was a kind of humane and humanistic religious Zionism and now is associated with the language of permanent war in Gaza, a war of elimination, Jewish supremacy, theocracy in Israel.

I only know education. So, like you, who would wanna be in politics? Even if you win, you win in the short run. In the education, you make a long term play for history. But how do we actually win in some foreseeable future, that religious Zionism no longer is characterized by the values that dominate the public discourse today, but are characterized by the ethos that you’re trying to teach your students?

Jeremy: I don’t know. Now, historically, it’s always easier to be on the edges and not at the center. It’s very hard to be on the center. It’s so, psychologically, it’s so much easier to be radical. Because when you’re radical, you know, your whole self is one. When you’re in the center, you’re constantly struggling with different parts of yourself. The problem is that when you take one value, be it Torah, be it Eretz Yisrael, be it love, be it any single value which you take ad absurdum, disintegrates.

There’s that tendency, that human tendency, to reach to the extremes. It gives you self-fulfillment. It gives you the self… meaning to your life. It’s a classical dilemma. What I, what I would say is that historically, these mighty empires who took these, you know, communism, you know, there was something to the idea. But it became so violent and so absolute. But it disintegrated. And when they took National Socialism to the extreme, you know, you wonder, it disintegrated.

It seems that in the long run, people who can juggle different things, people who have the ability to adapt and to change, it seems that they survive longer. But it’s not easy. And it’s not easy in Israel because this constant war thing and the inability of the state of Israel to define borders. We’re a country without borders. You know, everybody knows where the border is between the United States and Canada, or we thought, until the last elections. But there’s a border. As of now, there’s a border. Border creates order.

When there are no borders, and you’re in constant friction, something, I think, very bad happens to your soul. That’s why, that’s why we want peace. We want peace so that we don’t destroy our souls. Now, I don’t think, I don’t think the Israelis have destroyed their souls, God forbid. I think that the war, while it brings out bad things, it has brought out amazing things. Not only in valor, not only on the battlefield, but there’s so much caring. There’s so much sharing.

There’s so many soldiers who told me that they would stop in a shop and buy something, and by the time they reached the checkout, someone else paid and left. I mean, it happens all the time in this country. I mean, there’s so many wonderful people in this country. But constant conflict is not good for the soul. It’s not good for the Jewish soul. Jews don’t want to be in constant conflict. They don’t want to have to be brave all the time. They want a life of peace, as Maimonides told us. We want a life in which we can do good things.

And we don’t even know what it means to be a Jewish and democratic state. That’s also up in the air. When everything’s up in the air, it becomes tough and people sometimes do radical things.

Yehuda: I’ll ask you one last question, which is a place where I think you’ve been unequivocal about your views and values, especially over the past year, which is the criticism of the ultra-Orthodox community for its unwillingness to shoulder the burden. You’re quoted as saying, “Every time I see the cynical, ‘we will die and not enlist sign,’ an image of my son in law Yinon flashes before my eyes.”

I want to Harken back to something that our teacher Rav Lichtenstein taught years ago when I was at the Gush. He was asked about the relationship between the religious Zionist community and the ultra-Orthodox community. And Rav Lichtenstein said something to the effect of our, they are our kindred. They’re our kin more than secular Jews or reformed Jews.

And I have to say, it troubled me at the time. I come from a background that deeply believes in pluralism, and fortunately I found the Hartman Institute, which already believed in it as well. It’s a good place to come work. And maybe we don’t have to decide on more or less, but I wonder whether that contract is really breaking in the world of Torah between those who identify as religious Zionist, for whom their Torah is a huge animating part of your life and the Haredi community as well, where that’s clearly the operative principle. Is this conflict about service to the state ultimately going to remap who religious Zionists see as their essential kindred spirits in the future of the state of Israel?

Jeremy: Good question. What will happen in the future, I don’t know. But I’d like to phrase the question somewhat differently. And that I did learn from Rav Lichtenstein. You know, Rav Lichtenstein, you know, he was a very, very halakhic -riented man and he couldn’t see any other way of Jewish life. That was what he believed in.

And you know, I feel that the Jewish people have to be connected to the world of Torah. Otherwise, I don’t know what the meaning is, but I think, and again, it’s important because I learned this from Rav Lichtenstein, I learned this from Rav Amital, these issues of Jewish law and practice and the questions of human morality are not two separate issues.

And when we have Jews who think that they are part of Jewish law and halakha, but they can sideline a very fundamental, moral issue—then, I think, the system breaks down. That’s what Isaiah talks about. He talks about people who are bringing sacrifices, which they had to do in the temple, but their behavior between each other was just impossible and the Prophet says, I’m not interested in your mitzvot. I learn Torah all the time, I teach Torah all the time, I love Torah all the time, but if my Torah is going to turn me into someone who’s not going to perform his basic moral obligations, and the basic moral obligation is that if you’re a 20 year old young man and you have the ability to fight, and because you’re not fighting, a 30 year old with three children is going to fight instead of you—Is that Torah? Is that what God wants of us? I don’t think that’s what Jewish tradition wants of us. I don’t think that’s what God wants of us.

In that sense, I think there’s a tremendous break because everybody understands that it’s just a game going on here. And what I learned in the Gush, actually we learned it from Rav Kook, that there cannot be a world of Jewish law which is not connected to basic human moral values. We can argue about what those moral values are, but here it’s such a clear cut case. You know, I’m not saying that every Western moral value has to be a Jewish moral value and, you know, that’s for another podcast, but here, I think, something is broken, and I felt a responsibility to myself, to my daughter, to my students, to secular Israelis.

And what’s very interesting is that a lot of Haredi Jews listened to what I said and they called me to say we can’t, of course, say it, but you should, but we appreciate what you said because we think you’re right.

Yehuda: Once in a while that happens in the field of education.

I can’t thank you enough for, uh, for coming on the podcast today, not only for your leadership and for the support you’ve demonstrated to your people, but also for the vulnerability that you put on display today. I’m sure that wasn’t easy and I’m, and I’m grateful and our listeners will be grateful as well.

Jeremy: Thank you. I appreciate it very much, Yehuda.