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. We’re recording on Friday, July 18th, 2025. Today’s podcast is a conversation that I had last week in Jerusalem with Donniel Hartman, part of a smaller and shorter version of our annual Rabbinic Torah seminar that we managed to pull off in spite of the war with Iran and all of the impossibilities of getting to Israel this summer.

Since the summer of 2023, Donniel and I have shared the title of President of the Shalom Hartman Institute, working closely and collaboratively as we had also for my first 13 years here at Hartman. In leading this complicated and wonderful institution, I learned a lot from Donniel as both a visionary institutional leader, but especially as a moral voice and our private dialogues. These past two impossible years have been indispensable for me personally in making sense of the world, as well as professionally, as we shape the Institute’s public voice, which I know, through podcasts like this one and through For Heaven’s Sake, which Donniel hosts with Yossi Klein Halevi, hold enormous importance for others, maybe some of you in seeking wisdom and clarity. I think that Donniel would say that the feeling is mutual.

Mostly, though, I’m grateful to work in an institution where the leadership involved in making hard business decisions is not divorced from the work of shaping the Institute’s moral and educational voice, the responsibilities both Donniel and I share, I think that that juxtaposition helps us make business decisions with greater integrity, as well as to make educational choices within plausibility structures that can have a greater impact in the world.

I’ve come to experience in Donniel a sense of true chavruta, and the more that we do dialogues like this one in our programs, which we do for a lot of our programs in Jerusalem, I find that the gap narrows for us between how we talk to one another privately in managing the day-to-day of the Institute and how we speak together publicly in trying to forge and share a Torah for our people navigating the complexities of the present.

At Hartman, we describe our institution as a Beit Midrash, or a study hall, with windows, one in which the concerns of the world shape the curriculum of what we study, and one in which what we study is meant to leap off the page and into the lives of the learners. I know that some of you hoped to be at Hartman in person this summer, or dream of coming in the future. I hope you’ll find your way back. This podcast is a window into our hearts right now. Thanks for listening.

Okay. Hi everybody. Good evening, and I wanna say hi to the rabbis and educators who were not able to be with us this summer, who are here live on the live stream. We miss you and we hope we’ll see you next year back here in Jerusalem. I wanna start by just a personal comment of how meaningful it is to be here. It was a, as you know, a really agonizing set of decisions created with conditions that we couldn’t control and a timeline that we couldn’t manage that initially forced the cancellation of a lot of our programs. And it’s a very big deal that our team here and in North America was able to pull off pulling something together. And it’s a very big deal that so many of you found your way here for this. I could feel it in the first couple of weeks of the summer that not being here, not being in the mode of less running an organization and more teaching, it was like, it was eroding something in me. So it feels powerful to be here with all of you tonight and, and back in what we’re supposed to be doing.

One of the key parts of the mission of this institution is create this Beit Midrash, this space for rabbis and educators and leaders of the Jewish people to do the kind of learning and thinking that’s vital for our community to thrive. So I’m, I’m grateful that you’re all here.

I wanna start on feelings. I’ve been here many times over the past couple of years. You live here. People are not well. You can see it on people’s faces. You can hear it in every encounter and conversation. There’s no version of a conversation I’ve had with anybody here over the last two years where you don’t feel dumb by asking, “How are you doing,” right? And then there has to be this like, well, you know, let me preface it with why the question is not really a great question. I’m obviously not okay, but in the context of not being okay, here are the things where I might be okay. Or worse, in the context of not being okay, let me tell you why I’m really not okay. It’s, you can feel it in the air, you can feel it in the atmosphere.

We can pathologize it in ways that are actually reasonable to pathologize it. There’s an immense number of people dealing with actual conditions of trauma. There are many people who are not in trauma but have moved to a place of post-trauma, and it’s not always clear physiologically and psychologically, which of those places is worse. The consequences of living with trauma or with post-trauma is oftentimes that you divorce your sense of agency from who you are. You are gripped by something you can fully control.

And for an institution like ours, teaching Torah, creating hope, it weighs on our people in very serious ways, and it weighs on all of us. I’ve been thinking a lot about my own reactions to this, you know, and, and we’ll talk a little bit about North American Jews in this, I’ll get to that later. Because I think for many North American Jews, Jewish leaders, it’s not primary trauma. There’s secondary trauma and there’s, it’s not like these things need to be ranked, but you do have to say, well, I’m not experiencing what you’re experiencing, but I’m experiencing something different, which also feels kind of bad and I feel guilty talking about it when I’m sitting with you.

I’ll, we’ll get to that in a moment, but I wanna start with you just to ask you how you’re doing. And since I know that you’re probably gonna say you’re doing okay, I wanna ask you—how?

Donniel: I’m doing okay. How did you know? How many years are we together already?

Yehuda: Yeah. 15. 15.

Donniel: 15 years. That’s not bad. I’m doing okay, ’cause I don’t believe that I have a luxury to feel anything else. It’s a decision. And I was raised in Israel in which men were trained to do that. Boys were trained and men and soldiers, we were trained that you have to be okay when you have to be okay. And what you’re feeling or not feeling is just not that important, just doesn’t matter that much sometimes. I don’t hold myself in particularly high regard. The future of Israel is not on my shoulders, but I feel a huge responsibility to talk about Israel and Judaism in ways that a lot of people aren’t talking about. And I can’t not be okay. I just can’t.

So there are times where my work output goes down a little bit. It’s like there’s, you are punched. You’re punched, you don’t sleep, there’s, you are punched, but I’m okay. And I am so wired to teaching. To talking. That’s what we do. We believe that ideas matter. We believe that ideas in the world are critical for the way the Jewish people could relate to Judaism, to Israel. And I feel in our space, you and I and people in the Hartman Institute, we have a holy task. And it turns out that we’re talking differently than other people. And that’s what we’re getting from people. That the way we’re talking is not the way other people are talking. And so I just don’t have a choice.

Yehuda: But I wonder about it because I wonder whether, I wonder whether that has to be true, because some of what you even suggested was, I was raised in an Israel where… and we kind of know, it’s not great. It’s not great psychologically to embed in young men that they bear this burden, and young women, that they bear this burden that requires of them to posture a sense of being okay when it’s not. And in fact, we’ve seen in this war, the IDF has created groundbreaking work around trauma therapy that no army has really ever done. They acknowledge that pretending that we’re okay is not okay.

But I also wonder even from the perspective of what it means to be an educator, whether you need to create that sense of detachment. And here, this is not just a personal question. We’re in a room literally and virtually with a lot of rabbis who have the same job that we do. And I wonder what it, what it means when we kind of insist, actually I’ll, I’ll contest what it means that we would insist that we need to be the ones who are okay in order to hold pastorally those in our communities that are really struggling and struggling on so many different fronts, sometimes because they, or their families are caught in climates of fear, sometimes because they’re far away and can’t control a lot. What space do we have to be the kinds of leaders where it’s “Imo Anochi b’Tzarah,” I’m actually in the suffering together with the people I care for.

Donniel: I’m not saying it’s necessarily healthy.

Yehuda: You’re just saying it’s…

Donniel: I’m not, I’m not making a virtue of it. I just know who I am. It’s just who I am. I’ve always been that way. I was raised that way from a, like, it’s just, it’s, but by the way, it’s not, which rabbi here doesn’t do that all the time? You know, the first time I did a funeral, I officiated funeral. Scariest thing in my life. Right? Could you all remember when you did it the first time, what do you, because always when you go to a Shiva, you’re like, what are you supposed to say? And how do you, like, there is you just, there’s sometimes you just have to do, and I know… ’cause it’s not that I’m not feeling, I’m feeling a huge amount of things.

So it’s not that I can’t resonate to what people are feeling and that I don’t feel it too. I feel it. I just don’t let it make me not okay. Like at some point it just, it needs to stop. And you pay a price. Of course you do. You pay a price. But also, like all of you, we have an institution, we have hundreds of workers. We have thousands of people who are coming here. There’s things we have to do. That’s why very often, a rabbi, where… it’s some of the loneliest jobs in the world, because what you’re feeling is really not that important all the time. There’s somebody else.

And it’s, that’s what it means to be a shaliach tzibur a little bit. I couldn’t teach what I’m teaching if I wasn’t feeling, but if I allowed my feelings, like I can’t allow myself to be depressed. I can’t allow myself to be pessimistic. I can’t allow myself to be negative. And so I decide there’s certain things, there’s places I’m not gonna go. And you pay a price for it. Of course you do. But there’s some value to it.

Yehuda: You said something earlier today when we were talking with… our senior leadership met for a few hours today, and one of the things that you said, which I think is a really important idea, is that part of being an educator and acknowledging that your fundamental role is being an educator involves the necessity and the courage in some ways to let go of thinking that you’re actually a short term change agent, that you can fix things.

This is a really complicated trap for anybody in a position of influence, especially in the challenges that we all face now. We’re watching immense moral challenges here in Israel. We’re watching immense moral challenges in America, political climates and challenges that feel as though—and a widespread moral narrative actually—that those who are on any of these issues, those who are silent or complicit, those who are not screaming out in very particular ways, organizing politically in very particular ways, are inherently contributing to this. So to say basically, I’m willing to say that my role in the world is fundamentally to be an educator, is to acknowledge I’m not gonna actually fix things.

Donniel: Not gonna fix things tomorrow.

Yehuda: Now, right. In the short run.

Donniel: I’m not, I’m not in the ambulance. I’m not stopping somebody from bleeding. I’m not, it’s like there’s a different level. It’s a larger arc. It doesn’t mean that it has to be generational, but you need to give yourself a little, a little larger arc. It’s not the arc of an academic. There are some academics who are educators. The arc of an academic is generational. I’m gonna write a book and I’m gonna believe that my book, once it gets into the library of the Jewish people, is gonna somehow shape… even though only 116 people read it. But that 100…

Yehuda: That’s a lot of people. That depends what field you’re in. But that’s a lot of people.

Donniel: That’s 116 people are gonna read it. I will sell 400 copies primarily to libraries. But it’s going to somehow connect to a chain of spiritual and intellectual growth. And you wanna know something? It’s true. It is actually true. When you look at the arc of history, these things, they, they do become part of a larger story. For us here, as educators, we don’t have, I don’t have a gen, I don’t think of the Hartman Institute or myself for years as generation, like what’s gonna be in 200 years. I don’t think of the… but I do think about what’s gonna be in… from two years, five years, 10 years, I don’t think more than 10 years. That’s ’cause you can’t even imagine that. But like there’s, how are you going to be part of a solution and know fully well that as an educator, you’re only one small part of that solution. You’re not gonna vote in the Knesset, you’re not raising your hand, you’re not pushing the button, you’re not giving the decision. That’s not your job. You can’t even decide—should we bring the hostages back? It’s not on you, but it is on you to flood the public discourse to the best of your ability with ideas and values. You know? And as you’re asking, like I remember, I hope you don’t mind, I remember 15 years ago when you had just finished your position at Harvard.

Yehuda: Brandeis.

Donniel: It was Brandeis? Okay. That’s right.

Yehuda: It’s the Harvard of Waltham.

Donniel: It’s the Harvard of Waltham. And I remember—what was the award that you got from Bronfman?

Yehuda: It was, it was the professorship at Brandeis. It was… it was the strangest contest in history.

Donniel: I know it was strange, but do you remember?

Yehuda: It was… the prize was a two year position as the visiting chair in Jewish communal innovation.

Donniel: But no, you had, you had to have like the best big idea in the world or something, right?

Yehuda: Yeah, basically.

Donniel: It was like, no, and it was, and it was built on your book. It was like the best big idea. Like it was like you were the new cream cheese of the Jewish world. It was like there was something that I remember.

Yehuda: Listen, it landed me a really good job afterwards.

Donniel: No, so I, no, no. And I remember, no, but I remember when I interviewed you, like, could you have imagined, like you went from one place and you entered into another world. And these 15 years, I have to tell you, have been insane. This hasn’t been a normal, what are we talking about? From 2010 till now? In Jewish life? In Jewish life, in Israeli politics, in American politics, in world… Like you went, you, you did, like when I’m talking about the… You said, and I remember you saying, I don’t want that world, I didn’t want academia. You actually wanted to… beware what you wish for. But that’s the world that you chose to be a part of. But it wasn’t to become a surgeon, or it wasn’t to become an emergency responder, but it was a shift out of that professorship and award world to fighting for something. And so, you know…

Yehuda: I, I think though what this attests to is there is a complicated place for religious and spiritual leadership in the world right now. I think that’s what I’m trying to tease out. And it does live somewhere between, as you describe, you know, an academic contribution to Jewish history, which is generational or civil. I think you used the term civilizational, right. It informs what we think as the Jewish people about what these ideas mean over time of Jewish history. And it’s not quite the same as the work of being an active social change agent who measures the work that they do based on who wins the next election or whether this piece of legislation right now gets passed. And at the same time, we live in an environment where the pressures on religious leaders are mounting to do far more of that second kind of work. And it takes a certain… I don’t know what the word would be, fortitude, to stand back of that culture of participating in rapid political change.

In the United States, by the way, the president changing the rules around endorsements in political office, this just happened, what, a week ago? That now the IRS, you no longer risk your tax exempt status if you make endorsements, which actually, I think the wise readers of this realize that this is a terrible bind for religious leaders because now there’s gonna be a whole quid pro quo with public officials about, oh, you’ll get what you need based on who you endorse. So there is a… but it, it also just comes from a climate of if you are not directly engaging with these issues in a particular way, you are, you know, you’re quiet to this period of time.

So, and I, I hear it even in my own articulation of this, I know that my own instinct, like I’m not a big protest person. I know you aren’t either. And we’ve talked about this before. We’re, we like long form things? This doesn’t, it doesn’t fit as well, right, on a bumper sticker. On a placard.

Donniel: We actually love podcasts.

Yehuda: Yeah, podcasts are long. Nobody can interrupt you on a podcast. Right. But it does put religious leadership in a very different kind of bind today to find that space of, how do I do the real work of educating, of spiritual guidance, of mentorship, of resilience, to be able to stay with ourselves, and one another, our commitments through a period of this time, not to argue that our religious and our moral convictions should not be applied to the moral challenges of our time, but also not to let it become so slippery that we’re just papering over our political commitments with our religious commitments. I think that we’re dealing with something that’s very hard of very deep.

Donniel: I agree. And we’re trying to find it. And to find it is like, it goes, that’s why we have to be okay, because we have to find that the world needs a certain voice and needs people to talk it a certain way.

Yehuda: I wanna talk a little bit about North American Jews and, and what it is to live through the last couple of years. I know the term you used this morning was Warrior Nation and what it means to be a Warrior Nation. I’ve been playing with…

Donniel: There’s a whole list now. Warrior… There’s Warrior Nation, Trauma Nation, Peaceful Nation, Kvetching Nation. There’s a whole bunch of them.

Yehuda: By the way, I think the Golden State Warriors refer to themselves as a Warrior Nation and their fans. So, you know, when we started talking about this in our, in our iEngage seminar, when you said Warrior Nation, I said, well, what I think North American Jews are in is Worrior Nation, which is a very different feeling because in some ways, what Israelis have in your society…

Donniel: Did you understand what he said? They’re not Warrior, Warrior. Worrier, Worrier, to worry, right. The worrying nation.

Yehuda: Right. In some ways, what you have here is the capacity, and I don’t mean this as like you would, I, I’m sure relinquish it, the capacity to vote, to make change, the folks in your families, when there is a war, fight in that war, you are part of a tradition which we call Zionism, which was fundamentally rooted in the decision by the Jewish people to have agency and control of your own destiny.

I think one of the things that’s so hard for Israelis right now is they feel so angry at their government and they feel a loss of a sense of agency in controlling where the society is going, but you’re much closer to that. And for those of us North American Jews who identify deeply in our relationship to the state of Israel, who are not among the small but vocal minority who stand in opposition to the state of Israel, we don’t quite know where that agency comes from. What is the agency that we are meant to express?

I went earlier today on an Israeli television news program, and they were asking about this interview that it was, it was, the prompt was this Mandy Patinkin interview that I don’t really need to go into, but a very, very trenchant New York Times, interview with Mandy Patinkin. I had to, before we got on the air, I had to tell the anchor how to pronounce Mandy Patinkin. That could have been a great set of memes. But it kind of, you could hear from the anchor that he couldn’t kind of make sense of North American Jews who say, as Patinkin said, I care about the state of Israel. I care about its people. I believe in the existence of the state of Israel. And I feel so… basically embarrassed. And I feel, and I think this was the weakest part of Patinkin’s argument, that the state of Israel is causing antisemitism in the world. And the whole thing, as he burst into tears, where I felt I identified with it, was, I have no ability to control this, and therefore the only thing that’s left is to scream and yell.

At the same time, we are living within an environment where screaming and yelling about the moral failures of the state of Israel takes place within an environment of plenty of people who have believed that well before October 7th, and puts us in very, very strange places. So there’s this moral squeeze that I think we’re facing as North American Jews and a lot of confusion about what it looks like to express those viewpoints. And when I tried to explain this to the anchor, right, of like, ’cause he said, is this a majority of American Jews? And I said, increasingly it is the majority of American Jews not who feel that Israel has no legitimacy to have fought this war, but who feel like it’s enough and you can’t do it anymore. And he said to me, this is so famously Israeli, he says, okay, you have better ideas? And I said, I said, we’re not having a policy discussion. I said there’s a difference between a policy discussion and a moral discussion, but I don’t know if that’s enough. And I guess I’m curious both in, as an Israeli, as an educator, what is the, like, what really do you want American Jews to do and how do you, how do we do that in a way that enables us to kind of thrive within this place of moral squeeze?

Donniel: We don’t know anymore, do we? We really don’t know anymore. We want American Jews to be liberal Zionists. We want Canadian Jews, we want Dutch Jews, I’m looking at you. We want Jews around the world to be liberal Zionists. We want you to love Israel. We want you to feel that something beautiful and powerful is happening here. That’s an integral part of your Jewish life. And that to be a Jew has never been defined simply by the particular community in which you live. There’s always been a worldwide Jewish community to which you feel connected, and that Israel is not just one other community, and it’s not just a community, the largest, now, Jewish community, that there’s something deeply important happening in this project of Jewish sovereignty. There’s something very powerful about Judaism working itself out in the public sphere and about creating here a Jewish state, which is a light. And we want world Jewry to be invested in that process. We want them to be, even in many ways, partners in thinking about what it means because our lives are on the line, or decisions we make affect us first, even though I, I don’t believe that, what’s his, how do you pronounce?

Yehuda: Patinkin.

Donniel: He was the one in Homeland, right?

Yehuda: Yeah. Uh, yeah, yeah, yeah. < strong>Donniel: That’s where he was empowered. I do believe that the recent dramatic increase in antisemitism around the world is a direct result of Israel. That’s the only factor that’s really changed. So I don’t think he’s completely wrong there. I think there’s a, like what has changed? War in Gaza? I think there’s a manipulation of it, but I think it’s part of the story, but it affects Israelis. But that really what we’re supposed to do here is not, and what does it mean to be a model, to to be a great people.

I don’t think we’re the only ones who are part of that conversation. I don’t think, “ki mi-Tzion tetze Torah,” I think Zion has a lot to Torah, and I think there’s a lot of Torah we have to learn. It’s a real lot of Torah to figure this out. We need you as chavrutas, we need you as thinkers, we need you as critics, we need you as all this stuff. But the problem is, is that it’s getting harder and harder to ask you to play that role. Doesn’t mean the role’s not worthwhile, just we know how hard it is. The fact that Israelis by and large, still, after all, after everything, after judicial reform, after October 7th and 8th, and the feeling of power and support that you give us, when all is said and done, they still, by and large, it’s not just that they don’t understand what you’re experiencing, they don’t even feel that acquiring a knowledge to understand it is a value.

And I know it’s very hard. It’s like now it’s like I’m, it’s like I’m praying that you’ll stick around long enough. Like what is the foundation for it? How much could I ask of you? Because it’s true. You don’t have a voice. You don’t. Maybe you’re like the same thing like an educator in that sense. You have to flood. Maybe you know, I’m gonna connect the first part to the second. Maybe you have to help flood the public discourse. With your ideas and your feelings and your aspirations and just like someone who’s a teacher or an educator, it’s, you’re not gonna decide even… by the way, even the soldier, you could have turned back to that person who interviewed you and said, what? You don’t feel the same thing? What are you talking about? You feel the same sense of tiredness, but just to be part of that conversation…

And I know the one thing you don’t have that we have is you don’t get to vote. And I don’t want you to vote. I don’t want you to vote. But the individual citizen in Israel is not more empowered or less empowered than you are if you think about it. You just don’t get to vote. You get to actually, even though you don’t vote, you get to contribute, ’cause you have more money than most Israelis do. And so you could through finances somehow effect… but you’re just part of a people who has to flood a conversation and not, not give up. But it’s hard.

Listen, we have lived in an exceptional period of time where most of the last 15 or 20 years has been a period in which Israel doesn’t represent or reflect many of the key values and Judaisms that most of world Jewry care about. That’s like, that’s, it’s almost a generation, it’s almost a generation where the gap between the Israel that we’re supposed to talk about and the Israel that it is, is, is significant and it’s just getting harder and harder.

It’s, you know, this is like, you can look at a continuum. My father used to say, Israel’s not a nachas machine. That was one of his famous lines. It’s not a nachas machine. If you want nachas… but you need a little nachas. It’s like a, it doesn’t have to be a nachas machine, but it could have like, you know, could there be a moment of a little simcha, you know, like, is there something like, and I know you struggle, like you struggle with this all the time, so do we wanna define ourselves in North America as, as a leading institution for liberal Zionism?

And even in your own career, you know how people, they either hate you or love you depending on which article you write and whether it represents their notion of loyalty. Right? Loyalty. What does it mean? This is the great word, the great test of, somebody is owning the loyalty medal, like who, they’re sitting out, they’re dispensing the loyalty medals. And that makes it very hard. But just be part of a chain of people who for 3000 years have been struggling to create decency in our lives. And now that is a part of a new experiment and a new project called Israel. And continue to be a part of that conversation and make your voices heard, and your voices can be heard, and Israelis will wanna silence it and don’t listen. But the gap… just don’t give up. Maybe it’s demanding. Maybe liberal Zionists really have to exit the political activist mode and be more in the educational load. Could that work?

Yehuda: Yeah. I, you know, Haaretz had a very contentious, controversial piece, what was it, a week and a half ago, saying a hundred thousand dead in Gaza. I don’t remember where that number came from today. I saw a different number that said, you know, death toll hits 58,000, right? And it was like, does it, it is worse, a 100,000 deaths than 58,000 deaths, but the argument about the number of deaths is completely morally obtuse. It’s a lot of people. It’s, it’s absolute carnage. And I felt this way increasingly even about the genocide debate. Do you call it a genocide? Do you not call it a genocide? And how much distraction that actually is creating from the sense of moral urgency about a lot of killing and a lot of starving, and a lot of bad policies that are being thrown around that are definitionally ethnic cleansing, moving people into a, a humanitarian area as it’s being called a humanitarian enclave in the south of Gaza and not permitting them to return to their homes, follows the international law definition of ethnic cleansing. And so these terms wind up having very little meaning compared to the moral weight.

And I can, I wanna say, apropos your comments, I’m in this forever. This is just who I am. Who I am personally and Jewishly and obviously institutionally, and I felt more of a tinge in the last couple of months of like, what would it be like to just change the channel for American Jews? Just change the channel. Focus on something else, right?

Donniel: Good luck.

Yehuda: Even America could use our help and responsibility that may be, that may be worse and more intractable… or Judaism. What about that? Could we just, could we just do Judaism? And I think part of that comes from the fact that, and this is an insight I I got from years ago from Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld. Anger enables people to stay in relationship. Shame is a distancer. The minute you get to a place of real shame, you don’t wanna be a part of something, you don’t wanna see it. You wanna get it outta your life. It’s such a bad, horrible feeling. And that feeling of shame, and you can argue whether it’s deserved or not, right? Well, maybe I should be proud of what Israel succeeded at doing at these fronts of the war and proud of its accomplishments—it could have been worse and it’s not worse, and you could play that game.

But to be a kind of, to be the kind of liberal Zionist we’re talking about, you don’t play games around, you know, let me use this language to make me feel better about my commitments. You feel burdened by that story of aspiration, what you want the Jewish people to be, what you want the state of Israel to be, to think of our obligations of holding ourselves to a more powerful moral threshold. And then you run up into that brick wall of a sense of not just powerlessness, but a sense of shame and being implicated by that story. And it’s very, very deeply worrying to me. I think it’s the better way of understanding what’s happening with younger Jews in America. The easier way to have dismissed them was they are ignorant, malignant, malicious. They don’t understand things. Let me post a meme of students.

Donniel: The first one was ignorant. Yeah, you got ignorant.

Yehuda: Yeah. Let me post a meme of students who are being asked, you’re claiming from the river to the sea, and look, they don’t really know which of the river or the sea. They’re just fools. That’s actually not the thing that worries me. There are always, there are gonna be people who are ignorant. The more far more worrying phenomenon is, maybe I just don’t wanna have anything to do with this. I don’t want to be associated with it. I don’t wanna be called on it. I, I’ll, I’m gonna distance myself from Jewish symbols because who, I don’t remember who I was talking about, a college student who just said, I just, I don’t want, the first thing that people to know about me is that I’m Jewish. Because if that’s the first thing they know about me, now they have a whole set of loaded assumptions about Israel and Zionism and the reputation of the Jewish people and so forth.

What we have here are two different challenges, actually, because one of them is here and figuring out what we think about and what we wanna say about here. And the second is whether we are capable of formulating a language of Jewish meaning and pride and significance that will enable American Jews to continue to feel a sense of something and a sense of agency that is strong enough to withstand that sense of shame. It feels, you know what I mean? It feels like two different projects. One is the, what’s the repair work here and what’s the space that is available for American Jews to participate in that repair work? And the other is like, what are we doing to, what’s the “aseh,” not just the “lo ta’aseh” for the future of Jewish life?

Donniel: Even that division aggravates me a little bit and I understand where it’s coming from because if one part of your Jewishness is activating shame, and by the way, anger after a long time doesn’t work either. Anger leads to divorce, right?

Yehuda: It’s corrosive.

Donniel: Yeah. It’s just, you know who needs it, like what do I, anger is not.. as if I have two Judaisms, I have my conversation about Israel and I have Jewish life and ritual and values, et cetera. I have, I have two separate conversations. One is aggravating me and embarrassing me.

So could I go back to Sukkos? Like, let’s talk about, you know, let’s get, let’s get Sukkos, or let’s reexamine Shabbos. Even the articulation as if there’s two Judaisms… I think the minute we start talking that way, I think we’ve lost, I think we’ve lost as a Zionist, I feel we’ve lost. I don’t think there is this, you know, and here maybe this new non-Zionist group are trying to advocate for some diasporic Judaism free from that shame. There is no Jewishness without Jewish peoplehood. There is no Jewishness without engaging in this current sovereign project. If I lived in another era, could there be a Judaism without it? Sure. But now this is Judaism, so there’s gonna be something so parve, poor, bifurcated, it’s like almost ghettoing.

So like, it’s like there’s, there is no, how could I teach justice and not be concerned about justice in Israel? It just has to be part of like… listen, you can divorce yourself from this place. It’s possible. I could understand that. But to present it as if you’re retreating into Judaism as distinct from Israel, that dichotomy, I think we shouldn’t buy that language.

Yehuda: A hundred percent. And whether to describe it as that these are inherently intertwined or to suggest to take one out, is to impoverish your Judaism, it reminds me of something of what you taught around, uh, one of the God seminars maybe a decade ago, on one of the, an, I think the question was, do you have to believe in God to be a good Jew? And I think your answer was no. But let me talk to you about the ways in which believing in God, having a relationship with God can be a source of greatness, of building out a serious Judaism. So that’s, you know, the first argument is, these are fundamentally intertwined. A second is you can cut this off, but you just have basically a weaker Judaism, right?

Donniel: And like you felt it very much.

Yehuda: This is, I mean this is as deep as it is to my Torah is like North American Jews…

Donniel: And you feel all the time also like when you wanna, how much of American and Canadian, North American Jewry, let’s not talk about world Jewry, which we don’t, I can’t speak about it, right? How much of North American Jewry has cut itself off from certain aspects of, of our tradition in which Israel is—Hear O’ Israel. Israel is the, you know, Shema Yisrael, right?

Yehuda: Right, it’s just a metaphor.

Donniel: It’s just, it’s just, Israel is Israel is Israel. And so it’s, you can’t do either, but yeah, but I think just to present as if there’s, you can do one.

Yehuda: Yes, and, and here, you know, I’ve offered this critique before in the field of Jewish education, and I’ll make it again. A good example of how we are already failing at this hybrid integration is that in Jewish schools, Jewish day schools, it is not obvious what department the study of Israel lives in, right? It’s somewhere between the history department, it is in the Hebrew Language Department, and it’s in the cafeteria. Those are the three places. It doesn’t it, it certainly doesn’t have it. Sometimes you have your own discipline, a class about Israel, but in theory it should be in…

Donniel: Judaism.

Yehuda: Jewish philosophy, Jewish law. Any time you’re asking essential moral questions about what does it mean to live Judaism in the world, one of the sites that that plays out is your backyard and your neighborhood, and another site that it plays out is the largest stage that the Jewish people have ever had to play out the questions of our values, which is in the state of Israel. So we are already behind the eight ball on it. But it somehow feels as though even with a vision of integrating these, the balance is still a little off, that Israel takes up so much of the emotional energy of what it means to be a Jew in America.

Donniel: But we don’t do it as Judaism.

Yehuda: But we don’t do it as Judaism.

Donniel: Yeah, we don’t do it as Judaism. If we did it as Judaism would be an integral part of everything that we do. And as we talk about all questions, we do it as something else.

Yehuda: We’re gonna open up to a couple of questions from folks who are here.

Audience Member #1: Hi. So one thing that occurs to me is you, you’re talking about our Judaism and Israel, and it does occur, at least in my community and several communities I’ve seen, one of the big debates we’re having about is should we have an Israeli flag on the bimah? Should we be singing Hatikvah every week after services? So there really is, and some people were saying like, no, Hatikvah is not a prayer. We don’t wanna make, like even if we’re supporting Israel, it’s not a prayer that’s, it’s not the right place for it. So we’re definitely having those debates and at least in some communities, I think there is a sense of, is that enough of a debate? Like what would this look like if we were really having this debate?

Yehuda: Can I give you an example of… on this actually? So a number of years ago I got a call from a synagogue and I’m gonna talk about this and I’m not gonna mention who it is, but the people will know and anyway, that’s okay. I got a call from a synagogue that was dealing with a crisis because they had had a sign outside the building that said some banal version of “We Stand with Israel.” Right? And that came up during a war. And then at some point after the war had ended and there had been a construction project and the sign had been taken down during the construction project and the synagogue was torn up on the question of shall we put back the sign? And they said, Yehuda, can you come help us resolve the question of shall we put back the sign? And I said, here’s how I can help you:

I can tell you that this debate is not about the sign. This debate is about larger previously unarticulated tensions within this community of how does support for the state of Israel live within this congregation, and how do we wanna broadcast it internally and externally to others? Now we can learn and we can talk, and I think the same goes to the question of should a congregation sing Hatikvah or not sing Hatikvah? You can find plenty of Zionist congregations in America, fabrente Zionist congregations in America, including my own shul in Riverdale, where we do not sing Hatikvah as part of davening.

And by the way, there’s a shul down the block in Riverdale also that does ritually sing Hatikvah at the end of davening. And I don’t think they are more Zionist. But both of those synagogues have been working on and thinking about how Zionism and a support for Israel shows up in these congregations. I just think when it gets to the halakhic place of are we doing this ritual act or that ritual act, we’re sublimating what could be a much more profound conversation in congregations of how does this value live within the visuals of our congregation, but more importantly, within the spiritual life of a congregation.

Donniel: But it goes something, Yehuda, that you have been speaking about for years. When Israel is all about loyalty tests, it’s dead. It’s like people who are dating and wanted, who called whom last, like, I gave you the last call, it’s your turn. And that’s what we do. We’re all, we’re looking for loyalty rituals. I’m not talking about… the questions we were talking about, it’s not about loyalty rituals at all. It’s about engaging with Judaism in your lives, wherever they may be. And as it is expressed here in Israel and, and flooding the world with your ideas about it in whatever way you can. It’s about talking about these issues. But actually what happens is the loyalty test is undermining your ability to have Israel as a Jewish conversation. Because as a Jewish conversation, by definition, it’s not that you’re engaged in constant criticism. You’re talking about what ought to be knowing fully well that there will always be a gap between what ought to be and what is.

But when it’s about loyalty, you can’t even, you can’t even engage, ’cause if I’m gonna sing Hatikvah, then I can’t talk about fighting a just war justly. Because I’m saying Hatikvah. Or if I’m standing with Israel, I can’t talk about the serious questions that I have. If you use that word, you’re disloyal… when the substance of the question is, is Israel as careful in fighting this war as it ought to be, in distinguishing combatants and non-combatants? Is the objective of the war still achievable and is it achievable using military might, which would then justify the taking of life and self-defense? These are serious questions, but these words become triggers of loyalty, and the only thing we’re not doing is just continuing to engage in this type of conversation.

Audience Member #2: I really appreciate the conversation and I want to go to a place of suffering. That’s where we Jews go. That’s where, that’s where we go. I’m finding for a lot of people, they can only hold onto one type of suffering, one side suffering, and they’ll hold onto the suffering of their kids in Israel, the suffering of their family, and that’s where they are. Or I have people in my community, I’m sure all of us do, who can only hold onto the suffering of the Gazans. And I think many of us understand that you can have more than one type of suffering and you can hold that, but it’s really hard to do. What are your thoughts on helping us, helping others, helping us really go to that place of holding onto more than one suffering?

Yehuda: First of all, I wanna, I wanna find ways to have empathy for that before, before we try to correct it. I actually, if I have relatives here in Israel who, who have had their kids in Gaza for 400 days in the past two years, friends who have suffered immeasurably, and if they feel that their world requires of them, their beliefs, their trust, their willingness to put their children in harm’s way, demands of them to close off their moral world a little bit, and focusing on the suffering of themselves, I don’t wanna sit there and demand of them that they’re doing something wrong. Not only is it bad to do so, but it’s irrelevant because then all I lose is the relationship with them.

And I think the same applies to people who may not have those same relationships and who are watching the news and just saying, look, I, what I need them to acknowledge is there was and is continued suffering for the Jewish people throughout this period of time. And to then say, but the bulk of my moral attention is on where I perceive the greater suffering to be. Right now, I am trying to stretch to find room to say that’s, we gotta make space for that too. I think it starts at the top actually.

I think part of the reason why we have so many people in our community who feel that empathy is a limited resource and that it can’t be played out on both sides of this conflict is because we have too few role models and leaders who show them the way that they can have a more capacious, moral world. And there’s a lot of reasons for religious leaders to fear doing that. Your strongest loyalists are gonna be super mad at you one way or the other. You see it in shuls around the country. Here’s the people who are gonna make it impossible to do so. But I don’t see a way out of that moral binary or that empathy binary, unless we start with our capacity to speak in a different way and show people that it’s possible.

Donniel: If I could add to that, when suffering, awareness of suffering and empathy for suffering are parts of the loyalty discourse, that’s where we go completely wrong. I’m not pained by, Israeli army and Israeli Jewish suffering is a sign of loyalty. It’s not a sign of loyalty. It’s my family. It doesn’t, it’s not, oh, I am loyal to my family and therefore I’m paying for their suffering. It starts before the loyalty. It’s nothing to do with loyalty. It’s just my family. It’s an identity. It’s not loyalty, it’s an identity. And as a result, my concern and my empathy and my ability to feel the suffering of Gazans is not an act of disloyalty.

And part of what’s happened in Israel, and the same thing happens, is everybody’s making a loyalty. What, don’t you care? It has nothing to do with loyalty. It has to do with identity. It has to do with justice. It has to do with compassion. It’s not a loyalty issue. When I believe that all human beings are creating the image of God, it’s not me, therefore declaring my loyalty to all of humanity.

And then the question is, how do we balance, it goes back to, you know, the age old, how do we balance particularism with universalism? How do we do that? And, and that I don’t have to choose, again, it’s not a loyalty, it’s that I have a particular identity, but universalism, it’s not a replacement for particularism. It’s a recognition that I have a bifurcated identity. That together with my particular belonging, I am also part of a human race. And therefore when you ask to choose which one is dominant, then you look and you say, one second, what about, what about your mishpacha? Do you have a feeling of your family? It’s not that you’re being disloyal, but the question is how do you see yourself and where do you locate yourself? And when you put it in that context, we ought to be able to do both.

But when what you say, and that’s when the loyalty police come, the loyalty police are gonna wanna know, in your expressions of paying for this suffering, how much did you do for that one? And I’m gonna decide… there’s the loyalty police for Israel and then there’s the moral police, the universalists. And when those people police, it’s just, you know, our humanity loses. We just, we can’t express our just what it means to be a human being. Why should I have to pick? And that’s… which ones first? How much do I care more of? It just, those are the wrong questions when you’re confronting suffering.

Audience Member #3: Thank you. I actually appreciate that, David’s question, who was before mine. So I am actually, I am a protest person. Very much. Every protest I can be, you’ll find me there. And I also very much appreciate the idea that engagement in conversation that are deep and nuanced. I’m really appreciating this and my question is very much about, to what extent we can honestly allow these conversations. I know that in my community, and I’m assuming this is true for others, I am trying very hard to build a community where students who sit at encampments can be part of my community, proudly Jewish, and students who felt threatened by the encampments can sit in my congregation, proudly Jewish, and their parents can be in conversations with one another. And I am doing this, and I’m actually troubled by the question of this, how we get rid of anti-Zionism. I think we need to engage in conversation to defy ignorance. So the question is really, really honestly, how far are we willing to really have these honest conversations, knowing that some people don’t want us to have the conversations, neither from the left, nor from the right. So that’s where I wanna go.

Donniel: Thank you. We’re really privileged here. Yehuda and I live very privileged lives, and that’s also one of the reasons why we have a sense of profound responsibility. Because we could almost just about say whatever it is that we feel we could say it and we’re not gonna be fired. And we’re not gonna be judged. People might critique us. Fair enough. Who said that? We can’t be wrong. But in the confines of the Hartman Institute, we have conversations…

Do you know how many times, I spoke to you about this seminar, which I’m in, this Israeli seminar, over and again, people are saying like, don’t quote me outside of this like, like here, it’s, you could say anything you want and nobody’s gonna sit there, snap judge you as immoral as a hater of Israel, as a hater of the hostages. Like either you could just, you we have, we’ve succeeded in creating a room at the Hartman Institute, and that’s part of what we want to communicate in our teaching, that you can have what you call nuanced, we could talk and we could talk. I’m sitting and talking to Ben Gvir supporters. They’re part of my conversation. Maybe they’re not determining policy at the Hartman Institute, but there are, they aren’t, but there are students of the Hartman Institute who are Ben Gvir supporters and Smotrich supporters.

Part of the disease, that both in Israel and North America, I find it, it’s been on steroids since October 7th, is our inability to have serious conversations with each other. I’ll just, I’ll… maybe Yehuda, we, in graduation ceremony for our boys’ school and our girls’ school, I, in preparation for, I had an understanding of what’s a machloket le’shem shamayim that I never understood before. What is debate for the sake of heaven? And the Mishna says a machloket le’shem shamayim is a machloket of Hillel and Shammai. And the machloket she-lo le’shem shamayim is the machloket of Korach ve-adato. And the idea behind it is that Korach was debating for the, the argument was not for the search of truth, it was to win. And for the search of power. Korach wanted power. That’s the story, whether that’s what he wanted or not, Korach personifies the person who uses Torah to basically get personal gain and power. And Hillel and Shammai are debating for the sake of truth, et cetera.

And I had another understanding over this last, I’ve been feeling it a lot this year, is that a machloket le’shem shamayim is not determined by what your intent is in entering the conversation. Most people are in the search of truth and doing good. What makes a machloket she-lo le’shem shamayim is when you give the other person the worst possible reading that you can of what it is that they said. A machloket le’shem shamayim is when you allow somebody to say, that’s not what I’m doing, where if you’re in the search of truth, you give the other the best possible reading that they could have. Part of what’s happening now is not that we are trying to debate for the sake of power and winning, but in our pursuit of truth, we’re not listening anymore and we’re not letting each other explain, no, that’s not what I mean. That’s not what I’m trying to say. And we shut down and decide for them what it is that you are saying so that I will always prevail. There’s such destructiveness.

I see it in the Just Trump—Just Not Trump all… just the war. All of this right wing, left wing, progressive, liberal. Everybody is telling the other one what it is that they truly believe. And when they try to say to you, no, that’s not what I believe. We don’t wanna hear. And in that environment, my friend, there’s no, there is no possibility of a conversation. Everybody comes out wounded and there’s no growth. A machloket le’shem shamayim is you give the other person the best reading, and most importantly, you let them tell you what it is that they are trying to say and to do. And you accept that as a given, even if it challenges some of your truths. And if maybe… the reason why is, if you could articulate this method. It’s not saying we should be able to, we have to teach our congregations to have these conversations, to treat our conversation, our communities, to limit the loyalty tests. Then maybe we could have the types of conversations that we know that we need to have.

Yehuda: I’ll just briefly say, ’cause I wanna, with this we’ll close. This is a lot of what I’m gonna try to talk about on Thursday morning. So this is a good lead into that. I’ll just add one thing here, which is, apropos what you said, there’s a lot of different viewpoints that get expressed in these hallways. There’s a lot of different viewpoints that get expressed on the stage at programs at the Hartman Institute. There is room and space in our, in our institution, but it doesn’t mean that those people shape the policies of the Hartman Institute just because they have that opinion. It doesn’t mean that it lets it rewrites the mission statement of the Hartman Institute.

And I think that there really is a big issue in many Jewish communities about the conflation of what conversations do we permit to happen within our walls, and ultimately, who is the mara de-atra who sets the policy and represents the institution publicly? I find anecdotally, but in, in many places that when there isn’t a clear sense of like, of leadership with its own moral position, that’s when you create a vacuum that the people who are arguing about their positions are actually competing to represent the institution. But there’s a really big difference between the room to argue and the right of being platformed. I think about it a lot in our programs and I think there’s something there for rabbis and educators to think about of, the more clear an institution is about its priorities and its, and its moral positions and its values, paradoxically, you actually have more room to allow people to bring their full selves to debate, because in some ways why them accepting you as the leader of this congregation, right, now, you’ve given them the ability to be their full selves in that context. So there’s more to talk about it there and to be continued. Thank you everybody.

Donniel: Thank you.