The following is a transcript of Episode 122 of the For Heaven’s Sake Podcast. Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Donniel: Hi, this is Donniel Hartman and Yossi Klein Halevi from the Shalom Hartman Institute. And this is our podcast For Heaven’s Sake, our special edition, Israel at War. Today is day 193. And I hope this is the only time I’m going to have to say this: this is day 3, from the Iranian missile attack. We don’t know. But I hope. We’ll talk about that. In fact, that’s our theme for today. Our theme for today is Iran. 

And Yossi, I know you’re now on a different front line. There are many front lines to this war, and you’re traveling now around America. You’re in multiple campuses. I think you just were at Berkeley. Tomorrow you’re at Stanford. I know, I don’t. You know, there are, we use the word frontline. I don’t know who’s in greater danger. I think after Saturday night, we are in greater danger here in Israel. 

Yossi: Fair to say, fair to say.

So, I’m not gonna get, I’m not gonna go, you know, you’re also in danger. You know, some proportion. But you’re at a very important place and God bless you for doing it. 

But today we wanna talk about Iran. We want to talk about what Iran is doing to Israel right now. I don’t mean which missiles it’s firing. What is this whole experience? How is it shifting Israel? And how is it shifting the conversation about the war or not shifting the conversation about the war? And I wanted to start for a few minutes, Yossi, since I’m on this front line here, I wanted to share with you, share with our audience a little bit. I want to give voice to this strange, bizarre, troubling, surreal, nightmarish evening that 9.8 million people went through. 

And somewhere around 11 o’clock at night, we’re now told between 1 and 2 o’clock, the missiles are going to hit. Iran has sent hundreds of drones, and initially, it was just drones, and then it was cruise missiles, and then 10 minutes before they landed, they told us, yes, there’s also ICBMs coming. And…

It was, you know, I, Yossi, I’ve been to war, you know, we’ve lived in Jerusalem in the midst of intifadas, of immense, immense fear. This was very different. This wasn’t raw fear. It was complete raw destabilization. It was different. You weren’t as frightened for your life. We assume that they weren’t going to be attacking the population centers. Even though it does turn out it wasn’t reported that they were targeting, probably, the Knesset in Jerusalem as one of their sites. We all knew that they were going to try something in Dimona. But it wasn’t a personal sense that death is approaching.

But there was a personal sense that the order of our universe is changing. And it’s a very strange thing. It’s one thing to be shot at. It’s one thing to be in a terrorist attack. It’s another thing when you look at your clock and somebody’s filming this stream of drones and in three hours, it’s in two and a half hours, like there was this countdown. There were even these jokes. 

I don’t know if, you know in Israel, in the newspapers, they print the time when Shabbat comes in. You know, Jerusalem, Shabbat is coming in Jerusalem at 5:32, so the joke was the missiles are coming in Jerusalem are at 3:32, and Jerusalem is 18 minutes early and it’s never a round time and in Be’er Sheva it’s going to come in at 1:43 in the morning. It was just, but we joked about it, but there was a sense that something very significant happened.

And I want to tell you, I don’t feel the same person. I’m not, you know, it’s not that my politics are changed. I just, I feel, everything has its, the experience, it was so unsettling. And even though I knew it wasn’t existentially dangerous, it’s just not the same. That experience of hundreds, 

Yossi: So what’s changed? What’s changed, Donniel?

Donniel: I don’t really know, Yossi. 

Yossi: Is it feeling more personally vulnerable? Because we’ve had, look, we’ve been under missile attack, rocket attacks for years, but not on this level. This was really a much more sophisticated attack.

Donniel: You know, it is possible. I wonder, it’s possible that the people who live in the Gaza envelope, Sederot, Ofakim, the Kibbutzim, the people in the north had a similar feeling. But there was something about Iran. See, we poo-poo Hamas. We don’t poo-poo Hezbollah, but we poo-poo Hamas. There’s something about Iran coming into the equation that psychologically changes the stability. It’s not a fear factor. Our world has shifted, and it’s just not the same. 

We know Iran is an enemy, planning and plotting to kill every single Jew in Israel. Literally every single Jew. That’s what they want to do. But the nuclear Iran is just, you were obsessed about this for years and I always made fun of you. I didn’t do it publicly, but inside, I made fun of you, myself personally. It’s like, because I can’t be worried about nuclear disasters. When you deal about the end of the world stuff, I just don’t know what to do with it, so I just deny it and just never really bothers me. I just sort of figure it’s beyond my pay grade. 

But this, it wasn’t nuclear, it just had this immense power coming forward. You know, it turned out that we could deal with them. But it just, there’s something shifted and it’s, maybe it is a sense of instability. I could tell you, and we’ll talk about this, it mostly impacted me personally, but also I feel, I’ve been doing my own personal polls with tens of people. I think it’s changed the way Israelis think about the war, think about themselves. It was just a very strange thing.

Yossi: But say more, say more, in what way? Again, it’s not personal vulnerability. Is it national vulnerability, is it…?

Donniel: I think now, I think Israelis don’t have a clue what they want anymore. I think, there’s only one certain thing remains right now. And that is that we want the hostages back. And as it’s seeping deeper and deeper into our consciousness that they’re literally getting killed there, that, excuse my French, the son of bitches, are killing them. There is a sense of urgency that we have to get our family back, as many as we can, and that urgency you see everywhere, everywhere. 

But other than that, I don’t think there’s any certainties anymore. The attack came, all of a sudden, people aren’t thinking about Hezbollah and the war with Hezbollah. Rafiah is not even on the horizon. Israel hasn’t done anything in Gaza. And it’s not clear. I think people sort of know that. We’re not going to destroy Hamas. I even hear more and more people this week laughing at the notion, you know, Netanyahu says we want complete victory. I think the whole term victory is even, we spoke about that in the last podcast, I don’t want to talk about, we spoke about our feelings, but in Israeli society, the people I’m meeting and you know, obviously I only want to meet people that reaffirm my what I believe, but not just, I’m actually meeting a broad spectrum of people, and the terms don’t even have meaning anymore. 

I think what Iran is starting to do and then I want to turn to you, is recalibrating a lot of things. It’s recalibrating priorities. You know, if Iran would have been successful, it would have been a different game. Not that Israel would have been destroyed, but it would have been a different equation. I think people are looking for a new center. And I don’t think they have a center. There isn’t a center. 

Again, I don’t want to get you started on this, but I’m just going to say it and you’re not going to say anything about it. There is no leadership centering Israelis. We have a bunch of generals on the left, center, and right, and one of the secrets in Israel is that there is no left-wing or right-wing divide when it comes to security. And generals, they’re used, they have one tool, you know, they have a hammer and they want to pound, they want to use their hammer and more and more people are just, they don’t know what they want. 

Hamas, no one’s even talking about Hamas. No one’s even talking about Sinwar. They’re just talking about hostages, and they’re talking about Pesach. And just, it’s reorganized things, and it’s reorganized it into a place of instability. I would like to be more clear. Maybe it’ll come out more clear as we talk with each other. But let’s just hold that. 

And Israel, I just want to tell people, it’s not that we feel less safe here. It’s not less safe. I actually feel safer now, after Saturday night, than before. I feel much safer now. The tremendous victory that we achieved, the sense of competence, the sense of actually seeing that when Israel had a strategy that it was working on for 20 years, how accomplished we could be, as distinct from the war in Gaza, where I don’t think we, we haven’t had a strategy. 

So there’s a sense of personal security, but I think an instability in our overall consciousness or in our goals, in instability in our objectives. What did this, and I know you’ve been the Iran guy, one of the key Iran people in the Jewish community for decades, shouting and shouting and many of us said you were shouting, calling, whatever, crying wolf or whatever, but this must have been for you a very, very profound moment, Yossi. 

Yossi: Well, we have our first argument, Donniel, because for me this was a clarifying moment. There was nothing confusing, nothing confusing about this moment. First of all, in terms of an Israeli victory, I experienced it as an illusion. It certainly was an impressive momentary victory, but had Iran chosen to unleash the vast arsenal of missiles that it possesses, and Hezbollah, and Iraq, and Syria, and the Houthis, our missile defense system would have collapsed, would have simply been overwhelmed. And we know this. We don’t have an answer to 200,000 missiles and rockets. We have an answer to Hamas’s arsenal, to Iran’s limited attack. But we—and this is an extraordinary failure of our defense system. We are vulnerable in the extreme to a serious attack. So that’s, first of all, but that’s not my main point or even the main argument that I have with you on this.

Donniel: But it is an important point to just stop on for a moment, because it is. It’s not an argument, but it’s a very different perspective. For me, this was unsettling. And for you, it was clarifying. Those two terms are very different. And I think it’s important to put them out there. I think it’s a clarifying moment in our conversation together. But I didn’t mean to stop you. Please continue, Yossi.

Yossi: Right. No, I’d say the deeper level of clarity for me is that it restored this moment to its rightful context. This is not the Israeli-Hamas war, the Israeli-Palestinian war. That is one front of the real war that opened up on October 7th, which is the Israeli-Iranian war. And that front, as we’ve talked about in the past, that war has shifting fronts. It may well open up in the north or in the south against the Houthis, but the real war is Israel against Iran. And that was clarifying, first of all, in terms of understanding that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was never just, or I would even say primarily, that. It was always in the context of a regional conflict. 

And for many years, for most of Israel’s existence, it was a Sunni-Israeli conflict. Now, the Sunni-Israeli war is coming to an end. And if Saudi Arabia enters into a process of normalization with Israel, we will really be seeing the historic and definitive end of the Sunni-Israeli war. But that has been replaced by a Shiite-Israeli war. 

Donniel: Shiite-Sunni war. 

Yossi: Well, a Shiite-Sunni war with Israel as the Jewish Sunni state. And so the clarifying moment for me is that we’ve all been focused, understandably, the Gaza War has been the worst war that Israel has ever fought, the most brutal war. And I understand the focus. I understand the international community’s focus on this war. But it is missing the strategic heart of what’s happening, and Iran helped restore the focus to what this war really is about. 

And I think people need to ask themselves a very simple question. And this again is part of what for me is such a clarifying moment. With all of the moral complexity and agony of the Gaza War, there’s a fundamental question here. Will the Middle East and the world be a better place if Iran prevails in this war? Or Israel prevails? That’s the question. And that’s why I feel as counterintuitive as it sounds, I felt a certain relief seeing Iran launch this attack against us. And a sense that, okay, now we are finally looking at this conflict in its proper dimensions.

Donniel: Interesting. I hear you and I also agree with you. Partially. I just don’t, I believe that this is, you are right, a much larger conflict. But I don’t think that Israel is going to know how to maintain this focus.

And if this is really the story, Yossi. And let’s assume together that it is with one caveat. I do believe that the conflict between Israel and Palestinians still is a story unto itself, which can’t be subsumed because there’s a justice issue and moral issues that are so critical on both sides that they can’t just be swept aside. I’m not claiming you were, but

Yossi: No, no, I agree with you on that. That’s an important distinction. Yes, yes, yes.

Donniel:  In others, it’s not as, okay, now it’s Iran, because, you know, okay, we’re fighting Iran now. And then, so you have to decide what’s worse, Iran or Israel? Is Iran or an Israel which occupies Palestinians worth, like, I’m petrified sometimes of that macro vision, because when you work macro, injustices are allowed on the micro level. And I’m frightened of that. 

But I agree that the larger instability is that the fact is that Israel is confronting an enemy that it doesn’t have alone a solution for. And one of the most moving parts of this whole experience, you know, as Saturday night evolved, and you know, none of us slept. It was a very interesting, I forgot, that was part of the experience, you know. 

It’s coming, so you don’t go to sleep at 11 or 12, and you know, by 1, and you’re waiting at 1:30, and then 1:30 till 3:30, you know, the bombs, and everything is going off, and then there’s the analysis, and then at 4:30, you can’t shut off your phone, and then all the WhatsApp messages from friends in North America, for whom it’s only the early evening, are sharing their sympathy, and they’re keeping you up, so most of Israel didn’t sleep the whole night. There was a…

Yossi: It’s like waiting for the dinner guest from hell to show up. You know?

Donniel: It was like this whole… It was just there. It was this, tiredness was also part of it. But one of the redeeming experiences was we weren’t alone. We’ve spoken about this over and again. Every time Israel is criticized, they’re anti-Semites. Every time Israel’s criticized, oh, they’re placating their progressive wing. The anti-Semites are taking over all over the world. And here it was. The October 7th coalition was even magnified. We have real friends in the world, whether they love us because of our democracy, they love us because of our strategic significance for the Sunnis. I’ll leave that aside. And then when you add Saudi Arabia and you add Jordan into the equation, there was something very powerful here. 

And if that is one of our greatest strategic victories, that has to define how we respond. And part of the feeling of unsettledness that I’ve been sensing, not just personally, is that you wonder whether we have the wisdom, maybe by the end of this week we’ll discover that we have. Do we have the wisdom?

You know, I really appreciated Tom Friedman and Bret Stevens’ articles in the New York Times. I really appreciated their latest ones. It had a… Could we understand that this was really a victory? It doesn’t mean, I know, it doesn’t mean that the war is over. But that if we’re fighting Iran, it’s not just about our air force and it’s not just about our missiles, whether they’re attack missiles or defense missile systems. 

It needs a different mode of thinking, Yossi, in which Rafiah is small, Hezbollah is serious, but fighting one more day in Gaza. Like I could see right now, if we move back, Iran disappears again. And so I hear you, I hear you, but it needs then to be handled with tremendous nuance and thoughtfulness and almost nobody in Israel today feels that we have that confidence. And maybe that’s where the sense of unsettledness that I was speaking about beforehand is coming from.

Yossi: So I think you’re raising a very important point here. The true victory of Israel’s response to the Iranian attack was that it wasn’t only Israel’s response. We had the Jordanians, apparently Saudi Arabia in some sense, and of course the US and England, this was a real, and France, this was a real coalition of a future Middle East, of a possible Middle East. And that’s what was thrilling about this moment. 

And I’ll say something more, Donniel. If we shift the strategic focus to Iran in this war, then I’m with you. Then let’s, whatever we’ve succeeded doing in Gaza, let’s get the hostages back and, as you would put it, dayenu. But what worries me is that we don’t have a strategic vision, not Israel and certainly not the West, in terms of our policy toward Iran.

The very word that’s being bandied about, retaliation, is Israel going to retaliate against Iran? I hate that word retaliation because we are not in a tit-for-tat conflict here. We’re not trying to restore the balance of terror between Israel and Iran. From my perspective, this is the beginning of the war to bring down the Iranian regime. Nothing less than that. And so here, you and I will have a real disagreement here.

Donniel: No, I won’t. I actually, Yossi, I very much appreciate it, because what I want, you know where I get nervous? I get nervous when I feel we’re in a Middle Eastern car accident and people are getting out of their car and strutting. You know, like, oh, like, you know, they’re shouting and screaming like that. I want to attack Iran now because I want to show them that you can’t do A, B, and C and get away with it. Like there isn’t a long-term strategy of victory. 

And I think, listen, what Tom Friedman, what Tom Friedman was arguing for, he said, take this and now let’s begin a serious campaign of sanctions against Iran. You even hear the government, the American administration beginning to shift that. This requires a much more complex strategy. But it requires of Israel to actually have a strategy. 

What we saw, what we saw, can I just do this comparison, for 20 years plus we had a strategy of creating a missile defense system. No one in the world had it. I don’t know if you ever saw the White, you remember there was that show in America called the White House or the West Wing, excuse it was the West Wing. You were in America. 

Anyway, there was this thing that they were bringing the chief of staff to see one more missile defense system. And he says, it never works. He was like making fun of it. We’re spending billions and it never works. The Star Wars initiative. Well, we actually pulled it off. We pulled it off with a 20, 25-year strategy, moving money, focusing our energies. And it was a tactical strategy, but there was a goal that we wanted to reach. 

Now this is going to require a multi-year goal. And in that goal, we’re going to have to ask ourselves, if there’s a Sunni coalition, what do we need to do to maintain that? What does it mean that we have to do vis-à-vis Palestinians? What does it mean about our relationship with Jordan and Egypt? How does the prime minister of Israel talk and reach out to people? What about an international coalition? There’s a long game being played here. And Israel, we saw here the best of Israel. And in many ways, by seeing the best of it, it also exposed the worst of it. 

We’re like, in the Bush leagues and we’re looking to strut right now. I want, oh, we want to, as you said, call it tit for tat, no. We know the Iranians were humiliated. Do you know what we want? We want them to say uncle. I want to embarrass them even further. It’s just a small game, Yossi, and I am all in for a larger strategic battle against Iran. I don’t know if it’s necessarily only a military one, but the Sunni coalition is something that we have to think about. So in many ways, Saturday night was also a clarifying moment, but it was more destabilizing because it exposed Israel’s deepest weakness when it comes to these issues.

Yossi: I think that’s right. You know, there was something childish in the reporting that I was reading in the New York Times and elsewhere, which is, well, Iran was responding to Israel’s attack against its consulate in Damascus, as if we are in a kind of war of attrition, or as you put it, a war of honor.

This is a war against a regime that has declared its goal of destroying Israel and that has achieved a historic victory over Israel by surrounding our borders with its proxies. Now, we have fought this war against Iran over the last two decades basically in three ways. 

The first is within Iran itself. We have tried to slow down the nuclear program through assassinations of its scientists and other means. The second piece of this war has been fought in Syria and Iraq, where we have sabotaged the flow of weapons from Iran to Hezbollah and Hamas. And the third way, and maybe in some ways the most problematic of all, is that we periodically fight mini-wars against Iran’s proxies. 

Now, the war in Gaza is a break with that pattern. It’s certainly not a mini-war. But it does fit the pattern of Israel fighting, rather than fighting Iran directly, we’re fighting its proxies. And those three forms of war have all in effect really been part of Iran’s strategy. We’ve played into their strategy. We need a much more profound way of understanding how do we, first of all, stop Iran’s nuclear program and it’s almost too late, but it isn’t yet too late. 

And secondly, how do we help bring Iran down. This is a regime that is despised by its people. I once had a meeting many years ago with an Israeli official, sitting in the defense ministry, who had been shunted aside by the establishment. He was given his little office, but his dream was that Israel would actively support the Iranian opposition. And he had a whole plan. And it was a brilliant plan. And nobody listened to him then. 

There’s so much that we and the West together can do to help weaken this regime. And we need to start getting serious. That’s what, for me, that’s the significance of this moment. Iran has helped us refocus what our strategic goals should be.

Donniel: You know, here, Yossi, against my own self-interest, I find myself agreeing with you completely. I don’t know what’s happening to me. 

Yossi: Be careful, you never know where that’s going to lead, Donniel.

Donniel: Don’t worry, I, but I, I really hear you. And maybe that’s, I’ve said this already, but that’s why I think Israelis feel so unsettled. It’s a new ball game. And all we’ve been used to are little band-aids. Band-aids, strutting, satiating our nationalist aspirations, you know, oh, like the Ben Gvirs who, you know, and Ben Gvir speaks for a lot of a part of a lot of Israelis, you know, now we have to attack, you know. Like our national honor was injured. It’s all the wrong conversation.

And if there really is a major strategic danger, Israel needs to get serious. And that requires, by the way, not only generals around the table. I like personally, I have a deep respect for Eisenkot and a respect for Gallant and for Gantz. And also I used to respect Netanyahu, who had a very cautious attitude towards power. But there’s just so much nationalist strutting right now. 

And part of the problem of October 7th is that it harmed our national pride so deeply, that we haven’t yet found the balance. And now we’re being called to a level of maturity that requires politicians, public conversation. Israelis always rise to a challenge. That’s one of the greatest things about Israel. We rise to the challenge. But I don’t see people calling us to that. 

And then I want to just end. This podcast is going to come just a few days before Pesach. And it’s going to be a strange Pesach. It’s very strange, I’m telling you. Israelis are all thinking about Iran and Pesach, because Pesach is probably the most significant national day. The preparation, in a certain sense, it’s even more powerful than Yom Hazikaron and Yom Haatzmaut. 

Yossi: Memorial Day for the fallen soldiers and Israeli Independence Day, just to translate.

Donniel: Thank you. Just to translate, Yossi, thank you. You’re in North America, so you’re in translation mode. 

Everybody keeps a Seder. It’s just, what are we gonna talk about? How do we come to the Seder this year? What does it mean to be at a Seder when we have hostages? What does it mean to have a Seder just a week after Iran attacks us? What does it mean to have a Seder in the midst of a war and death and uncertainty? There’s so many questions. 

Do you have maybe one observation that you wanted to share with our audience to help them forget to just start the Seder?

Yossi: So I think you and I are, I suspect that we have similar approaches to the Seder, which is on the one hand, deeply traditional, love and respect for the tradition. And on the other hand, the kind of impatience with the heaviness of repeating the texts and really, the heart of the Seder is creating space for a conversation, real conversation. What is everyone sitting around the table bringing to the Seder at this moment? From their personal lives. What are they thinking about, about what being Jewish means to them? What is this moment? 

And this year is obviously, more fraught than ever. So for me, I want my kids around the table to feel that this is a chance for them to speak about what they’re going through, what they’re feeling, and what does this story mean? The story that we carry for thousands of years, and we keep repeating every year, we’re at one of those moments in the story that we all sense is a turning point, of some sort. 

And so the Seder for me is this wonderful gift, really an opportunity to just sit back and take a long-term perspective. What does this mean in the context of a people that tells itself the same story through constantly changing circumstances?

Donniel: So what’s the opening question you’re going to ask at your Seder, Yossi?

Yossi: Why is this year different, certainly in the Jewish lifespan that we’ve experienced? Why do we all feel that this in some ways is the most significant year of our personal Jewish history, our slice of Jewish history? How about you, Donniel?

Donniel: Beautiful. You know, also we, you know, the Haggadah is a boring book, you know, and if it wasn’t for the Zion family, which we have great, all of us have such a deep sense of gratitude for helping us navigate it. It has moments, you know, the rituals are nice, but the words are, you know, whenever a book is written by a committee over a thousand years, it just gets, it’s a nightmare.

But the first thing I would ask people, before we even get into the ritual, like everybody sits down and quiet. And I would ask everybody, how are you feeling? How are you feeling? What, you know, for so many years, the story of Pesach is from slavery to freedom. And there’s a trajectory that we assume is there. It’s from slavery to freedom. But I don’t think that trajectory works this year. I don’t think that’s what we’re feeling right now. 

And Jews were in the diaspora for 2,000 years, and the purpose of the Passover Seder was to give them a model of success and hope. For 2,000 years that you’re in the diaspora, we told the story of redemption, which fortified our belief that redemption was possible. 

I think this year, I think we have to allow ourselves to be in a non-redeemed reality. And we’ve been spoiled these last, since ’67. We’ve been leaving. Redemption was self-evident. Good news was self-evident. I would start by just asking people, tell me how you’re feeling. And I wouldn’t even concentrate on the redemptive part. You know, if you want to, and that works for you, yeah, okay, but you don’t have to get there. It doesn’t have to be a happy ending here. 

And in order to do that, I want to remind everybody of what for me was always, it’s right in the middle, the four children and the model of the four children. You know, we mishandled the wicked child. That was one of the great failures of the Haggadah, is this notion that there is a wicked child and there is a wicked question and we hit him and we slap him and we say, you’re out of here, we have no interest in you. 

But the model of the children is the model that if we’re going to do what I’m asking and also what you’re suggesting, Yossi, is there can’t be wrong questions at this Seder. There can’t be wrong questions, and there can’t be wrong feelings, and there can’t be wrong anger and wrong hostility. And part of what we are facing in our world in North America is profound intergenerational tension. 

The Seder could be a nightmare, by the way. It could be a nightmare, where we’re demanding loyalty. That’s, you know, when family has to do this, the four children is the model. So I would say to you, if you have the courage to really ask a question which is open-ended and allow any answer to be there, any question to be there, and don’t feel you have to answer it, we don’t have to answer people’s feelings, there are right ones or wrong ones, we need a time as a people to talk.

And the Seder is our family—it’s not a family celebration, it’s a family conversation, unmediated by rabbis. So if you can’t do it, then stick with the traditions because sometimes the purpose of traditions is enable you to stop thinking, you know, shut down your brain and say some words, you know. But if you have the room, start asking people a question. 

And I think we have to make room this year for far more brokenness than we allowed in previous years. And then have fun with the songs at the end, you know, they’re good, they, who knows what they mean.

Yossi: Well, I love this, I love this, DOnniel. I love the model. I love the model you’re saying.

So in a way, this is the seder of the broken middle matzah this year. And you know, there’s this really interesting paradox about the wicked child, because the wicked child is present at the seder. So on the one hand, the wicked child says, what does this have to do with me? You know, what does this have to do with me? 

And the subversive move that the Haggadah does against its own advice of how to treat the wicked child is to accept the wicked child as part of the conversation.

Donniel: That’s right. And let’s even get rid of the word wicked, could we? Could we just get rid of it? Get rid of—at the Seder, there’s no boundaries. At the Seder, there’s no wicked people. There’s no anti… There’s people struggling to find meaning in their lives. And this has been an unsettling time. And give people that room. 

And so, Yossi, I want to wish you and your family, and your granddaughter is a little too young for Mah Nishtanah yet, but it will come to you and your whole family, I don’t know, a joyful Pesach, a meaningful Pesach. I hope a healthy Pesach. Maybe this year we have to call it a healthy Pesach for all of us and for all Am Israel. 

Yossi: And for you, Donniel, and your family. 

Donniel: Thank you. My friends, this is For Heaven’s Sake, Israel at War, Day 193, and Day three.

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