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Thoughtful debate elevates us all. Donniel Hartman, Yossi Klein Halevi, and Elana Stein Hain revive the Jewish art of constructive discussion on topics related to political and social trends in Israel, Israel-Diaspora relations, and the collective consciousness of being Jewish. 

The podcast draws its name from the concept of machloket l’shem shemayim, “disagreeing for the sake of heaven” and is part of the Institute’s iEngage Project.

Israeli Normalcy Transcript

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

Donniel: Hi, this is Donniel Hartman and Yossi Klein Halevi, and this is For Heaven’s Sake, Israel at War, today is day 284, and our theme for today is Israeli normalcy, it’s to try to describe and understand the nature of our life after 284 days. For families of the hostages, there is no normalcy. For people who live in the north especially, and also most of the displaced people from the south, even though they now have temporary places to live, we can count as many days as we want, the war, the effect of the war, the aftermath of the war is still ongoing, and there is no normalcy. For people whose kids are in the army, there’s very little normalcy or spouses.

But that said, there still is a very large subsection, not subsection, mass of Israeli society that as you walk in the streets and something’s shifting in the war, something’s shifting in the experience of the war. A very close friend of mine, new friend from Miami wrote me a WhatsApp, he was in Tel Aviv and he couldn’t even make sense of what he was seeing, and it’s not the Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, you know, they’re not serious, it was just, he went and he just sensed life. The beaches were full, the restaurants were full. So he describes going to the hostage plaza and then leaving it like, he said, are we one country?

But it’s not just Tel Aviv. Last night, we had an event with senior management of the Institute and we went out for dinner to a place downtown, the music plaza, five, six restaurants around, hundreds of tables, packed, packed, people were going.

Now, I’m not saying that people are, you know, screaming for joy, but there is a normalcy. I think there’s a sense that the war’s winding down a little bit, but we’ll have to talk about this, the precariousness of this normalcy. Maybe I’ll say it from the outset, the nature of Israeli normalcy is that it’s not really normal because it could come to an end in, in one second and everybody knows that.

But for what it is at this moment. You know, Gaza seems to be a little less tense. If we don’t bomb something in the north, Hezbollah doesn’t fire. We’ve even read an article of this tit for tat type, what do we do? And I’m not talking about the larger war, which nobody even knows is going to happen or not. But we’ve entered into a certain, you know, I can’t call it normalcy, but I’ll call it Israeli normalcy. It’s, I mean, it’s part of this insane,

Yossi: Normalcy with quotation marks.

Donniel: With quotation marks. I want to try to understand it. I want to understand where, where do you think it comes from. I also want to analyze what are its strengths, and what is its power, but what are also some of its profound weaknesses. But first, I shared my experience. I know we picked this theme together, because we both are sharing it, but do you also feel some sense of Israeli normalcy descending in your life? I know because I’m a bigger denier than you. You know, like I, I pick which emotions I want to have at which time, but you do that less.

Yossi: I do feel a lessening of the intensity and the disorientation. You know, when people ask me now, how are you? It doesn’t sound inherently like an absurd question. You know, I’m okay. I’m okay. I’m doing okay.

Donniel: It’s right, you know, less people are doing the long three-minute dance for that question.

Yossi: K’shalom ami. My well-being is as the well-being of my people, you know.

Donniel: Someone should write a book, you know, of all the weird ways, you know.

Yossi: Right, right. You know, for me personally, though, where I do feel the disorientation is, I can never remember the day, and sometimes I can’t remember the month, I have to think about it. The other day I thought it was April or May and I had to remind myself. And since October 7th I feel unmoored in time. But, you know, when you ask me about my own experience, I mean, as you know, Donniel, my son Gavriel just got married a couple weeks ago, to Tamar.

Donniel: You know, we never, maybe because it was earlier on, we didn’t wish you a mazel tov.

Yossi: Well, thank you.

Donniel: I’m wondering, you know, maybe, isn’t that interesting?

Yossi: It is.

Donniel: We didn’t, maybe it just didn’t feel right. But like now, so maybe belatedly. Yeah, it was, it was a huge mazal tov, and I’m very, very happy for you.

Yossi: Thank you, and it was wonderful to celebrate with you, and what was so remarkable for me about that wedding were the kids, you know, they were dancing through the night. The dancing didn’t end till one in the morning. You know, at around midnight, Sarah and I said, we can’t, you know, it’s enough already. We’re going home. So we got in the car, we start driving away.

Donniel: I don’t want to interrupt you, but just, till one o’clock, it doesn’t count as into the night. You’re dating yourself.

Yossi: Maybe so. But you know what was so remarkable about it was that the intensity and the joy and some of these kids were coming straight from the front. Gavriel’s boss came in uniform and changed. He came straight from the north. And so, an outsider looking at this would say, this is an expression of the Jewish triumph over despair, and this is an affirmation of our love of life. It was not an affirmation of our love of life. It was our love of life. There was nothing conscious or demonstrative about it, that’s what I’m really trying to say.

And so there’s something in that, that gives us an essential insight into the Israeli psyche, which is, if you have a moment to celebrate, you do it. You don’t think, you plunge in, and really those kids were dancing without stopping. Gavriel didn’t stop for five hours. And he and Tamar, it was just extraordinary. And yet it wasn’t extraordinary. That’s what’s so amazing about it. It wasn’t extraordinary at all because we know how to live in the cracks between impossible situations and to make the most out of it. And our strength is that it’s not conscious. It’s not, you know, I don’t think

Donniel: It’s not ideological.

Yossi: It wasn’t, people weren’t saying, oh, we’re going to show that, you know, this is our,

Donniel: Jewish people live. This is our ultimate victory over.

Yossi: Yes. And can I, by the way, do a little segue here about Am Yisrael Chai? Because it annoys me to no end. And everywhere you look in Israel, there are banners, the Jewish people lives on electronic billboards on the highway. You’re driving, you know, I’m driving to Kfar Saba, you know.

Donniel: Kfar Saba, a city in the center of Israel.

Yossi: And it says traffic is flowing Am Yisrael Chai.

Donniel: The people of Israel live.

Yossi: I’m thinking, you know, yeah, well, that’s the whole point of this country, isn’t it? This notion since October 7th that we have to demonstratively prove that the Jewish people lives, that’s a slogan that I used to sing when I was a kid on Soviet Jewry demonstrations, and it was appropriate for the post-Holocaust generation. It makes no sense in Israel, and that’s an expression of abnormalcy.

Donniel: Okay. Right. Expand on that because I think that’s very, very powerful. Why is it abnormal?

Yossi: Because until October 7th, Israelis would have been slightly embarrassed about the slogan. It’s not what we do. It’s not Israeli. We don’t. Because we won. Because we are. We are. Yes. We know. I’m Israel. I know. I know.

Donniel: I don’t need to see it on the billboards. I don’t live outside of Israel and it’s not Independence Day in America or wherever. I could just, we’re alive.

Yossi: So it’s an expression of the trauma of October 7th that Israelis have adopted a slogan that really betrays insecurity in seemingly affirming the permanence of the Jewish people, you’re really revealing this anxiety. Are we going to make it as a people? And until October 7th, it was taken for granted, especially among young Israelis. And now when I hear young Israelis, you know, singing Am Yisrael Chai, I say, what’s happened here? So that’s one measure of abnormality.

Donniel: So it’s interesting. There’s like two sides to it. We take our life for granted, and it just is. And maybe we’re also taking war for granted. They’re both part of our normal, and we just live with them. We don’t make a great ideology out of one. We do make a great ideology for a while out of war, even though I think it’s just, it’s something forced upon us. It’s nothing that we want. After October 7th, there was a very strong pathos of reclaiming. You know, you spoke about the ideological notion of reclaiming our ability to be a deterrent and, and we were just reclaiming certain core basic security.

And now, you know, I find that in Israel, I’ve been thinking a lot, I’m trying to understand myself, because I also, you know, when people now ask me, Donniel, how are you feeling? I say, fine, thanks. And the truth is, if you ask me, like, how are you feeling? I’m feeling fine. So if I sit down and think and I remember and, and we’re all cognizant because we have zero degree of separation from somebody who’s not fine right now. So then we stop, you know, we stop and realize this was not appropriate. And again, you know, who’s in the room and at which time and then you go back.

I think we have become the generation of the status quo. We love the status quo and we want to return to it. And we’re capable of elevating ourselves at certain moments. We’re capable of doing that. We can. But then we want to go back to that status quo. We just want to. You know, a week or so ago, I got these, I was bombarded for advertisements to buy television screens. Why? Why is everybody selling me now large screen television screens? Because of the Euro Cup. You know, you want to watch, don’t you want to watch the soccer matches on a 65, a 72, a 95-inch screen like the whole, and they’re bombard, so here it is, and I want you to, everybody was watching the game.

I, again, I hope I’m not going to insult anybody. I used to like soccer. There’s something so profoundly boring about it, but I’ll leave that aside.

Yossi: No need to explain to me, because I never watched.

Donniel: Okay, I apologize if I insulted and profoundly. I know we have phenomenal listeners in England, and mazal tov on your second place. See, I even knew. But it was just, it’s, you know, we’re in the middle of a war. Hostages, people, and they’re selling me my television, so like there’s, so like I feel like Israelis want to, like, we just want to go back to a status quo. It’s not, the Jewish people live, we have prevailed over the forces, that, you know, we have holidays for that. You know? Like Hanukkah, the forces of light have prevailed over the forces of evil and Purim. The truth is, so many of our holidays are, you know, we, but there’s something about, we just want to live.

And this year was a tough year, but I feel people are beginning to crawl out. And I can imagine that for some of our listeners, we might sound schizophrenic, but you and I, we decided that what we’re going to do every single week is what’s relevant for that week. And it could be last week, we were profoundly depressed because it looked like there was a war about to be here, or also the pace of change. Maybe that’s also the reason why people want a status quo, because you could go crazy.

Yossi: You’re also pointing out a very complicated internal mechanism in Israelis for coping, and that is that on the one hand, our ability to immediately inhabit the rituals, the motions of normalcy, you know, to maintain the pretense of normalcy, in such abnormal conditions, it’s a tremendous strength. It helps, really helps us cope and one of the ways that we cope is we don’t think about the future here. We don’t do long-term planning. We don’t send out, hold this date for weddings. We sent out the invitations for Gavriel and Tamar’s wedding two weeks before.

Donniel: That was, by the way, In Israel, it’s usually the protocol says three and a half weeks.

Yossi: I know. We were late. We were late.

Donniel: People were saying, well, what’s happening? Am I invited? They worried, you know.

Yossi: Well, you expect it at three weeks. And so on the one hand, that really helps us cope. I remember, you know, a few years ago, there was a stabbing terrorist attack at the light rail station in French Hill, not too far from my home. I heard this on the news, and I said, you know, I’m going to go check out the station. About an hour and a half later, I wander over. Nothing. Everything was cleaned up. People were just waiting at the station.

I went to the synagogue in Pittsburgh, the Tree of Life, that had been the scene of a massacre in 2017. And I visited there six months later. It was still cordoned off. And that really showed me something about how Israelis cope and how everyone else copes. The negative side of that. It’s something that you mentioned in passing before, which is Israelis crave the status quo.

We’re living in a situation right now where the status quo is antithetical to our most fundamental interests. The fact that Netanyahu and his government has been able to survive for nine months after October 7th in any quote “normal” country, this government would have resigned in disgrace. Here they are as if nothing has changed. They’re still attacking the left. They’re still attacking the traders. Back to business as usual. And I really thought after October 7th that we’re going to see a tremendous uprising. They’re going to have to leave in disgrace. We don’t do things that way in this country. Exactly because of what you said. Status quo.

Donniel: Let’s play with this category a little bit. I went to the demonstration for the hostages on Saturday night. There was a group.

Yossi: You went back.

Donniel: I went back.

Yossi: You see? You can’t keep away.

Donniel: I can’t keep away. I went back for a reason, because I felt that Netanyahu was backtracking on the deal that he himself had presented. And there was a dishonesty there.

Yossi: Say it ain’t so.

Donniel: Say it ain’t so. But yeah, like, you know, there was a clear statement. We all now have the full written ceasefire agreement, and it includes full, complete ceasefire and a withdrawal. It says it. And then for him to say, no, I never said it. It’s not,

Yossi: Our Bibi?

Donniel: So whatever, we’ll leave your cynicism aside for a moment. So I felt like I had to show up again. This was like, it was too much. But there was a group, there was a mass demonstration walking up to Jerusalem for four days, culminating on Saturday night. You know, I’m wondering whether the status quo desire and need of Israelis is also one of the reasons why masses aren’t showing up. It’s, you know, maybe after the war, there will be a mass demonstration to bring down the government. But Israelis, this week, what I’m feeling is Israelis are trying to manage the war, manage the catastrophe, manage the tragedy.

You know, I disagree with you slightly because Israelis do, while you’re wedding, you, you know, to barely. It gave us time to even get dressed, but, you know, Israelis, the biggest sign of our long-term planning is, is the birth rate of Israelis. We have children more than any other developed country in the world. That’s long term. We actually think that status quo is sustainable. It’s sustainable, you can live in it, and we want to come back to it. Maybe it’s the only way for us to make it here, because if you analyze all of the dangers and you analyze the speed of change…

One of the things I felt since the beginning of the war is how crazy the conversation is. How we go from, not even here, around the world, the nature of the dangers that we’re facing. Part of the challenge over nine months is that it was very hard to reclaim that status quo. And it was not a natural place to be in. And the truth is, it was, listen, the amount of stuff next week, the International Criminal Court could come out and the elections in the United States and what will be and, and being attacked, you know, we might have killed the military chief of staff, Deif.

Yossi: Of Hamas,

Donniel: Which would be, which is a great, and I just heard today, Blinken said, oh, but you know, too many civilians were killed. How do we even know how many civilians were killed there? It was a terrorist camp, but still, this is not a proportion, like we’re constantly being inundated with moral attacks and with political dangers and, Hezbollah, there’s so much.

Yossi: There’s so much emotional and psychic overload in being an Israeli.

Donniel: It’s just so much. It’s like, you see, so I think part of the challenge this last nine months is that we couldn’t find the status quo that we need in order to live here.

Yossi: Look, what happened was, first just on the most basic level. We all more or less bought into this notion that we can maintain a status quo and live next door to regimes and terror enclaves that are committed to our destruction. And that’s not possible anymore. And it never was, it was always an illusion. And so when you talk about the status quo, something basic has been upended for Israelis. And maybe there’s some desperate clinging to whatever, again, the pretense of the status quo, we can reconstruct.

Donniel: But let’s, I understand the reason for it, I see it in my own life. I see what place it plays for me, and how it enables me to function and to work. I could see very deeply the benefits of it, but let’s look at some of its challenges. You know, there is a challenge. How do we keep, maintain a country of compassion for those who aren’t living in normalcy? Let’s remember that Hamas has been bombing Israel since 2007. And the people in the South never had a status quo. But we wanted it, so we ignored it.

Yossi: A whole generation of kids grew up in the South with psychological problems that they’ll never get over.

Donniel: And we, you know, so for us, the war started on October 7th. The reality is, is the war’s been ongoing now for over 15, 18 years. So we just caught up with the South. So we caught up. But now? One of the negative possibilities is that, are we losing our ability to empathize with people? Because in a society, a society is built around deep loyalty, deep care. And when we all get shocked, Israeli society stood up and said, I’m here, count on me, I’m there, I’m under the stretcher. But how easy it could be for us to lose some of our sense of moral responsibility. There’s a lot of people who don’t have normalcy.

So I think the hostages, by and large, are going to remain an issue. But are the people in the North? But again, it’s not simple. And I think they’re doing a heroic job of reminding us that our status quo is not there. But, but the people in the North. It’s going to be, you know, and I’m not even getting to what the solutions might be, but what happens if solving certain problems requires of us to give up on our status quo again? That is one danger. Do you see other dangers in this or negative, not dangers, negative dimensions? The positive we understand, but what price do we pay for this status quo?

Yossi: Well, the craving for normalcy is subtly undermining the social solidarity here. And you’re right, you know, we’ve got 80,000 people from the north living in hotel rooms. And a friend of mine went up north last week to see what was happening there. He went on an army sponsor trip and he came back profoundly shaken. He said, Metula, half the houses are destroyed. People don’t have homes to go back to.

Donniel: There’s, by the way, at least 100,000 people who are living in the North, who’s in the Golan, whose life is in imminent danger for anybody from Tzfat, from Safed and north, are in constant, constant.

YossiL They didn’t qualify for the evacuation because they technically weren’t in the range of, katyushas, right.

Donniel: No, they were of the first five kilometers. But so, but the kornet anti-tank missile goes 10 to 13 kilometers. So anybody in that, and the drones? Anybody in the north.

Yossi: And we’re not thinking about them. That’s the truth. That’s, we’re so desperate to get,

Donniel: Yeah, we are and we’re not.

Yossi: We are and we’re not. We’re so desperate to get on with some semblance of normalcy until it hits us.

Donniel: You know, I think this government also, its power base is, there’s actually an inner tension within the government between the Likud, which wants to return to a status quo, and the more right-wing nationalists, and I’m not saying that they’re wrong, but I’m just identifying them as such, who want us to go into Lebanon. Even Betzalel Smotrich, the Minister of Finance, who said, we have to go into Lebanon, had to say, it’ll be very easy, it’ll be quick and easy. Like, don’t worry Israelis, this is not going to be a big thing. Because if it was another big thing, you know.

Yossi: Could anyone imagine on October 8th that we would still be fighting in Gaza? That this would be our longest-ever war against our weakest enemy? So you know, that kind of bravado, and it’s worse than bravado, it’s so reckless.

Donniel: To even say. But he’s trying, in many ways, as a deep ideologue, he’s saying to Israelis, the work is not done.

Yossi: And I’m with him on that, but it’s about time that we be honest with ourselves.

Donniel: But could we? So, here, you’ve been, for years, you’ve been speaking about the great dangers, and we haven’t talked about Iran, and all, all, there are great dangers here, but there’s a push and pull between how do we deal with those dangers and how do we give space for that status quo.

Yossi: You know, it’s funny, I find myself in this very strange psychological state where for years I was writing and warning and really anticipating something like this. And now that it’s here, all I want is normalcy. I want to forget Iran, I just, just, just, you know, let me work in peace and try to live my life as much as possible until the moment comes, and it can come in an instant, we all know that, where, where everything is upended again.

Donniel: You know, I feel this very deeply that one of the greatest dangers of status quo is not that it returns us to normalcy, it returns us to mediocrity. That major issues that we’re facing as a people and you know my own political positions are such that I believe that the occupation of Judea and Samaria and the permanent conflict with Palestinians has to come to an end, and I yearn for a two-state solution and I talk about a Gaza tomorrow which will give birth to new possibilities. I’m not saying they’re going to be easy and I’m, but I’m all in for us to start working on how do we change the status quo? I don’t know if it can be changed and we all know that you can’t change it on your own, so there’s all the reasons we could say yes, but, but, but, but, but…

My biggest challenge very often as a teacher in Israel, is that I’m countercultural. Because what I’m talking about requires a different type of danger. Maybe I’m just like Smotrich in some way. We’re both ideologues. He’s saying, we know the story isn’t over and keep on fighting. And I’m saying the story isn’t over, let’s take chances for peace. Like, let’s take chances to create justice. What could we do? But there’s something we’re hitting in Israeli society, who for almost a generation likes to return to that status quo.

And I, so much of the history of the Jewish people, maybe, you know, I’m idealizing it, but so much of the history of the Jewish people and so much of the history of the state of Israel involved, you know, the term chutzpah, you know, it was like, it was a chutzpah to,

Yossi: How do you say chutzpah in Hebrew?

Donniel: It had this audacity, this courage, this innovativeness. There is so much innovativeness on the economic frontier. There’s so much innovativeness in Israeli culture, in Israeli intellectual Jewish thought, in sciences, but in our larger existence, it’s just there. And by the way, I just, I wanted to say one last time, I know I said it, I just feel like I have to say it for myself one more time.

Yossi: You said it, and I’m going to say something that I’ve said in response to you in the past.

Donniel: But it’s just, it’s just, it feels mediocre. I feel like the Jewish people were supposed to be more than just status quo. You know, make Israel great again, you know, I know I’ve aggravated some people, but that slogan is an important slogan.

Last words, Yossi?

Yossi: Look, we’ve discussed this before and I feel that this is not the time to try to shake up the political status quo. But what does worry me is an emotional status quo. And I’m worried about a deadening in our capacity, in my capacity, for empathy, even empathy with my fellow citizens. You know, I don’t look at the photographs on the streets of hostages. I can’t. Can’t look. It will interfere with my status quo, my ability to maintain a daily life. I can’t look at their faces. And so maybe that’s a necessary way of coping. Maybe what I’m experiencing is a kind of a moral flaw, a casualty of this craving for some semblance of normalcy. But that’s where we are right at this moment, this week.

Donniel: I remember very early on in the war, I think we spoke about this, but we don’t really remember, but I remember because I have hundreds of workers here at the Institute. And as the war broke out, I realized that in addition to everybody trying to serve the larger causes of the country, I also had to take care of our workers. And I remember, if you remember, we spoke a lot about this, telling every worker, I want you only to do what you have to, what you can do. You can come to work, come to work. If you feel it’s important for you to come to work and not work, but be here, that’s what you can do. And for months, and if you feel you can come to work, don’t come to work. And for over three months, we made no demands on any worker at the Hartman Institute, none. Everybody is, I said to people, if you’re going to work, it has to be excellent. But if you’re not going to work, that’s okay. And every program, we can wait. It could wait. And there was this sense of accepting people where they are.

And as I hear you, part of this normalcy is we have to accept that if an Israeli wants to go out for dinner and forget, and they want to concentrate on, on a soccer game. And that feels really good, you know, and soon the Olympics, that’s going to be okay too. And we have to, you know, there’s this term in Yiddish, fargin. How would you translate fargin? Do you have a way of doing it?

Yossi: To give people space, to indulge.

Donniel: To allow them. And, but the truth, if I look at myself, I’m getting more tired of that indulgence. I’m getting more tired of the status quo.

Yossi: And I have a friend who once said, there should be a sign at Ben Gurion airport now entering a fargin-free-zone because we don’t really forgive each other.

Donniel: We don’t do that. But in any, I think, question, I understand why there’s this Israeli normalcy. We talked about its benefits. Some of its dangers, a question is when, you know, you remember the famous Heschel conversation when a student came to Heschel and said, Rabbi Heschel, I can’t pray today. The Spirit’s not moving me. And Heschel famously answered, my son, I think it’s time for you to move the Spirit. When do we keep it? And when do we push?

Yossi, a pleasure to be with you.

Yossi: Always.

Donniel: And now, let’s just formally and officially embrace the fact that now all of the audience could celebrate in the beautiful wedding of your son and his gorgeous wife, and may they just have a life filled, not filled with, but with much happiness and health.

This is For Heaven’s Sake, Israel at War. We’re still at war, 284 days. And there’s still large segments of Israeli society who aren’t experiencing Israeli normalcy. May they have strength and may the hostages come home and the people find peace and safety back in their homes. Be well, people.

Maital: You can now sponsor an episode of For Heaven’s Sake Israel at War. The link to donate can be found in the show notes or at shalomhartman.org/forheavenssake. We will acknowledge your gift on a future episode. For more ideas from the Shalom Hartman Institute about what’s unfolding right now, sign up for our newsletter in the show notes or visit shalomhartman.org/israelatwar.