The following is a transcript of Episode 177 of the Identity/Crisis Podcast. Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Yehuda: Hi everyone. Welcome to Identity/Crisis, the show about news and ideas from the Shalom Hartman Institute. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer. We’re recording today on Monday, March 4th.

I returned last week from a week-long trip to Israel, my third such trip since October 7th and since the outbreak of the war. Some of this back and forth is normal. The Shalom Hartman Institute is a bicontinental organization, and even in a normal year, I expect to go back and forth a few times, sometimes to be with colleagues and sometimes to teach in our programs. 

In fact, the impetus for this specific trip was an internal executive staff retreat, planned for a long time, nothing too dramatic. But also there’s a war on and it feels differently important to be there regularly. Then again, for most people, I think the fact of the war would be a good argument to travel to Israel less. Folks were shocked to see me on October 14th when I was there for the first time since the war started, and even this time around, more than one acquaintance who I ran into on the street or in shul on Shabbat gave me a look or made a comment, something to the effect of, you’re here again? 

I felt like each of these trips has been a little bit of a time capsule. For me, maybe selfishly and maybe also because my work involves teaching and explaining to North American Jews what’s going on in Israel, these trips have been invaluable. As with anything complicated, any human drama, the more proximate you can get, the better you’ll understand it.

The war in Israel is the war with the most media coverage in the history of war. And still, there are so many pieces you can’t fully get from far away. And even up close, you know you’re missing big pieces of the story. I’m very aware, for instance, that my time with Israelis has not included time with Palestinians in Gaza, for obvious reasons, and that I’m limited to my own circle of friends and colleagues and networks, and all of that is going to color what I see and what I understand.

Nevertheless, each of the trips had a clear theme as relates to the emotional state of affairs of Israelis, and the differences I encountered on the three different trips were stark. It has felt a little bit like watching a real-life, human-sized enactment of some sort of equivalent to Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’ stages of grief, but played out on a national scale. 

My first visit on October 14th was entirely about trauma and shock. In retrospect, arriving only a week after the attacks, I actually marvel about how still so very functional so many of the people were who I saw that week, that they were even able to be operating with such diminished emotional capacity, that they could do anything. The country felt frozen in slow motion and eerily quiet. Shops were closed or had limited hours. Many people were sitting shiva in their homes or visiting the shiva houses of friends and families. Others were hunkering down for an unpredictable stretch ahead with all of their loved ones called into battle. 

There was mild frenzy in some parts of the country that were pivoting to create support systems for the displaced, but even this felt enveloped in silence. One night I walked back from the Shuk in Jerusalem to my hotel, my empty hotel, where there were 17 people staying. The streets were mostly empty and I passed one of the big Jerusalem hotels along the way. In the window of the hotel I could see a woman who had clearly been relocated from one of the kibbutzim in the south that were now uninhabitable for the foreseeable future. A place of idyllic beauty that was now destroyed and functioning as an active military zone. The woman was standing in the lobby of the hotel and folding her family’s laundry on the couch in silence.

I’ll never forget that image and how strange it looked. I remember thinking about how I know rationally Israel is not a weak country and no one looked weak that week. In fact, the country was mobilizing for war, which itself would be a show of strength. But the image of that woman in the hotel evoked that thing that lingers for many of us Jews in our consciousness, that epigenetic memory all of us carry of having once been strangers in Egypt, the knowledge that we are the first generations in our histories and in our families not to be refugees. The displaced Jews of the north and the south in Israel are wearing on their faces and their bodies the memories of their ancestors even as they still live within the borders of their homeland. 

In the midst of that shock and trauma, the only plausible responses were the kind that our tradition offers us as the rules of mourning. I wrote that week that to be in Israel was to fully understand, I felt for the first time in my life, that phrase, “Walking through the valley of the shadow of death,” all the death that had already happened and all the death that people were just waiting for as soldiers went off to war. 

My second visit in January left me with a really different impression of the state of Israeli society. I wrote that week that the trauma that had been so heavy that had covered the surface was now peeling away to yield a deep sadness, like a plodding hopelessness. One friend wrote to me to correct my language. Not hopelessness, but resigned-ness. And I said, okay, that’s fine. That works too. I understand the sensitivity of a people whose national anthem is literally “the hope,” who don’t want to be characterized ever as hopeless. 

And indeed, by January, the whole civil infrastructure was set up and hundreds of thousands of soldiers were at war. The country was buzzing and it was showing again its startup nation stripes. But it wasn’t clear then, as it still isn’t clear now, that the war would be winnable quickly, or at all. Israeli resilience was back in full force, that old, firm-lipped, resolute understanding that our society was going to do whatever it needed to do. 

But I sensed then that it lacked one key element of that old stereotype of the Israeli in crisis. And that is that no one, as far as I could tell, was uttering that old phrase, y’hiyeh b’seder. No one could say for certain that things were going to turn out fine, because I’m not sure that anyone fully believed it. That week, a friend told me that one strange upside of that moment in the war was that he was checking his phone less, because every time he checked, there was more sadness. He was rationing his sadness.

On this third trip that I did last week, I found yet a different Israel, and I’m struggling to come back from it. On this third trip, I found a lot of fear, and worse, I experienced a lot of anger. A lot of the fear stems from Hezbollah, Israel’s pathological and genocidal enemies on its northern border. Everyone knows that a war in Lebanon would be far worse than the present war, hard as that may be to imagine. Hezbollah is quadruple the size of Hamas with an arsenal of precision rockets that can reach most parts of Israel and could destroy much of Israel’s civilian infrastructure. Hezbollah has already succeeded at effectively moving the long-standing buffer zone from inside southern Lebanon to inside Israeli territory, with thousands of Israelis still indefinitely displaced from their largely uninhabitable homes. 

I couldn’t detect anger quite as much as directed towards Hezbollah, but almost like an inarticulable fear. As one friend described it to me, it’s like you talk for two hours about all the issues and all the worries, and then someone says, “And then there’s the north,” and then you say, “And then there’s the north,” and then there’s not much to say. There are a lot of fears about the future in Israel. One friend talked to me about how no one is reporting how many young men are injured in battle, sitting in hospitals with terrible wounds and injuries, and what’s going to mean for a whole generation of Israelis to grow up with missing limbs and in a cloud of post-traumatic stress. 

There are fears about what will happen in Gaza, especially, as has become abundantly clear, there is the absence of any real plan by the government. And there are fears about any of the possible imperfect choices that would await even a competent and less self-interested government. Palestinian citizens of Israel fear the police led by the arsonist Itamar Ben Gvir, who runs it, and they also fear their neighbors, Jewish citizens of Israel, who overwhelmingly can’t read Arabic, fear what their colleagues are writing on their social media, and whether they can trust one another to share offices and hallways. 

Maybe fear eventually goes away. Maybe as the war evolves the fear will begin to dissipate. Maybe there won’t be a war in the North, for now. Maybe. I have to say I’m much more concerned about the anger. The anger is widespread and palpable, and it’s like this sputtering volcanic ash and lava spitting hellfire in all directions atop a volcano that’s fueled by that very fear. And once it’s unleashed, anger doesn’t matter where it comes from. Anger is the emotion that can be most self-consuming and destructive to others as well.

I think about the Torah’s metaphor of God’s inflamed nostrils. When God gets angry, God’s nostrils inflame. And what seems in the Torah like the reality, that once God gets angry, it’s virtually impossible that there won’t be violence as a result. Here we are, human beings created the image of God, and our anger manifests in the same way. 

I tried while I was there to listen to all the anger, listening for all of its expressions. I tried to be empathetic in my listening, even the times that it was directed at me. Or at other times when it just felt like it was stinging just to be in its presence. Where’s the anger? Well, there remains, of course, lingering anger towards Hamas and especially its leaders who are hiding below ground in Gaza and hiding in plain sight in Qatar. Hamas are like terrifically comic book villains. Part of the anger towards Hamas is about what they did, and some of it is about what they represent. 

But a good piece of it is also that destabilizing stuff of Israelis feeling like their critics on the world stage simply will not see Hamas for what it is. 

There is a mounting, seething anger growing in Israeli society towards the ultra-Orthodox about the imbalance of responsibility in Israeli society as to who has to sacrifice their children for the security of the state. Now this is not a new story. The ultra-Orthodox have used their political clout as sidelined kingmakers in Israeli politics for decades to preserve their status as protected outsiders. They might be beneficiaries of the welfare system and paying their debt to society through expressions of piety that only they think offers any sort of social value. It’s hard to think that this is gonna hold through this war. In Haredi enclaves in Israel, you wouldn’t even know there was a war on, and it is absolutely grating to everyone else. 

As it is, certain communities in Israel, like the religious Zionists, for whom army service still plays a central role in their community’s political identity, those folks are incurring a disproportionate number of casualties among their children. The fact that the Haredim are entirely not at risk, and for what it’s worth, not stepping up in any meaningful way on the home front either. I mean, it’s like either send your children to war or volunteer in the soup kitchens. The combination of all of this has reached a boiling point. 

Last week, Israel held municipal local elections. The ultra-Orthodox had massive turnout, which is pretty common. Other communities couldn’t turn out in full because many of their stakeholders were at war. Over 650 of the candidates for various municipal elections around the country were reservists, which meant that they couldn’t fully campaign. This can’t hold. I saw bumper stickers in Israel citing the book of Numbers and Moses’ furious accusation against the two-and-a-half tribes who didn’t want to cross over to the land of Israel, saying, “Will your brothers go to war and you stay home?”

There’s a lot of anger in Israel directed towards the West and towards the media. I’ve spoken here on the show in the past about Israelis and their ethical loneliness, especially exacerbated by the clown show of the international human rights networks and their failure to publicly show support for Israeli victims of October 7th or to engage in any public advocacy on behalf of the hostages. This and the very visible images of protests against Israel around the world have entrenched for many Israelis a kind of dangerous isolationist anger, the belief that they alone are left to handle their challenges. 

Now this, of course, is false. America has steadfastly supported Israel through this war, as have many Western countries. In fact, as we know, the president continues to support Israel in spite of the fact that in certain places it has become a political liability for him. Quietly, Israel has also maintained the support of some of its regional normalization partners, who are publicly critical of Israel, but privately very clearly want Israel to succeed. Americans, in general, still largely support the war, in spite of what Twitter sounds like. Israel stands to risk a lot, politically and militarily, if it misapprehends the support it holds around the world and makes light of it. That could make it a self-fulfilling prophecy, but it doesn’t mean that the anger and resentment aren’t there and growing. 

There’s anti-Palestinian anger too. Some of it truly stems from fear, but I think it gives the majority too much credit to justify their fear of a minority over which they exercise so much control already. 

Anyway, anger politically in Israel goes in all directions. Everybody’s angered at each other. Over the past few months sitting with Israelis, I absorbed personally the anger of some of my Palestinian colleagues who felt that the morally right thing to do was to condemn October 7th and to condemn the war and they couldn’t understand why others, including me, didn’t feel the same. I also absorbed the anger of some family members and colleagues who didn’t want to look at me because they know that I have supported pro-peace, leftist politics in Israel, and now they feel that all the leftists led them to this crisis, because it was those leftists who were unwilling to take the existential threats seriously. 

Then I absorbed the anger of Israeli left-wingers who have been screaming for decades that there is no military solution to this conflict and who feel, they wouldn’t say this, but I think they feel tragically vindicated by the fact that none of the military or security solutions worked to prevent October 7th and none are going to work going forward. 

And I absorbed all of this anger daily, not directed at me personally in real conversation, but on social media, because I’m a public person who is therefore apparently fair game for an angry and fearful people to direct its hostilities at.

But all of this anger — multi-directional, omnipresent — pales in comparison to the primary object of Israeli rage and loathing, which is the government, and Bibi Netanyahu in particular. Now, I know I’m largely a product of my networks, but Netanyahu’s popularity is laughably low, especially for wartime. And were it not for the complexity of coalition politics and Netanyahu’s own powerful self-interests, he would have been easily tossed to the street. And the most confounding variable right now for any of us who identify in any way as supportive of Israel and supportive of this war is the extent to which we simply cannot disentangle Netanyahu’s personal political motives from any decision he is making on behalf of the country. 

Netanyahu has always embodied the ethos of Louis XIV, the state is me, especially when it comes to issues of national security. And now the very prosecution of this war that so many Israelis support is so intertwined with Netanyahu’s personal legacy and his political future. It is exasperating that all of us have our passions for Israel’s safety and security intertwined with Netanyahu in this way. 

You’ll recall that Netanyahu was already deeply unpopular leading up to the war following 10 months of judicial reform kerfuffle and now, as the second coming of Golda Meir and the 1973 intelligence failures of the Yom Kippur War, which took place almost 50 years to the day, when that took place, Netanyahu is absorbing hate and heat so quickly that he is almost incandescent, which would be especially the case if he weren’t also invisible. 

I wish I can end this section of today’s program with a message of hope that’s going to lift us past this hate. To do so, I would need to believe that there was some way out that was obvious or inevitable. Unfortunately, fear and anger do come with inevitabilities and they tend to be quite bad. I came home from the first trip to Israel feeling depressed and sad, and I came home from this last trip feeling really, really nervous. 

The best I think I hope for right now is that Israelis find a way to diffuse some of this anger before it erupts. It will help, for instance, that families are being reunited as many of the reserve units return home, even just temporarily. It would help a lot for Israelis to go to new elections. Don’t know how that’s going to happen. It would help to see more of our hostages come home, to end some of the national helplessness that’s exacerbating all of this, accompanying the knowledge that our friends and family are held away just a few kilometers away, but invisible and underground. 

Israelis need something right now to let off the steam because the natural expressions of a society boiling over are just too frightening to contemplate. One way we can help from afar, I think, is just to give Israelis some love. Love is not a perfect antidote to fear and anger, but I don’t know, I saw firsthand, just with a little bit of listening, the ways that sometimes it can take a little bit of the edge off. 

So, a second observation, and it’s one about listening itself, something I’m taking away from these three trips, times when I have done vastly more composite, focused, and attentive listening than I usually do. Listening is a strange part of this strange job called thought leadership. On one hand, all the incentives for this line of work are on the talking side rather than the listening side. We are in a world populated by noise and some of us are called to just put more noise in, to speak into the chaos, and try to help make order, or maybe just to try to speak louder than others, I guess, and hope for the best. 

I feel very afflicted by the noisiness of life and of public discourse. Actually, I’m kind of an introvert, you might not know that. And I really am noise-averse. I also know that I’m, as relates to the noisiness of public discourse, part of the problem. As an act of mussar of self-discipline, I often push myself to ask, am I writing this article or that Facebook post because I’m trying to express something that needs to be heard or simply because I’m trying to keep up with the noise? Is what I’m trying to say something that needs to be heard or am I simply trying to be heard? I often wish for clarity in those moments that no one can ever really find. 

But meanwhile, I don’t think you can do a job like this without listening. Those of us who do the most teaching at Hartman have come to learn, but as much as our teaching opportunities provide us with a framework to refine our own thinking, to test out ideas, to try to share our thoughts in ways that will hopefully land with and resonate with others, those same teaching opportunities are also the means by which we get to listen, which we get to read on what’s actually important to our learners. Like with any form of leadership, if you get so far in front of the people you’re trying to guide or teach, you might eventually find yourself alone with nobody following you. The act of listening as part of teaching is essential to know whether you’re actually in conversation with the people who you hope to influence. 

At Hartman, we push all of our people, scholars and speakers and teachers and staff to work in  chavruta. Chavruta, paired study, companionship, is actually countercultural in today’s thought leadership culture, which incentivizes idiosyncratic and iconoclastic speakers.

For instance, Yossi Klein Halevi and I, we often read each other’s drafts, and the best feedback we can give each other, since we’re not going to agree on what we’re actually saying, is, here’s how you might say this in a way that someone can hear it. I genuinely believe that you can’t be in the talking business if you’re not constantly in the listening business. 

But it’s easier said than done. We talk as human beings as a means of understanding the world. Actually, I’ll go one step further. We talk as human beings to make meaning in the world. I think that’s how we’re meant to understand the book of Genesis. God speaks into chaos, God names things, and chaos turns to order. Human beings then, who are created in the image of God, do the same thing. We name the animals, we start talking, and it becomes clear that it’s incoherent to live in the world without words, without naming things. It’s both the means by which we conquer the world, which God wants us to do, and the means by which we destroy each other, which God doesn’t want us to do.

Cain slays Abel. The only legitimate behavior he should have exhibited in a moment like that, maybe the only thing that would have saved him, was to have felt enough shame to have exhibited in that moment the humility of silence. But instead, he fills the void with his words. And God’s response is telling. Your brother’s blood is screaming at me from the ground. You committed violence against your brother and you think that the answer is to continue talking. 

This is the problem we humans have over time. Words are how we make sense of the world, but there are so damn many of them. The world is full of words and it makes the experience of trying to figure out how to be fully human in this world noisier and harder and harder. There’s so much noise.

Early in my career, my friend and coach, Rae Ringel, offered me a useful metaphor to think about leadership. She told me to imagine I was a quarterback in a football field. And if you’re not a sports person, come up with your own analogy. In the midst of the action, you have to listen for the important voices and filter out the distracting noise. It’s really hard. The important voices might be your teammates telling you who’s open for the pass or your coach and his instructions before the game, before the play about what to watch for. There’s dangerous noise too that you have to listen for, like the footsteps of a defender as he’s charging at you. But the biggest danger is that you’ll instead hear the wrong noise. The roar of the crowd, fans trying to distract you, your own anxious heartbeat pounding in your eyes, the deafening sound of your own internal self-doubt. 

Good leaders, Rae helped me understand, learn how to separate the useful noise from the destructive noise. I think about this message all the time and I’ve tried to use it affirmatively as well. How do I put useful noise into the world and how do I try to make it sound different from what’s out there? How do you put noise into the world that’s actually hearable?

All the noise makes us think that noise is the only option. In the public conversation now, you can say that you support the war, and if you don’t say that you support the war, I promise you will be asked over and over if you do. Or you can say that you call for ceasefire. That’s the only verb associated with ceasefire, calling for it.

Hoping for it or praying for it? In one of my essays during the war, I said that we should pray for peace, but not demand it, and I got relentlessly mocked on social media for sounding like the equivalent of a politician saying “thoughts and prayers” after yet another mass shooting. And I agree that politicians who are actually in charge should do more. But what are we doing to ourselves when we debase thoughts and prayers as meaningless? Between supporting the war and calling for a ceasefire, there’s also the options of crying silently or sitting circumspect. 

I think for me the thing that has kept me going for these four months was that in between trying to use my voice here, which for months I’ve done in teaching and writing and podcasting, and some of that use of my voice I’ve made mistakes that I regret, which you’re bound to do if you’re desperately trying to put words into the world. But I’ve also been able to counterbalance all of those words with those three weeks in Israel, mostly taken up with sitting and listening. I can’t describe for you how spiritually significant that has been for me, even if at times it has been painful and exhausting. 

Of course, there were voices I couldn’t listen to and I couldn’t hear. I couldn’t listen to the voices of the hostages who have been silenced and imprisoned underground. I have not heard directly from the so many voiceless, especially the children of Gaza, who probably can’t describe their realities in ways that would be coherent to us and some of whom are too hungry to talk. And I’ll admit at times I’ve been more capable of hearing from my own people than I have been from others. 

I’ve had no interest whatsoever in hearing the pontificating of politicians. I overlapped in Israel with a mission of prominent Jews connected to prominent organizations. We were all in the same hotel. Every morning I heard what they were going to do. They had a lineup of prominent speakers and I got to tell you, I had no interest. If you’re committed, if you’re going to commit to try to listening, you actually have a lot of agency in what you allow to penetrate your ears, especially when you know that words can penetrate your heart.

Many times, listening is hard. I felt more empathy of late than I usually had for Job’s friends. They’re the antagonists in the story of Job because they keep wanting to interject once in a while and explain things. They want to say to the people who are complaining about their suffering, this is why. Sometimes you do that in your own head. You do it from far away. But it’s actually bad listening behavior, and maybe it’s really not what’s needed if we want to be listeners right now. 

There’s one great and underrated noise in the world, and that’s the noise of the study hall. These last few months have come to re-appreciate a classic text of the Hartman Institute, which says as follows, a Talmudic text describing the masters of assemblies: These are the Talmidei Chachamim, the disciples of the wise, who sit in all of these assemblies and occupy themselves with the Torah. And some are pronouncing unclean and some are pronouncing clean. Some are prohibiting and others permitting, some disqualifying and others declaring fit. 

I’ll just interject and say when I was in about sixth grade our school took us on a trip to the Beit Midrash Govoha in Lakewood. I’d never seen anything like it. People were screaming at each other. Screaming at each other. In words of Torah, two guys were yelling about the kashrut of a chicken. That’s what these rabbis are describing in this Talmudic text. Some are pronouncing unclean, some are pronouncing clean. 

And the Talmud goes on to say, should a person say, how in these circumstances shall I learn Torah? Therefore the text says, all of them are given from one shepherd, Moses. God gave all of them one leader, uttered them from the mouth of the Lord of all creation. For it is written, and God spoke all these worlds. 

So what should a person do? The Talmud would says, make your ear like a hopper and get yourself a perceptive heart to understand the words of those who pronounce unclean and the words who pronounce clean, the words of those who prohibit and those who permit, the words of those who disqualify and the words of those who declare fit. 

I love this text. The words of Hillel and Shammai are both epistemologically viable. How in a world of multiple truths and multiple possibilities that are creating noise, how does a person speak or know? How does a person study Torah is the question, which means seek truth. And the answer that the Talmud gives is, cautiously, tentatively. You speak, but not always. Hopefully the periodic speaking never gets in the way of the listening. After all, the text tells us it’s on you, the individual, to make your ear a certain way, to make your heart a particular way. You are not going to fix the noise of the world. You are going to be the kind of person who finds a way through it. 

After all, the noise of the study house is rich and generative. It encompasses the contradictory possibility that the Word of God can live in competing worldviews. And it illustrates the immense gap between God’s infinite truth and our finite foolishness, which makes us think so highly of our clever phrases. In the world of noise, if you want to discern Torah, be a listener. 

If you remember by the end of the Bible, the world has become so full of noise that Elijah says in his prophecy that God is not in the noise or in the fire or in the fury, but only to be found in a small still voice, or if you prefer, in the small sound of silence. Maybe that’s the only place left. Maybe part of our responsibility as humans, even now that we have all the power of words and the gift of words, especially those of us who are good at words. Maybe the way we now make meaning is to find ways periodically to listen through all the dissonance, to listen to all the pain and the sorrow right now, to listen knowing we will still have to say things and have opinions and believe things, and sometimes even professionally, some of us will have to try to persuade others with our words. 

But maybe in all of that noise, somewhere, little bit of silence in which we can find the humble word of God.

Thank you so much for listening to our show. Identity/Crisis is produced by Tessa Zitter. Our executive producer is Maital Friedman. This episode was produced with assistance from Sarina Shohet and edited by Gareth Hobbs at Silversound NYC with music provided by So Called. 

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