Shavuot celebrates the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai and is traditionally a holiday of immersive text study. Reflecting on the spirit of the holiday, this week’s episode is a recording of an interview with Yehuda Kurtzer on “Jewish Insights” on Jewish Broadcasting Service. Yehuda and JBS host Justin Pines share how they each relate to the Torah and discuss how it informs the way they think today.

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In a frenzied media cycle, Identity/Crisis creates better conversations about the issues facing contemporary Jewish life. Host Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, talks with leading thinkers to unpack current events affecting Jewish communities in North America, Israel, and around the world, revealing the core Jewish values underlying the issues that matter most to you.

Stewarding Torah Transcript

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

Yehuda: Hi everyone. Welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show from the Shalom Hartman Institute, creating better conversations about the issues facing contemporary Jewish life. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer. We’re recording this introduction on Monday, June 10th, 2024. 

This week is Jewish holiday of Shavuot. For most of you who are listening in real time, it starts tonight. Many of you have been counting down exactly to this moment, 49 days between Passover and Shavuot. That’s one of the themes of the holiday, but the other big one, as we’ve covered on previous holiday episodes in the past, is about the giving and the receiving of the Torah. Our friends over at Jewish Broadcasting Service, and in particular, Hartman alumnus, Rabbi Justin Pines, who left the Institute earlier this year to take over as the CEO of JBS, put together a whole series of television interviews about Torah, about this time of year, multiple perspectives on what we think Torah means, what it includes, and what it’s ultimately about.

So I’m turning over the microphone again this week to Justin, who invited me onto his show to talk about Torah and a whole bunch of other things. It was a wonderful and wide ranging interview. We’re proud of Justin and what he’s doing over at JBS, and we hope you enjoy this conversation.

Justin: Shalom and welcome to Jewish Insights. As I’ve said many times before, when I look at the Jewish calendar, I think of questions we come back to every year. And this time of year, the time of Shavuot, we think about what is Mount Sinai? What is our Torah? How do we celebrate Torah? 

And one theme that has come up over the past several shows is how do we approach Torah? What do we do with Jewish text? We started with Rav Kook and the idea that within Torah embedded is the plan, where we’re going we already know regardless of what’s happening around us during the world today. And then we spoke about Nechama Leibowitz with Smadar Rosensweig and we talked about the idea of, how do you create a conversation with all of the greats, all of those who have commented on Torah before, how do you create a conversation among them and derive something from that? And also, how do you teach Torah to young people?

And then we had Daniel Matt speak with us about Shimon Bar Yochai or Rabbi Moshe de León, depends who you ask, the author of the Zohar and talking about how do we find the meaning that’s behind the text, that’s not the the black fire, but the white fire around it. And then we spoke with Rabbi Yitz Greenberg about Yisrael Salanter, the founder of the Mussar movement, and raising the question of what is the purpose of Torah? When we sit down with Torah, are we trying to become a better person as a result of that? 

And then most recently, we met with Yael Ziegler, the professor from Herzog College in Israel, and talked about Megilat Ruth, the story of Ruth. And she laid out her Torah methodology, where she takes classical approach, a religious understanding of Torah, and puts it alongside an academic approach, using tools from comparative literature to think about what meaning can we derive from the text by looking at character arc, and which languages repeat themselves.

And so today, you know, in our final session on celebrating Torah in this way, and we will celebrate it again in the future, don’t you worry, I want to explore the path from revelation at Mount Sinai to today. What is the relationship between us as humans, as people, today? And I’m super excited to be exploring this topic and this question of Jewish tradition of interpretation with Dr. Yehuda Kurtzer. 

Yehuda Kurtzer is president of the Shalom Hartman Institute. He is a leading thinker and author on the meaning of Israel to American Jews, on Jewish history and Jewish memory, and on questions of leadership and change in American Jewish life today. He led the creation of the Hartman Institute of North America in 2010 as a pioneering research and educational center for the leadership of the North American Jewish community and teaches in its many platforms for rabbis, lay leaders, Jewish professionals, leaders of other faith communities, and the list goes on. He is the co creator of the Shalom Hartman Institute’s iEngage project, which seeks to bridge between Israel and world Jewry through content, curriculum, and cutting edge educational programs. He’s also the host of Hartman’s award winning, famous, and amazing Identity/Crisis podcast. He’s the author of Shuva: The Future of the Jewish Past, and the co editor of The New Jewish Canon. And for me, he is both a mentor and a friend. 

My first memory of Yehuda was I was a Wexner graduate fellow, and everyone said I should take his class. He was teaching a class, I think, in Vermont, and I went into the room there, and Yehuda hit me hard in the head with an idea I had never thought about before, which was he introduced an idea that the Jewish people before then, for many years, had been homeless, and now we suddenly had two homes. One home in America, and one in Israel. And I remember there being kind of like this question around the circles on the board. What’s the mothership, and what are the other circles? I’m sure, Yehuda, it’s probably coming back to you now, and I just remember being like, I had never thought of it that way, at all. I grew up the grandchild of Holocaust survivors, Israel was home, America was amazing, but I hadn’t thought of it in those terms, and I, it’s, it’s sat with me ever since. 

And most recently, I spent over four years, prior to joining JBS, as part of the Shalom Hartman Institute team, and learning from Yehuda. To use language very familiar to Yehuda, who’s an avid Yankees and baseball fan, I would say that he taught me the fastball, the curveball, and the slider, and there are still many, many, many pitches for me to learn from him. 

When I was first asked to be a guest on In the Spotlight with Abigail Pogrebin several years ago, before I joined JBS, it was Yehuda, who I of course went to in his office to get advice for how to prepare for that interview. And he is someone that many, many Jewish professionals, politicians, rabbis, and leaders turn to for advice, for his wisdom, his sense of leadership, and his amazing sense of the pulse of the Jewish people, both in North America and in Israel. Yehuda, welcome. 

Yehuda: Thanks for having me, Justin. 

Justin: It’s great to have you here. I know you’ve been on JBS several times before, and our audience is familiar with you, but for those who, for whatever reason, haven’t seen you before or haven’t seen you on JBS, let’s just start with telling us a little bit about yourself and what brings you to become interested about how we interpret Torah.

Yehuda: Yeah. Thanks for having me, Justin. It’s always wonderful to be here, mazal tov, on this new role. It’s exciting to see you in this work. I’m excited to talk to you about Torah. The reason I do what I do in this weird realm that’s called like thought leadership or Jewish communal leadership is because I feel the heaviness of the past.

I think we, we don’t choose when we’re alive in Jewish history, but if you’re awake to Jewish history, you know you’re part of something that, you know, you stand on the shoulders, or you’re the inheritor of something great that came before us, and you feel the weight of responsibility to make sure that it passes through your generation and goes to the next. And the language that the Jewish people has used to process history and to translate history into ethics and meaning and purpose has been the language of Torah. It’s a very secular way of thinking about Torah. We can kind of unpack that if you want to. But that’s always been what it’s about for me.

I even was at an inflection point right before I went to get a doctorate where I was holding a rabbinical school application in my hand and ultimately it was, it wasn’t really a question of like, what do I want to be? I knew what I wanted to be was learned. It was just a question of what was the mechanism, through academia or through rabbinical school, where I was going to get that learning.

So that’s always been Torah, the language of Torah, has always been about what I want to do professionally, and then how do you find means of communications to bring the voice of Torah to the Jewish people. 

Justin: Beautiful. I have two questions. First question. You mentioned the heaviness, what comes behind us. You know, for me, like, I had no choice, I had four grandparents who are Holocaust survivors. I grew up thinking that every Jewish grandparent was a Holocaust survivor until I got to college. I don’t really understand that. Is it the destruction of the Beit HaMikdash? Is it the Spanish Inquisition? Like, what, play out for me, like, emotionally, what hit you from the heaviness? Is it the Holocaust? What, what is it for you? 

Yehuda: So, we have really different family stories. All four of my grandparents were born in the United States of America. So, on my side, at least, my kids are fifth generation American. It’s like, I know for you, it’s like wild to think about. 

Justin: There were Jews in America then? 

Yehuda: I know, right? And actually, you know, my family trajectory, in many ways, was of the American Jewish immigrant story, which climbed the socioeconomic ladder. And from, I think, many of my relatives, that meant the assimilation story also.

So my family is a little bit unusual in the observance level at generation 4 and 5 of American Jewish immigration story. I don’t know what it was for me that kept me feeling that my role to play was in Jewish life. I know that my father’s professional choices as a diplomat informed a decision to want to be in public service. And that was true for my siblings also. All of us have stayed committed to public service one way or the other. But for some reason, public service for me was through the lens of particularism. What people am I a part of? What do I belong to? And what is my role to play in serving that population? 

Is it a particular historical event? Yeah, I mean, I guess if I look back in Jewish history, I’ve always been drawn to the first century, the destruction of the Temple, the sectarianism of the first century, which sounds a lot like the denominationalism of the 19th century, and maybe the pluralism of the 21st, the transformation of history that Jews live through and have to figure out how to process. All of the rupture and the rebirth that feels very 20th century, about the first century, that was always my first love. And for a while it was academic, and, I guess there’s not really a distinction between these two things, it’s an academic love that also turned into a love for the Torah that flourishes around that academic conversation.

Justin: Beautiful. So first of all, I’ll notice that for me, it’s interesting, this sense of service. I think I also grew up with a sense of service. But for me, I think it was like that I felt that Torah was right. And like we needed to like, tell the world about that or that like, I believe in God and I wanted to like share that out. And it’s interesting that it was a sense of like connection to like I need to serve my community. So it could be, this is the town I live in, but it could also be, this is the tribe or the people that I’m part of. 

You know, you mentioned academic. Just say one word, I’m curious, you know, I hadn’t heard you say that before. How did you ultimately decide to go the academic path and not the rabbinic path? 

Yehuda: Well, for me, it was, I ultimately knew that I wanted to study. I wanted to learn something. And I would say I wanted the authority or the credibility that came with knowing something really well, really deeply. Especially if I knew then, and I think I did, that I wanted to teach, you gotta know something before you teach. And I was always, like I said, romanticized by ancient Judaism, ancient Jewish history. 

The truth is I started one doctoral program, dropped out, and started another one that was a whole thing. 

Justin: Okay. What was the topic of the first one? 

Yehuda: I started trying to do a doctorate that would be jointly held between ancient Judaism and early Christianity, which I always was fascinated by, like, like learning, for the first time I learned that, like, Ancient Judaism and early Christianity were not that different from one another for a few centuries. That it wasn’t like, this was born then, and that was like, mind blowing. What does that mean for how difference gets created, how identity gets produced, that these actually took centuries to diverge from each other? So I thought I would, I would live there. It wasn’t the right program, it wasn’t the right setup. And ultimately when I went back and started my doctoral work again, I just camped myself squarely in Jewish studies and that felt like a little bit more secure.

I never stopped being interested in the early Christianity stuff. I studied Greek, I learned New Testament, but I at least had a little bit more of a secure footing. 

Justin: Got it. Interesting. All right. So we’ll put aside a conversation around the authority of academics and also the authority of academics versus the authority of rabbis today, which is a great one. And I think I, you know, looking back on my rabbinic experience, I think like there was a sense of like, you need to learn all of these things to become a rabbi. And like, there wasn’t a sense of like, oh, you really want to focus on Mussar, let’s say you can get your PhD in Mussar. So I hear that very much. Okay, fine. Let’s talk a little bit about Torah. 

So we’re thinking about Mount Sinai. I think one of the things that the Hartman Institute does in general and that you do very well is kind of, I’ll almost say that I feel like you, you personally taught me this. And I don’t know if this is where you’re going to go with this, let’s see, but I think that, I think for me, coming in, I kind of felt like Judaism describes the way to live our lives, right? There’s this like perfect ecosystem. I remember coming from my year in Israel to law school and being like, first of all, this case is only 30 years old. I don’t, like, that’s not interesting. We have cases that are much older in Judaism. And second of all, why are there all these flaws in the American system? Like, why can’t they get it right and it be perfect? Judaism is perfect. America is not perfect. 

And I think you helped me to see that, like, the challenge of taking Torah, taking Jewish values and building a society around that. We have, like, an experiment that’s called Israel. And not everyone’s trying to do that experiment when it comes to Israel, but there’s an example of, what does it mean to bring values to life. 

But I think behind that question is a question around, like, okay, how do we relate to Torah, and how does it inform the way we think about it today? So I’ll push it to you first, you know, offer some thoughts on this, and then I’ll respond. 

Yehuda: Yeah, so if Shavuot, this holiday that we’re about to celebrate, or, depending on when people see this, have already celebrated, there’s only two options on the calendar. I can tell you’ve been on JBS before. If Shavuot is about the revelation at Sinai and the giving of the Torah as the central plot point and this covenant that gets created between God and the Jewish people, I guess the question becomes, and I think it’s a little bit of a Rorschach test for people, are you more interested in talking about the giving of the Torah or the receiving of the Torah?

Now, by definition, in a transaction and definitely in a covenant, you need both of those pieces. You need two players. You need the act of giving and the act of receiving. But there are actually different theological emphases that often tell a story of what a person wants to understand about Torah. 

And I, I think you are a giving of the Torah person, right? Even in your language of, yeah, because even in your language of, there’s something perfect here, and the notion that the giving of the Torah was this act of generosity and grace by God to the Jewish people, which we see in our tradition of imagining the Torah as a precious treasure that God has given to God’s beloved, the people of Israel, leads you to a certain conclusion about how immaculate or perfect the Torah is, then our responsibility as Jews is almost in this preservationist mode of making sure it doesn’t get damaged, making sure it’s protected from people who shouldn’t have access to it, and that there’s lot of consequences to that. 

And I am much more interested in being the side of receiving the Torah, because when you place the emphasis on what does it mean to receive Torah, first of all, you don’t take for granted that what you’ve received is perfect. You actually might even want to place the emphasis on now, what am I supposed to do with this? So now I’m actually, I don’t know about the giver. I know that as a receiver, I’m responsible for something. When I think about the responsibility of receiving Torah, which I think happens at Sinai, and happens every minute of every day.

Justin: Happening right now. Here we go. 

Yehuda: Right? And it happens, the most powerful moment that it happens in our lives is when we know of another generation that’s receiving it. Right? When we see the echoing of Pirkei Avot, of the ethics of the chapters of the fathers of our ancestors, which describes rabbis passing down the Torah from generation, and you see it happen in Jewish classrooms with children who are receiving it. I’m interested in what responsibilities each of us bears once we are now the holders of the Torah. What do we have to fix in Torah and in the world? What do we have to change in order for it to be something that can continue to be received from generation to generation? You identify on that? 

Justin: Yeah. So let me jump in. So first I, I respect the binary ’cause I think it’s, it’s easier. I’ll insert myself into the binary question and not put myself far in one end or the other. I’ll say that in thinking about Torah, I think for me, I do think that Torah is divine, from God, and there’s something perfect about it, but in the same way we have paradoxes where we say, how could God possibly create the world and be all powerful and also we can be here at the same time, or how can God, you know, know the future and us not have free will?

I think that, inherent of the very fact that the Torah, even the Torah as we have it, is a text that is written in human language, you know, that goes from right to left, that cannot be, you know, the metaphor I often think of is like, I’m not an art historian, but Picasso’s cubism, where I think, if I understood in my high school art class, is the idea that Picasso was trying to show the back of the face and the front of the face at the same time, that Torah, the same thing, that like, it’s not meant to be read from here to here. There’s something that’s beyond that, and all we could do is do our best to understand it. 

So I think for me, it doesn’t feel like necessarily a perfect thing that can’t be messed with or that we have to protect. I think it does feel like a gift to us that we’re supposed to take with us, but I think there’s a sense that it’s there, right? It’s the sense that there’s something unique about this. It’s not the same as any other text. There is something divine about this text, but it’s divinity put into a human bottle that, by nature, makes it imperfect. 

And I’ll say, just what came up for me, I don’t know that I have, like, a thought on this, is that what you described very much felt like my time with Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, where I felt like I had this moment in my life where I was going there two or three days a week, and he was just talking, and I just felt like, this is a fire hose, this is crazy, everything he’s saying, yes, it’s not divine, it’s not, like, perfect, perfect, perfect, and I’m sure there’s things that I agree or disagree with, but it felt like they were just, like, something godly coming out of his mouth and the way that he behaved with his wife that I felt like, I have like a responsibility, what do I do with this? Like I should be recording everything he says and put it into writing and I need to put it out there.

Like, there are moments where I’ve had that, but I feel like that sounds somewhere between giving and receiving, which is like, yes, there is a gift, but also acknowledging that with the gift comes responsibility, without having to say that the gift is broken, let’s say, or there’s something imperfect about it. Does that make sense? 

Yehuda: Yeah, although this question of the giving over and the receiving of Torah can compel you to, and the sense that you had, with a great teacher, that you were receiving something that was infinite and divine, and that you, so one, you described one impulse, which is, oh my god, I gotta make sure I write this down, and make sure it’s preserved and saved for generations.

Justin: Or something about responsibility, I would say. 

Yehuda: Yeah, so there’s a different kind of responsibility that’s emerged, which is, I don’t need to really write all this down, I just have to become that kind of person. Because there really is a difference between the transmission of electric knowledge when it is paper knowledge versus when it is the fiery beating heart.

And I’ve had wonderful teachers over the years who I’ve asked, why did you never write down your insights? Why have you not given us a book? And the beautiful answer I got from one of my teachers was, it’s not my job as a teacher of Torah to, like, codify what I have and hand it over. Maybe it gets read. Maybe it actually gets, sits on a shelf. 

You know, think about this, like through your family story your grandfather’s experience of surviving the Shoah breathes in your soul as a story. It might be written down somewhere. You may have a family chronicle of it. But you don’t want to make sure it’s written down and sits on the shelf and then tell your children, just make sure when you move, take the book with you. What you want is that that story kind of lives in the values of your children, that it’s also alive, that also people forget certain details of it. But they’ll remember the core moral emphasis. I don’t know. 

I don’t know. I have friends and teachers who are incredible at memorization. They remember everything like a steel trap. And I’m not that way. And I’m more interested in like, does, when you learn something, does it wash over you? Does it alter how you think? Do you see the world a little bit differently? And then, how does that keep happening and then keep transmitting?

Justin: Great. So I hear a couple things there and it very much relates. I think one of the things that I feel often an exception about when it comes to Holocaust memory is that I feel like I’m often surrounded by people that are obsessed with the dates and the chronicling. We’ve seen that all, since October 7th, that like, we have to chronicle, we have to chronicle. These are facts that people need to know about and I think there’s value there and we could talk about where there’s value there. 

I think for me, you’re right. It’s the moments in the story where choices were made are the things that stick with me and the stories that I want to tell my kids, those kind of things. I think, you know, you’re getting at a different challenge which is, you know, this reminds me of kind of like the debate, you probably know this better than I do, but like the debate back in the day, you know, early Judaism around like whether we should canonize the Siddur or let people meditate and figure out their connection to God.

And ultimately there’s a decision that’s, we need to canonize it because otherwise give it a few generations and it’ll disappear. So I think there’s, you know, we talked about assimilation before, and I’m not like a scared of assimilationists, it’s not that, but it’s more, I do think there’s something, like, unique is the minimum about Torah, I guess, let’s say, and then there’s a sense of like, okay, well, is the obligation that there’s some sort of, you know, we receive something at Torah, but the idea is to kind of just like keep the energy going however we see fit? Or is there some sense of like, no, there’s, like we want to make sure people’s eyes go there, and it doesn’t get lost in the shuffle, and there is something that like, at a certain point, it doesn’t look like that anymore, where we’re very far from Torah, and we’re in a different category?

Yehuda Yeah, I think, I think it would be useful even thinking historically, this is just a hypothesis, that at the same time that the rabbis decide we do need to canonize texts. And you know they debate this question, should we, even the Mishnah itself, the first rabbinic text, this is a big, it is the reflection of oral tradition. I was actually explaining this to one of my kids yesterday. He couldn’t, he was like, when was the Mishnah written? I was like, well, you know, It was written down in the early third century, but like, don’t, stop thinking about it as a book. It’s a collection of stuff that’s accumulating for centuries, so we can’t fully date all of it. That’s a weighty decision. The rabbis debate it. Are we screwing something up? 

But the second thing that emerges at that same time in Jewish history is the idea that studying Torah is part of Jewish virtue ethics. So if I don’t do that second move, then I wrote it down, I saved it for history. Which, by the way, is a very modern thing. Preservation, the notion of preservation, that’s like a very modern move, but if you also say, yes, you’re writing it down so it doesn’t get lost, but you have to also have a habit of continuing to recite it and poke at it and notice all of the things that are missing and then come up with new explanations, you rescue it from becoming something that’s now been calcified just by writing it down. 

I worry about that now, whether Torah is a plaything for us as a Jewish people or whether there’s a lot of like, if you’re pious in the study of Torah, it’s a habit of recitation, memorization, getting it right. And if you’re not, it feels so inaccessible that all you’re doing is like this uphill climb to try to acquire it, as opposed to just being kind of conversant in it. 

Justin: Great. So I think this is an interesting area to go into. Also, first of all, I want to just note what you pointed out, which is, of course, like, the backdrop of the conversation we’re having is that we actually have different ways of thinking about Torah, which is written in oral Torah, and then we have this idea that oral Torah becomes somewhat written in some way, but it’s continuing now. So there is, there’s maybe a sense that there’s some kind of combination of the written Torah and the way it’s evolved.

I’ll say for, you know, the most recent point you brought up. I think for me, you know, the way I think about that is I come from the Mussar world, and I think I’ve said this to you before, which is, you know, uh, Ralph Schlomo Wolbe, the author of the Alei Shur, he says, if you, he get up from learning Torah and you’re not thinking about a different way to be in life, you’ve done idolatry, you’ve turned Torah into idolatry, because you’re making it an academic exercise that’s like about who knows the most or who can, you know, resolve it.

So for me it feels like, when you’re sitting at the Torah, that’s what you’re doing. You’re trying to get answers that are, to be frank, mostly personal, mostly, how do I behave differently? How can this affect the way I parent, or become a spouse, or go to my job, or those kind of things? And of course, details. We’re not farmers anymore, but those kind of questions. But, there is a value system I’m trying to access here. And I want to turn that to you, right? So this question around, okay, fine, we don’t want people to just do like a rote memorization thing and we don’t want also to like not be able to access it.

So, you know, both personally when you’re sitting down to learn Torah, whether it’s for chavruta or to prepare a class, whatever it is, or it’s thinking about how to apply Torah, what’s your mindset? What are you approaching when you’re, what are you trying to draw from Torah? 

Yehuda: Well, the sources that I’m oftentimes drawn to from the rabbis themselves, this is gonna be a little bit meta, I’m very drawn to the Talmudic texts which describe human responsibility. It goes back to where we started about the giving of the Torah. I’m really interested in how, in those texts that describe human capacity to interpret things differently, to change Torah for the needs of the Jewish people, texts that sideline or even subordinate God in this transaction, because the Torah I’m interested most of all in contemporary Jews understanding is that that’s what they are supposed to be. That we are supposed to be a people who takes ownership of Torah and then makes sometimes conservative and sometimes radical decisions that we have to make in this era of Jewish history for our people to be able to get through to the next.

I was teaching this to a group of rabbis recently, where I ultimately ended was, for a whole variety of reasons, nobody is in charge in the Jewish community. 

Justin: Which is crazy, because we’re so small. 

Yehuda: I know, some of your, I will say this, some of your guests, I think, think they are. But nobody’s actually in charge. So what’s the guarantee that the next generation of Jews will be Jewish and do Jewish things? If people empower themselves to say, we’re in charge, we’re responsible to be custodians of the present and transmitters of it to the past, and, but custodians doesn’t mean it stays the same. We gotta mess with it. 

So that’s what I’m drawn to in the kind of Torah that I’m studying for, like, what’s the stuff that makes me feel a little bit scared, because ultimately, does that mean, like, we’re just out here on our own figuring it out? 

Justin: So, alright, so I want to ask, I’ll give you back your Rorschach test a little bit here. So I hear inherent in there something about that, like, Torah needs fixing, or improving, or changing, or we need to do it for the next generation. You know, a metaphor for Mount Sinai that’s often given is that it’s a wedding between the Jewish people and God, that it’s the ketubah, and I think, like, you know, one of the number one rules about marriage is don’t spend your time trying to fix your spouse and telling, you know, don’t come into it being like, well, these few things are wrong, so I think, obviously, I don’t think that, like, I’m not someone who’s like, we need to capture time in a glass and just preserve it forever, but I think sometimes, the idea that, Shabbat, for example, comes to mind, the idea that, like, a new generation can know better. And be like, well, listen, we don’t really need, like, we could do it differently. There’s a different way to, like, instead of being like, okay, well, let’s give the benefit of the doubt to the system that’s been working. 

And I know that Judaism has not been the same every year forever. But let’s give the benefit of the doubt of the system. Let’s start there. Let’s assume Judaism has it right. And then if I go deeper into it, I have a sense that, okay, really, like it could be improved a little bit here. Let’s go deeper. Like, how do we, you know, what, is there a distance between going in with an assumption that like by nature, anything is imperfect and we need to perfect it more, versus, maybe that’s a Hasidic, actually, approach, where we’re trying to, you know, perfect the world again, or, should we be going in with a, let’s give it the benefit of the doubt, but if we notice glaring changes, then let’s like slowly fix those changes.

Yehuda: You know that thing where it’s like, when people describe their own politics, like anything, anyone to the left of me is a communist, and anyone to the right of me is a fascist, so the same, the same thing applies to the whole question of tradition and change in Jewish life. The person who you feel is moving too quickly to change this tradition, that’s cause, that’s where you are, and that’s your bias, and I don’t think there’s any scientific way of asserting whether someone’s motives are l’shem shamayim, for the purpose of heaven, or for the purpose of the Jewish people. 

We sometimes can evaluate whether someone manipulates Torah in ways that we think are methodologically correct. So when someone comes along and, and says, I want to, the most powerful ways to change Torah are to find new sources of meaning in the words themselves. Anybody can come along and say, I know it says this, but I’m going to tell you it says something else. Like, who cares? Like, that’s not interesting. 

When someone comes along and says, I have figured out a new way to read this, and you demonstrate that they’re actually misreading the words. They’ve mispunctuated it. They didn’t do their homework. It just falls apart. Of course. Then it’s just their own stuff. But when a person comes along and says, I’m exposing something of this tradition that, that is getting at the core of what it’s supposed to be about, or where there’s room to do this.

You know, the text we go back to at Hartman all the time is a text in Tractate of Yoma, which says that the, two of the prophetic figures, Daniel and Jeremiah do something radical, which is, they take the words that Moses uses to describe God. Moses had described God as “Ha’El hagadol v’hagibur v’hanorah,” God who is great and mighty and awesome.

And Jeremiah lives through a period of time when the temple is being destroyed, and the, it obviously doesn’t say this in the text, but the rabbis notice that when Jeremiah describes God, Jeremiah doesn’t say the great, mighty, and awesome God, Jeremiah just says, God who is great and mighty, and leaves out awesome. This is such a brilliant way of reading the text and they say they notice. How could it be that Jeremiah didn’t say the same thing that Moses said. 

Now the normal human answer is, like, big deal. This is fine. This is also okay. But if you live within a world in which every choice has meaning, their argument is, Jeremiah was living through a terrible period in Jewish history, and he couldn’t describe God as being awesome. 

And then they do the same thing for Daniel. Daniel takes away God being mighty. God is just great. And what they’re signaling in that reading is that you are allowed to approach our tradition and speak truth about ultimate commitments only on the basis of how you’re experiencing the world. 

That, we should all feel incredibly burdened by that. You cannot repeat Torah about truth claims and commitments in the world if it means that you’re lying about what you actually believe. So what does it really look like to say, I’m reading this, and I’m thinking this based on how, when I live in Jewish history. And now I have to find some way of reconciling between what I believe to be true and what Torah is telling me. That both of those are equally binding on me. And I, I don’t know. I, I think there are a lot of people who get scared off by that encounter. 

Justin: Sure. And it’s interesting that you raise this. We talked about this with Rav Yitz around Rav Salanter a little bit, which is like a big question that he raised was he was like this amazing student who could, was the best that pilpulearly on and could outthink everyone and at a certain point he realized, I’m just doing this to impress people, to be the smartest person in the room. I can, but I don’t want to be doing that. 

So then he kind of moved away from that. And then at a later point he realized, there’s no, there’s no way around it. You still need to formulate your own opinions about the text and try to determine what they say. And of course, he certainly lived a life that was around reaction to the world around him. How do we think about modernity? How can I invent the Mussar movement to respond to modernity? 

I think, you know, one of the areas he brought up was kind of trying to develop some sort of checks and balances system, which I guess maybe we would call that chavruta, but some sort of system where you’re coming together with a group of people and being like, this is what I see here. Is this what you’re seeing here? And then there’s some element that people kind of making a circle around it. 

I think that’s what both of us, I think, would call ourselves pluralists. I think, for me, one of the things that draws me to pluralism is this idea that, in a perfect world, we could have people, you know, I don’t want to say the top, there’s a different discussion around what makes someone allowed to be a top Torah scholar, which we could talk about, but to have people of different understanding of a text come together and actually, like, work that out and notice, like, you know, for Salanter, it was like, if it’s driven by your emotions, you’re wrong. You’re missing something here. It’s not about what you feel. It’s about trying to separate that and actually trying to like, follow the divine will to get there, to, you know, the future world, because you followed it, and not saying, well, I just convinced myself of this because it’s better. 

And it dovetails beautifully actually with, again, just bringing in what we’ve been learning. All I know is what I’ve learned is, as Ziegler described me about Rut, that like she was too selfless, that she like self abrogated, that she almost did too much to hurt herself. But actually that was the point for King David, who was the king. Kings need to put themselves last, not put themselves first. That there’s a whole different challenge there, which is like, if you’re going to be someone that’s like, you know, telling people where to go, you need to, you need to, it can’t, so I think for me, I guess two checks and balances that come up.

One is, is it even good to allow your emotions to get into it? Which I think a modern approach is, of course, we’re human, we should let it in. Is there checks and balances that can help us along the way? And is there a third thing, which is like, well, you know, when we’re thinking about Torah for the masses, is there a sense that like, one check is to be like, well, do I benefit in any way from this interpretation? And if I do, does that mean I need to step back from it? 

Yehuda: So I would say, you know, for me, all of this comes down to, I’m not really a God person, but it’s not, not really the point. The point is I’m interested in the receiving of Torah as this vehicle for the empowerment of human autonomy and not for empowerment on its own, but because empowerment engenders responsibility.

So we’re the Jews of this period of time. Here’s our toolkit. What are we doing with this toolkit? In that context, you’re right, there’s a big risk of self aggrandizement, not empowerment, but aggrandizement. There’s a real risk that if all of Torah becomes the mirror image of what a person is, then that’s the ultimate idolatry.

And yeah, maybe chavruta, and maybe community of learners is the antidote to that idolatry, because now I’m seeing things through the prism of my own experience of the world, and I have to hold it against your experience of the prism of the world. I can’t turn my self empowerment into, I can’t become God in the story. All of us can only encapsulate some piece of the human experience, which, as our tradition says, God understands the world in ways that are beyond human comprehension. 

But on top of that, I would say the beautiful tie in to Ruth is, I think the other thing that’s happening in the Ruth story, which I only realized this year, so this is new.

Justin: It’s the beauty of coming back to Torah every year. 

Yehuda: We’ll try it out, and, and I’m gonna, I’ll issue a challenge to Yael Ziegler, we’ll talk about this, whether she thinks this is right. The power, I find, of the Ruth story is that it’s not really a story about God also. It’s really a story about human relationships. And it starts with Ruth’s fundamental commitment to be part of the Jewish people. I want to be a part of this. And the whole book is a kind of celebration of the core Jewish value, which I think is at the heart of Ruth’s conversion, which is lovingkindness. She has cared for, she cares for others.

And how that gets mediated in the book of Ruth is through halakha. It’s a late book that gives you all of these examples of like leaving the field of the corner of the field for gleaning of others and all of the laws of marriage practice and who inherits them. 

So the whole book is like, it is centering the human experience, but not just through lovingkindness in some sort of abstract way, but essentially routing it through the halakhic process. So, both chavruta and community are means of preventing, you know, human aggrandizement, but also a life within the halachic system prevents, which is a means of transacting in the world, prevents it from just being like, well, I’m the agent who now controls Torah in the world. I can do whatever the hell I want with it. Like, I actually need systems by which humans live. 

You were smiling when I mentioned the halakhic thing. 

Justin: I know, I, well, first of all, I think that was an interesting chiddush. Like, I hadn’t thought of it also. Like, I think, you know, I thought of it as like a place you could learn about halachah being practiced, but I didn’t think of it the way that you put it together, which is really beautiful.

I think thar, you know, that raises a whole different point, which is, you know, we’ve been talking about Torah, but the relationship between Torah and halakha is a whole separate thing, right? So, you know, the same way we think about how each generation looks to Torah to interpret, and again, I came to a place like Hartman thinking that Torah informs how I live my life within community, but not how Torah might inform, let’s say, Israeli law, for example.

But I think that like, the question that we’re discussing becomes even more potent when it comes to the question of halakha, because if someone’s kind of saying like, well, okay, I could figure out, I don’t know, laws of ritual purity, whatever, pick whatever area you want. Kashrut, that’s an easy one. That’s a very high hanging fruit one. Or low hanging fruit one, I should say. You know, I get what it’s about. Being kosher is really about being ethical around animals. So, I’ll be a vegan. I don’t need to be kosher. I’m moving on, right? Or, it’s really about being mindful of how long we wait between to put meat on the pedestal, or I want to slow down to make blessings, or Jews are only meant to eat with Jews at Jewish restaurants. Come up with your reason for why we are kosher, so if I can solve for that reason, then I can, 

Yehuda: Easier said than done, right? I mean, you have to do a lot of work to demonstrate that kashrut is fundamentally just about kindness towards animals or environmental stewardship. The texts don’t lend themselves to the simplicity of that reading. In fact, the more simple, the more simply you can reduce some sort of obligation or commandment in Torah, the more the tradition kind of looks at you and they’re like, really? That’s the best you can do. 

I guess why the rabbis are so skeptical of this thing called Ta’ame Hamitzvot, the giving simple explanations for, it just means you’re not really doing the work. You’ve basically decided on the simplest explanation of something in order to do exactly what you said, which is, now run with it. 

But to genuinely grapple with why does the Torah, want us to eat differently? Well, that’s an amazing question. Why is that such a huge feature of what it means to be a Jew? Is this whole culture of mindfulness around food? And then you wind up, you’ll notice through a history of studying the material, not as an anthropologist, but inside your own tradition, you’ll see, yes, it is about how we relate to other species. It’s about how we relate to other humans. It’s about modesty and self consciousness. It’s about the capacity as human beings to make differentiations, as like a core moral commitment that is not intuitive to human civilization. There’s a lot of things, and now I can’t reduce it to simply one moral story that allows me to do whatever I want on the other end. And the truth is, Justin, people are going to do whatever the hell they want anyway. 

So, it’s just does that muscle of studying Torah, I want it to empower people, but I wanted to empower them towards lives of richness and complexity as opposed to empowering towards the simple choice of being able to peel off one convenient message and then run with it. Those are two very different ways to think about empowerment. 

Justin: Great, and I’ll, I’ll say it another way, which is, which is emerging for me the way you’re describing it beautifully, which is kind of thinking of it as like three lanes and like one lane is like, I’m never going to figure out what this is about. Let’s just follow the rules and move on, you know? Like, who am I to figure out what Kosher it’s about? It says, be kosher, I’ll be kosher, and let’s move on. And on the other extreme, like, I can out think this or I don’t care about this and I can square it away. And somewhere in the middle, what you’re asking people to do, which is much harder of course, is to be like, okay, I’m going to sit in this question in a meaningful way and I’m going to study text and try to learn more.

So I think, first of all, that ideal. Sounds beautiful to me. Of course, you run the risk, and I think it is a risk of, you know, once you’re playing in that middle lane, people falling to either side for whatever reason, and that comes with it. 

And I think, you know, it raises a question that’s kind of been in the background that I want to bring up also, which is, is this question of accessibility and expertise, and like, you know, there’s the idea that like, there are Torah scholars, the idea that everyone should have access to Torah. I think that, you know, if I had, I don’t want to speak for communities, but I would say like, there’s probably certain, let’s call it, Jews to the right, just for lack of a better term, I don’t like using right and left, who might be like, well, until you’ve been through Shas X amount of the, you know, the Jewish canon, the Jewish canon, X amount of times, like, you know, there are the people who like would never think to have an opinion because they have like their Rebbe who’s been through it 27 times and they’ve been through it one time, right, that thing.

And there’s also the people that would be like the idea of mesorah, the idea that like any empowerment comes, mesorah being tradition that’s passed down, any empowerment to have opinions about these things and to develop things, it has to do with, well this person was the student of this person who was a student of this person, it goes all the way back to whoever, that kind of thing, I think that those are kind of, you know, if I was, you know, spreading our table with more people that were pretty close together, that they would bring into the room and be like, the idea of, empowering the average Jew to kind of just step in and like take on these questions themselves is, at minimum, risky, let’s say, at, at maximum, a bad idea.

Yehuda: Yeah. You know, another way to get at that is like, a lot of the texts that I’m drawn to, that many liberal Jews are drawn to actually of like, you know, God is not in heaven. In fact, the rabbis are in charge. And, you know, these rapid changes post the destruction of the Temple, which empower humans and and make God out to be like, God laughs, God cries, God’s sitting in a chair, God’s knitting, and it’s really human beings doing this.

So the critique of that is well, yeah, but those are great rabbis. They are the ones who can be who can play with this stuff and make changes but not, that’s, you amateurs, you can’t come along and model yourself that way.

So I’m not sure what the rabbis thought about that question as they were writing these traditions, as they were putting themselves into Jewish history in this way. I know you have a Mishnah where Rabbi Yochanan Ben Zakkai describes his students, and one of them is like a cistern that doesn’t lose a drop. I recognize that student. I know people like that. And there are other people who are described as great, philosophical thinkers or users of hermeneutical principles. And I imagine those people are not the people who have gone through the Talmud 75 times and can memorize the whole thing, but they were incisive, sharp thinkers. And when you pull those people together, something magical can happen for the creation and preservation of Torah. 

So I have a hard time subscribing to the what you’re what you’re describing is a fundamentally conservative 

Justin: For sure, I’m just trying to bring it in. Yeah, 

Yehuda: Of, you can’t play with it. You can’t contribute to this. You can’t play with it until you’ve read it a hundred times Well, let’s say this if we if you’re keep reading it a hundred times gets you to a place where you now are less conservative about it, where you’re now more playful, then you have credibility. But if your insistence on that is just like a setting up a barrier to access, then you’re showing your hands that you’re not actually interested in the Torah evolving to meet the needs of human civilization.

Justin: And I think, by the way, I think there are two things. I think one, there are, I think that sometimes those examples are so powerful because of that. When some like big rabbi in Israel like takes a step in a direction related to, I don’t know, chained women, or around end of life questions or something like that. It’s like this big moment because it’s like, oh, this person who is so deep in that has chosen to make so. I think there is, there’s some power there. 

And I will say, you know, I don’t want to get too deep into it, but I think you also brought up the, you know, it also makes me think of the Mishnah where Moshe comes to see Rabbi Akiva in the future, right? And sees Rabbi Akiva saying drashot, like deriving meaning from the crowns in the Torah, and Moshe is totally bewildered, and then there’s this moment of Halakha mi Moshe mi Sinai, that like Rabbi Akiva says, this came from Moshe. And Moshe,isn’t able to follow that chain, but there’s some sense of, okay, there’s something that I could follow here.

Yehuda: But stay with that text. It’s amazing, there’s three layers that are amazing about that text. That God has planted, we now call in the internet world Easter eggs, in the tradition that are only going to be discovered at later generations, right? You can’t, you didn’t get it, sorry. It’s gonna have to be something figured out by your grandchildren, right?

By the way, what that’s that’s a beautiful way of giving God a place in the story but ultimately allowing human beings to be in the process of discovery of new things over time. There’s giving and receiving, right? So God has that place and Moshe is is burdened with the humility of recognizing that he may have been the progenitor of this project, the receiver, and Torah seems to think that the whole Torah was given to Moshe at Mount Sinai, and the answer the Talmud says, nope, sorry, there’s someone coming along, and Moshe gets rewarded with, this all comes from you in some sense, and then you have the real plot of the story is, the hero of Jewish history is the rabbi’s contemporary, who is capable of gymnastics with this stuff that nobody before him was capable of doing.

What happens, Justin, if we ultimately then say, innovative scholars of today are like a thousand times better than Rabbi Akiva? I don’t like saying that out loud. But why not? Why not have the confidence of what the Talmud is basically modeling for us? And by the way, the punchline of the story ultimately is that Rabbi Akiva is martyred. And the rabbis ask, how can it be that this great scholar achieved this reward? And God basically is like, the human realm and the divine realm are separate. I’m not dictating morality anymore. Or in other words, I’m not really in charge. You all are in charge. It’s not always going to make sense. 

But I just love the charge of like, do we want to grow up, do we want to raise children thinking that they are preserving what Moshe received at Mount Sinai? Or do we want them to be Rabbi Akivas? 

So I think, I love the question. I will say, you know, you mentioned today’s age. I think that, you know, one of the things my wife always tells me, she’s a dietician. She spent a lot of years studying it. You mentioned before the authority of having your PhD and doing the time. And we live in an age, you know, a social media age where now, like, anyone could post whatever they want about nutrition and it could be totally false, whatever it is, and people could follow. And it’s just about, like, you know, can you market in a way that you get followers and that kind of question. 

So I do, I do think that, yes, we’re in an age where I certainly want to empower people. I think it’s a beautiful vision. But I also want us to be mindful of the fact that we could also, you know, we could totally lose the forest for the trees or whatever metaphor you want to use, because you have people that like just because people are listening or that kind of thing.

I think the image that you gave before of what would it be like to have the person who doesn’t lose a drop in the same room as the person who’s an artist, with ideas. That, to me, really, like, gets me jazzed up. I think that’s, like, one of the things, you know, you mentioned it. It blows my mind that even, you know, during this October 7th crisis, we don’t even have, like, a common symbol, right? We have, like, different necklaces and different color braids and, and different opinions, and we’re a small community. And so the idea of, like, trying to get tthis vision of pluralism, this vision of trying to get, you know, what would it look like to really take the best of the Jewish people and beyond and have them in conversation and come up with best ideas. That, to me, like, that is the vision of the, you know, you mentioned Akiva moved back and forth from two different batei midrash during his time. This idea of, like, what team is he going to be on? Because there were teams back then. 

But I feel like sometimes there’s, there’s no communication between the teams right now. And so I feel like a combination of people feeling like, I can do this on my own, I don’t need a team, and a combination of each team being so internally focused that we don’t have that, that collaboration. But that to me, gets me like, jazzed, I guess, if that makes sense. 

Yehuda: Well, maybe we can’t solve for the whole people, but we can solve for communities, learning communities. Do we find ways to elevate both of, those are just two, maybe there’s five, key disciplines of Torah study. In every learning community those should be there, and they hold each other accountable. That the innovative thinkers are accountable to the footnote people. 

You know, I, and it will not surprise you that in graduate school, which we were talking about before, I struggled as a graduate student because when you write a dissertation, you’re supposed to have very little text and a lot of footnotes. You can’t say anything without attributing it. And as a result, like, you’re not supposed to make audacious claims in a dissertation. You’re supposed to find some little thing and then write 200 pages demonstrating the importance of it. And I was so bored with that. 

Justin: Sounds conservative. 

Yehuda: Right, I was so bored with it. And my advisor, to his credit, said to me near the end, he’s like, Yehuda, you know, most of it is supposed to be the footnotes, and you have all this text. And I was like, what can I do? That’s just who I am as a thinker. Like, that’s, I don’t know if it’s actually right. But it’s really interesting.

So yeah, I need to be in community with learners who are people who don’t lose a drop. Actually, professionally, I count on them. I fact check with them, and they need to be in learning communities with people who are going to help them move beyond, let me give you a chronicle of the 78 times this appears in the Talmud, and be able to make bold claims about the world.

So I don’t know if we can solve it for the Jewish people, but when it comes to the study of Torah, the rabbis are giving us an image of what, like, a creative community could look like. 

Justin: All right, so that transitioned us to our last five minutes, actually, beautifully, which is that, you know, one of the things that Hartman does that I had the privilege of playing a role in last summer is people of all walks of life descend on Israel in the summer. It’s like the Hartman summer in Israel. People joke that it affects the economy. 

Yehuda: Descend on or ascend? 

Justin: Ascend. Yeah, great. There you go. It’s all about a matter of perspective. That like, it gives the economy a bump that summer because everyone’s coming. So you have the lay leaders and this year, which is sold out and you have college educators and day school educators and college students really, across every, anyone you could think of that should be learning comes, and different than most conferences or learning experiences that you might go to, one of the things that’s so beautiful about it is that it does feel like a beit midrash. It feels like a house of study that, you know, people are coming to present ideas, certainly, there are these frontal moments, but they’re in conversation with each other. There’s some sorts of questions that are guiding the summer, and you’re hearing different people speak about that question from different angles. And then also there’s these evening programs where people, you know, discuss even more detail. 

So I think, first of all, that gives an example of what we’re trying to get at here. But I just, you know,I can’t help myself, I want to ask, I know every year we spend, you, we, you spend the spring at this point thinking about what are the questions of the summer. You know, going into this summer, what are the questions on your mind, and give us a little preview of what you’re thinking about.

Yehuda: Sure. So, it will not surprise you that we’ve been consumed for eight months now by the events of October 7th, as generational events. Not merely tragic events, but genuinely as generational events. And the only people I can listen to right now, in the world, are people who express some version of the way I thought about the world before October 7th is different than now. 

People who are insistent that nothing is different, and I told you so, or who are dunking on others of like, ah, you didn’t listen to me, or my ideology can withstand these things, I find to be completely uninteresting. I think you have to know when you’re alive in Jewish history, and that, that means a sensitivity that you at least have to interrogate your moral commitments in hard moments. I think the rabbis are very adamant about this. You don’t know why something terrible happened in the world? Investigate. That’s like a part of what it means to be human. 

So our summer is dedicated to, the topic is Israel of tomorrow. We want to get back to a conversation that’s not merely, woe is me and why did this happen and the experience that many of us have been in of a combination of sorrow and anxiety and fear, but also what does it look like for the Jewish people to imagine its future in the state of Israel among liberal Zionists in North America? What is that going to look like going forward? 

So in many of our programs, we’re kind of following a storyline of starting with what did we think and what have we learned, quite a bit of Torah on what does it look like to live through hard moments. Our colleague, Elana Stein Hain is going to teach about sermons, great rabbinic sermons of people living through crisis. There’s so much Torah on like, after the crisis, adaptation after the crisis, but what is a religious personality amidst a crisis? 

And then we’re going to spend a lot of our time in a conversation about the future. What is, how does Jewish tradition help us think about hope? Not only in the ideal sense, but in the pragmatic sense? How do we reclaim a moral conversation when you have spent a lot of time in a period of victimhood and vulnerability? How do we approach the question of Israel’s loneliness, which is a deep experience of many Jews and many Zionists. But if we stay there, it misses out on what Zionism was supposed to do, which was to fix that condition. 

So that’s what we’re going to try to be in, a place of, you know, recognition of the depths of the emotional consequences of the past eight months, and then some creative Torah to help lift ourselves out of it.

We have an educational summit this summer where we’re inviting educators from all backgrounds to do something we’ve never really done, which is just be in one community of Jewish educators to process this last year and to plan for the future and to build a stronger networking community of educators, whether they’re supplementary school, Hebrew school, day school, JCC, camps, campus. So that’s going to be a special piece of this summer. 

And I have a feeling, you know, a lot of what is going to happen is merely, folks who feel the need to show up and be together. And this has been a trend over the past year of Jews showing up in Jewish institutions because they just want to be in proximity and in community. And I think the reason we have such a big turnout this summer is just folks need to be in Israel. 

Justin: Beautiful. It sounds amazing, as always. And I think it’ll be extra special, and there’s, it’s not a surprise that it’s sold out, the CLP piece of it, the lay portion. 

I’ll give you a last lightning question, which is, you know, you alluded to this. I don’t want to take away from what you’re going to share in CLP, but give me one axiom that you felt before October 7th that you’ve thrown out the window. 

Yehuda: So, I don’t know if it’s thrown out the window, but I would say, I think one of the hardest questions that many of us are struggling with is the question of allyship. For liberal Jews, the whole nature of allyship has been a big part of how we have built relationships and how we’ve created sense of place and security. I think there was a big rupture between American Jews and many allies of like, why didn’t you show up the way I expected you to? And I think that that for some people, it’s shattering their politics. Forget it. I don’t want to do that anymore for them. 

I think for most people, it’s not that, because I, it’s not like, oh, I only showed up for racial justice because I had some reciprocal expectation you were going to show up for me. No, I want to remain committed to it, but what do I need to do differently in building relationships with others in which they genuinely understand my commitments? Because it’s pretty clear that that hasn’t been the case. 

So that’s an example of, wow, I felt this sense of crisis or rupture, and I could either, this is what we do, either you wallow in the rupture, you accept the downstream consequences, you are a different person as a result, or you, or you say, pick up the pieces and figure out what I want to do differently, and then, you know, pave my way to something different in the future. 

Justin: Wow. Alright. Dr. Yehuda Kurtzer, thank you so much. Check out Identity/Crisis. Check out the Community Leadership Program at Hartman this summer, and it’s such a pleasure to have you here. Thank you so much. Thank you. Okay.

Tessa: Thanks for listening to our show, and special thanks to Justin Pines and his show, Jewish Insights, for sharing this interview with us. Identity/Crisis is produced by me, Tessa Zitter, and our executive producer is Maital Friedman. This episode was produced with assistance from Sarina Shohet and edited by Gareth Hobbs at Silver Sound NYC with music provided by Socalled.

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