WEBVTT

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Welcome to The Dealing Pod, with me, James Dealing-Pol.

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And I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest,

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but before we meet him, let's have a word from one of our sponsors.

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otherwise you wouldn't be listening to this podcast,

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and all the people who were having to put on these horrible hand

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sanitizers were getting their skin all cracked and dry and horrible.

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for to provide local nurses near Stroud where she lives

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with soothing beeswax balm.

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So it was just a kind of altruistic gesture.

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And over 1,000 nurses and carers across the Stroud area

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ended up getting these soothing beeswax balms,

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and this developed into a business of massage oils,

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bath oils, shampoo bars, aromatherapy oils,

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organic handmade soaps and so on.

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no nasties, no cruelty to animals.

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And now Brand Zero Naturals is going great guns.

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So you can find them at brandzeronatrals.co.uk.

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That's brandzeronatrals.co.uk.

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I love their stuff, and they're really popular as well.

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Loads of people buy their stuff.

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I think you'll like them if you don't use their stuff already.

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brandzeronatrals.co.uk.

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Welcome to the Delling Pod, Gavril.

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What's your surname?

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Martin Dome.

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Gavril Martin.

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I like Gavril.

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I mean, it's obviously like Gabriel, yeah?

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Yeah, so English people usually name me as Gavril.

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Oh, yeah.

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My English person says Gavril.

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I want to explain to everyone how this podcast came about.

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I think in the early days of my telegram channel,

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when I was just starting to go down the rabbit hole

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and realizing that the world was just way crazier than I thought,

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one of the people who hung out on the channel was a rabbi in New York.

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And I liked having him there,

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because he could answer questions that one wanted to know

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about Jews and Judaism and what they believe, or, I mean,

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he was only one man, but...

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And then he left, and he was always quite secretive,

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because he likes to fly under the radar.

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And you know his name, but you've also told me

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there's no point telling his name,

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because he obviously wants to keep it a secret.

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I mean, I think he was...

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I've read some articles that he's written

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on things like how the schools in New York

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have been in Jewish schools are incredibly Israeli-fied.

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They're basically pushing Israeli propaganda.

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They're not all about Judaism, per se.

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They're about pushing Zionism.

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But that's all I know about him.

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Anyway, he said,

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you should get my friend Gavril to talk about stuff.

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He'd be happy to do it.

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And all I know about you is you're a friend of the Mystery Rabbi

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and you're called Gabriel,

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and that you've got a sub-stack called non-Zionism.

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So that's kind of your position, isn't it?

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You're kind of not pro or anti.

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You're just kind of...

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You want to be out of that particular loop.

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Yeah, that's the idea.

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The idea is to see if it's possible, really.

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Basically, events conspire to make it

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so you feel as a Jew you have to have an opinion.

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And I, well, I have opinions, shall we say, aside.

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And the blog is, you know, a stab at what it might look like

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to not have a side, and that does be...

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And before we go on, what's your story?

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You've got a very English accent,

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so I'm presuming you were brought up in...

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Because you're now in the Golden Heights, aren't you?

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Right, so I was born on the South Coast of England, near Brighton.

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I went to a normal English school.

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I went to a normal English university,

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where I met our mystery rabbi friend.

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And I was brought up more at religious, you might say.

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I became more religious at university.

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And then I lived for a few years

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in an ultra-Orthodox, anti-Zionist community.

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And then, through various media,

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I went to the other end of things.

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I became a religious Zionist.

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And based on my religious Zionist opinions, I moved to Israel.

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I lived for six years in Jerusalem,

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during which time my religious Zionist opinions crumbled.

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And I moved to the Golden Heights for a quiet life, basically.

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Golden Heights is a nice place.

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It's the safest place in Israel, for various reasons.

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It's a bit like living in Dorset or something.

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The nature is as pretty as Dorset,

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but the houses aren't as pretty as Dorset.

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And that's why I live there. It's not a political statement.

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It's the opposite of a political statement.

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That's interesting. I'll probably never get to see the Golden Heights.

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But I sort of, in my imagination, I imagined the name sounds like...

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It sounds very forbidding.

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I know that the Golden Heights were strategically important,

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because if you control the Golden Heights,

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you can shell Israel, can't you, from the Golden Heights,

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which is why they wanted to capture it

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in either Yom Kippur or the Six-Day War, I forget which.

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Both.

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Both. Right.

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OK. So, you've covered both extremes.

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You must have done time with the IDF.

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No. When we moved to Israel, I was...

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29, I think that's right, something like that.

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And as a result, at the time, the general tendency of the IDF

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was to move to a smaller army, what they call a quasi-professional army,

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as opposed to a conscript army,

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because they thought that the days of large-scale warfare were largely over.

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And they actually never even... They never asked me.

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They just said, oh, you're older than normal age of conscription.

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You're already married, you already have a child.

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And it never came up.

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Some people who immigrate do have to join the army.

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Some people do a kind of token bit of army.

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Some people have to seek an exemption.

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But for me, it literally just never came up.

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It never asked me, and I never asked them.

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So, you've really whetted my appetite now,

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because I'm really interested in hearing both what it was like

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in the ultra-Orthodox, anti-Zionist community

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and your phase when you became massively pro-Zionist.

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So, well, yeah, tell me about the anti-Zionist ones first,

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because I mean, I've heard about this,

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that there are ultra-Orthodox Jews

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who don't believe in the state of Israel.

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They think it's a bad thing.

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I mean, they don't think it's... What's their line?

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Okay, so the traditional view of Orthodox Judaism is against Zionism.

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When Zionism started as a movement in the 1880s,

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originally there was... At the very early stage,

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there was some Orthodox interest.

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But by the time of Herzl,

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the overwhelming majority of European rabbis,

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who at the time were the overwhelming majority of rabbis

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before World War II,

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were very, very much against.

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And it wasn't really an ultra-Orthodox or Orthodox issue.

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It was just Orthodox Judaism was against Zionism.

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And the goodest Israel, which was the umbrella group

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for Orthodox Judaism in Europe at the time,

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until various splinter groups, to their right,

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or more ultra-Orthodox groups, split off.

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Their definition, they were defined by the opposition to Zionism.

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So that's the traditional view.

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And the traditional view is very...

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It has three... There are three ways of putting it,

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and they can go together, or you can emphasise one point or the other.

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One is that the Zionist movement is secular.

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It was always led by secular Jews.

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Or the very most somewhat religious Jews.

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But that was earlier on.

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By the time of Herzl, it was really a secular movement.

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And who are you to say that you are now the leaders of the Jews?

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We've had our religion for 3,500 years, or whatever you want to say.

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But certainly a long time. It's been this way.

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We want to continue with the Judaism we know.

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We're not interested in your new Zionist solution to the Jewish problem.

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That's wonderful with Orthodox anti-Zionism.

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Another one is the idea that it's forbidden for Jews to have a state.

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Even if, hypothetically, the Zionist movement was religious, or pro-religious,

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it would still be forbidden for the Jews to have a state.

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Because we're in exile for our various sins.

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We'll know when the exile is over, prophetically, or through miracles, or whatever.

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This has not happened.

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And therefore it's forbidden for us to have a state.

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And there's a concept, which is Google-able, called the Three Oaths.

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Which is based upon a Midrashic exegesis of some parts of the Song of Songs.

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Which basically says there are three oaths.

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And the Gentiles have an oath not to oppress us too much.

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And we have an oath not to rebel against the Gentiles.

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We're supposed to be subject to their rule for the time being,

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until the time of the Messiah.

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And then we won't be.

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So that's another form of anti-Zionism that it represents a rebellion against divinely composed exile.

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And the third form of orthodox anti-Zionism, which doesn't necessarily have to be orthodox,

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but it can be orthodox, is that it's just a bad idea.

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What do you mean?

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You're going to travel all the way to Ottoman Palestine and fight the Nases.

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What are you going to do?

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You're going to rebel against the Ottoman Empire.

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What are you talking about?

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Where are your armies?

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Where are your anything?

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That was the mainstream anti-Zionist argument originally.

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And orthodox people participated in that just as non-orthodox Jews participated in that.

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So that's the basis of orthodox anti-Zionism.

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And then what happened is that the success of the state of Israel in existing

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and winning wars against its enemies.

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And then the last of those arguments was no longer considered valid.

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Okay, at the time, and Zionism might seem a bit of a wacky idea, but it worked.

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So there's no real or at least it was fought.

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There was no real reason to oppose Zionism on those grounds.

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The idea that it's a rebellion against God

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is difficult to maintain for many people because if it's a rebellion against God,

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why did it work?

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As in, if you believe that God runs the world and you don't want to go in for some kind of

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dualist theology in which the devil has whatever evil entity has the ability to run rampage,

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you would have to say that, okay, Zionism, it's a rebellion against God.

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Well, we know what happens when people rebel against God.

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They fail, they will be crushed, and that will be that.

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And the fact is they were crushed, they were very successful.

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So therefore maybe it wasn't a rebellion against God.

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And the first form of anti-Zionism, the fact that it's just,

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it's just, it's not religious or anti-religious has ebbed because the state of Israel is a lot

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less secular than it used to be.

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I don't think any reasonable person would say the state of Israel today is anti-religious

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or persecutes religious people.

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There are people who say that, but it's not a reasonable thing to say.

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And therefore, most religious Jews have come around to one of two positions.

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One is religious Zionism, which we can get to.

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And one is something you might call quasi-non-Zionism,

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not my personal form of non-Zionism, but ultra-Orphodox non-Zionism, which is just,

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look, we don't really understand.

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We were against this, but it seems to have worked.

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It offers us certain concrete benefits, like the ability to live in a land of Israel,

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which for most Orthodox Jews is considered at least desirable, shall we say.

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And this just kind of worked for this thing.

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And that is the mainstream Orthodox position today among non-religious Zionists, I mean,

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the idea that basically, okay, it seems to have got some kind of divine validation.

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Also, the Holocaust happened.

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So that kind of seems, in some sense, a divine invalidation of just kind of being in exile

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and hoping the Gentiles aren't too persecute you.

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So we'll work with this thing.

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And because there's this constant tension and worse intention with the Arabs around

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and there's terrorist attacks, et cetera, that tends to lead to more of a,

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just to instinctively see the state of Israel and the Israeli army as kind of defending you

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as a Jew, which tends to make you more positively disposed towards it.

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And so the mainstream Orthodox non-religious Zionist position has become,

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they think, a very, very pro-Israel.

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So it's non-Zionists, they won't say they're Zionists,

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and they don't idolize Herzl or have any particularly, they don't think about Zionist history

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or care about it, but they just like Israel.

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They think Israel's good.

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The IDF protects us.

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You know, they like to go to the Western Wall in Jerusalem, et cetera.

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So that would be the mainstream Orthodox position among non-religious Zionists.

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There is a smaller group who adhere to, who maintain the strict anti-Zionist position.

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It used to be the overwhelming majority of Orthodox Judaism.

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And the largest group that do that are called Satmar Khasidim,

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who were descendants of a Hungarian group who set themselves up in New York after World War II,

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and there's a large Satmar community in London, in North London.

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And basically what they say is, it's all a test.

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That's what they say.

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So it looks like the state of Israel has been very successful.

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It looks like they've received some kind of divine validation,

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but really it's just a test.

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And you just wait and see because everything's going to turn out a big disaster.

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But it's very hard to straddle that line without falling into kind of

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Naturi Carter.

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And I'm sure probably a lot of your viewers have heard of Naturi Carter

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because they make a big song and dance about themselves.

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They have a social media.

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They have a YouTube account.

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They go to demonstrations.

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And they're the ones who you see who they walk around with Palestinian flags

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and they denounce the state of Israel every time they can

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on the world media, et cetera.

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So they are a very small group.

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And they consider themselves to be really the only authentic Jews today.

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And they consider even mainstream Satmar Hasidim to be some kind of sell-out.

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The Satmar Hasidic position is we oppose Zionism as a rebellion

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against our divinely mandated exile,

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but that doesn't mean that we support Palestinian nationalism.

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We have no position on who should rule the Holy Land.

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It could be the Ottoman Empire.

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It could be the British Mandate.

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It could be whoever.

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But we have no interest in seeing the Palestinian Liberation Organization

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take over Palestine.

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Like it's not our concern.

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And basically they keep it up with a certain amount of stress

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by being very, very insular.

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They've built this town in upstate New York called Curious Yol,

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which is kind of Hasidic only.

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They call it a village, but it's 60,000 people now.

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Something like that.

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And they just don't really think about the outside world very much.

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And basically they're just waiting patiently

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until what they believe will happen,

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which is that the state of Israel will collapse

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and they'll be vindicated all along.

17:11.520 --> 17:14.460
That's anti-Zionism, religious anti-Zionism today.

17:15.560 --> 17:16.860
Right. Okay.

17:18.300 --> 17:22.260
And that was the sect that you were part of in the early days?

17:22.280 --> 17:22.620
No, no, no.

17:22.920 --> 17:24.380
So yes and no.

17:24.520 --> 17:27.220
So in Stanford Hill in North London,

17:27.760 --> 17:31.680
there's every single type of Orthodox Jewish group is represented.

17:33.140 --> 17:36.960
Satmar are, they're not a majority, but they are the largest group.

17:37.140 --> 17:39.160
There may be 20% of the community in Stanford Hill,

17:39.220 --> 17:39.760
something like that.

17:40.200 --> 17:42.500
And they exert a lot of dominance there.

17:43.580 --> 17:45.500
So I'll give an example of something that happened

17:45.500 --> 17:46.340
when I was living there.

17:47.920 --> 17:51.060
The Israeli, there's a Jewish ambulance service called

17:53.280 --> 17:53.760
Hatsala.

17:55.140 --> 17:56.400
They raise money.

17:56.400 --> 18:00.380
They have their own ambulance and they serve the local community

18:00.380 --> 18:02.060
and they work with NHS, et cetera.

18:03.140 --> 18:04.800
And they're a respectable charity

18:04.800 --> 18:06.660
and they invited the Israeli ambassador,

18:07.820 --> 18:09.980
what's her name, that woman, I don't recall,

18:10.980 --> 18:13.300
to just do a normal photo shop, whatever.

18:15.540 --> 18:17.880
And then they had to apologize to the community

18:17.880 --> 18:21.900
because Satmar got very upset.

18:22.240 --> 18:23.380
They made a big stone of dance about it.

18:23.380 --> 18:25.340
So they had to take out an ad in all the local newspapers.

18:25.340 --> 18:27.300
We're very sorry for offending you.

18:27.560 --> 18:29.820
We, of course, we don't adore Zionism, whatever.

18:30.460 --> 18:32.160
So that's how it goes in that community.

18:32.440 --> 18:34.760
I, the strict anti-Zionists are not a majority,

18:34.780 --> 18:36.960
but they kind of throw their weight around enough

18:36.960 --> 18:40.780
to maintain some kind of distancing

18:40.780 --> 18:44.580
from any kind of pro-Israel viewpoint.

18:45.260 --> 18:46.780
And at times of stress,

18:47.220 --> 18:49.660
which usually the main thing is the draft issue,

18:49.760 --> 18:51.760
the idea of the ultra-Orthodox draft question, Israel,

18:52.360 --> 18:53.660
they're able to kind of mobilize

18:54.360 --> 18:56.500
larger parts of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community

18:56.500 --> 19:00.220
get to be more assertively anti-Zionist

19:01.700 --> 19:03.780
because they're able to portray it as a threat.

19:04.360 --> 19:07.700
So the ultra-Orthodox community as a whole kind of,

19:08.020 --> 19:08.640
they kind of waver.

19:08.820 --> 19:10.840
So around about the time of October the 7th,

19:10.840 --> 19:12.080
they were feeling a lot more pro-Israel

19:12.080 --> 19:13.980
because there was this natural kind of solidarity

19:13.980 --> 19:14.660
with other Jews.

19:14.880 --> 19:15.900
The idea that they're all under threat,

19:16.080 --> 19:16.660
we're all in this together.

19:17.240 --> 19:18.980
When the draft issue comes up,

19:19.100 --> 19:21.440
they switched to being in a more anti-Israel

19:21.440 --> 19:23.480
position because they see it as more of a threat to their community.

19:23.840 --> 19:25.180
I wasn't in Satmar itself,

19:25.240 --> 19:26.540
but I was part of this broader community

19:26.540 --> 19:29.140
which was heavily influenced by Satmar.

19:30.420 --> 19:34.380
Right. I had a girlfriend who used to live in Stamford Hill.

19:34.460 --> 19:35.060
I bet you'd know it.

19:35.560 --> 19:37.300
I hope she wasn't a Satmar Khasid.

19:37.620 --> 19:38.040
She wasn't.

19:38.380 --> 19:39.020
Ravensdale Road?

19:39.680 --> 19:40.240
Of course, yes.

19:40.640 --> 19:40.960
Yeah, yeah.

19:41.100 --> 19:41.260
Okay.

19:41.660 --> 19:43.260
So obviously I used to see,

19:44.300 --> 19:45.580
she used to call them Frommers.

19:45.620 --> 19:46.000
Is that right?

19:46.340 --> 19:48.560
Is that the name for the Frommers?

19:48.580 --> 19:50.120
Yeah, yeah, that's a normal term.

19:50.770 --> 19:51.920
Is she a Jewish girl?

19:52.460 --> 19:52.960
No, she wasn't.

19:53.300 --> 19:56.960
I suppose you can't live in Ravensdale Road

19:56.960 --> 20:00.400
without becoming familiar with the culture.

20:01.260 --> 20:02.660
I mean, it was quite interesting.

20:02.940 --> 20:05.400
I used to like looking at the different hats,

20:06.540 --> 20:10.120
and there were sort of broad brim, sort of fedora type hats.

20:10.820 --> 20:11.870
And then there were the kind of

20:13.680 --> 20:18.160
like woolly or like more Russian looking.

20:18.820 --> 20:20.200
Tell me about the different hats.

20:20.600 --> 20:20.800
Okay.

20:21.160 --> 20:23.700
So there are people who wear normal fedora hats

20:23.700 --> 20:25.500
who are called Lithuanian.

20:25.780 --> 20:26.520
That's how they're known.

20:26.940 --> 20:29.620
Lithuanian, non-Khasidic, another term is Yashivish,

20:29.900 --> 20:32.160
which is one of the two main barges of Orthodox Judaism.

20:32.420 --> 20:34.520
And basically they dress, they wear like a normal suit,

20:35.000 --> 20:37.080
always black, usually without a tie,

20:37.280 --> 20:39.220
and a normal hat, except it's not normal anymore

20:39.220 --> 20:40.100
because people don't wear hats.

20:40.980 --> 20:43.960
But their clothing is basically

20:43.960 --> 20:46.720
what it was normal to wear in Lithuania

20:46.720 --> 20:48.920
a hundred years ago if you were a smart person.

20:49.780 --> 20:50.420
That's them.

20:50.920 --> 20:52.040
And there are then the Khasidin,

20:52.420 --> 20:54.240
which there are lots of different Khasidic sects,

20:55.300 --> 20:56.840
who wear weirder clothes.

20:58.160 --> 21:00.340
It's part of their, they're much more,

21:01.000 --> 21:03.780
they're much more separatist in terms of their lifestyle.

21:04.000 --> 21:06.980
So they speak Yiddish as a first language, as a rule,

21:07.040 --> 21:09.120
whereas Lithuanians don't, they tend to speak English

21:09.120 --> 21:11.360
or if they live in Israel, Hebrew as their first language.

21:11.800 --> 21:13.840
So Khasidin speak Yiddish.

21:15.340 --> 21:17.480
They obviously have this weird clothing

21:18.220 --> 21:20.880
and they're just, they're much more segregated

21:20.880 --> 21:23.180
from wider society, whether it's in Israel

21:23.180 --> 21:27.520
or whether it's in a gentile country as a matter of policy.

21:28.140 --> 21:29.700
And so yeah, they're the ones with weird hats.

21:29.800 --> 21:31.600
So they have what's called a furry hat on the Sabbath

21:31.600 --> 21:32.240
or on festivals.

21:32.580 --> 21:34.340
They have a furry hat, which is called a strimal,

21:34.400 --> 21:38.020
which is what the Polish lower nobility used to wear

21:38.460 --> 21:39.380
hundreds of years ago.

21:41.080 --> 21:43.340
And on other days, they have other types of hats,

21:43.340 --> 21:47.720
a kind of weird, Jew-only hat, which it's very complicated.

21:48.420 --> 21:49.740
You probably don't want to know what the details are.

21:49.940 --> 21:51.760
It might not be worth it, but basically it depends,

21:51.880 --> 21:54.680
which hat you wear depends on which Hasidic sect you are,

21:54.760 --> 21:58.480
but also which wing of that Hasidic sect you are.

21:58.680 --> 22:00.820
So some of them indicate you're,

22:00.900 --> 22:03.100
if you're like more of a business-minded person,

22:03.960 --> 22:05.480
you wear a particular type of hat,

22:05.520 --> 22:06.880
but if you're a very pious person

22:06.880 --> 22:09.480
who devotes more of your life to piety,

22:09.520 --> 22:10.620
then there's a particular type of hat.

22:10.900 --> 22:12.320
And it all kind of symbolizes things

22:12.320 --> 22:13.920
and it's also a family thing and blah, blah, blah.

22:14.020 --> 22:15.280
And it's extremely, extremely complicated.

22:15.680 --> 22:17.420
I only understand 60s and 60s.

22:17.440 --> 22:19.400
Just let the cat in because it's meowing too much.

22:19.700 --> 22:19.940
No problem.

22:20.440 --> 22:20.960
Yeah, come on in.

22:25.440 --> 22:27.720
No, I like the idea that there are different hats,

22:27.820 --> 22:31.760
depending on what how religious you are,

22:31.940 --> 22:33.480
what rank you are, what...

22:33.480 --> 22:37.300
It seems to me that the men get a much better deal

22:37.300 --> 22:37.780
than the women.

22:38.620 --> 22:40.780
The women seem to have to wear

22:40.780 --> 22:43.380
slightly horrible blue,

22:46.140 --> 22:47.020
like unnatural...

22:47.500 --> 22:50.340
Dresses made of what look like unnatural fibers to me.

22:50.580 --> 22:54.020
They don't look like cotton or silk or...

22:54.020 --> 22:54.780
And then wear wigs.

22:55.760 --> 23:00.160
Okay, so in Orthodox Jewish law,

23:00.380 --> 23:01.880
a woman has to cover her hair when she's outside.

23:02.120 --> 23:02.840
So there are different ways.

23:02.960 --> 23:04.280
You can wear a hat, you can wear a scarf.

23:05.560 --> 23:09.260
Wigs is considered the more moderate thing to do

23:09.880 --> 23:11.500
as because women...

23:12.480 --> 23:14.080
Sorry to offend 50% of the audience,

23:14.200 --> 23:15.520
but women tend to be vain.

23:17.000 --> 23:21.020
And many of them find it a burden to have to cover their hair

23:21.020 --> 23:24.700
outside and most Orthodox Jews would say also inside the house.

23:26.340 --> 23:28.920
And so therefore the idea of wearing a wig came up,

23:28.980 --> 23:30.520
which is obviously a loophole.

23:30.900 --> 23:32.720
And among certain groups,

23:32.940 --> 23:34.180
Stamford Hill would be much less this way,

23:34.260 --> 23:35.580
but other in Northwest London,

23:35.720 --> 23:37.000
Hendon, Golders Green, et cetera,

23:37.600 --> 23:39.460
women often wear very, very glamorous wigs

23:39.460 --> 23:41.820
that make them look much more eye-catching,

23:42.140 --> 23:45.280
we might say, than your average woman who's not wearing a wig.

23:45.740 --> 23:46.600
And then there are different ones.

23:46.740 --> 23:47.420
There are more extreme ones.

23:47.660 --> 23:50.280
Stamford Hill is a very extreme place in general.

23:52.340 --> 23:53.680
How long ago was it you were there?

23:54.800 --> 23:56.640
This would have been in the...

23:58.300 --> 23:59.840
This would have been in the 90s.

24:00.320 --> 24:01.400
Okay, so if you go back now,

24:01.480 --> 24:03.220
you might be surprised by how much...

24:03.220 --> 24:04.860
Because the community is much larger than it was

24:04.860 --> 24:06.400
and also much wealthier than it used to be.

24:06.400 --> 24:07.960
You'll be surprised about this whole

24:07.960 --> 24:10.640
Hasidic fashion industry among women has grown up.

24:11.460 --> 24:12.200
And they're very...

24:13.500 --> 24:15.640
One of the things my wife didn't like so much about living there

24:15.640 --> 24:18.360
is actually there's a lot of pressure to dress smart

24:19.580 --> 24:21.780
from the women internally among themselves.

24:22.060 --> 24:25.800
They don't like to doll yourself up,

24:25.900 --> 24:27.480
to always make sure you're whatever.

24:30.300 --> 24:33.420
So again, there are women who are more pious

24:33.420 --> 24:35.320
and therefore they'll just wear a cloth on their head

24:35.320 --> 24:38.740
and kind of black clothes and not make up.

24:38.940 --> 24:40.720
But I mean, a lot of ultra orthodox women

24:40.720 --> 24:42.760
put a lot of time into their appearance,

24:43.300 --> 24:45.360
at least as much, if not more than outside.

24:46.080 --> 24:51.100
I was thinking probably, certainly when I was there,

24:52.080 --> 24:54.140
the women in their wigs and dresses

24:54.140 --> 24:56.740
probably didn't have much of a budget.

24:57.220 --> 25:00.080
So they were probably buying not very good wigs

25:00.080 --> 25:05.180
and not very quality clothes, do you think?

25:05.960 --> 25:08.220
Okay, so again, I'd actually recommend going back

25:08.220 --> 25:09.340
and having a little stroll around.

25:10.300 --> 25:11.220
You know, don't worry, they won't bite.

25:11.840 --> 25:13.940
I think you'd be surprised about how nice

25:13.940 --> 25:15.300
some of the wigs are, the wigs that go

25:15.300 --> 25:16.900
down for £5,000 or more.

25:18.080 --> 25:21.120
It certainly would be a trip down memory lane.

25:22.020 --> 25:24.020
And I would quite like to see the hat.

25:24.240 --> 25:25.500
Did you wear a hat?

25:26.360 --> 25:28.640
I wore like a normal fedora type of hat.

25:29.740 --> 25:32.540
Do you not kind of covet those Russian ones?

25:32.540 --> 25:35.420
No, no, I never, I was never like, I was never,

25:35.720 --> 25:37.520
you said this is a kind of internal thing

25:37.520 --> 25:40.540
about philosophy and observance.

25:40.720 --> 25:42.640
I was never hastilically inclined myself.

25:42.860 --> 25:44.780
I'm not pro-hastilic.

25:45.360 --> 25:47.480
Right. Yeah, okay.

25:47.640 --> 25:50.400
So this brings us to a much bigger question,

25:50.540 --> 25:54.540
which is like, I certainly when I was at university

25:54.540 --> 25:56.780
in the years afterwards, when I lived in London basically,

25:57.580 --> 26:01.340
I would say a very high proportion of my friends,

26:01.340 --> 26:04.020
higher than is represented in the population,

26:04.900 --> 26:06.600
as a percentage of the population, were Jewish.

26:08.140 --> 26:12.600
But they were generally very secular.

26:13.160 --> 26:16.860
I mean, one knew they were Jewish because you just do,

26:17.020 --> 26:19.540
you know, which of your friends are Jewish and which are not.

26:19.780 --> 26:21.860
And you occasionally get nods to it.

26:22.400 --> 26:25.780
But I think if you quizzed them

26:25.780 --> 26:29.440
on what are the tenets of their religious belief,

26:29.440 --> 26:31.820
they would not have had a clue.

26:32.780 --> 26:35.660
Does that make sense to you?

26:36.440 --> 26:38.560
I mean, there are certainly many Jews who are not very religious.

26:39.800 --> 26:41.100
But the majority probably.

26:42.480 --> 26:44.200
Where? Gloverly, worldwide?

26:44.640 --> 26:52.520
Well, I suppose we're talking about in Britain,

26:52.640 --> 26:56.240
which is what I know, but I would imagine America is similar,

26:56.440 --> 26:56.880
I don't know.

26:56.880 --> 26:59.720
But you tell me, I'm asking actually, I'm curious.

27:00.100 --> 27:02.480
Okay, so traditionally, Britain is a bit unusual.

27:02.760 --> 27:05.840
Britain had a model which is quite similar to Anglican Christianity,

27:06.600 --> 27:12.160
in that the majority of Jews in 1990, but even more so in 1970,

27:12.360 --> 27:13.880
were members of an Orthodox synagogue.

27:15.020 --> 27:18.560
And they would go maybe once a month, maybe once a week,

27:18.600 --> 27:21.260
if they were more into it, maybe twice a year,

27:21.340 --> 27:22.180
if they were less into it.

27:23.760 --> 27:28.660
But in their everyday lives, they were not very observant,

27:28.760 --> 27:31.100
which is not the case in America.

27:31.280 --> 27:34.420
Sorry, in America, the vast majority of Jews, until very recently,

27:34.980 --> 27:38.840
were members of either the reform or what's called the conservative movement,

27:38.840 --> 27:41.560
which is a bit of a misnomer because they're very, very liberal.

27:44.800 --> 27:46.960
But in Britain, traditionally, most Jews,

27:48.020 --> 27:51.380
the philosopher Isaiah Berlin once put it,

27:51.380 --> 27:54.180
and something that is very recognizable concept in English Judaism,

27:54.340 --> 27:56.820
he said, the synagogue I don't go to is Orthodox.

27:57.960 --> 28:02.720
And that was the Judaism of most people.

28:02.880 --> 28:06.760
And for example, I remember once, we were probably more religious

28:06.760 --> 28:09.240
than the average English Jew, but certainly not very religious.

28:09.440 --> 28:12.200
And I remember once, I was at school, there was this other girl,

28:12.360 --> 28:13.740
and I had no idea what she was Jewish.

28:15.280 --> 28:17.720
And then I found out, and she mentioned she'd had a bat mitzvah.

28:18.160 --> 28:20.160
And she mentioned that her bat mitzvah

28:21.900 --> 28:23.600
she'd been called up and she'd read from the Torah,

28:24.160 --> 28:26.120
which is something you can't, in an Orthodox synagogue,

28:26.380 --> 28:29.060
there's no such thing as a woman getting up to read from the Torah.

28:29.260 --> 28:33.620
They sit in a separate part of the room, behind some small barrier, etc., like Muslims.

28:35.340 --> 28:37.840
And I remember at the time, I was just like disgusted,

28:38.280 --> 28:39.180
what are you talking about?

28:39.260 --> 28:41.080
You're a girl and you can't go out to read from the Torah.

28:41.680 --> 28:44.900
But I wasn't, you know, there were huge areas of Jewish law

28:44.900 --> 28:45.940
that I didn't observe myself.

28:46.320 --> 28:48.860
But in terms of the synagogue and the ritual side of it,

28:48.860 --> 28:52.980
to the extent that we kept it, we kept it very much on an Orthodox Jewish model.

28:53.220 --> 28:57.100
So back in 1990, I would imagine these guys, you knew,

28:58.460 --> 29:01.780
if they ever went to a synagogue, most likely the synagogue they went to

29:01.780 --> 29:04.180
was an Orthodox synagogue, where they would pray in Hebrew,

29:04.980 --> 29:07.360
in the Reform synagogue often they pray in the vernacular language.

29:08.420 --> 29:12.480
And where, you know, Orthodox Jewish law is followed

29:12.480 --> 29:15.160
for the duration that you're in the synagogue and then outside it's not.

29:15.160 --> 29:20.640
A very common thing that an English Jews do is they kind of they keep kosher a bit.

29:21.640 --> 29:27.000
So the norm that I knew of really growing up was, you know, you eat wherever you want,

29:27.020 --> 29:27.920
but you eat vegetarians.

29:28.080 --> 29:29.860
So you don't eat non-kosher meat, but you're not worried.

29:31.800 --> 29:34.820
You have no idea what's going on in the kitchen, what got mixed up with what.

29:35.280 --> 29:37.480
So probably you're eating non-kosher, but, you know,

29:38.400 --> 29:41.000
you do the minimum, you don't order a steak, you know.

29:41.180 --> 29:43.440
Or the next level down is you would order a steak,

29:43.500 --> 29:44.620
but you wouldn't order a pork shop.

29:44.620 --> 29:48.660
These are the kind of, that's what English Jewry used to be.

29:49.360 --> 29:52.420
Nowadays English Jewries are very different because basically what happened is that kind

29:52.420 --> 29:54.480
of quasi-Anglican model collapsed.

29:56.680 --> 29:59.540
A lot of people went one of different ways.

29:59.820 --> 30:02.420
Either they just blended into the general population

30:04.400 --> 30:09.960
and dropped Jewish observance altogether, or they moved to Israel,

30:10.420 --> 30:12.220
which is something that's happened.

30:12.480 --> 30:14.080
Yeah, it's quite common and it's becoming more common.

30:15.180 --> 30:17.820
Or they joined the growing ultra-Orthodox movement,

30:19.460 --> 30:21.340
which, even when I was a boy,

30:21.860 --> 30:24.880
ultra-Orthodoxy was considered like a very, very fringe thing.

30:25.020 --> 30:27.240
I remember also, I remember the first time I ever saw a Hasidic Jew,

30:27.560 --> 30:30.080
we were in London, I looked to my mother,

30:30.300 --> 30:31.800
what on earth is that? What have I just seen?

30:34.220 --> 30:36.880
But nowadays the community has massively expanded,

30:37.800 --> 30:39.340
to some extent because of people joining,

30:39.460 --> 30:42.180
but also because of, they have a very high birth rate.

30:42.900 --> 30:50.120
And something close to half of Jewish children today under the age of 10

30:50.680 --> 30:51.860
are now ultra-Orthodox.

30:52.220 --> 30:54.220
So the Jewish community of the future

30:54.900 --> 30:59.540
is going to look totally, every Jewish stereotype that you know,

30:59.760 --> 31:02.280
like very interested in secular, very interested in education,

31:02.480 --> 31:04.160
that's the big Jewish stereotype, right?

31:05.780 --> 31:08.820
Or vote Labour Party as a master, of course.

31:09.020 --> 31:11.960
That used to be a Jewish stereotype until about 15 years.

31:11.960 --> 31:14.400
Become lawyers or doctors or...

31:14.400 --> 31:17.860
Yeah, all of those things is the exact opposite

31:17.860 --> 31:20.440
of what the stereotype of a Jew in England will be

31:22.680 --> 31:23.760
in 50 years time.

31:25.980 --> 31:30.960
So Hasidim also are quite, they're quite money-minded,

31:31.140 --> 31:32.980
all Jews, that's something that's common to a lot of Jews,

31:33.320 --> 31:35.180
but they don't go for the professions,

31:35.360 --> 31:36.300
they didn't become doctors and lawyers,

31:37.620 --> 31:38.840
they're really into real estate.

31:38.840 --> 31:42.300
The kind of, the dream of every Hasidic Jew,

31:42.620 --> 31:44.660
except the really pious ones who just want to learn Torah all day,

31:44.720 --> 31:46.140
but the dream of your average Hasidic Jew

31:46.660 --> 31:51.240
is to own a row of properties and flip them and stuff.

31:51.540 --> 31:53.240
And I think, for example, people don't notice

31:53.240 --> 31:55.100
like Canary Wharf, for a long time,

31:55.140 --> 31:56.960
was owned by a Hasidic Jew in Stafford Hill.

31:58.000 --> 31:59.280
I think I did know that.

31:59.820 --> 32:00.520
I can't remember why.

32:00.700 --> 32:01.960
Yeah, okay.

32:04.120 --> 32:06.940
So it's changing quite dramatically.

32:07.840 --> 32:11.880
So, sorry, you said ultra-orthodox for the orthodox.

32:12.780 --> 32:16.340
Is there an accepted definition of the two?

32:17.640 --> 32:20.340
Okay, so one is just by dress.

32:20.680 --> 32:22.420
As in, if you were all black as a man,

32:22.620 --> 32:23.800
you're probably ultra-orthodox.

32:24.780 --> 32:27.620
That's one difference.

32:28.140 --> 32:29.620
One difference, it used to be a difference,

32:29.720 --> 32:31.400
but it's kind of, it's kind of feigning a little bit.

32:31.520 --> 32:32.820
It used to be the attitude to Zionism.

32:33.260 --> 32:35.240
As in, after the state of Israel was formed,

32:35.240 --> 32:38.680
the ones who maintained an anti-Zionist

32:38.680 --> 32:40.700
or non-Zionist position, who, for example,

32:40.860 --> 32:42.740
they don't mark Israel independence day.

32:42.900 --> 32:44.260
That would be a key test.

32:44.640 --> 32:46.200
Then there's no marking of Israel independence day.

32:46.580 --> 32:48.660
That would mark you as ultra-orthodox,

32:48.800 --> 32:50.480
whereas a normal orthodox synagogue

32:51.000 --> 32:53.260
would in some way mark Israel independence day.

32:54.580 --> 32:55.660
That was one difference.

32:56.460 --> 32:57.320
And the other difference is just,

32:58.020 --> 33:01.640
it's a gradient of how strict you are

33:01.640 --> 33:02.720
about fulfilling Jewish law.

33:02.880 --> 33:04.560
And in that one, it's quite hard to pick a

33:05.240 --> 33:06.480
it's quite hard to pick the boundary.

33:06.680 --> 33:07.480
Where does orthodox end?

33:07.580 --> 33:10.380
Where does ultra-orthodox begin?

33:10.800 --> 33:13.100
But you know, you know where the extremes are, so to speak.

33:13.460 --> 33:14.920
Right, right, okay.

33:14.980 --> 33:15.500
Oh, another one.

33:15.620 --> 33:16.740
Sorry, and actually a very, very big one

33:16.740 --> 33:17.960
is attitude to secular education.

33:18.340 --> 33:22.120
So in orthodox Judaism, non-ultra-orthodox Judaism,

33:22.340 --> 33:24.540
secular education is considered good.

33:25.100 --> 33:26.240
You know, it's not the main thing in life maybe,

33:26.260 --> 33:27.820
but it's fine, it's good, it's whatever.

33:28.400 --> 33:30.740
Ultra-orthodox Jews are to some extent,

33:31.280 --> 33:32.260
it depends which group,

33:32.260 --> 33:35.620
but to some extent anti-secular education.

33:35.920 --> 33:37.120
They might say it's allowed

33:37.680 --> 33:38.820
because you need to get a job,

33:38.960 --> 33:39.700
you need to get on in life,

33:39.860 --> 33:41.100
or it's allowed because of government,

33:41.100 --> 33:42.520
but they're in principle opposed

33:42.520 --> 33:43.900
to the concept of secular education.

33:44.140 --> 33:46.040
That's part of the definition of being ultra-orthodox.

33:47.600 --> 33:50.240
Right, so do you think we should,

33:50.740 --> 33:57.240
shall we do your Zionist phase of your life next?

33:57.500 --> 33:59.220
So I want to ask you some

33:59.220 --> 34:02.220
tricksy questions about what it is that Jews actually believe,

34:02.400 --> 34:04.200
and I know it's not that simple,

34:04.220 --> 34:05.860
but we're going to talk about that,

34:05.900 --> 34:10.300
but shall we do, okay, you felt the lure,

34:10.900 --> 34:13.840
you felt the call of Zion.

34:14.780 --> 34:17.380
Is that, by the way, are you sort of,

34:18.260 --> 34:20.140
you mentioned the Torah?

34:21.060 --> 34:23.980
The Torah is what, is that the same as the Pentateuch?

34:24.600 --> 34:27.020
The first, is it the first Bible?

34:27.020 --> 34:29.660
Basically, the Torah can mean one of two things.

34:29.860 --> 34:32.100
It can mean the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible,

34:33.480 --> 34:36.020
or it can mean all of Jewish law.

34:37.020 --> 34:37.580
Those are kind of,

34:39.700 --> 34:41.500
if I say the word Torah in speech,

34:41.760 --> 34:43.180
I might be referring to the first,

34:43.340 --> 34:44.220
or I might be referring to the second.

34:44.780 --> 34:46.100
Right, okay, that's complicated.

34:46.260 --> 34:47.420
It's a bit like Europe and Europe.

34:47.500 --> 34:48.780
You could be talking about the continent,

34:49.000 --> 34:50.600
or you could be talking about the political entity.

34:51.160 --> 34:54.540
Yeah, okay, so we'll come back to that one.

34:54.620 --> 34:56.120
So you felt the lure.

34:56.120 --> 34:57.660
What was it that?

34:59.040 --> 35:01.960
Okay, so basically, for me it was like this.

35:02.180 --> 35:07.260
So I grew up in the traditional English sub-Orthodox environment.

35:07.720 --> 35:09.760
So the synagogue we went to was Orthodox.

35:10.020 --> 35:10.820
The rabbi was Orthodox.

35:11.420 --> 35:13.520
And I was aware that the rabbi kept Jewish law

35:13.520 --> 35:15.400
much more strictly than we did.

35:17.580 --> 35:20.720
But I guess in the same sense that maybe a typical

35:20.720 --> 35:22.520
Roman Catholic looks at his priest

35:22.520 --> 35:24.660
and he doesn't feel any need to be celibate

35:24.660 --> 35:25.820
just because his priest is celibate,

35:25.820 --> 35:27.180
I didn't feel any need to be strictly

35:27.180 --> 35:29.040
observed into the Sabbath just because my rabbi was.

35:30.500 --> 35:33.860
And then during and after university,

35:34.280 --> 35:37.060
I became, first of all, Orthodox and then ultra-Orthodox.

35:37.600 --> 35:40.940
And basically, for me, as a personal experience,

35:41.040 --> 35:42.860
it was the idea that you could keep,

35:43.440 --> 35:44.880
well, basically that was all wrong.

35:45.020 --> 35:46.680
Basically, you keep Judaism 100%.

35:46.680 --> 35:48.580
Whatever Judaism tells you to do,

35:48.660 --> 35:49.680
whatever the Torah tells you to do,

35:49.980 --> 35:51.520
that's what you do, no compromises.

35:52.220 --> 35:53.860
And where I was, the community that I was,

35:53.980 --> 35:54.700
the Oxford Orthodox community,

35:54.700 --> 35:55.500
there's a very strong...

35:58.500 --> 36:02.160
Global warming is a massive con.

36:02.540 --> 36:04.960
There is no evidence whatsoever

36:05.660 --> 36:09.240
that man-made climate change is a problem

36:09.240 --> 36:10.800
that is going to kill us,

36:11.000 --> 36:12.660
that we need to amend our lifestyle

36:12.660 --> 36:13.980
in order to deal with it.

36:14.020 --> 36:15.280
It's a non-existent problem.

36:15.540 --> 36:18.320
But how do you explain this stuff

36:18.320 --> 36:20.740
to your normie friends?

36:20.980 --> 36:24.420
Well, I've just brought out the revised edition

36:24.420 --> 36:28.220
of my 2012 classic book, Water Melons,

36:28.760 --> 36:31.320
which captures the story of how

36:31.840 --> 36:35.020
some really nasty people decided to invent

36:35.020 --> 36:39.380
the global warming scare in order to fleece you,

36:39.780 --> 36:41.060
to take away your freedoms,

36:41.380 --> 36:42.540
to take away your land.

36:43.500 --> 36:44.640
It's a shocking story.

36:45.280 --> 36:46.920
I wrote it, as I say, in...

36:46.920 --> 36:50.700
Well, 2011 actually, the first edition came out.

36:51.080 --> 36:54.200
And it's a snapshot of a particular era

36:54.200 --> 36:59.320
the era when the people behind the climate change scan

36:59.320 --> 37:03.120
got caught red-handed, tinkering with the data,

37:03.640 --> 37:04.920
torturing till it screamed,

37:05.480 --> 37:08.840
in a scandal that I helped christen Climategate.

37:09.280 --> 37:12.520
So I give you the background to the skull jugglery

37:12.520 --> 37:14.920
that went on in these seats of learning,

37:15.120 --> 37:17.660
where these supposed experts were informing us,

37:17.720 --> 37:18.700
we've got to act now.

37:19.260 --> 37:21.500
I rumbled their scan.

37:22.080 --> 37:23.460
I then asked the question,

37:23.460 --> 37:26.040
okay, if it is a scan, who's doing this?

37:26.480 --> 37:27.780
And why?

37:28.280 --> 37:29.300
It's a good story.

37:30.020 --> 37:33.360
I've kept the original book pretty much as is,

37:33.420 --> 37:36.480
but I've written two new chapters,

37:36.720 --> 37:38.740
one at the beginning and one at the end,

37:39.120 --> 37:42.760
explaining how it's even worse than we thought.

37:43.420 --> 37:44.120
I think it's a good...

37:44.120 --> 37:45.200
I think it still stands up.

37:45.320 --> 37:46.600
I think it's a good read.

37:46.920 --> 37:48.640
Obviously, I'm biased, but I'd recommend it.

37:49.060 --> 37:52.480
You can buy it from jamesdellingpole.co.uk

37:53.200 --> 37:54.240
forward slash shop.

37:54.820 --> 37:55.540
But you'll probably find that,

37:55.580 --> 37:57.380
just go to my website and look for it,

37:57.500 --> 37:59.400
jamesdellingpole.co.uk.

38:00.080 --> 38:03.200
And I hope it helps keep you informed

38:03.200 --> 38:06.940
and gives you the material you need to bring around

38:06.940 --> 38:09.940
all those people who are still persuaded that,

38:10.040 --> 38:11.520
oh, it's a disaster.

38:11.720 --> 38:14.000
We must amend our ways and appease the gods,

38:14.120 --> 38:15.020
appease Mother Earth.

38:15.460 --> 38:16.040
Merry day.

38:16.420 --> 38:16.880
It's a scan.

38:20.780 --> 38:22.960
Two days and tells you to do whatever the Torah tells you to do.

38:23.260 --> 38:23.960
That's what you do.

38:24.160 --> 38:24.820
No compromises.

38:25.400 --> 38:27.160
And where I was, the community that I was,

38:27.260 --> 38:27.960
the Oxford Office of Community,

38:28.120 --> 38:31.980
there's a very strong ideology of,

38:32.220 --> 38:34.140
we don't compromise with anything.

38:36.960 --> 38:39.400
But then I start asking myself kind of questions like,

38:40.620 --> 38:41.320
well, wait a second.

38:41.440 --> 38:42.940
There's a whole aspect of the Torah we're not keeping,

38:43.260 --> 38:43.400
right?

38:44.240 --> 38:44.980
There's the temple.

38:46.080 --> 38:46.860
Where's our temple?

38:48.920 --> 38:50.880
There's the concept of just living in Israel,

38:52.240 --> 38:55.260
which according to many people is itself a commandment.

38:56.140 --> 39:00.420
And basically for me, becoming a religious Zionist was the next step.

39:00.640 --> 39:06.940
It was keeping, Judaism with no compromises means going to Israel

39:06.940 --> 39:09.080
and helping to form a state that will have a temple,

39:09.200 --> 39:10.420
that will be a religious theocracy,

39:12.420 --> 39:15.140
where Judaism will be the law of the country,

39:15.660 --> 39:18.740
and it will be like it says it's supposed to be in the Torah,

39:18.840 --> 39:19.220
in the Bible.

39:19.800 --> 39:22.880
That was the ideology that brought me to Israel.

39:24.500 --> 39:25.160
Right, okay.

39:26.480 --> 39:27.860
And I mean, I can see that.

39:28.100 --> 39:32.280
I can see, in the same way my brother's just,

39:32.880 --> 39:35.400
he's converting to orthodoxy.

39:36.780 --> 39:37.000
Oh yeah?

39:37.120 --> 39:37.440
Which one?

39:38.480 --> 39:39.040
Well, in Greek.

39:40.560 --> 39:42.300
I can totally see why.

39:42.680 --> 39:45.540
They observe their fasting more strictly.

39:46.180 --> 39:47.540
Every other day is a fast day.

39:48.940 --> 39:52.340
You have to stand up through their very, very long services and stuff.

39:53.420 --> 39:56.020
It's more committed.

39:56.220 --> 39:58.480
You feel like you're doing it right.

39:59.180 --> 40:02.860
So I totally get the siren lure of that.

40:05.420 --> 40:07.800
And you went out to Israel.

40:08.660 --> 40:09.640
What was it?

40:09.660 --> 40:12.060
Did it sort of, well, you're still living there,

40:12.080 --> 40:17.560
so you can't have hated it, but did it, what your expectations

40:17.560 --> 40:21.100
and how did Israel match them or fail to match them?

40:25.660 --> 40:27.940
So it wasn't so much to failing to match.

40:30.100 --> 40:33.100
I knew that Israel wasn't the country I wanted it to be.

40:33.580 --> 40:35.060
I was coming here to build a temple.

40:35.060 --> 40:38.120
I wasn't under the impression that there was already a temple or something.

40:39.300 --> 40:44.800
I was involved in certain religious movements

40:44.800 --> 40:47.720
that were trying to make certain changes to the way things are done.

40:50.040 --> 40:53.340
And I was not very successful in any of these endeavors.

40:58.220 --> 41:02.620
And I became demoralized with the whole thing.

41:02.620 --> 41:06.080
And first of all,

41:08.840 --> 41:12.240
once I came to the conclusion that my dreams were never going to happen,

41:13.220 --> 41:17.260
then you open yourself up to seeing, well, wait a second, this country is kind of a dump.

41:18.520 --> 41:20.940
Obviously, the nature here, what's left of it is very beautiful.

41:21.820 --> 41:23.080
And there are beautiful places.

41:23.420 --> 41:26.160
But when you look around, much like Britain,

41:26.620 --> 41:30.320
everything that's nice was built before 1945, right?

41:31.360 --> 41:34.620
But the difference is in Britain, there's still quite a lot of stuff that was built before 1945.

41:35.320 --> 41:37.020
That's A, whereas here there wasn't.

41:37.120 --> 41:39.820
I don't want to kind of come off as some silly Zionist who says,

41:39.900 --> 41:42.000
this country was completely empty and we came and there was no one here.

41:42.260 --> 41:44.680
But it was a very undeveloped backwater.

41:44.860 --> 41:47.840
There's not a lot to some, but there's not a lot of stuff here from before.

41:49.140 --> 41:50.620
It doesn't have a rich archipelago heritage.

41:50.840 --> 41:53.860
But the main point is everything we, the state of Israel built,

41:54.760 --> 41:56.980
it is bad. It's a really ugly country.

41:57.520 --> 42:00.520
There's actually the early Zionists in the 1920s.

42:00.520 --> 42:03.520
There are some old parts of Tel Aviv that they built that are really quite nice.

42:03.960 --> 42:05.940
And theoretically they could have continued on that vein

42:06.600 --> 42:09.600
and built a nice country, but they didn't.

42:09.800 --> 42:14.260
So for me, just separate from everything else, I'm very,

42:15.200 --> 42:19.420
you know, I'm a kind of, I was very into Roger Scruton and that kind of stuff

42:19.420 --> 42:20.820
and the importance of urbanism.

42:22.440 --> 42:26.800
And I realized that Israelis don't care about that stuff at all.

42:27.520 --> 42:28.460
But it's more than that.

42:28.620 --> 42:32.040
It's specifically the right wing of Israel, the group that I identified with.

42:32.680 --> 42:35.920
They're the group who cares least of all, as in the ones who are most

42:37.940 --> 42:41.600
in theory about, wow, this is the most beautiful, this is God's home on earth.

42:42.060 --> 42:43.560
When you said, okay, so it's God's home on earth.

42:43.660 --> 42:45.760
So maybe don't litter everywhere.

42:47.900 --> 42:49.900
Or, you know, we may get to the issue with the Arabs.

42:49.980 --> 42:52.220
You want to kick out all the Arabs because it's so important, right?

42:53.420 --> 42:56.960
Well, maybe don't just build some like concrete monstrosity all over it.

42:56.960 --> 42:57.660
Once you kick them out.

42:58.140 --> 43:01.220
And I just got sick of kind of bumping my head into a brick wall.

43:02.860 --> 43:06.420
And I just came to reject the whole thing.

43:06.860 --> 43:10.560
And once I did, I can see, then I started reading more about the history

43:10.560 --> 43:11.520
of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

43:12.840 --> 43:16.380
And in a way, it's kind of a bit, it's silly to say it, but it's just true.

43:16.940 --> 43:19.540
Obviously, it turns out when I read into it, it's a bit more complicated

43:19.540 --> 43:22.300
than I thought at first, having only heard one side of the story.

43:25.360 --> 43:31.480
I would say that when I first started, my opinion of the Israeli side was like a 10,

43:31.600 --> 43:34.440
10 out of 10, whereas my opinion of the Palestinians was like 3 out of 10.

43:34.900 --> 43:38.440
After reading about the conflict, my opinion of the Israelis went down to like a 4.

43:38.880 --> 43:40.780
And my opinion of the Palestinians went down to a 0.

43:41.080 --> 43:44.340
So I didn't become more pro-Palestinian as a result.

43:44.940 --> 43:47.980
But I did realize that it was a lot more complicated than that.

43:50.340 --> 43:55.260
And I live here because since one of our children was born in England,

43:55.380 --> 43:59.420
but the other one, he grew up here basically, and our other children were born here.

44:00.880 --> 44:03.580
We live in a Golan Heights and life is fine as far as it goes.

44:05.420 --> 44:09.880
Also England is like, you know, England is falling apart.

44:11.920 --> 44:16.160
It's probably like the worst, it's not the worst country in Europe,

44:16.160 --> 44:17.180
but it's the most hopeless.

44:17.840 --> 44:18.560
Would you agree with that?

44:18.940 --> 44:20.220
England, yeah.

44:21.540 --> 44:28.520
It's hard to say because I don't travel everywhere as I'd like to, but I would say

44:28.520 --> 44:34.760
certainly if you were to judge, for example, by use the state of our roads as a metric.

44:37.660 --> 44:42.980
When I went overland through Africa in 1984, I encountered roads like this.

44:42.980 --> 44:48.520
I never imagined that this would become the norm in England in the future.

44:49.000 --> 44:50.660
The roads are so bad.

44:50.900 --> 44:56.420
Even A roads now have huge potholes in them, which don't get fixed.

44:56.560 --> 45:00.300
And if it's night or if it's raining, you don't see them.

45:00.400 --> 45:04.660
So the amount of damage that is being done for everyone's cars,

45:04.980 --> 45:08.460
and nothing's being done about it, and nobody's really complaining enough about it.

45:09.820 --> 45:12.840
So that, yeah, that kind of thing, I think you're right.

45:12.960 --> 45:14.820
So my other option is to move back to England.

45:15.140 --> 45:15.920
That would be the obvious.

45:16.160 --> 45:18.420
I've got no real reason to do that right here.

45:18.920 --> 45:20.640
So what do I want for this country?

45:20.920 --> 45:23.040
Well, I would like it to be as good as country as possible.

45:23.680 --> 45:26.780
I would like for it not to be always at war with its neighbors, if possible.

45:29.600 --> 45:32.940
And look, the blog, I mean, the blog is only part of my life, you know.

45:33.100 --> 45:37.880
Most of my life is either working or, you know, holding the baby or whatever.

45:39.060 --> 45:40.300
You know, I run this blog.

45:40.520 --> 45:43.240
I devote maybe a day, half a day, depending on the week to it.

45:43.780 --> 45:48.000
And I just try and promote the idea that, look, we are where we are.

45:49.700 --> 45:53.880
We got to where we are, in most cases, by having some rather unrealistic ideas.

45:54.540 --> 45:56.540
One of those unrealistic ideas is really designism,

45:56.640 --> 45:58.300
but there's a whole lot of other unrealistic ideas.

45:59.420 --> 46:00.740
It could be a lot better.

46:00.960 --> 46:01.640
It could be a lot worse.

46:02.320 --> 46:03.580
Let's try and make it as good as possible.

46:03.580 --> 46:11.620
And let's, my message to Jews is, you know, try and like, chill out a bit.

46:12.200 --> 46:13.480
Try and be a bit less intense.

46:14.800 --> 46:18.620
You're putting a lot of people off to some degree.

46:19.260 --> 46:19.960
Some of that's justified.

46:20.180 --> 46:23.280
Some of it's not justified, but even in a sense, it's not justified.

46:23.440 --> 46:24.900
The way you're handling it is not working.

46:25.820 --> 46:27.040
So I write an article.

46:27.240 --> 46:27.720
I write articles.

46:28.020 --> 46:31.220
Most of my articles are, whatever, it's just really what's on my mind.

46:31.220 --> 46:38.840
And the theme is basically like, Jews should manage their affairs better

46:39.460 --> 46:41.760
for our benefit and everyone else's benefit.

46:43.280 --> 46:50.900
I was really interested in what you were saying about the architectural ugliness.

46:51.760 --> 46:57.100
And I was thinking that, presumably, was a kind of ideological decision that was made.

46:57.300 --> 46:59.740
It's like, yeah, we're about the future.

46:59.740 --> 47:01.040
And we're militaristic.

47:01.220 --> 47:03.880
We don't care about Ponzi aesthetics.

47:04.300 --> 47:06.760
We're going to build a country for the...

47:07.400 --> 47:12.900
Was that a sort of tied in with the sort of brutalism in architecture generally

47:12.900 --> 47:14.300
and sort of the modern...

47:15.920 --> 47:20.000
So there definitely was, in the first few decades of the state of Israel,

47:20.260 --> 47:26.200
it was dominated by socialists and they had typical socialist ideas about everything.

47:26.200 --> 47:31.500
And definitely one of those ideas was this idea that ornament is unnecessary.

47:32.060 --> 47:33.500
Maybe it's even harmful in some way.

47:33.880 --> 47:36.560
And they built a lot of bad stuff.

47:37.340 --> 47:41.260
And when I came over, I knew a lot about a lot of problems with Israel.

47:41.460 --> 47:46.520
And what I was thinking at the time and what a lot of people I know and still

47:46.520 --> 47:48.700
figure is, yes, fine, there's a lot of problems with Israel.

47:48.740 --> 47:52.000
But those problems come from the old Israel that was run by the socialists.

47:52.500 --> 47:53.820
That Israel is collapsing.

47:53.820 --> 47:56.560
There is a new Israel that's much more religious, much more traditional.

47:58.420 --> 48:02.420
And therefore, things are going to get better, which would be amazing if it was true.

48:02.640 --> 48:05.560
The problem is, it's getting worse.

48:06.220 --> 48:10.660
As in, the left are not in power in this country.

48:11.200 --> 48:11.840
It's not a thing.

48:13.020 --> 48:16.060
They haven't run a government since the 1990s.

48:18.440 --> 48:21.180
You know, there's some kind of deep state like there is everywhere,

48:21.180 --> 48:24.580
which is a bit more leftist, maybe an elected government, but not really.

48:25.220 --> 48:32.580
The fact is, the right in this country is very chuddy to use a word that your

48:34.160 --> 48:35.440
younger viewers might know.

48:35.780 --> 48:36.440
It's a chud right.

48:37.400 --> 48:44.780
And they care even less about aesthetics than the old left did because they're driven

48:45.340 --> 48:50.440
by the most kind of pro aspects of society.

48:52.380 --> 48:56.280
And some people just have kind of ugly spirits.

48:56.700 --> 48:57.920
And so they manifest ugliness.

48:59.400 --> 49:03.780
What's really bad about this country is it's not just when they build something cheap

49:03.780 --> 49:04.440
and it looks chubby.

49:04.640 --> 49:06.620
It's when they actually have some money to throw a project.

49:06.900 --> 49:07.620
It's even worse.

49:10.180 --> 49:12.920
What, I mean, it's also tacky and bling or what?

49:13.680 --> 49:13.880
Yes.

49:14.300 --> 49:17.800
One thing that is, yes, we have this kind of middle east, quasi middle eastern

49:17.800 --> 49:24.740
aesthetic, which was introduced by the middle eastern Jews who came here,

49:24.980 --> 49:27.920
which is very much like a kind of Pakistani vape shop kind of vibe,

49:28.680 --> 49:29.800
to put it in English terms.

49:30.180 --> 49:30.680
So that's one thing.

49:30.720 --> 49:31.380
That's a vape shop.

49:32.520 --> 49:35.740
And then, and then there's this, and then on top of that, there's this kind of

49:35.740 --> 49:41.740
more religious Zionist vibe, which is it's based upon this view that kind of

49:41.740 --> 49:43.660
we have to have our own Jewish style of architecture.

49:43.660 --> 49:48.080
Anything that looks like anything like French architecture or Islamic architecture,

49:48.180 --> 49:50.960
that would be the worst thing in the world for these people, that's bad.

49:51.080 --> 49:52.820
So they have to come up with some new style of architecture.

49:53.420 --> 49:56.700
It's just the problem is that all the good styles of architecture have already been taken.

49:57.120 --> 49:59.380
They're just there aren't, human beings have been around for a while.

49:59.480 --> 50:00.020
There isn't anything.

50:00.540 --> 50:06.420
So and the synagogues that these people build are so bizarrely and preposterously

50:06.420 --> 50:11.240
bad that it's almost like they're trying to make it ugly.

50:12.600 --> 50:20.520
And so for me, this is, not everyone has to have architecture as a pet issue.

50:20.960 --> 50:22.760
But for me, architecture is my pet issue.

50:23.200 --> 50:26.020
And so for me, it was personally a thing that really turned me against Israel and said,

50:26.980 --> 50:28.480
yes, Israel is moving to the right.

50:28.720 --> 50:35.380
In some ways, I'm on board with that, you know, family values wise, et cetera, whatever.

50:37.280 --> 50:42.540
But it's not leading to a kind of Roger Scruzan-esque future at all.

50:42.700 --> 50:45.820
It's a kind of, it's a very chuddy thing.

50:45.960 --> 50:55.700
And it's based upon this crude militarism, which I can understand where the militarism

50:55.700 --> 50:56.900
comes from given our situation.

50:57.280 --> 51:00.640
But what I really object to is the fusing of militarism with Judaism.

51:01.560 --> 51:04.500
What I like Israel to do, you want to be militarists, that's fine.

51:04.500 --> 51:05.380
You can be militarists.

51:05.520 --> 51:09.620
But just like don't, don't bring Hanukkah into it.

51:09.900 --> 51:14.720
Like, you know, you want to, you want to, you want to go and blow up Gaza

51:14.720 --> 51:15.980
because you think you've got no choice.

51:16.200 --> 51:17.280
Okay, maybe you don't have a choice.

51:17.460 --> 51:17.760
I don't know.

51:18.020 --> 51:22.040
But don't build, don't bring a big like menorah and like light it

51:22.040 --> 51:24.120
and sing Jewish songs while you're doing it because it's gross.

51:25.220 --> 51:27.760
It looks really bad to the outside world, that's for sure.

51:28.940 --> 51:32.140
And so for me, what one of the things I write about on my blog is

51:33.240 --> 51:37.660
that what's going on with the rise of the right in Israel is a big disaster for,

51:37.720 --> 51:40.300
for Judaism because it's associating it with

51:41.680 --> 51:42.420
Groyperism basically.

51:43.240 --> 51:49.300
Like, look, if I was a Catholic, I would look at Groyperism and I would say,

51:49.340 --> 51:51.180
okay, in some senses, this is a good thing.

51:51.280 --> 51:54.740
It's good to persuade young men not to look at eagles.

51:55.040 --> 51:57.260
Okay, it's good to persuade people to get married, whatever.

51:57.620 --> 52:00.680
But it's not good to associate my religion with just kind of,

52:01.240 --> 52:06.020
you know, crude racial hatred and trolling and misogyny.

52:06.260 --> 52:09.700
Okay, so I look at the Israeli right in the same way.

52:10.620 --> 52:11.920
Fine, some of the things are good.

52:12.140 --> 52:15.720
But it's, I think that's actually a good comparison.

52:16.300 --> 52:19.920
The ascendant trend in Israel was a kind of Jewish Groyperism.

52:21.400 --> 52:24.340
And for the same reason I don't like non-Jewish Groyperism,

52:24.400 --> 52:25.380
I don't like Jewish Groyperism.

52:27.520 --> 52:34.080
Yeah, I think you, you're unfortunate in having the legacy of King David,

52:34.960 --> 52:37.740
who, who, who, if the better or worse was a warrior,

52:39.360 --> 52:44.740
blessed be the Lord, my strength, which teaches my hands to war and my fingers to fight.

52:45.400 --> 52:48.740
You know, I'm sure, I'm sure you know your Psalms, Psalm 144.

52:49.280 --> 52:55.140
So there's that kind of, yeah, we can be like, we can be like we were in David's day

52:55.140 --> 52:57.080
when, when Israel was truly great.

52:58.140 --> 53:00.880
So look, that's definitely a big, that's definitely a big part of it.

53:01.140 --> 53:04.100
There's a big part of ascendant Israeli writing, ideology is this idea.

53:04.440 --> 53:07.460
Okay, we were in exile and we were just, we were scholars,

53:07.780 --> 53:09.240
we were money lenders, we were whatever.

53:09.900 --> 53:11.500
And now that's all over, thank God.

53:11.820 --> 53:15.780
And now we can go back to the true Judaism, which is fighting and stuff.

53:17.240 --> 53:20.320
Look, I'm not immune to the argument, but

53:22.040 --> 53:24.660
look, for a, it was 3,500 years ago.

53:24.840 --> 53:26.500
Okay, you know, some, some things have changed.

53:26.780 --> 53:27.180
All right.

53:28.700 --> 53:34.080
But B, look, if you want to be a Jewish warrior and you want to go out with your sword

53:34.080 --> 53:36.580
and you want to fight a Palestinian with a sword,

53:37.680 --> 53:38.620
okay, go for it.

53:38.860 --> 53:42.060
But you don't get to kind of be this like, I'm a Bronze Age warrior

53:42.560 --> 53:45.880
in an F-15 blowing up a tower block.

53:46.320 --> 53:46.820
Yeah, yeah.

53:46.880 --> 53:49.160
If you want to fight, if you want to, if you want to fight with modern weapons,

53:49.160 --> 53:53.400
you have to fight a modern war like in a modern way.

53:54.080 --> 53:55.980
In this sense, I guess I'm just a bit of a lib.

53:57.580 --> 54:03.880
As in, it's true that international law probably goes a bit too far in kind of

54:03.880 --> 54:05.800
tying the hands of militaries.

54:06.120 --> 54:10.720
And it's open to abuse by kind of bad paramilitary actors who hide themselves among civilians.

54:10.900 --> 54:11.480
All that is true.

54:12.300 --> 54:15.620
But it's also true that, you know, things like here on Israeli right,

54:15.760 --> 54:17.300
and it's not rare here almost every day,

54:17.300 --> 54:19.660
which is just you can just blow up anyone you want.

54:19.800 --> 54:20.200
It's fine.

54:20.520 --> 54:22.020
There's no such thing as international law.

54:22.560 --> 54:23.240
That's wrong.

54:23.940 --> 54:25.000
It's like, it's wrong.

54:25.320 --> 54:29.180
I understand that's how people feel when they've been in a conflict for 70 years.

54:29.480 --> 54:30.200
I do get it.

54:30.540 --> 54:34.020
But I also think that responsible people in a society should resist that.

54:34.900 --> 54:37.940
And I also think the most important thing for me,

54:38.120 --> 54:40.200
maybe it's a bit of a feat that I think this,

54:40.300 --> 54:44.280
but the most important thing for me is to not mix Judaism as a religion in with that.

54:44.280 --> 54:47.800
So let's say, for example, England Dresden.

54:47.920 --> 54:49.340
I don't know where you stand on the Dresden question.

54:49.800 --> 54:51.680
I think it was a terrible war crime.

54:51.900 --> 54:56.600
I think Churchill was committed a terrible satanic blood sacrifice that day.

54:56.680 --> 54:58.560
I think Churchill was basically a wrong one.

54:59.440 --> 55:00.400
I think it was really evil.

55:00.780 --> 55:00.900
Evil.

55:01.320 --> 55:01.460
Okay.

55:02.000 --> 55:08.800
But one thing that is good is that the Archbishop of Canterbury condemned it at the time.

55:09.360 --> 55:14.180
As in, I can understand where England was coming from under the situation,

55:14.840 --> 55:18.960
but even if you kind of, even if you can come up with a defense Dresden,

55:19.080 --> 55:20.760
I think I'm more moderate on the issue myself,

55:21.820 --> 55:25.020
it's good that the church as an institution was the one saying,

55:25.100 --> 55:27.080
whoa, put it back and, you know, dial it down a notch.

55:27.140 --> 55:27.320
Okay.

55:27.680 --> 55:29.920
I think that's the proper role of religion in a society.

55:30.600 --> 55:32.100
It shouldn't, the religion shouldn't be there.

55:32.480 --> 55:36.740
It shouldn't be the religious part of society saying, kill them all, right?

55:37.380 --> 55:45.200
As, you know, there was a particularly egregious example of what you describe in the First World War

55:46.380 --> 55:52.160
when the Bishop of London, I think he was, was called Winnington Ingram.

55:52.620 --> 55:56.260
And he was a fanatical war monger.

55:56.360 --> 55:59.380
He was like, you know, kill more Germans, bend at them.

56:01.040 --> 56:02.200
And you're right.

56:02.420 --> 56:05.380
This is not where, this is not where men of the cloth

56:06.740 --> 56:08.440
of any variety should be.

56:08.800 --> 56:10.320
It's, it's just no.

56:13.580 --> 56:21.560
So the traditional Jewish perspective is that cruelty war is bad.

56:21.820 --> 56:22.100
Okay.

56:22.740 --> 56:24.060
And we want peace.

56:24.380 --> 56:26.700
And if you look in the early Zionist movement,

56:27.520 --> 56:31.260
the religious Zionist movement, which was a distinct minority of the movement,

56:31.420 --> 56:35.540
it was a very, there's a small minority both within Zionism and also a small minority within

56:36.740 --> 56:38.260
Orthodox Judaism, but it did exist.

56:39.540 --> 56:46.900
So people like Rabbi Abraham Cook or Rabbi Jacob Amiel, if you read their writings,

56:47.020 --> 56:51.840
they're very clear on this, that, you know, we may or may not need to have a military

56:51.840 --> 56:55.460
to establish a state we want to establish, but that the spirits of militarism is completely

56:55.460 --> 56:56.680
alien to us as Jews.

56:57.000 --> 56:57.200
Okay.

56:57.660 --> 56:59.080
They write this at great length.

57:00.520 --> 57:05.100
And what's kind of, so this is not the, oh, this is not the anti Zionist religious Jews,

57:05.100 --> 57:08.120
who of course were kind of, in a sense, kind of principled pacifists.

57:08.400 --> 57:10.140
Their whole point was we're not supposed to have a state.

57:10.340 --> 57:11.960
So of course we're not supposed to have armed because we're not supposed to have a state in the

57:11.960 --> 57:12.080
first place.

57:12.140 --> 57:16.200
Even though I thought we should have a state, they were, they were very utopian in that,

57:16.200 --> 57:20.940
you know, we're with our state, we're going to show the world what it is to kind of

57:20.940 --> 57:23.040
be the most moral state in the world.

57:23.780 --> 57:27.840
And what's happened over the last 70 years, what's, what's scary is how quickly it's

57:27.840 --> 57:33.340
happened is that religious Zionism has become this super crazed militarist thing.

57:34.100 --> 57:39.120
And again, you can understand why it's happened because the arrows have been very unreasonable

57:39.120 --> 57:43.160
in many ways, but also the whole Palestinian tactic of terrorist attacks,

57:44.580 --> 57:46.920
it doesn't really achieve any strategic goals of Palestinians.

57:47.160 --> 57:50.220
But one thing it does really just do is it just really makes Israelis hate Palestinians.

57:52.000 --> 57:55.020
And I've never been in a terrorist attack.

57:55.280 --> 57:58.100
And I don't, I never had a friend die in a terrorist attack.

57:58.260 --> 58:00.540
And I never had a family member die in a terrorist attack.

58:01.180 --> 58:05.700
I do know people who know, who have had friends who've died in terrorist attacks.

58:06.880 --> 58:11.120
And I think the ISU will know one person at least who's had a family member die in a terrorist attack.

58:12.640 --> 58:15.560
So I don't personally judge people who've been through that

58:15.560 --> 58:19.240
and it produces these feelings of bitterness in them.

58:19.880 --> 58:25.360
By the way, I also don't judge a Palestinian who his family was killed in an Israeli airstrike

58:25.360 --> 58:26.680
and he also has those feelings of bitterness.

58:27.720 --> 58:35.680
All I want to say is yes, but A, the fact that you have these things of bitterness

58:35.680 --> 58:39.960
and their legitimate innocence as feelings doesn't mean that they get to determine government policy.

58:40.420 --> 58:46.260
But also B, the role of religious people is not to kind of fire you up

58:47.140 --> 58:51.120
and tell you that because you feel this way, it's legitimate for you to do the same to the

58:51.120 --> 58:52.980
other side or worse or 100 times worse.

58:52.980 --> 58:53.640
Yeah.

58:54.300 --> 58:58.780
And religious Zionism has just become this crazy militarist extremist thing

58:59.580 --> 59:05.480
and Jews have, I think Jews have a responsibility to

59:07.460 --> 59:11.400
try and turn this crazy machine off, whatever way they can.

59:11.860 --> 59:16.520
Yeah, I think well, loads of people are going to be watching this and agreeing with you.

59:17.140 --> 59:28.660
So I want to cut to the chase here now and ask you the tough questions, which is what

59:30.380 --> 59:36.940
do Jews actually believe? I mean, it's hard to generalise because we've got the completely

59:36.940 --> 59:40.640
secular ones who haven't a clue and you've got the Orthodox and you've got every shade in between.

59:40.640 --> 59:48.680
But, for example, to mature, I'm a Goy, right? I'm Goyim. I'm one of the Goyim.

59:49.980 --> 59:50.960
What does that mean?

59:52.340 --> 59:53.120
It means you're not Jewish.

59:53.960 --> 59:57.980
Yeah, but doesn't it mean, but literally what? Goyim means cattle?

59:59.460 --> 59:59.660
What?

01:00:01.220 --> 01:00:04.620
I think Goyim is also a word used for cattle, isn't it?

01:00:06.200 --> 01:00:06.640
No.

01:00:10.000 --> 01:00:12.000
Goyim is not a word used for cattle, no.

01:00:12.440 --> 01:00:16.140
Right, but there's a disparaging undertone.

01:00:18.040 --> 01:00:22.120
If I say the word Goy, can it have a disparaging undertone?

01:00:22.480 --> 01:00:24.840
Yes. Does it always have a disparaging undertone?

01:00:26.820 --> 01:00:29.360
Yeah. I mean, I'm not holding you responsible.

01:00:30.480 --> 01:00:32.220
No, no, no, first of all, first of all you can hold me responsible.

01:00:32.520 --> 01:00:34.160
Gabriel, struggle session.

01:00:34.180 --> 01:00:35.260
No, first of all you can hold me responsible.

01:00:35.260 --> 01:00:43.320
No, but I don't get many people who know about Judaism on this podcast.

01:00:44.840 --> 01:00:51.920
And I'm just interested because I remember going back, you know how when you're at school

01:00:51.920 --> 01:00:56.740
and you have these, you must have done the scripture classes or divinity classes, whatever,

01:00:57.240 --> 01:01:03.900
and there will come a time in about the second year at your secondary school

01:01:04.620 --> 01:01:09.240
where your class will be given a project and you'll all have to choose a religion and

01:01:09.240 --> 01:01:13.720
do a sort of poster about it or do a specialist study.

01:01:14.540 --> 01:01:18.780
And people, some people chose Islam because it's, you know, like not Christianity,

01:01:19.060 --> 01:01:21.600
which was their religion and was probably quite boring.

01:01:22.200 --> 01:01:25.460
And some people chose the Eastern religions.

01:01:27.020 --> 01:01:31.300
Very, I think I may have chosen Judaism, looked into it and just thought,

01:01:31.300 --> 01:01:33.160
sod this, this is just too difficult.

01:01:33.760 --> 01:01:38.940
There are very few resources on what Jews believe.

01:01:39.360 --> 01:01:43.300
And I think it's partly to do with the kind of secrecy

01:01:44.500 --> 01:01:48.720
among Jews about jealously guarding the terms of their religion

01:01:48.720 --> 01:01:52.280
and really not saying what they actually believe.

01:01:52.540 --> 01:02:00.000
So if you ask the 70 million counten, Zionist Christians in America

01:02:00.640 --> 01:02:07.740
who've been schooled in the Scofield Bible and they've imbibed all this kind of

01:02:08.320 --> 01:02:13.300
Zionist propaganda, if you ask them what Jews believe, it's basically

01:02:14.120 --> 01:02:17.660
they're the Old Testament, but not the New Testament.

01:02:18.000 --> 01:02:20.460
They're basically, they're God's chosen people.

01:02:21.220 --> 01:02:26.920
This land is theirs, yada, yada, yada, and Moses and Ten Commandments

01:02:26.920 --> 01:02:30.240
and Joseph and his mates protect the kind of dream code and they're great,

01:02:30.300 --> 01:02:34.360
they're lovely and they gave us our religion because they provided us with Jesus.

01:02:35.840 --> 01:02:41.720
But when you look into it completely broad, open-minded and think,

01:02:41.880 --> 01:02:43.040
well, hang on a second, what's all this about?

01:02:44.580 --> 01:02:48.820
Anyone who's done even a modicum of research into Judaism

01:02:48.820 --> 01:02:52.500
realizes it's not, it's not just the Old Testament.

01:02:53.080 --> 01:02:55.700
In fact, it's not even the Old Testament in a lot of cases.

01:02:55.700 --> 01:03:04.120
It's mainly about Talmudic traditions, which seem to date back to the Middle Ages.

01:03:04.580 --> 01:03:12.200
I mean, a lot of this, I correct me if I'm wrong, but the religion of Israel is Talmudic Judaism.

01:03:14.360 --> 01:03:16.140
The religion of the state of Israel?

01:03:16.560 --> 01:03:16.720
Yeah.

01:03:17.160 --> 01:03:19.460
I mean, Judaism is Talmudic Judaism.

01:03:19.800 --> 01:03:22.000
There were non-Talmudic forms of Judaism

01:03:22.000 --> 01:03:25.100
and there are still carried Judaism.

01:03:25.360 --> 01:03:26.740
There's maybe 10,000 of them today.

01:03:26.980 --> 01:03:29.120
But all Judaism today is Talmudic Judaism.

01:03:29.280 --> 01:03:30.350
It just might be more or less religious.

01:03:31.660 --> 01:03:32.460
Where does it all come from?

01:03:33.860 --> 01:03:34.020
Okay.

01:03:34.260 --> 01:03:35.740
Is it just the Old Testament, is it?

01:03:36.540 --> 01:03:36.660
Okay.

01:03:36.880 --> 01:03:41.660
So fundamental to Judaism is the idea that there's the written law and the oral law.

01:03:42.700 --> 01:03:46.280
So the written law is specifically the five books of Moses.

01:03:46.840 --> 01:03:50.020
The rest of the Old Testament is less important in Judaism.

01:03:54.960 --> 01:03:57.760
So Psalms is extremely important.

01:03:58.320 --> 01:04:04.900
So if you're on Israel, especially if you go introduce them and you just ride around on a bus,

01:04:05.240 --> 01:04:09.440
if you do it for 20 minutes, you're probably seeing four or five women with a little book just going

01:04:09.440 --> 01:04:11.980
and what they're doing is they're saying Psalms.

01:04:13.520 --> 01:04:16.420
So that kind of psalmic devotion is very, very common.

01:04:16.420 --> 01:04:24.660
As part of the prayer service, I every single day say 15 Psalms, something like that on the Sabbath more.

01:04:25.540 --> 01:04:26.240
So Psalms are big.

01:04:26.580 --> 01:04:28.380
But then Psalms aren't a source of authority.

01:04:28.700 --> 01:04:31.160
You don't, they're just prayers, right?

01:04:31.460 --> 01:04:32.280
They're not telling what to do.

01:04:32.280 --> 01:04:35.000
Well, they're sort of like, up to a point, I'd say they're quite,

01:04:35.500 --> 01:04:38.300
they're condensed versions of lots of bits of the Old Testament.

01:04:39.280 --> 01:04:39.680
Okay.

01:04:39.860 --> 01:04:40.540
But I mean,

01:04:42.480 --> 01:04:43.220
But I agree.

01:04:43.300 --> 01:04:43.720
You say them.

01:04:43.920 --> 01:04:44.740
They're not like Leviticus.

01:04:44.860 --> 01:04:45.200
They're not.

01:04:45.200 --> 01:04:48.700
They inspire you, but they don't give you a map.

01:04:48.920 --> 01:04:50.980
They don't tell you what your country's supposed to look like.

01:04:51.140 --> 01:04:53.600
So Psalms are very big.

01:04:54.280 --> 01:05:01.000
I mean, other parts of the Bible, they're kind of, I won't lie.

01:05:01.640 --> 01:05:04.360
In religious Zionism, they're quite big into starting historical books,

01:05:05.940 --> 01:05:07.720
judges, Samuel, Kings, etc.

01:05:07.920 --> 01:05:10.760
Because they're all about kind of reconnecting with this history and stuff.

01:05:11.320 --> 01:05:17.040
But the other prophets, I personally think they should be more studied.

01:05:17.640 --> 01:05:21.200
The objective truth is they're not very extensively studied.

01:05:22.040 --> 01:05:25.020
They're written by, when people say the written law, what they mean is the first five books

01:05:25.020 --> 01:05:28.000
of the, which are called the Torah, which Orthodox Judaism believes

01:05:28.640 --> 01:05:32.420
is, was given by God to Moses on Mount Sinai.

01:05:32.860 --> 01:05:34.260
Now, what exactly that means?

01:05:34.400 --> 01:05:35.340
You mean every single word?

01:05:35.520 --> 01:05:37.020
That would be the strict Orthodox position.

01:05:37.140 --> 01:05:37.880
Yes, every single word.

01:05:39.160 --> 01:05:41.540
Obviously, you might ask some obvious questions on that.

01:05:41.560 --> 01:05:43.520
Well, what about the bit that happens after Moses dies, etc.

01:05:43.780 --> 01:05:47.460
But that's, you know, simple down.

01:05:47.580 --> 01:05:50.300
The idea is the first five books of Moses, that's the source of all authority.

01:05:52.040 --> 01:05:53.480
And that's the written law.

01:05:55.500 --> 01:06:03.720
But the oral law, which is what the Talmud contains, starts with a basic question.

01:06:03.840 --> 01:06:06.480
So for example, the written law says that I have to,

01:06:07.200 --> 01:06:10.500
in the Feast of Tabernacles, I have to live in a tabernacle for seven days.

01:06:11.180 --> 01:06:11.440
Okay.

01:06:11.940 --> 01:06:13.600
Well, what's a tabernacle?

01:06:14.520 --> 01:06:19.140
So the oral law provides me with lots of definitions of what a tabernacle is.

01:06:19.280 --> 01:06:21.740
It has to be at least 10 hand widths high.

01:06:22.020 --> 01:06:25.400
It can be a maximum of 20 qubits high.

01:06:26.000 --> 01:06:31.080
It has to be covered with stuff that grew out of the ground

01:06:31.600 --> 01:06:35.240
that hasn't been worked into like a vessel.

01:06:35.240 --> 01:06:39.440
So basically, bits of branches of old tree, leaves, whatever.

01:06:40.040 --> 01:06:41.660
And then there's weed mats.

01:06:42.020 --> 01:06:44.520
And then there's lots of definitions about what kind of weed mat you can use.

01:06:46.920 --> 01:06:48.400
What can the walls be made of?

01:06:48.700 --> 01:06:50.120
What has to be holding it up?

01:06:50.680 --> 01:06:51.960
It can't be underneath a tree.

01:06:52.240 --> 01:06:53.300
It can't be inside the house.

01:06:53.560 --> 01:06:54.780
Also, what does it mean to live in?

01:06:54.980 --> 01:06:55.620
What does it mean to live?

01:06:55.740 --> 01:06:56.580
Do I have to sleep in it?

01:06:56.900 --> 01:06:58.020
Do I have to eat in it?

01:06:58.260 --> 01:06:59.840
Does that mean I have to, if I have a glass of,

01:06:59.940 --> 01:07:02.000
if I have to eat in it, does it mean I have to have a glass of water?

01:07:02.480 --> 01:07:04.500
Do I have to, can I eat a glass of water?

01:07:04.500 --> 01:07:07.540
There are, I mean literally, I'm not exaggerating,

01:07:07.720 --> 01:07:10.520
there are literally thousands of rules about what it means

01:07:11.140 --> 01:07:13.300
to live in a tabernacle for seven days.

01:07:13.500 --> 01:07:16.880
So the Torah, sorry, the written law, the Torah, what we call the Torah,

01:07:17.280 --> 01:07:23.100
has five verses maybe that tell you you have to live in a circle for seven days.

01:07:23.880 --> 01:07:29.400
And the Talmud contains thousands of laws on what it means to live in

01:07:30.580 --> 01:07:32.200
the circle for seven days.

01:07:32.580 --> 01:07:36.220
Now, let's say how investing you reject the Talmud.

01:07:36.300 --> 01:07:39.760
You say all of this stuff is made up, it's just rabbis saying it.

01:07:40.600 --> 01:07:47.300
You'd still have to have some kind of alternative version of the Talmud.

01:07:47.640 --> 01:07:50.780
I, if I say, okay, I reject the whole Talmud,

01:07:51.260 --> 01:07:52.980
the Talmud tells me what a tabernacle looks like,

01:07:53.060 --> 01:07:55.280
what size it has to be, what shape it has to be, etc.

01:07:55.480 --> 01:07:56.220
I reject all that.

01:07:57.040 --> 01:07:59.580
I'm now going to follow just the written law

01:07:59.580 --> 01:08:01.360
and I'm going to be living my tabernacle for seven days.

01:08:01.360 --> 01:08:03.380
Okay, well, what does your tabernacle look like?

01:08:03.880 --> 01:08:11.180
You know, so there were groups that tried, that have rejected this.

01:08:11.240 --> 01:08:12.860
So the largest group is called Karaites.

01:08:13.580 --> 01:08:16.720
And like I say, there's still about 10,000 and something like that today.

01:08:18.400 --> 01:08:19.900
They used to live a lot of them in Crimea.

01:08:20.320 --> 01:08:23.400
I think now most of them are either in America or in Israel.

01:08:24.760 --> 01:08:27.560
And they reject the Talmud, but they have their,

01:08:27.740 --> 01:08:29.960
they still have a source of version of the oral law

01:08:29.960 --> 01:08:33.740
because in practice, even better example actually would be

01:08:33.740 --> 01:08:36.000
the Torah says, and the written law says on many occasions,

01:08:36.380 --> 01:08:38.100
you have to keep Sabbath.

01:08:38.260 --> 01:08:39.080
You can't work on Sabbath.

01:08:39.500 --> 01:08:40.160
Well, what's work?

01:08:41.320 --> 01:08:44.480
Okay, can I cook on the Sabbath?

01:08:44.780 --> 01:08:45.980
Can I grind flour on the Sabbath?

01:08:46.120 --> 01:08:46.860
Can I weave on Sabbath?

01:08:47.320 --> 01:08:50.260
I don't know, but the written law literally doesn't tell me.

01:08:50.580 --> 01:08:54.560
So again, the Talmud is divided up, well, the Mishnah,

01:08:54.760 --> 01:08:55.700
and we can get into the difference,

01:08:55.800 --> 01:08:59.740
the Mishnah is divided up into 63 tractates, as they're called.

01:09:00.800 --> 01:09:02.900
Sections, one of those sections is on,

01:09:04.140 --> 01:09:05.660
the first thing I talked about, the tabernacle.

01:09:05.980 --> 01:09:07.620
What do you do on this feast of tabernacles?

01:09:08.240 --> 01:09:09.860
Another section, which is one of the largest ones,

01:09:10.000 --> 01:09:10.960
is called Sabbath.

01:09:11.480 --> 01:09:12.280
What do you do on the Sabbath?

01:09:12.500 --> 01:09:13.020
What is allowed?

01:09:13.180 --> 01:09:13.680
What is not allowed?

01:09:15.040 --> 01:09:16.700
What rituals are you supposed to do on the Sabbath

01:09:16.700 --> 01:09:18.020
to make it holy, et cetera?

01:09:18.200 --> 01:09:20.980
And again, you've got five or, no, it's more,

01:09:21.080 --> 01:09:22.380
in the case of the Sabbath, I don't know,

01:09:22.440 --> 01:09:25.800
20 verses in the Torah, and also a little bit of stuff

01:09:25.800 --> 01:09:28.820
in the prophets.

01:09:28.820 --> 01:09:30.740
And you know a few things here and there.

01:09:30.840 --> 01:09:32.760
So you know there was a person who was stoned to death

01:09:32.760 --> 01:09:34.080
for picking up sticks on the Sabbath.

01:09:34.260 --> 01:09:35.280
So you know you're not allowed to pick up sticks.

01:09:35.540 --> 01:09:37.640
It also says you're not allowed to light a fire on the Sabbath.

01:09:37.780 --> 01:09:38.760
You know you're not allowed to light a fire.

01:09:39.200 --> 01:09:40.660
In the book of Jeremiah, it says you're not allowed

01:09:40.660 --> 01:09:42.660
to carry a load on the Sabbath, so you also know that.

01:09:43.340 --> 01:09:46.340
So you could piece together something very, very, very basic

01:09:48.700 --> 01:09:50.740
from the written law and the prophets,

01:09:51.440 --> 01:09:53.080
but it wouldn't really tell you what to do.

01:09:53.180 --> 01:09:56.360
So the oral law is telling you, in practice,

01:09:57.780 --> 01:09:58.640
what you're supposed to do.

01:09:58.640 --> 01:10:06.800
So among Christians, there's an enormous spectrum of practice

01:10:06.800 --> 01:10:10.300
of what you're supposed to do on the Sunday.

01:10:11.040 --> 01:10:12.740
There are Christians who keep this on Saturdays,

01:10:12.760 --> 01:10:13.840
but for most Christians it's Sunday.

01:10:14.740 --> 01:10:16.260
So you know for a tradition, you know, an Anglican,

01:10:16.400 --> 01:10:18.960
you go to church in the morning and you go to the pub,

01:10:19.120 --> 01:10:20.080
right, and you have a Sunday dinner.

01:10:20.920 --> 01:10:22.280
But there are Presbyterians.

01:10:23.360 --> 01:10:24.920
You know, you hear some really crazy stories.

01:10:24.920 --> 01:10:28.920
There was a Presbyterian who he would walk,

01:10:29.120 --> 01:10:30.900
because he lived up on some hill,

01:10:31.480 --> 01:10:34.880
and he would walk all the way to the pension office

01:10:34.880 --> 01:10:38.360
to collect his pension, but he wouldn't do the walking

01:10:38.360 --> 01:10:40.460
on the Sabbath, because that would be work on the Sabbath.

01:10:40.940 --> 01:10:42.480
So he'd have to set out, you know,

01:10:43.740 --> 01:10:46.020
so the spectrum of opinion among Christians

01:10:46.020 --> 01:10:48.740
of how he's supposed to keep the Sabbath is very, very wide.

01:10:49.540 --> 01:10:51.440
The spectrum of opinion among Jews is very, very small.

01:10:52.440 --> 01:10:53.840
Why? Because it's all based on the Talmud.

01:10:53.840 --> 01:10:55.620
There are Jews who are more religious and Jews who are less religious,

01:10:55.740 --> 01:10:58.040
but Jewish law, how you're supposed to keep the Sabbath,

01:10:58.220 --> 01:10:59.200
is actually very, very specific.

01:10:59.980 --> 01:11:01.840
And the only way to make it specific is to have

01:11:01.840 --> 01:11:04.260
what we call the oral law.

01:11:04.460 --> 01:11:05.900
The oral tradition. I get that.

01:11:06.060 --> 01:11:07.560
And I don't think anyone's particularly bothered

01:11:07.560 --> 01:11:11.400
by what the regulatory requirements are

01:11:11.400 --> 01:11:15.460
on the erection of a tabernacle and the usage thereof.

01:11:15.620 --> 01:11:19.160
But I think, okay, so we know that there are

01:11:20.820 --> 01:11:24.200
some very difficult bits of the Talmud.

01:11:24.500 --> 01:11:27.380
For example, the scene that describes Jesus

01:11:28.180 --> 01:11:30.480
either being bawled either in excrement or semen,

01:11:30.580 --> 01:11:33.040
I forget which, or maybe it depends on the translation.

01:11:33.680 --> 01:11:34.780
No, it's the letter.

01:11:35.620 --> 01:11:36.060
Okay.

01:11:36.680 --> 01:11:38.560
Oh, by the way, it doesn't say Jesus.

01:11:39.240 --> 01:11:41.160
I'm not going to lie, I think it probably does mean Jesus,

01:11:41.280 --> 01:11:42.480
but it doesn't actually say Jesus.

01:11:42.960 --> 01:11:45.680
Okay. And that was a line

01:11:46.820 --> 01:11:50.400
inserted by a rabbi, one of the more notorious ones,

01:11:50.460 --> 01:11:53.380
but quite an influential one, in the Middle Ages, wasn't it?

01:11:53.440 --> 01:11:56.160
I mean, we're not talking ancient tradition.

01:11:56.360 --> 01:11:58.200
We're talking, well.

01:11:58.800 --> 01:12:00.080
Well, it depends on what you mean by the Middle Ages.

01:12:00.420 --> 01:12:02.960
The Talmud, when people say the Talmud,

01:12:02.980 --> 01:12:03.700
they mean the Babylonian.

01:12:04.140 --> 01:12:05.520
Well, obviously post Jesus.

01:12:05.920 --> 01:12:09.080
Yeah. So the Talmud, people mean the Babylonian Talmud.

01:12:09.220 --> 01:12:11.960
That's what most Jews study as the Babylonian Talmud.

01:12:12.120 --> 01:12:14.220
That was, well, it's an ongoing academic debate

01:12:14.220 --> 01:12:17.620
exactly when it was collated,

01:12:17.640 --> 01:12:21.960
but it's sometime between 450 AD and 700 AD.

01:12:22.620 --> 01:12:24.360
So, okay, you can call it out in the Middle Ages if you want.

01:12:24.500 --> 01:12:25.560
I don't want to get caught.

01:12:25.780 --> 01:12:26.100
Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

01:12:27.260 --> 01:12:29.580
Well, yeah. Then.

01:12:30.660 --> 01:12:32.080
So you've got that.

01:12:32.340 --> 01:12:34.440
And you've got, I mean, I have to say,

01:12:35.960 --> 01:12:41.160
I read Mymonides's Wikipedia entry the other day.

01:12:41.440 --> 01:12:42.640
And to read it, you think,

01:12:42.640 --> 01:12:43.960
yeah, this is a great guy.

01:12:44.020 --> 01:12:45.660
He's a scholar and he's wonderful.

01:12:46.060 --> 01:12:48.040
You see, you read some of this.

01:12:49.180 --> 01:12:51.460
Mymonides was, certainly if you're not Jewish,

01:12:52.280 --> 01:12:55.420
not a good person to listen to.

01:12:55.820 --> 01:12:56.100
Do you mean?

01:12:57.640 --> 01:12:58.260
What do you mean?

01:12:58.660 --> 01:13:02.120
Well, it seems to me to be a kind of

01:13:03.120 --> 01:13:05.860
a supremacist religious approach

01:13:05.860 --> 01:13:08.140
which looks down on people of other religions.

01:13:08.140 --> 01:13:12.520
And I mean, he looks down on Jews who are not religious.

01:13:12.960 --> 01:13:14.820
I mean, Mymonides was just very...

01:13:14.820 --> 01:13:14.840
Well, that's that.

01:13:14.960 --> 01:13:17.380
I mean, he looked down on Jews who were religious,

01:13:17.540 --> 01:13:18.500
who had the wrong kind of

01:13:21.120 --> 01:13:22.520
philosophical beliefs about God.

01:13:23.520 --> 01:13:27.780
I suppose what I'm saying here is you've sensibly made the point that

01:13:27.780 --> 01:13:30.800
the Talmud is a way of interpreting the Torah

01:13:30.800 --> 01:13:32.960
and it's necessary for the reasons you've given.

01:13:32.960 --> 01:13:40.980
But how is the average Jew to distinguish between

01:13:40.980 --> 01:13:42.960
which bits they should take seriously

01:13:42.960 --> 01:13:44.460
and which bits they should reject?

01:13:44.620 --> 01:13:46.100
I mean, I imagine there's quite a lot of Jews

01:13:46.100 --> 01:13:49.400
who think that Jesus is boiling in semen

01:13:49.400 --> 01:13:50.640
and this is a jolly good thing.

01:13:51.260 --> 01:13:52.880
And the stuff about when...

01:13:54.300 --> 01:13:57.140
There are definitely passages which say

01:13:57.140 --> 01:14:02.040
that you can have sex with a goy under any circumstances,

01:14:02.040 --> 01:14:03.580
you know, even when they're three years old

01:14:03.580 --> 01:14:06.080
because they're just goy and they're just trash,

01:14:06.320 --> 01:14:07.100
they're not like us.

01:14:10.100 --> 01:14:11.320
You know of these passages.

01:14:12.280 --> 01:14:14.080
Well, I know the one you're referring to.

01:14:14.480 --> 01:14:15.980
The cattle thing, I have no idea what you're talking about,

01:14:16.260 --> 01:14:17.160
but I know the one you're referring to

01:14:17.160 --> 01:14:17.800
and I'll get to in a second.

01:14:18.440 --> 01:14:21.040
So look, first thing, I just want to make a point

01:14:21.040 --> 01:14:21.460
about the Talmud.

01:14:21.800 --> 01:14:24.180
And it is important to understand,

01:14:24.300 --> 01:14:27.320
like if I sit down and I read the Talmud all day,

01:14:27.700 --> 01:14:29.500
I probably won't see the word goy.

01:14:30.060 --> 01:14:32.900
As in, I really think that

01:14:33.420 --> 01:14:34.560
some people got the idea from the internet

01:14:34.560 --> 01:14:36.840
that the Talmud is fundamentally a book about Jews.

01:14:37.080 --> 01:14:38.260
Like, I just hate goyim.

01:14:38.360 --> 01:14:39.220
I hate goyim so much.

01:14:40.580 --> 01:14:43.300
I would say probably the attitude,

01:14:44.180 --> 01:14:46.180
the attitude which you might find offensive

01:14:46.180 --> 01:14:46.800
for a different reason,

01:14:46.920 --> 01:14:48.140
but the attitude of the...

01:14:48.140 --> 01:14:49.380
towards goyim in the Talmud

01:14:49.380 --> 01:14:51.100
is really one of like very...

01:14:53.260 --> 01:14:54.140
Like, unconcerned.

01:14:54.140 --> 01:14:57.560
As in, Talmudic Judaism is very inward censored.

01:14:57.560 --> 01:15:01.080
Basically, it's a kind of scholar religion

01:15:01.080 --> 01:15:02.040
for people in...

01:15:03.260 --> 01:15:04.480
It's not really that even concerned

01:15:04.480 --> 01:15:05.560
about the lives of ordinary Jews.

01:15:05.920 --> 01:15:09.160
They're obsessing about very minute details of law.

01:15:10.200 --> 01:15:12.300
Sometimes, Gentiles might come into this.

01:15:12.640 --> 01:15:18.240
So, like, most of the time,

01:15:18.640 --> 01:15:19.060
the word...

01:15:19.060 --> 01:15:20.380
If the word goy does come up in it,

01:15:20.500 --> 01:15:22.460
it's to do with, you know, let's say,

01:15:22.520 --> 01:15:23.820
I'm not allowed to sow my field

01:15:23.820 --> 01:15:25.540
with two different types, with wheat and barley.

01:15:25.540 --> 01:15:27.500
That's an offense according to the...

01:15:27.500 --> 01:15:28.920
Or the written law.

01:15:29.120 --> 01:15:30.040
Again, a classic example.

01:15:30.340 --> 01:15:33.480
One verse, don't sow your field with mixed things.

01:15:34.040 --> 01:15:34.240
Okay?

01:15:34.540 --> 01:15:35.880
Again, thousands of laws

01:15:38.040 --> 01:15:39.280
telling me what's mixed.

01:15:39.720 --> 01:15:40.060
What is...

01:15:40.060 --> 01:15:42.720
Okay, if my field is sowed with mixed things,

01:15:42.780 --> 01:15:43.420
I have to pull it out.

01:15:43.540 --> 01:15:44.720
Well, what if a Gentile came along

01:15:44.720 --> 01:15:45.700
and sowed my field for me?

01:15:45.900 --> 01:15:46.680
Do they and I?

01:15:47.000 --> 01:15:48.420
Can I pay a Gentile to do it for me?

01:15:48.700 --> 01:15:51.420
Most of the times that a Gentile comes up in a Talmud

01:15:51.980 --> 01:15:53.280
is to do with questions like this.

01:15:53.400 --> 01:15:54.460
You know, I'm not allowed to do this,

01:15:54.460 --> 01:15:55.660
but can I pay a Gentile to do it?

01:15:56.360 --> 01:15:57.840
I'm not allowed to do this, but a Gentile did it.

01:15:57.920 --> 01:15:58.680
Can I benefit from it?

01:15:58.840 --> 01:15:59.440
These are the kind of things.

01:16:00.600 --> 01:16:02.920
The Talmud is really, really big,

01:16:03.260 --> 01:16:05.740
and these lists of offensive quotes is...

01:16:06.540 --> 01:16:06.980
What is it?

01:16:07.060 --> 01:16:07.740
20 quotes?

01:16:08.300 --> 01:16:08.820
I don't know.

01:16:09.080 --> 01:16:10.300
Like, it's not like...

01:16:10.300 --> 01:16:11.720
Well, okay, I see most of this is...

01:16:11.720 --> 01:16:15.340
Are they being denounced and rejected?

01:16:15.640 --> 01:16:16.620
I mean, why aren't they being...

01:16:18.520 --> 01:16:20.880
I mean, prescribed, anathematized,

01:16:20.980 --> 01:16:23.020
because having sex with a kind of three or whatever...

01:16:23.020 --> 01:16:23.540
Okay, no, no, okay.

01:16:23.540 --> 01:16:24.940
I need to correct this.

01:16:25.040 --> 01:16:25.920
This is just not true, okay?

01:16:26.440 --> 01:16:27.220
Like, okay.

01:16:27.820 --> 01:16:29.680
There's, first of all, the thing about the three-year-old

01:16:29.680 --> 01:16:31.160
is not talking about Gentiles or not Gentiles.

01:16:31.300 --> 01:16:32.080
It's actually talking...

01:16:32.080 --> 01:16:33.000
It's a general thing as this.

01:16:33.440 --> 01:16:36.600
If I have sex with my sister, for example,

01:16:36.780 --> 01:16:38.670
according to the Torah, I have to be...

01:16:40.000 --> 01:16:41.480
This is one thing the Torah is clear.

01:16:41.600 --> 01:16:42.260
The original is clear about.

01:16:42.340 --> 01:16:43.440
I have to be executed, okay?

01:16:44.120 --> 01:16:46.400
So again, what kind of questions does a Talmud ask?

01:16:46.880 --> 01:16:47.660
What is sex?

01:16:48.220 --> 01:16:48.880
It has to ask these questions.

01:16:49.000 --> 01:16:49.380
What is sex?

01:16:49.380 --> 01:16:53.620
What if, God forbid, my sister...

01:16:54.840 --> 01:16:56.540
I don't know, whatever,

01:16:56.700 --> 01:17:00.200
perform some non-vaginal sex acts on me or her, whatever.

01:17:00.800 --> 01:17:03.200
Do I have to be executed for that?

01:17:03.480 --> 01:17:04.500
So it has to define all these things.

01:17:04.920 --> 01:17:05.760
So one of the things is,

01:17:06.120 --> 01:17:10.120
sex with a girl under three is not considered sex.

01:17:10.920 --> 01:17:14.480
So therefore, if I do it with my two-year-old sister,

01:17:14.760 --> 01:17:17.580
God forbid, I can't be executed for it.

01:17:17.580 --> 01:17:19.420
That doesn't mean it's permitted to do it.

01:17:20.100 --> 01:17:25.520
It means that the capital offence in the Torah of sex

01:17:25.920 --> 01:17:27.860
doesn't apply to someone below the age of three.

01:17:28.020 --> 01:17:28.920
It's not sex.

01:17:30.220 --> 01:17:30.540
Okay?

01:17:30.880 --> 01:17:31.460
Now, you might say the opposite.

01:17:31.580 --> 01:17:32.720
Well, why is it sex to a four-year-old?

01:17:32.860 --> 01:17:33.300
I want you to...

01:17:33.300 --> 01:17:34.360
Oh, maybe you're a bunch of paedophiles

01:17:34.360 --> 01:17:35.160
for the opposite reason now.

01:17:35.840 --> 01:17:37.000
The law says...

01:17:37.000 --> 01:17:37.960
The oral law tells you...

01:17:38.620 --> 01:17:39.580
This is all basically theoretical,

01:17:39.940 --> 01:17:40.720
because you don't have Jewish courts

01:17:40.720 --> 01:17:41.580
to impose any of this stuff.

01:17:42.480 --> 01:17:43.840
If someone's brought to court,

01:17:44.700 --> 01:17:45.760
you have sex with your sister.

01:17:45.920 --> 01:17:46.960
Okay, you're going to be executed now.

01:17:47.820 --> 01:17:49.020
Okay, how old was she?

01:17:49.120 --> 01:17:49.460
She was two.

01:17:49.600 --> 01:17:50.740
Okay, well, we can't execute you for her.

01:17:50.860 --> 01:17:51.460
You're not going to be executed.

01:17:51.900 --> 01:17:52.420
You're going to prison,

01:17:52.600 --> 01:17:53.860
because you're a disgusting person.

01:17:54.080 --> 01:17:55.140
But we're not going to execute you for her,

01:17:55.180 --> 01:17:57.220
because at least we're not going to execute you

01:17:57.220 --> 01:17:58.060
according to the Torah's law,

01:17:58.120 --> 01:17:59.460
because you didn't violate the Torah's law.

01:17:59.540 --> 01:17:59.920
That's what it says.

01:18:00.020 --> 01:18:01.560
It's not talking about...

01:18:01.560 --> 01:18:02.600
It's got nothing to do with Gentiles.

01:18:02.880 --> 01:18:03.480
It's got...

01:18:03.480 --> 01:18:03.980
It's a general...

01:18:04.560 --> 01:18:05.280
What is sex?

01:18:05.320 --> 01:18:05.640
Right.

01:18:06.040 --> 01:18:06.700
Now, wait a second.

01:18:07.300 --> 01:18:07.980
Wait, wait, wait.

01:18:08.280 --> 01:18:08.480
Okay.

01:18:09.220 --> 01:18:11.280
You said we're allowed to have sex with Gentiles.

01:18:11.440 --> 01:18:11.800
The opposite.

01:18:12.300 --> 01:18:13.680
It's completely forbidden to have sex with Gentiles.

01:18:14.180 --> 01:18:15.740
It's a banqu yet prohibition in Jewish law.

01:18:18.920 --> 01:18:20.440
Well, that's more...

01:18:20.440 --> 01:18:21.000
Okay, so you're...

01:18:21.000 --> 01:18:21.680
And now I'm offended...

01:18:21.680 --> 01:18:23.300
I used to be offended because he told me it was okay.

01:18:23.640 --> 01:18:24.960
Now I'm offended because he told me it's not okay.

01:18:25.180 --> 01:18:26.280
Okay, I mean...

01:18:26.280 --> 01:18:27.540
But at least be offended for the right thing.

01:18:27.920 --> 01:18:29.660
It's completely forbidden in Jewish law to have sex with Gentiles.

01:18:30.200 --> 01:18:31.040
Yeah, okay.

01:18:32.780 --> 01:18:33.820
So, I think...

01:18:34.880 --> 01:18:36.220
Certainly where I am now...

01:18:38.220 --> 01:18:41.300
I think if I would suddenly discover that I was Jewish

01:18:41.300 --> 01:18:42.320
and this were my religion,

01:18:42.440 --> 01:18:44.980
I'd be having crimes about this stuff.

01:18:44.980 --> 01:18:48.520
And while we're on this some tricksy territory,

01:18:49.040 --> 01:18:50.920
I mentioned to you that I was going to talk to you

01:18:50.920 --> 01:18:52.420
about the Noahide Laws.

01:18:53.020 --> 01:18:53.560
So, wait a second.

01:18:54.700 --> 01:18:55.720
What would you have crimes about?

01:18:56.580 --> 01:18:57.840
The Noahide Laws.

01:18:58.040 --> 01:18:59.880
No, no, no, no, forget the...

01:18:59.880 --> 01:19:00.980
Go off the Noahide Laws.

01:19:01.240 --> 01:19:02.020
You find out you're Jewish.

01:19:02.300 --> 01:19:02.480
Okay.

01:19:03.120 --> 01:19:04.400
You've got crimes about what?

01:19:04.740 --> 01:19:05.660
Which bit do you have a crime about?

01:19:05.660 --> 01:19:09.760
Well, if I consulted my holy books...

01:19:09.760 --> 01:19:10.120
So, I'm sorry.

01:19:10.740 --> 01:19:14.440
Yeah, yeah, the Talmudic teachings.

01:19:14.440 --> 01:19:19.480
And I discovered that actually having sex with a child

01:19:19.480 --> 01:19:21.840
below the age of three is considered insufficient

01:19:21.840 --> 01:19:23.120
for capital punishment,

01:19:23.120 --> 01:19:25.920
but is okay for being imprisonment.

01:19:25.980 --> 01:19:28.300
I'd be thinking, well, this is just weird.

01:19:28.900 --> 01:19:29.540
No, wait a second.

01:19:29.780 --> 01:19:30.060
Wait a second.

01:19:30.300 --> 01:19:30.740
Embarrassing.

01:19:31.140 --> 01:19:31.680
Wait a second.

01:19:32.200 --> 01:19:32.420
Okay.

01:19:32.740 --> 01:19:33.240
What did I say?

01:19:33.740 --> 01:19:38.740
I said, the law prescribes that there are capital punishment

01:19:38.740 --> 01:19:39.880
for having sex with your sister,

01:19:40.080 --> 01:19:41.140
having sex with another man's wife,

01:19:41.300 --> 01:19:42.260
having sex with your mother,

01:19:42.260 --> 01:19:44.860
having sex with your aunt, etc., etc.

01:19:44.940 --> 01:19:45.380
There's a list.

01:19:45.520 --> 01:19:46.840
It's there in the book of Leviticus.

01:19:47.480 --> 01:19:49.180
The question is, what meets the legal definitions

01:19:49.180 --> 01:19:50.120
of these foods?

01:19:50.820 --> 01:19:52.920
If a government wants to make it a crime

01:19:52.920 --> 01:19:53.800
to commit pedophilia,

01:19:54.320 --> 01:19:56.160
the Talmud doesn't say you're not allowed to do that.

01:19:56.520 --> 01:19:59.340
It's defining what the boundaries of Jewish law are.

01:19:59.540 --> 01:20:00.980
It's just telling you what sex is.

01:20:01.720 --> 01:20:02.840
Like, it's not saying...

01:20:02.840 --> 01:20:05.080
It's not telling you what a government policy should be.

01:20:05.180 --> 01:20:06.020
It's not like...

01:20:06.020 --> 01:20:06.740
No, but that...

01:20:06.740 --> 01:20:10.660
Like, in itself, I find it weird just...

01:20:11.440 --> 01:20:15.500
De facto that there's a distinction

01:20:15.500 --> 01:20:19.520
is made between a three-year-old and a pre-three-year-old.

01:20:19.700 --> 01:20:20.700
It's just...

01:20:20.700 --> 01:20:23.460
It just seems to be symptomatic of a kind of

01:20:23.460 --> 01:20:27.840
a very odd mindset, which I do not find to be...

01:20:27.840 --> 01:20:30.580
No, the mindset it's symptomatic of is legalism.

01:20:30.960 --> 01:20:32.080
So, if you're a Christian,

01:20:32.640 --> 01:20:34.180
then I would presume you agree with Paul

01:20:34.180 --> 01:20:35.700
that legalism is bad,

01:20:35.960 --> 01:20:39.480
that it kind of leads to, like,

01:20:39.480 --> 01:20:40.420
deadness of the spirit.

01:20:41.240 --> 01:20:41.540
Yeah.

01:20:41.920 --> 01:20:43.000
And that's fine.

01:20:43.240 --> 01:20:45.280
Like, I'm not going to...

01:20:45.280 --> 01:20:46.360
I think Paul was wrong,

01:20:46.360 --> 01:20:47.620
but I'm not going to come and tell you

01:20:47.620 --> 01:20:48.780
you have to think Paul was wrong.

01:20:48.880 --> 01:20:49.820
Okay, so you think Paul was right.

01:20:49.900 --> 01:20:51.140
But, like, my point is,

01:20:51.460 --> 01:20:52.780
if you think legalism is bad,

01:20:53.140 --> 01:20:54.420
okay, fine, think legalism is bad.

01:20:54.460 --> 01:20:56.820
But don't kind of pick out specific bits of legalism

01:20:56.820 --> 01:20:58.520
and say, oh, you know,

01:20:58.820 --> 01:21:01.060
trying to make some sort of big song and dance about it.

01:21:01.280 --> 01:21:03.920
Like, the thing about the three-year-old

01:21:03.920 --> 01:21:08.560
has no relevance to any kind of aspect of Jewish life.

01:21:09.060 --> 01:21:09.980
Let's say, you know,

01:21:10.140 --> 01:21:12.420
a rabbi was discovered to be a pedophile tomorrow, okay?

01:21:12.980 --> 01:21:14.920
Now, as in any other kind of Jewish community,

01:21:15.240 --> 01:21:17.020
people may react well to that,

01:21:17.060 --> 01:21:17.680
they may react badly.

01:21:17.800 --> 01:21:18.460
They may say, oh,

01:21:18.760 --> 01:21:20.480
he must be innocent because he's such a holy rabbi,

01:21:20.580 --> 01:21:22.440
or people might try to cover it up.

01:21:22.540 --> 01:21:23.700
All sorts of bad things might happen

01:21:23.700 --> 01:21:25.500
as, you know, I don't need to go into detail

01:21:25.500 --> 01:21:27.060
about the Catholic Church, whatever.

01:21:27.520 --> 01:21:28.480
But no one's going to say,

01:21:28.900 --> 01:21:30.820
wait a second, was she free or was she for?

01:21:31.080 --> 01:21:32.640
That's just not a conversation that's going to come up.

01:21:32.680 --> 01:21:33.540
It's not like...

01:21:33.540 --> 01:21:34.240
It just has no...

01:21:34.860 --> 01:21:37.240
The specific laws that you're finding very offensive

01:21:37.240 --> 01:21:39.740
have no relevance to kind of Jewish life.

01:21:39.880 --> 01:21:42.420
You might say that the general mentality of legalism

01:21:42.420 --> 01:21:44.720
leads to this kind of loophole mentality.

01:21:45.420 --> 01:21:46.460
Now, I will tell you,

01:21:46.840 --> 01:21:48.520
that's kind of obviously true in a sense,

01:21:48.720 --> 01:21:50.700
and every religion has a failure mode,

01:21:51.040 --> 01:21:52.660
or probably multiple failure modes.

01:21:52.840 --> 01:21:55.500
I will say a classic failure mode of Judaism

01:21:55.500 --> 01:21:58.660
is missing the forest for the trees.

01:21:59.940 --> 01:22:01.340
I'll omit openly,

01:22:01.480 --> 01:22:02.960
because we'll read a part in not omitting it.

01:22:03.020 --> 01:22:04.480
Many Jews, they get caught up

01:22:04.480 --> 01:22:05.900
in this kind of legalistic mindset,

01:22:06.340 --> 01:22:09.060
and they kind of miss big overarching ethical principles.

01:22:09.440 --> 01:22:11.600
And this is a point that's been made by many Jews many times,

01:22:11.660 --> 01:22:13.020
and there's a whole Jewish ethical literature

01:22:13.020 --> 01:22:14.360
trying to make you not think that.

01:22:14.480 --> 01:22:17.820
But it happens because that's a failure mode of legalism.

01:22:18.380 --> 01:22:22.740
But my point is that, okay, you can be pro-legalism,

01:22:22.820 --> 01:22:24.480
you can be anti-legalism.

01:22:24.540 --> 01:22:26.760
That's kind of what the fundamental debate

01:22:26.760 --> 01:22:27.580
between Judaism and Christianity.

01:22:28.340 --> 01:22:33.100
Okay, but, like, kind of focus on the...

01:22:33.100 --> 01:22:34.780
You know, focus on that as an issue.

01:22:34.780 --> 01:22:35.840
You know, fine.

01:22:36.020 --> 01:22:38.360
Okay, you think it's weird to kind of argue about these things.

01:22:38.540 --> 01:22:39.840
Okay, maybe it's weird to argue about these things,

01:22:39.900 --> 01:22:45.020
but it doesn't have any relevance to life.

01:22:45.240 --> 01:22:45.500
It just...

01:22:46.160 --> 01:22:47.740
Well, you see, I think it sort of does,

01:22:47.880 --> 01:22:51.400
because I think it's symptomatic of a mindset.

01:22:52.280 --> 01:22:53.080
That's the problem.

01:22:54.800 --> 01:22:58.380
It's not the legalism per se,

01:22:58.980 --> 01:23:01.280
but what it says about the mindset

01:23:01.280 --> 01:23:05.080
that values legalism as opposed to anything else,

01:23:05.140 --> 01:23:07.980
it seems to me almost...

01:23:10.700 --> 01:23:11.580
Almost amoral.

01:23:13.680 --> 01:23:14.340
Yeah, okay.

01:23:14.500 --> 01:23:18.860
So, look, there's one school of Jewish philosophy

01:23:18.860 --> 01:23:21.080
that actually is kind of explicitly amoral.

01:23:21.140 --> 01:23:21.920
Basically, it says,

01:23:23.760 --> 01:23:25.480
morality is what God dictates,

01:23:26.800 --> 01:23:28.540
and reason doesn't come into it.

01:23:28.740 --> 01:23:29.420
Okay, now, by the way,

01:23:29.440 --> 01:23:30.440
there are also schools of Christianity

01:23:30.440 --> 01:23:31.220
that are like that.

01:23:33.180 --> 01:23:35.240
I would disagree with such an interpretation.

01:23:36.600 --> 01:23:37.880
I can see how you might...

01:23:40.180 --> 01:23:41.740
For Jews, this is how we look at it.

01:23:42.520 --> 01:23:43.900
You know, I'm not going to say every single Jew

01:23:43.900 --> 01:23:44.440
looks at it this way.

01:23:44.520 --> 01:23:46.620
I'm going to say this is how I look at it,

01:23:46.660 --> 01:23:48.280
and this is how I think this is what I honestly

01:23:48.280 --> 01:23:50.540
believe to be the authentic Jewish tradition.

01:23:52.640 --> 01:23:53.860
God has never spoken to me.

01:23:55.380 --> 01:23:56.780
I... Probably God will never speak to me.

01:23:57.060 --> 01:23:58.380
So, the only thing I have from God

01:23:58.380 --> 01:24:00.120
is the Torah that he gave...

01:24:00.120 --> 01:24:01.340
The law that he gave to Jewish people.

01:24:01.980 --> 01:24:05.500
And the way that I submit myself to God

01:24:05.500 --> 01:24:07.220
is by fulfilling the details of that,

01:24:07.700 --> 01:24:10.120
but also by learning the details of that.

01:24:10.340 --> 01:24:15.460
So, most of the Torah is never going...

01:24:15.460 --> 01:24:16.640
It's never going to be relevant in my life.

01:24:16.680 --> 01:24:18.160
And that's not only the bits like a temple and stuff

01:24:18.160 --> 01:24:18.960
because we can't do it.

01:24:19.000 --> 01:24:19.800
We want to do it, we can't.

01:24:20.080 --> 01:24:22.180
But like, you know, the Torah has all sorts of details

01:24:22.180 --> 01:24:25.120
about implementing capital punishment.

01:24:25.440 --> 01:24:27.600
Well, I hope I never have to execute someone, okay?

01:24:27.600 --> 01:24:28.220
Yeah.

01:24:30.560 --> 01:24:33.040
But the point is what we believe is that

01:24:33.040 --> 01:24:35.820
by delving into the details of this law,

01:24:38.680 --> 01:24:42.260
we're kind of connecting with that covenant that we have,

01:24:42.340 --> 01:24:44.880
which is the only connection that we really have to God.

01:24:45.600 --> 01:24:50.400
Now, I understand, I'm not offended that a Christian would say,

01:24:50.500 --> 01:24:51.000
no, that's wrong.

01:24:51.080 --> 01:24:51.620
You've got it all wrong.

01:24:51.760 --> 01:24:52.480
You've got mixed up.

01:24:52.900 --> 01:24:53.500
That's fine.

01:24:56.300 --> 01:24:59.020
But okay, that's what we think.

01:24:59.200 --> 01:25:03.400
And it's true that someone who only studies Talmud

01:25:03.400 --> 01:25:06.000
and never thinks about ethics, et cetera,

01:25:06.000 --> 01:25:07.500
probably will get a bit of a warped mindset.

01:25:09.340 --> 01:25:11.680
And that's a criticism that I'm happy to make

01:25:12.260 --> 01:25:15.640
within kind of Jewish debates.

01:25:16.200 --> 01:25:19.080
And to be fair, you would not be the only Jew

01:25:19.080 --> 01:25:19.960
that's made this point.

01:25:20.380 --> 01:25:21.940
I wish I could remember the next...

01:25:21.940 --> 01:25:24.410
Problems I read so much that I forget the names of...

01:25:25.100 --> 01:25:30.780
There was a Jewish writer who wrote a book

01:25:31.860 --> 01:25:34.700
explaining his problems with Israel.

01:25:35.800 --> 01:25:39.300
And I think he wrote in the introductory chapter

01:25:40.230 --> 01:25:44.880
about how, for example, on a Sabbath day,

01:25:46.160 --> 01:25:48.240
if on the Sabbath, if a tourist,

01:25:49.340 --> 01:25:53.320
a Goy tourist has a heart attack in the street,

01:25:54.240 --> 01:25:59.540
it is religiously permissible for an observant Jew

01:25:59.540 --> 01:26:01.460
to just kind of walk past him,

01:26:01.560 --> 01:26:02.120
because he's not...

01:26:03.020 --> 01:26:04.860
It's the Sabbath and it's not their problem.

01:26:05.360 --> 01:26:06.280
That kind of thing.

01:26:07.300 --> 01:26:09.240
Okay, so yeah, so this is actually...

01:26:09.240 --> 01:26:10.320
Okay, he's called Israel Shahak.

01:26:10.720 --> 01:26:14.440
So look, Israel Shahak, I haven't actually...

01:26:14.440 --> 01:26:16.000
One of the things I want to do for my dog

01:26:16.000 --> 01:26:17.940
is properly sit down and read his book

01:26:17.940 --> 01:26:18.820
and write a review of it.

01:26:19.260 --> 01:26:20.400
So I haven't done that.

01:26:20.900 --> 01:26:22.060
I have flicked through it.

01:26:23.060 --> 01:26:26.600
Look, he's kind of like a Reddit atheist.

01:26:27.160 --> 01:26:28.980
He's like Dawkins or Sam Harris, okay?

01:26:30.520 --> 01:26:31.780
Now, I can...

01:26:31.780 --> 01:26:32.660
No, that's what he is.

01:26:33.460 --> 01:26:34.240
Like, that's fine.

01:26:37.080 --> 01:26:38.540
I can be antagonistic

01:26:38.540 --> 01:26:40.140
and I can go through the church fathers

01:26:40.580 --> 01:26:43.840
and I can find crazy stuff and I can put it...

01:26:43.840 --> 01:26:44.840
I'll do it for you.

01:26:45.300 --> 01:26:50.480
So, Tertullian says that one of the pleasures

01:26:50.480 --> 01:26:51.700
of the Christians in afterlife

01:26:51.700 --> 01:26:53.260
is that they'll be able to see the damned.

01:26:53.900 --> 01:26:55.720
So they'll be in heaven enjoying eternal bliss.

01:26:55.840 --> 01:26:57.940
But part of the eternal bliss, okay,

01:26:58.540 --> 01:26:59.700
is that they'll be able to look down

01:27:00.480 --> 01:27:02.060
and they'll be able to see people suffering

01:27:02.060 --> 01:27:03.400
in hellfire for them, okay?

01:27:05.580 --> 01:27:08.160
Augustine says that the damned

01:27:08.160 --> 01:27:09.840
are predestined to be damned.

01:27:10.200 --> 01:27:11.400
It's predestined from the beginning of time.

01:27:11.420 --> 01:27:12.100
It's not your choice.

01:27:12.320 --> 01:27:13.260
Some people are predestined.

01:27:13.260 --> 01:27:14.960
Now, there's double predestination,

01:27:15.120 --> 01:27:15.940
a single predestination

01:27:15.940 --> 01:27:17.460
and different people have...

01:27:17.460 --> 01:27:18.160
What exactly means?

01:27:18.280 --> 01:27:19.540
But definitely he believes that the damned

01:27:19.540 --> 01:27:20.900
are destined to be damned, okay?

01:27:21.920 --> 01:27:24.480
And Origen castrated himself

01:27:25.640 --> 01:27:26.800
because to be...

01:27:26.800 --> 01:27:27.720
Now, I could say...

01:27:27.720 --> 01:27:31.120
Now, a rough comparison of the Talmud

01:27:31.120 --> 01:27:33.600
is that the Talmud is like the church fathers.

01:27:34.000 --> 01:27:35.720
It's not how Protestants look at the church fathers,

01:27:35.800 --> 01:27:37.260
but it's like how Greek Orthodox people

01:27:37.260 --> 01:27:38.080
look at the church fathers.

01:27:38.820 --> 01:27:40.060
So I could turn to a Greek Orthodox

01:27:40.060 --> 01:27:40.940
like your brother and I say,

01:27:40.960 --> 01:27:42.240
look, you believe in a religion

01:27:42.240 --> 01:27:43.580
where you think that when you die,

01:27:44.060 --> 01:27:45.360
you're going to be sitting there

01:27:45.360 --> 01:27:48.020
laughing at people, enjoying the fact

01:27:48.020 --> 01:27:49.860
that people are burning for eternity

01:27:50.420 --> 01:27:52.760
because they were predestined to burn for eternity

01:27:52.760 --> 01:27:55.100
because they refuse to castrate themselves like Origen.

01:27:55.600 --> 01:27:56.460
What a sicko.

01:27:58.740 --> 01:28:00.660
And that's in the Psalms, isn't it?

01:28:01.540 --> 01:28:02.700
Now, here's the thing, it's like...

01:28:04.140 --> 01:28:05.100
It's in both our religions.

01:28:05.100 --> 01:28:08.620
I just don't think it's productive.

01:28:08.920 --> 01:28:10.480
I know enough to know

01:28:10.480 --> 01:28:14.520
that if you'd read Augustine in full context,

01:28:14.760 --> 01:28:16.520
the doctrine of predestination makes a lot more sense

01:28:16.520 --> 01:28:17.340
than I just did it.

01:28:17.420 --> 01:28:18.860
And the same with Tertullian and the same with Origen.

01:28:18.920 --> 01:28:19.900
Well, to be honest, I'm not sure

01:28:19.900 --> 01:28:21.280
you can justify Origen castrate yourself.

01:28:21.420 --> 01:28:23.620
Maybe that one is a bit off.

01:28:23.980 --> 01:28:28.140
But the point is that you can do the same...

01:28:28.980 --> 01:28:31.000
There are anti-Christian writers

01:28:31.000 --> 01:28:32.020
who've done this in Christianity

01:28:32.020 --> 01:28:33.900
and Israel shall hack his life then with Judaism.

01:28:34.660 --> 01:28:37.820
You can definitely take a bunch of stuff in Judaism

01:28:37.820 --> 01:28:38.720
and make it look really bad.

01:28:39.040 --> 01:28:39.560
That's for sure.

01:28:39.560 --> 01:28:40.580
You can take a bunch of stuff in Judaism

01:28:40.580 --> 01:28:41.360
and make it look really good.

01:28:43.460 --> 01:28:44.520
The correct thing to do,

01:28:44.580 --> 01:28:45.920
which is much harder than I've read these things,

01:28:46.020 --> 01:28:47.380
is to actually look at it in the round

01:28:47.380 --> 01:28:49.000
and say, what is it really?

01:28:53.560 --> 01:28:54.700
Israel shall have...

01:28:54.700 --> 01:28:55.760
Again, it's a book I haven't read.

01:28:56.600 --> 01:28:57.600
I have read enough to know

01:28:57.600 --> 01:28:59.120
he does make some just flat mistakes.

01:29:01.080 --> 01:29:05.080
But I think that he's describing...

01:29:05.080 --> 01:29:07.040
What he's describing is a failure mode in Judaism,

01:29:07.760 --> 01:29:10.840
which is that basically this kind of amoral,

01:29:11.480 --> 01:29:14.380
ethnic narcissist legalism.

01:29:14.940 --> 01:29:17.300
I think that's something...

01:29:17.300 --> 01:29:18.760
I think that's a failure mode of Judaism

01:29:18.760 --> 01:29:21.080
that real Jews who actually exist

01:29:21.080 --> 01:29:23.040
now in the past, no doubt in the future,

01:29:23.200 --> 01:29:24.440
have entered that failure mode.

01:29:25.100 --> 01:29:28.840
I think that Jews should not enter that failure mode.

01:29:30.040 --> 01:29:31.880
I also think Christianity has failure modes.

01:29:32.360 --> 01:29:33.560
I think Islam has failure modes.

01:29:34.960 --> 01:29:36.460
A lot of them are very prominent.

01:29:43.060 --> 01:29:47.560
Look, the thing about not saving a Gentile on the Sabbath,

01:29:48.040 --> 01:29:51.840
so there's two ways of doing this.

01:29:51.940 --> 01:29:52.820
I understand that this is...

01:29:52.820 --> 01:29:54.360
Look, I understand that's offensive.

01:29:54.680 --> 01:29:56.400
So make clear what we're talking about.

01:29:56.480 --> 01:29:56.980
The idea is this.

01:29:58.040 --> 01:29:59.020
If I can save...

01:30:00.100 --> 01:30:02.120
The specific case given here is

01:30:03.340 --> 01:30:05.440
there's someone who's trapped under a pile of rocks

01:30:05.940 --> 01:30:07.920
and you're lifting up the rocks to try and get them out.

01:30:08.020 --> 01:30:08.640
They're underneath of it.

01:30:09.300 --> 01:30:10.900
If you know for certain that they're a Gentile,

01:30:10.980 --> 01:30:11.560
you can't do it.

01:30:12.160 --> 01:30:12.520
Why?

01:30:13.480 --> 01:30:14.040
Because as follows,

01:30:14.840 --> 01:30:17.020
you're not allowed to pick up rocks on the Sabbath.

01:30:17.180 --> 01:30:17.420
It's work.

01:30:18.500 --> 01:30:20.040
Oh, you are allowed to save a life,

01:30:20.420 --> 01:30:24.660
but you're only allowed to do it to save a Gentile's life.

01:30:25.380 --> 01:30:25.520
Why?

01:30:26.200 --> 01:30:26.860
The Talmud says,

01:30:27.100 --> 01:30:29.420
because the only reason you're allowed to save the Jews' life

01:30:29.420 --> 01:30:33.200
is because he will go on to keep the Sabbath in the future.

01:30:34.160 --> 01:30:36.940
So you're breaking the Sabbath for the purpose of saving the Sabbath.

01:30:37.100 --> 01:30:38.580
So, first of all, there are a few things here.

01:30:39.260 --> 01:30:40.400
It's not just a Gentile.

01:30:40.800 --> 01:30:41.620
A non-religious Jew,

01:30:41.980 --> 01:30:42.920
I'm equally...

01:30:42.920 --> 01:30:43.900
The law applies equally to him.

01:30:43.980 --> 01:30:45.460
If I know for sure he's a non-religious Jew,

01:30:45.960 --> 01:30:47.260
I'm sorry, there's nothing I can do to help you.

01:30:47.760 --> 01:30:48.420
That's one thing.

01:30:49.560 --> 01:30:50.880
On a practical level,

01:30:55.820 --> 01:30:59.220
the normative Orthodox Jewish teaching is as follows.

01:31:00.120 --> 01:31:01.320
If you don't save him,

01:31:01.400 --> 01:31:02.540
if you don't save the Gentile,

01:31:03.620 --> 01:31:05.260
then someone might find out about it,

01:31:06.620 --> 01:31:08.160
and then they might get very angry,

01:31:08.700 --> 01:31:10.420
justifiably, from their perspective, certainly,

01:31:11.000 --> 01:31:12.700
and they might do a pogrom or whatever.

01:31:12.860 --> 01:31:13.540
So, therefore, you should save.

01:31:13.720 --> 01:31:17.040
That normative Jewish law that you'll be instructed to do,

01:31:17.300 --> 01:31:18.440
not what's written in the Talmud,

01:31:18.560 --> 01:31:20.060
but normative Jewish law that you're instructed to do,

01:31:20.480 --> 01:31:21.800
is that you should save the Gentile's life.

01:31:21.960 --> 01:31:22.400
Now, you might say,

01:31:24.200 --> 01:31:26.700
you're kind of using legalism to get round to legalism.

01:31:26.840 --> 01:31:28.600
So, you came up with this weird legalism

01:31:28.600 --> 01:31:30.740
that tells you you're not allowed to save the Gentile's life from the Sabbath.

01:31:30.860 --> 01:31:30.980
Yeah.

01:31:31.760 --> 01:31:33.760
And then you come up with some other legalism to say,

01:31:33.920 --> 01:31:35.140
to get you to do the right thing.

01:31:35.880 --> 01:31:37.180
And really, what you should just do

01:31:37.180 --> 01:31:39.200
is go back and challenge the assumption from the off.

01:31:39.540 --> 01:31:41.760
Okay, maybe you're right.

01:31:44.240 --> 01:31:46.960
And, you know, there is a kind of...

01:31:48.400 --> 01:31:59.440
There is an inherent problem in moral standards change over time.

01:32:02.060 --> 01:32:05.220
The Talmud was written when it was written for various reasons,

01:32:06.540 --> 01:32:09.940
and it was written at a time of, at least in the early period of the Talmud,

01:32:10.100 --> 01:32:14.520
of quite extreme animosity between Gentile and Jewish populations,

01:32:15.620 --> 01:32:18.320
because following the Jewish revolt against Rome.

01:32:18.900 --> 01:32:21.440
By the way, Jesus expresses the same views.

01:32:22.420 --> 01:32:24.440
You know, that's what he says pearls before swine, right?

01:32:24.620 --> 01:32:25.800
He refers to Gentiles as swine.

01:32:29.660 --> 01:32:32.300
Okay, there's a case to be made that to some extent,

01:32:32.860 --> 01:32:37.000
the Talmud should be revisited in the light of evolving moral standards.

01:32:38.020 --> 01:32:40.780
The problem with that is what is a generic problem,

01:32:40.960 --> 01:32:43.160
which is that within any religion, things get canonized

01:32:43.160 --> 01:32:44.640
and it's very hard to go back and change something.

01:32:46.460 --> 01:32:49.580
And the specific problem is, okay, so I go back and change the Talmud

01:32:49.580 --> 01:32:51.160
to take out all the things that are kind of,

01:32:51.160 --> 01:32:53.040
they're not nice about Gentiles, okay?

01:32:53.440 --> 01:32:55.400
But then someone else comes up and says,

01:32:55.480 --> 01:32:58.380
well, I want you to take out all the things that are not nice about homosexuals.

01:32:58.380 --> 01:32:59.320
And then someone else comes and says,

01:32:59.380 --> 01:33:01.080
I want you to take out the things that are not nice about trans.

01:33:01.300 --> 01:33:05.740
As in, it's very, very hard, it's very, very hard in practice

01:33:05.740 --> 01:33:08.480
to kind of fix a religious text without it all spiraling out of control

01:33:08.480 --> 01:33:10.520
and just becoming like liberal Protestant uniseries.

01:33:10.920 --> 01:33:11.080
Yeah.

01:33:13.100 --> 01:33:17.260
Okay, I think that, look, what does this practically mean?

01:33:17.440 --> 01:33:18.880
Okay, you're not thinking about conversive Judaism,

01:33:19.240 --> 01:33:20.200
so it's not a relevant issue.

01:33:20.520 --> 01:33:22.340
You have it discovered you're Jewish, so it's not a relevant issue.

01:33:23.360 --> 01:33:25.620
How should this affect Jewish-Gentile relations?

01:33:26.480 --> 01:33:31.760
I think Jews should appreciate that Gentiles legitimately feel offended by this stuff.

01:33:32.420 --> 01:33:37.320
And I also think the Gentiles shouldn't kind of get too worked up about

01:33:37.960 --> 01:33:41.780
like 10 lines out of a book of 20, like a million lines.

01:33:41.780 --> 01:33:45.020
By the way, Gabriel, I just want to say to you,

01:33:45.660 --> 01:33:49.440
I'm really grateful to you for putting yourself through this,

01:33:49.440 --> 01:33:56.040
because I'm feeling, I'm very happy that you came on this pod,

01:33:56.280 --> 01:34:02.460
and I feel it's really unfair of me to hold you to account for your entire religion,

01:34:02.940 --> 01:34:03.680
which is not fair.

01:34:03.880 --> 01:34:08.480
It's a bit like I've been out with a net, with my special Jew-catching net,

01:34:08.580 --> 01:34:13.300
and I pulled you in, and I'm forcing you to go through this ordeal.

01:34:13.360 --> 01:34:17.940
So I hope you're not feeling too got at, because it's not my...

01:34:18.440 --> 01:34:20.720
There's a reason why our mutual friends suggested me.

01:34:21.120 --> 01:34:22.840
First, I thought about these issues a lot,

01:34:23.080 --> 01:34:24.600
probably more than most people for various reasons,

01:34:25.080 --> 01:34:30.180
and also on the Big Five personality traits, I'm high in openness,

01:34:30.480 --> 01:34:31.820
and also high in disagreeableness.

01:34:32.100 --> 01:34:33.980
So it's fine, I don't mind.

01:34:34.140 --> 01:34:36.220
Oh, which one are you?

01:34:36.460 --> 01:34:40.520
Because I think I'm definitely the high in openness one, and...

01:34:42.580 --> 01:34:43.460
You're pretty similar.

01:34:44.020 --> 01:34:48.260
I think I'm the one that likes an argument, and will carry on,

01:34:48.300 --> 01:34:50.840
but there's no kind of ranker.

01:34:51.560 --> 01:34:53.240
Right, that's what I try to be, mostly.

01:34:53.780 --> 01:34:57.140
Yeah, maybe we are the same entjet or whatever.

01:34:59.380 --> 01:35:01.480
Anyway, so I just want to make that clear.

01:35:03.340 --> 01:35:05.960
I totally agree with your point about,

01:35:06.040 --> 01:35:11.380
you don't want to go mucking about with canonical texts,

01:35:12.340 --> 01:35:16.180
and I totally agree with you that Christianity,

01:35:17.320 --> 01:35:20.720
or at least the Church Fathers are not beyond criticism.

01:35:21.100 --> 01:35:22.540
I get all that.

01:35:23.020 --> 01:35:32.460
I suppose the difference is that Christianity does not have a Christian state,

01:35:33.120 --> 01:35:37.160
and it does not have an organisation,

01:35:37.400 --> 01:35:39.140
which I doubt you have much sympathy with,

01:35:39.140 --> 01:35:43.800
it doesn't have an organisation like the Anti-Defamation League,

01:35:43.960 --> 01:35:49.200
the ADL, pushing this very, very hardcore agenda.

01:35:49.820 --> 01:35:53.980
And I'm thinking, I mentioned them earlier on, the Noahide laws,

01:35:54.820 --> 01:35:59.560
the Noahide laws, which cannot be enforced at the moment,

01:35:59.560 --> 01:36:03.100
because the world is not kind of run by rabbinical courts,

01:36:03.400 --> 01:36:05.760
but should that time ever come,

01:36:06.440 --> 01:36:13.380
and nobody I've heard of in Israel is repudiating this,

01:36:14.120 --> 01:36:17.340
under the Noahide laws, and I did a podcast with this,

01:36:17.400 --> 01:36:19.260
with a Jewish couple who were so appalled,

01:36:19.480 --> 01:36:22.760
they kind of, they cease to be Zionists,

01:36:23.600 --> 01:36:26.220
under the Noahide laws, as a Christian,

01:36:26.800 --> 01:36:34.280
I am eligible for execution because by worshiping Jesus,

01:36:34.840 --> 01:36:39.440
according to the Noahide, according to the rabbidical definition of idolatry,

01:36:39.560 --> 01:36:43.600
I am an idolater, and therefore liable for the chop.

01:36:45.240 --> 01:36:50.020
And I'd be fine with that if this was just some bollocks from the Middle Ages,

01:36:50.020 --> 01:36:53.380
which had long since been repudiated by all Jews,

01:36:53.900 --> 01:36:54.540
but it ain't.

01:36:54.880 --> 01:36:59.620
You've got Noahide training schools in Israel,

01:36:59.620 --> 01:37:06.980
you've got it being pushed by Ben-i-Brit,

01:37:08.800 --> 01:37:12.700
these are not negligible organisations, and I'm thinking,

01:37:12.840 --> 01:37:16.220
well, I don't like this, I think it's really offensive.

01:37:16.900 --> 01:37:19.140
I don't know, actually I don't care, it's not the offensive part,

01:37:19.380 --> 01:37:20.720
I find it threatening.

01:37:23.160 --> 01:37:26.520
Okay, so remember what we were saying before,

01:37:27.400 --> 01:37:32.480
you're offended by the implication that Judaism permits sex with someone who's less than three,

01:37:32.600 --> 01:37:34.680
and I say, well, it's not saying that at all, what it's saying, it's not sex,

01:37:34.820 --> 01:37:35.660
it's only sex after three.

01:37:35.740 --> 01:37:39.180
I said, well, now you're offended by the implication that sex before we rolled a sex.

01:37:39.820 --> 01:37:43.060
So this is kind of similar, people are often offended by this idea that Jews kind of,

01:37:43.280 --> 01:37:45.640
it's just an ethnic religion, and we're not really interested in what anyone else

01:37:46.260 --> 01:37:49.560
does, and we don't care if you're saved or not, and we're just very inward and stuff.

01:37:49.740 --> 01:37:52.840
And so some Jews said, okay, fine, we got a message for humanity.

01:37:53.380 --> 01:37:56.020
Our message for humanity is as follows, you're not allowed to worship idols,

01:37:56.020 --> 01:37:58.720
you're not allowed to steal, you're not allowed to murder.

01:38:01.060 --> 01:38:04.880
The weird one is always, you know, not allowed to eat the limb of a living animal,

01:38:05.260 --> 01:38:08.620
which probably most people agree, you shouldn't eat the limb of a living animal, right?

01:38:08.680 --> 01:38:10.620
But it's a bit weird to have that in your seven fundamental principles.

01:38:10.620 --> 01:38:11.480
It's harsh on the mass side.

01:38:11.840 --> 01:38:15.620
The mass side, well, they don't eat the limbs off, but they do drink the blood of

01:38:15.620 --> 01:38:18.260
a living animal, which may disqualify them.

01:38:18.500 --> 01:38:22.900
So the point is, the Talmud, one of the things that Talmud discusses,

01:38:22.900 --> 01:38:27.560
because it discusses everything, really, is what laws are uncommon on a Gentile.

01:38:27.700 --> 01:38:33.420
So it scours through the Torah, the written law, and it finds that we find hints at the idea that

01:38:33.420 --> 01:38:36.340
Gentiles forbidden from forbidden sexual relations.

01:38:36.620 --> 01:38:37.780
We find that they're forbidden to steal.

01:38:37.920 --> 01:38:38.760
We find they're forbidden to kill.

01:38:39.280 --> 01:38:40.940
We find, because it's in the book, the story of them.

01:38:41.180 --> 01:38:43.300
Well, it's how we interpret the story of Noah, I should say,

01:38:43.680 --> 01:38:45.240
that they're forbidden to tear the limb off a living animal,

01:38:45.420 --> 01:38:47.900
and they have to set up a court system, et cetera.

01:38:48.760 --> 01:38:49.940
So some Jews said, okay, look,

01:38:49.940 --> 01:38:51.260
you've criticised us.

01:38:51.400 --> 01:38:52.280
We're too ethnocentric.

01:38:52.740 --> 01:38:55.320
We're not offering anything to anyone else.

01:38:55.980 --> 01:38:57.060
Here's our message to mankind.

01:38:57.460 --> 01:38:58.240
Keep the Noahide laws.

01:39:00.220 --> 01:39:01.340
And then you say, well, what do you...

01:39:01.340 --> 01:39:02.520
This is a Jewish supremacist call.

01:39:02.780 --> 01:39:03.100
You want to...

01:39:03.100 --> 01:39:07.460
Now, you're saying the reason why is because the punishment for the...

01:39:07.460 --> 01:39:08.380
This is what the Talmud says.

01:39:08.580 --> 01:39:09.540
What's the punishment for the Noahide?

01:39:09.560 --> 01:39:11.740
In Jewish law, there's a range of punishments.

01:39:13.340 --> 01:39:17.720
There's, well, there's lashes, and there's various types of execution.

01:39:18.060 --> 01:39:19.400
They didn't have prison back in those days.

01:39:19.400 --> 01:39:20.600
It wasn't like a normal form of punishment.

01:39:20.860 --> 01:39:22.460
Now, obviously these are quite brutal punishments,

01:39:22.460 --> 01:39:25.380
and any reasonable person will ask, wait a second,

01:39:25.560 --> 01:39:28.340
you're not seriously suggesting having a legal code in the year 2025,

01:39:29.000 --> 01:39:30.980
in which your only punishments are lashes,

01:39:32.780 --> 01:39:35.120
and stoning, and strangulation, whatever.

01:39:36.800 --> 01:39:39.040
And I would agree that that's an issue

01:39:39.040 --> 01:39:40.880
for anyone who seriously wants to set up a Jewish bureaucracy.

01:39:41.520 --> 01:39:44.300
Now, I would consider myself tough on crime,

01:39:44.300 --> 01:39:46.100
compared to the average liberal,

01:39:46.460 --> 01:39:47.660
but I'm not that tough on crime.

01:39:48.040 --> 01:39:48.340
Fine.

01:39:48.840 --> 01:39:52.440
Now, the Noahide laws did what the Talmud says,

01:39:52.600 --> 01:39:54.820
is the punishment for all of them is exactly the same.

01:39:55.040 --> 01:39:55.500
It's execution.

01:39:56.220 --> 01:39:57.800
If a Gentile steals, execute.

01:39:58.440 --> 01:40:00.920
If a Gentile commits adultery, he's executed.

01:40:01.180 --> 01:40:03.140
If a Gentile does idolatry, he's executed.

01:40:06.220 --> 01:40:08.320
Now, that doesn't sound like a very

01:40:11.100 --> 01:40:14.280
practical way of setting up a justice system.

01:40:14.940 --> 01:40:15.780
I'll agree with that.

01:40:16.140 --> 01:40:19.300
And the truth is, it's not the Talmud just says it,

01:40:19.300 --> 01:40:19.780
and then it moves on.

01:40:20.040 --> 01:40:22.520
Again, the Talmud is not very interested in Gentiles.

01:40:22.980 --> 01:40:26.900
It just is interested in very minute details

01:40:26.900 --> 01:40:29.180
about how your Tabernacle should look.

01:40:29.360 --> 01:40:30.520
It's just not very interested in Gentiles.

01:40:30.660 --> 01:40:31.180
It doesn't find him interesting.

01:40:31.620 --> 01:40:32.200
And then it moves on.

01:40:32.820 --> 01:40:34.840
In the modern age, some people have come up with this idea

01:40:34.840 --> 01:40:38.100
that we should be more ecumenical,

01:40:38.280 --> 01:40:39.720
and we should tell, okay, well, Gentiles,

01:40:39.920 --> 01:40:41.220
here's our message, keep the Noahide laws.

01:40:42.280 --> 01:40:44.180
People who say that, they're not saying you should set up a court

01:40:44.180 --> 01:40:46.300
and just start executing everyone who steals

01:40:46.980 --> 01:40:49.840
a Mars bar from a shop.

01:40:50.980 --> 01:40:52.160
That's not a thing.

01:40:52.240 --> 01:40:55.500
What we're saying, I'm not involved in pro-Noahide activities.

01:40:55.920 --> 01:40:58.740
What they're saying is, okay, this is what we think you should do.

01:40:59.020 --> 01:41:00.100
You don't have to convert to Judaism.

01:41:00.320 --> 01:41:01.560
You want to convert to Judaism, that's fine.

01:41:01.680 --> 01:41:02.440
You don't want to convert Judaism.

01:41:02.780 --> 01:41:03.740
Here's what we think you should do.

01:41:03.860 --> 01:41:04.620
You should be a Noahide.

01:41:04.720 --> 01:41:05.480
Here's the laws you should keep.

01:41:05.740 --> 01:41:06.020
Don't steal.

01:41:07.200 --> 01:41:07.820
Don't do idolatry.

01:41:07.820 --> 01:41:08.680
Don't worship Jesus.

01:41:09.120 --> 01:41:09.580
Wait a second.

01:41:10.000 --> 01:41:13.020
You agree that Gentiles shouldn't worship idols, correct?

01:41:13.020 --> 01:41:14.680
You just don't think Jesus is an idol, yes?

01:41:16.520 --> 01:41:17.220
Well, he's not.

01:41:17.940 --> 01:41:18.480
No, no, fine.

01:41:18.740 --> 01:41:20.720
But you do agree with the principle.

01:41:20.940 --> 01:41:22.980
You just don't agree with the specific application of the principle.

01:41:23.240 --> 01:41:27.240
I wouldn't be executing people for idol worship.

01:41:27.460 --> 01:41:28.320
Well, again, no one's executing.

01:41:28.700 --> 01:41:29.340
It's not yet.

01:41:30.360 --> 01:41:31.560
It's kind of hard to explain.

01:41:31.820 --> 01:41:37.780
Like, when I read, look, it comes up a lot in Jewish legal discussion.

01:41:38.440 --> 01:41:40.140
If I drive a car on the Sabbath,

01:41:40.320 --> 01:41:41.800
I'm supposed to be executing one is Jewish law,

01:41:41.800 --> 01:41:45.160
but it's not a thing that happens.

01:41:45.400 --> 01:41:46.480
We don't have Jewish courts.

01:41:46.860 --> 01:41:49.580
As a matter of fact, we don't have Jewish courts

01:41:49.580 --> 01:41:51.420
have the legal authority to execute them.

01:41:51.460 --> 01:41:52.780
We don't really have an execute anyone.

01:41:52.900 --> 01:41:54.660
We don't really have a mechanism to create circles.

01:41:54.840 --> 01:41:55.660
It's all very abstract.

01:41:55.900 --> 01:41:59.220
We don't think about it as a kind of thing

01:41:59.220 --> 01:41:59.880
that could actually happen.

01:42:00.040 --> 01:42:02.240
It just, when we say something is a death penalty offense

01:42:02.240 --> 01:42:03.840
or something is a lashing offense,

01:42:03.940 --> 01:42:06.200
what we're talking about is the severity of the offense.

01:42:07.220 --> 01:42:09.800
We're just saying this is a less severe offense.

01:42:09.920 --> 01:42:11.540
You would only get lashes for it, hypothetically.

01:42:11.800 --> 01:42:13.040
This is a more severe offense.

01:42:13.240 --> 01:42:14.400
You would be executed by a professor.

01:42:14.600 --> 01:42:15.760
We're not, but we're not talking about

01:42:16.120 --> 01:42:17.280
what you would actually do.

01:42:17.340 --> 01:42:18.960
And when we tell someone to become a Noahite,

01:42:19.320 --> 01:42:22.060
we're not saying, ideally, we set up a court system.

01:42:22.160 --> 01:42:23.600
We're just saying, these are the things you can't do.

01:42:23.700 --> 01:42:24.520
Now, but just back to the thing,

01:42:24.740 --> 01:42:25.800
because I think this is important,

01:42:25.960 --> 01:42:27.580
and it's important for Jewish-Christian relations

01:42:27.580 --> 01:42:28.260
such as they are.

01:42:28.940 --> 01:42:31.540
Jews and Christians agree that idolatry is bad,

01:42:31.700 --> 01:42:33.960
and not just bad, it's the worst thing you can do,

01:42:34.080 --> 01:42:35.880
because God created the universe,

01:42:36.040 --> 01:42:37.580
and you're bowing down to a statue.

01:42:37.740 --> 01:42:38.120
How dare you?

01:42:38.340 --> 01:42:38.440
Okay?

01:42:40.220 --> 01:42:41.260
What we disagree about

01:42:41.260 --> 01:42:44.880
is a specific application of is worshiping Jesus idolatry.

01:42:46.800 --> 01:42:50.220
Now, you also agree, if Jesus wasn't the Son of God,

01:42:50.440 --> 01:42:52.180
you agree it would be idolatry to worship Him, correct?

01:42:56.660 --> 01:42:58.020
If I worshiped you,

01:42:58.320 --> 01:42:59.440
and because I thought you were the Son of God,

01:42:59.680 --> 01:43:00.280
that would be idolatry.

01:43:00.380 --> 01:43:01.500
Even if I was very sincere.

01:43:01.880 --> 01:43:06.160
This is the legalistic mindset, which I'll be.

01:43:06.180 --> 01:43:07.120
No, no, no. It's all legalistic mindset.

01:43:07.120 --> 01:43:10.920
I feel like I'm being taken to a standard legal procedure.

01:43:12.160 --> 01:43:14.660
Which I would approach it another way.

01:43:14.800 --> 01:43:16.200
I mean, you're in a way saying,

01:43:16.300 --> 01:43:18.720
yeah, but come on, it's kind of like it makes sense,

01:43:18.720 --> 01:43:22.320
because I'm saying, and by the way,

01:43:22.380 --> 01:43:23.020
we're talking about

01:43:23.020 --> 01:43:28.000
that Noah Hyde is now embedded in the US legal system.

01:43:28.200 --> 01:43:32.100
George H.W. Bush actually introduced it

01:43:33.540 --> 01:43:35.840
under the umbrella of some kind of

01:43:35.840 --> 01:43:38.300
children's education act or something like that.

01:43:38.300 --> 01:43:44.360
Noah Hyde is now part of the US legal,

01:43:45.320 --> 01:43:46.660
it's not legally enforceable,

01:43:46.680 --> 01:43:47.960
because there are others in Noah Hyde courts,

01:43:48.020 --> 01:43:49.820
but it's there on the books.

01:43:50.420 --> 01:43:51.580
It's a bit like saying,

01:43:53.220 --> 01:43:55.940
oh, if you haven't committed a crime,

01:43:56.000 --> 01:43:56.900
you've got nothing to fear,

01:43:56.940 --> 01:43:59.400
which is why it's perfectly okay to have

01:44:00.400 --> 01:44:01.900
closed circuit television everywhere,

01:44:02.160 --> 01:44:03.700
and this and that, the surveillance state,

01:44:03.860 --> 01:44:06.960
it's there for your, for your, for your sisha height.

01:44:06.960 --> 01:44:08.460
You know, as, as they say,

01:44:08.700 --> 01:44:12.560
the problem is that when you get these, these,

01:44:14.100 --> 01:44:17.360
you've got Noah Hyde being pushed and,

01:44:17.360 --> 01:44:19.540
and indeed sold to evangelical Christians

01:44:20.160 --> 01:44:22.560
by organizations like, like the ADL,

01:44:22.740 --> 01:44:27.800
by, by Brith, you have Noah Hyde training schools in,

01:44:27.960 --> 01:44:29.560
in, in Israel.

01:44:30.160 --> 01:44:32.520
If all this is just purely ceremonial,

01:44:32.600 --> 01:44:33.960
of course, it's never going to mean anything.

01:44:34.180 --> 01:44:36.540
Well, these people are just wasting their time,

01:44:36.540 --> 01:44:36.980
aren't they?

01:44:37.300 --> 01:44:37.880
Do you think they're,

01:44:37.880 --> 01:44:39.140
they think they're wasting their time?

01:44:39.520 --> 01:44:40.920
No, it is not ceremonial.

01:44:41.040 --> 01:44:41.760
It's not ceremonial.

01:44:41.880 --> 01:44:45.000
We're saying, what should your religion be?

01:44:45.280 --> 01:44:46.660
Your religion should be, no, it isn't,

01:44:46.780 --> 01:44:48.520
i.e., you should pray to God.

01:44:48.720 --> 01:44:50.540
You should believe there's one God who created the universe.

01:44:51.000 --> 01:44:52.960
You should not, you should have ethics.

01:44:53.520 --> 01:44:56.420
That's what we, that's what we believe Gentiles should do.

01:44:56.560 --> 01:44:58.260
Look, look, take, forget this.

01:44:58.620 --> 01:44:59.560
Imagine I'm talking to a Hindu.

01:44:59.800 --> 01:45:00.440
What do I tell a Hindu?

01:45:00.560 --> 01:45:03.440
I say, you need, this is, this is an urgent thing.

01:45:03.680 --> 01:45:04.560
You've got your little statue,

01:45:04.720 --> 01:45:06.040
your elephant on your six hands.

01:45:06.040 --> 01:45:06.980
You need to break it.

01:45:07.320 --> 01:45:08.480
And you need to worship the one God.

01:45:08.960 --> 01:45:09.880
If you want me to say,

01:45:09.980 --> 01:45:11.700
if you want me to say what I think a Christian should do,

01:45:12.160 --> 01:45:14.620
sorry, you believe Chris Christ was the son of God.

01:45:14.820 --> 01:45:15.680
I understand you're sincere.

01:45:16.500 --> 01:45:18.640
I sincerely believe he was not the son of God.

01:45:18.820 --> 01:45:20.060
Therefore, I sincerely believe

01:45:20.060 --> 01:45:23.160
you're committing an offense by doing.

01:45:24.100 --> 01:45:24.760
It's not, we're not.

01:45:25.180 --> 01:45:26.740
Our goal is not to set up a legal system.

01:45:27.280 --> 01:45:29.180
Or our goal is to say, what should you do?

01:45:29.560 --> 01:45:31.280
My view is, all Jews view is,

01:45:31.400 --> 01:45:32.680
every single human being on earth

01:45:32.680 --> 01:45:34.120
should be a monotheist.

01:45:34.760 --> 01:45:35.700
You should be Dutch.

01:45:36.000 --> 01:45:37.560
You should be proud of your culture, your country,

01:45:37.640 --> 01:45:39.000
your cuisine, your whatever blah blah.

01:45:40.480 --> 01:45:42.360
But you should be a monotheist.

01:45:42.740 --> 01:45:44.400
And I'm afraid to say Christianity

01:45:44.960 --> 01:45:46.820
is not monotheistic from my perspective.

01:45:47.000 --> 01:45:49.060
I understand that you sincerely believe it's monotheistic.

01:45:49.180 --> 01:45:51.980
I don't think you're lying by saying that,

01:45:52.100 --> 01:45:53.460
but I am not lying by saying I don't.

01:45:53.560 --> 01:45:54.480
Now, here's the point.

01:45:54.840 --> 01:45:56.980
I think that from a right-wing perspective,

01:45:56.980 --> 01:46:00.060
you can quite easily look at nohidism

01:46:00.060 --> 01:46:03.360
as actually something much more positive.

01:46:03.360 --> 01:46:04.760
Because we're not saying you have to give up

01:46:04.760 --> 01:46:05.620
your national culture.

01:46:05.940 --> 01:46:07.920
It's not our globalizing faith.

01:46:08.040 --> 01:46:09.120
It's not like, say, Islam,

01:46:09.220 --> 01:46:10.440
which says you have to start reading

01:46:10.440 --> 01:46:11.700
the Koran in Arabic or something.

01:46:12.140 --> 01:46:13.500
And you have to start wearing our dress.

01:46:14.540 --> 01:46:16.160
The message of nohidism is this.

01:46:16.700 --> 01:46:17.280
You are French.

01:46:17.780 --> 01:46:18.260
Be French.

01:46:18.440 --> 01:46:19.340
Be proud to be French.

01:46:20.580 --> 01:46:21.560
Preserve your traditions.

01:46:21.820 --> 01:46:23.320
Preserve your way of life, et cetera.

01:46:24.200 --> 01:46:25.720
But you should be monotheists.

01:46:26.340 --> 01:46:26.740
That's it.

01:46:27.100 --> 01:46:28.900
I do respect you, Gabriel.

01:46:29.260 --> 01:46:30.820
There's quite a ballsy position

01:46:30.820 --> 01:46:34.180
to be saying, yeah, the nohide laws,

01:46:34.460 --> 01:46:35.540
but they're OK.

01:46:36.100 --> 01:46:36.940
And I totally...

01:46:36.940 --> 01:46:37.680
No, no, I just...

01:46:37.680 --> 01:46:38.500
No, I really like...

01:46:38.500 --> 01:46:41.480
Sorry, look, I'm not trying to move,

01:46:41.540 --> 01:46:42.800
but I really think you've just got your kind of nickers

01:46:42.800 --> 01:46:45.180
in a twist about a literal nun issue.

01:46:46.460 --> 01:46:48.320
First of all, nohidism is not a big thing.

01:46:48.440 --> 01:46:49.440
I know some nohides.

01:46:50.080 --> 01:46:51.140
Oh, actually, look, not really.

01:46:51.240 --> 01:46:52.920
I know some people whose parents are nohides

01:46:52.920 --> 01:46:53.880
and they converted to Judaism.

01:46:54.420 --> 01:46:56.360
And that's what nohideism in practice really is.

01:46:56.400 --> 01:46:58.540
It's kind of like a kind of stepping stone to do.

01:46:58.620 --> 01:47:00.540
It's people who they decide they want to be Jewish

01:47:00.540 --> 01:47:02.020
but for whatever reason, it's not going to work

01:47:02.020 --> 01:47:04.860
because it's too much of a life-changing thing.

01:47:04.980 --> 01:47:05.920
So they become nohides

01:47:05.920 --> 01:47:09.360
and then in practice their children usually become Jews.

01:47:09.960 --> 01:47:12.720
Now, that's not the idea behind the project.

01:47:13.040 --> 01:47:14.860
And it tends to be something like very, very cringe.

01:47:15.400 --> 01:47:16.360
Nohidism is very cringe.

01:47:16.520 --> 01:47:20.500
It's for people who are not very socially well-adapted,

01:47:20.860 --> 01:47:22.580
people who have problems with their parents, et cetera.

01:47:22.840 --> 01:47:24.520
It's not a successful movement.

01:47:25.100 --> 01:47:26.600
I'd like it to be more a successful movement

01:47:26.600 --> 01:47:27.940
because I think everyone should be a monotheist.

01:47:27.940 --> 01:47:30.920
But it's not a very successful movement.

01:47:30.920 --> 01:47:31.040
On that point.

01:47:31.120 --> 01:47:32.980
It's not about executing people.

01:47:34.620 --> 01:47:36.440
There's not what anyone involved is thinking.

01:47:36.660 --> 01:47:38.220
Oh, when can we finally execute people?

01:47:38.360 --> 01:47:41.520
It's just saying we think everyone should be a monotheist.

01:47:44.220 --> 01:47:47.940
On that point, on monotheism, because I...

01:47:47.940 --> 01:47:48.600
Yeah, you're right.

01:47:48.820 --> 01:47:50.380
I do think of myself as a monotheist

01:47:50.380 --> 01:47:53.020
and I think because of the nature of the Trinity and stuff,

01:47:53.160 --> 01:47:55.040
I don't think that I'm worshiping idols.

01:47:55.240 --> 01:47:57.080
I think that's unfair.

01:47:57.080 --> 01:47:58.540
But wait a second.

01:47:59.600 --> 01:48:00.800
What are you? Church of England?

01:48:02.240 --> 01:48:02.600
Yeah.

01:48:03.240 --> 01:48:05.340
Okay. I don't know what you think personally.

01:48:05.900 --> 01:48:07.120
The opinion of the Church of England

01:48:07.120 --> 01:48:09.560
until recently was that Catholics worship idols.

01:48:09.700 --> 01:48:10.560
They are idol worshipers.

01:48:11.100 --> 01:48:12.500
That what they do at the, you know,

01:48:12.520 --> 01:48:13.600
now a day every restaurant...

01:48:13.600 --> 01:48:14.360
I don't want to burn them.

01:48:15.800 --> 01:48:16.960
I don't want to burn anyone.

01:48:17.620 --> 01:48:18.760
Yeah, but you wouldn't be...

01:48:18.760 --> 01:48:20.040
Gabriel, it wouldn't be you doing it.

01:48:20.120 --> 01:48:20.680
It'd be the rabbinical call.

01:48:20.680 --> 01:48:21.460
No, no, no.

01:48:21.460 --> 01:48:22.500
Wouldn't be a nice guy like you.

01:48:22.520 --> 01:48:23.540
Honestly, I promise.

01:48:23.820 --> 01:48:24.040
I promise.

01:48:24.580 --> 01:48:24.700
Okay.

01:48:25.100 --> 01:48:26.860
I'm not here to defend everything in Judaism.

01:48:26.860 --> 01:48:29.760
I promise you the guys who are promoting no-hidism,

01:48:29.960 --> 01:48:32.520
they're not thinking about executing people.

01:48:32.660 --> 01:48:33.700
That's not what...

01:48:33.700 --> 01:48:34.920
It's not on their minds.

01:48:36.200 --> 01:48:38.320
Because nowadays we don't have courts to execute people

01:48:38.320 --> 01:48:40.520
and then in the Messianic days,

01:48:40.580 --> 01:48:41.700
you won't need to execute everyone

01:48:41.700 --> 01:48:42.800
because everything will be fine.

01:48:43.600 --> 01:48:44.680
It's a legal category.

01:48:44.940 --> 01:48:46.920
It's something that comes from legalism,

01:48:46.920 --> 01:48:49.020
but you're the one obsessing about it.

01:48:49.180 --> 01:48:49.880
They just read it.

01:48:49.940 --> 01:48:50.420
It says on the page,

01:48:50.480 --> 01:48:52.120
oh, death penalty and then they move on.

01:48:52.220 --> 01:48:52.920
They don't think about it

01:48:52.920 --> 01:48:54.460
because it doesn't have any relevance to life.

01:48:54.660 --> 01:48:56.540
One is going to be slightly...

01:48:56.860 --> 01:48:58.520
I think obsessed is too strong a word for it.

01:48:58.580 --> 01:49:02.260
One is going to be slightly rumpled, let's say,

01:49:02.600 --> 01:49:06.520
when one discovers that there is this kind of legal code

01:49:06.520 --> 01:49:10.580
which enjoins one to be executed

01:49:10.580 --> 01:49:12.860
for the crime of being a Christian.

01:49:14.640 --> 01:49:16.380
It's a pretty big deal.

01:49:17.500 --> 01:49:18.200
Okay, so look.

01:49:20.240 --> 01:49:20.720
Within...

01:49:20.720 --> 01:49:23.580
I love Netanyahu to be crawling on...

01:49:25.400 --> 01:49:26.660
Crawling it through the snow

01:49:26.660 --> 01:49:28.560
on his knees to beg forgiveness

01:49:28.560 --> 01:49:32.500
for this appalling thing

01:49:32.500 --> 01:49:35.560
which, of course, has a legacy of the medieval period

01:49:35.560 --> 01:49:37.540
which has no relevance to modern times,

01:49:37.540 --> 01:49:39.660
but I don't see it happening any time soon

01:49:39.660 --> 01:49:41.020
because what I'm seeing is

01:49:42.960 --> 01:49:44.620
Noah High School's in Israel.

01:49:45.140 --> 01:49:46.960
Don't forget because the point of Noah High School

01:49:46.960 --> 01:49:49.420
is not to train people to execute someone.

01:49:49.660 --> 01:49:50.760
The point of Noah High School is to say,

01:49:51.240 --> 01:49:53.480
this is, in our opinion, how...

01:49:53.480 --> 01:49:55.760
Yeah, we have an idea that our role is to promote

01:49:55.760 --> 01:49:56.840
monotheism among the nations.

01:49:57.000 --> 01:49:58.660
The truth is we haven't really done very much about it

01:49:58.660 --> 01:50:00.460
because we mostly just keep to ourselves.

01:50:01.000 --> 01:50:02.220
Okay, so we're trying to do our role

01:50:02.220 --> 01:50:03.780
of promoting monotheism in the nations.

01:50:04.000 --> 01:50:05.240
This is how you're supposed to be monotheistic.

01:50:05.440 --> 01:50:06.560
We give Bible lessons and stuff.

01:50:06.780 --> 01:50:07.880
Like, it's just...

01:50:08.500 --> 01:50:10.420
The idea of killing people doesn't come into it.

01:50:10.460 --> 01:50:12.940
We're just trying to tell you, be monotheists.

01:50:13.460 --> 01:50:15.620
Okay, it's hard because we don't have a lot for you.

01:50:15.740 --> 01:50:16.320
We don't...

01:50:16.320 --> 01:50:18.120
The truth is, Noah Buddhism is a big flop

01:50:18.120 --> 01:50:19.860
because it doesn't really give you a life structure.

01:50:19.960 --> 01:50:20.820
It doesn't give you a community.

01:50:21.100 --> 01:50:22.600
It doesn't give you a liturgy.

01:50:22.740 --> 01:50:23.600
It doesn't give you any of the things

01:50:23.600 --> 01:50:24.520
that people want from religion.

01:50:24.520 --> 01:50:25.700
So, actually, it's just a big flop.

01:50:26.420 --> 01:50:28.260
Maybe we should put a lot more effort into it.

01:50:28.320 --> 01:50:30.480
We don't because we're actually very self-obsessed.

01:50:31.000 --> 01:50:33.880
But the fact that we're trying to at least

01:50:33.880 --> 01:50:35.560
be a bit less self-success...

01:50:35.560 --> 01:50:36.440
Oh, even that's bad.

01:50:36.700 --> 01:50:40.520
Okay, you know, like...

01:50:40.520 --> 01:50:43.360
You know, a Christian...

01:50:43.360 --> 01:50:44.060
I don't know what you believe.

01:50:44.360 --> 01:50:45.060
Traditional Christianity,

01:50:45.520 --> 01:50:47.720
both Protestant and Catholic and Orthodox and everything,

01:50:48.060 --> 01:50:49.880
believes that anyone, including myself,

01:50:50.380 --> 01:50:54.120
who doesn't accept Jesus Christ

01:50:54.120 --> 01:50:55.260
as their personal savior,

01:50:55.760 --> 01:50:58.780
is going and also in most of the branches,

01:50:59.180 --> 01:51:01.640
is inducted into Churchary Baptism, etc.,

01:51:01.640 --> 01:51:03.280
is going to spend eternity of hell.

01:51:04.180 --> 01:51:05.160
Okay, I can get very offended.

01:51:05.380 --> 01:51:07.380
No, okay, you're not going to do anything to me personally,

01:51:07.980 --> 01:51:09.440
but you do think I'm going to go to hell for life.

01:51:09.540 --> 01:51:10.640
I can get very offended by that.

01:51:10.800 --> 01:51:12.220
Okay, but I'm not going to get offended by that

01:51:12.220 --> 01:51:12.920
because it's not productive.

01:51:13.160 --> 01:51:13.720
It doesn't need anybody.

01:51:14.220 --> 01:51:16.200
You're saying you're going to get offended

01:51:16.200 --> 01:51:17.980
because, in theory...

01:51:17.980 --> 01:51:19.900
No, I think you might execute you.

01:51:19.900 --> 01:51:23.280
I personally, I don't get offended by stuff.

01:51:24.860 --> 01:51:25.620
I get...

01:51:25.620 --> 01:51:28.280
I suppose the difference is that,

01:51:28.800 --> 01:51:30.860
if you're going to go burning in hell, Gabriel,

01:51:31.620 --> 01:51:33.220
that's going to be God's decision.

01:51:33.340 --> 01:51:34.120
It's nothing to do with me.

01:51:34.480 --> 01:51:35.280
I mean, it really isn't.

01:51:36.260 --> 01:51:37.280
God can judge you.

01:51:37.300 --> 01:51:38.680
And he may find you're fantastic

01:51:38.680 --> 01:51:42.840
and there are all sorts of get-out clauses for you.

01:51:43.540 --> 01:51:45.000
There wouldn't be any get-out clauses

01:51:45.000 --> 01:51:46.160
for me in a rabbinical court.

01:51:46.320 --> 01:51:47.280
Do you see, this is...

01:51:47.280 --> 01:51:48.920
There's no court, it's not happening.

01:51:48.940 --> 01:51:49.120
This is men.

01:51:49.240 --> 01:51:49.740
There's no...

01:51:49.740 --> 01:51:50.380
No, no.

01:51:50.480 --> 01:51:51.860
But were these courts to exist,

01:51:51.860 --> 01:51:53.460
which clearly...

01:51:54.660 --> 01:51:56.240
This stuff is meaningless

01:51:56.240 --> 01:52:02.260
unless potentially it has legal weight.

01:52:03.080 --> 01:52:05.580
Otherwise, these people are just cosplaying, aren't they?

01:52:06.140 --> 01:52:06.920
Are they cosplaying?

01:52:06.940 --> 01:52:08.700
That's just where you're completely wrong

01:52:08.700 --> 01:52:10.200
because, again, in Jewish law,

01:52:10.740 --> 01:52:10.980
we have...

01:52:11.880 --> 01:52:13.240
There's only seven no-high laws.

01:52:13.320 --> 01:52:15.620
There's 613 Jewish laws, Torah laws.

01:52:16.980 --> 01:52:19.980
All of them, none of the punishments apply.

01:52:20.820 --> 01:52:22.880
None of them have been implemented for 2,000 years.

01:52:23.840 --> 01:52:25.040
And yet we devote our lives

01:52:25.040 --> 01:52:27.020
to keeping a Sabbath in the right way,

01:52:27.120 --> 01:52:28.680
to building a tabernacle in the right way,

01:52:28.840 --> 01:52:30.240
all of these things, complying with this law.

01:52:30.720 --> 01:52:32.600
Even though no one has been punished

01:52:32.600 --> 01:52:34.520
and no one can be punished,

01:52:35.760 --> 01:52:37.780
as far as we know, indefinitely.

01:52:38.280 --> 01:52:39.320
So for us, it's not...

01:52:40.200 --> 01:52:41.960
I don't keep the Sabbath

01:52:41.960 --> 01:52:43.720
because one day I might be punished.

01:52:43.900 --> 01:52:45.640
It's got nothing to do with why I keep the Sabbath.

01:52:45.780 --> 01:52:47.320
It's not nothing to do with why I educate my children

01:52:47.320 --> 01:52:47.860
to keep the Sabbath.

01:52:48.000 --> 01:52:48.820
It's nothing to do with...

01:52:48.820 --> 01:52:50.300
It's just so completely irrelevant

01:52:50.300 --> 01:52:51.240
to why I keep the Sabbath.

01:52:52.280 --> 01:52:55.240
It's the fact that breaking a Sabbath,

01:52:55.780 --> 01:52:58.840
certain violations would incur inferior death

01:52:58.840 --> 01:53:01.220
and certain violations would incur inferior lashes

01:53:01.220 --> 01:53:03.640
kind of tells me about the importance of it.

01:53:04.020 --> 01:53:05.440
But I don't keep the Sabbath

01:53:05.440 --> 01:53:07.400
because I'm awaiting some time

01:53:07.400 --> 01:53:08.540
where people can ask me if I can help.

01:53:08.540 --> 01:53:08.900
I get that.

01:53:09.180 --> 01:53:11.920
So when people say keep the no-high laws,

01:53:12.540 --> 01:53:14.780
we're saying keep the no-high laws

01:53:14.780 --> 01:53:16.420
because we think that's what you should do,

01:53:16.520 --> 01:53:17.980
not because one day you'll be executed

01:53:18.440 --> 01:53:20.140
and we're just kind of practicing

01:53:20.140 --> 01:53:20.740
for when you're going,

01:53:20.880 --> 01:53:22.520
no, we just think you should keep the no-high laws.

01:53:22.860 --> 01:53:23.600
Well, you were okay anyway.

01:53:24.420 --> 01:53:25.780
Fortunately, all the six,

01:53:25.880 --> 01:53:27.560
apart from that one, you think are fine, right?

01:53:27.860 --> 01:53:29.040
If I go out to you and say,

01:53:29.340 --> 01:53:30.300
you shouldn't kill people,

01:53:30.480 --> 01:53:31.260
you're okay with that, right?

01:53:31.440 --> 01:53:33.520
No, I think it's weird.

01:53:34.380 --> 01:53:36.320
I say I feel sorry for the masses.

01:53:36.560 --> 01:53:38.340
I think they have a very healthy lifestyle

01:53:39.160 --> 01:53:40.460
drinking the blood of their cattle

01:53:40.460 --> 01:53:42.100
and I wouldn't want them to be troubled by...

01:53:42.100 --> 01:53:43.260
Okay, I mean, you can say the same thing,

01:53:43.440 --> 01:53:44.920
that Hinduism have a very beautiful religion.

01:53:45.080 --> 01:53:45.420
But we say, okay,

01:53:45.820 --> 01:53:47.560
Judaism makes certain offensive claims

01:53:47.980 --> 01:53:49.380
that worshipping idols is wrong.

01:53:50.000 --> 01:53:52.380
Most human civilizations have worshipped idols,

01:53:52.560 --> 01:53:54.780
so I guess in that sense,

01:53:54.880 --> 01:53:55.700
what we're saying is offensive.

01:53:56.000 --> 01:53:57.540
But we believe that there's one God

01:53:57.540 --> 01:54:00.640
and he's only here to be worshipped.

01:54:00.980 --> 01:54:04.620
Can I ask you about the Kabbalah,

01:54:05.220 --> 01:54:08.180
which from where I'm sitting seems

01:54:08.180 --> 01:54:10.780
not to put two final points on it,

01:54:11.020 --> 01:54:12.180
dodgy as.

01:54:13.680 --> 01:54:15.940
I mean, we've got people like Madonna

01:54:15.940 --> 01:54:18.420
going to wearing their funny little bracelet,

01:54:19.380 --> 01:54:21.140
the red bracelet thing.

01:54:21.640 --> 01:54:25.340
This seems to me to be sort of a mixture of,

01:54:25.340 --> 01:54:27.080
well, it's the occult, it's necromancy.

01:54:27.400 --> 01:54:30.580
This is stuff that you lot have inherited

01:54:30.580 --> 01:54:31.840
from the Babylonian exile.

01:54:32.060 --> 01:54:33.440
When you spent too long in Babylon

01:54:33.440 --> 01:54:36.240
and you were sort of mucking around

01:54:36.240 --> 01:54:37.380
with these rubbing shoulders

01:54:37.380 --> 01:54:38.600
with these dark magicians

01:54:38.600 --> 01:54:40.640
and you've incorporated a lot of this

01:54:40.640 --> 01:54:44.060
heavy-duty dark stuff into your religion.

01:54:44.060 --> 01:54:45.100
Over to you.

01:54:45.680 --> 01:54:49.160
Okay, so I'm not sure the history is correct.

01:54:49.320 --> 01:54:51.340
So there's an ongoing debate in scholarship,

01:54:51.760 --> 01:54:53.660
not among Jews, I'm talking universities,

01:54:55.120 --> 01:54:57.760
but when Kabbalah starts,

01:55:00.340 --> 01:55:03.680
it seems to be in the 11th or 12th century AD

01:55:05.840 --> 01:55:07.600
either in Provence or Spain.

01:55:08.400 --> 01:55:08.860
It's more recent.

01:55:09.440 --> 01:55:13.560
Now, Kabbalah, the roots of Kabbalah

01:55:13.560 --> 01:55:15.180
is trying to answer certain kind of questions

01:55:15.180 --> 01:55:17.660
that any monotheist has to deal with at some level.

01:55:17.800 --> 01:55:19.540
So if God is completely transcendent,

01:55:20.000 --> 01:55:21.560
how does God interact with the universe?

01:55:22.240 --> 01:55:24.000
Like, where's the connection?

01:55:25.300 --> 01:55:26.960
If God is completely omnipotent

01:55:26.960 --> 01:55:28.880
and he's completely good, where does evil come from?

01:55:31.180 --> 01:55:32.720
If God knows everything already,

01:55:33.040 --> 01:55:33.820
why do I bother praying?

01:55:34.060 --> 01:55:35.040
Like, he knows I'm going to pray,

01:55:35.340 --> 01:55:36.320
so why am I trying to change?

01:55:36.620 --> 01:55:38.920
We're like, oh, please, God who knows everything,

01:55:39.600 --> 01:55:41.400
change what your plan is because I asked you.

01:55:41.540 --> 01:55:43.460
Like, what am I even doing when I'm praying?

01:55:43.560 --> 01:55:46.960
So Kabbalah is based upon trying to answer

01:55:46.960 --> 01:55:51.140
a lot of these real questions

01:55:51.720 --> 01:55:54.740
that any monotheist has to face, these paradoxes.

01:55:56.260 --> 01:55:58.240
Can God make a rock so big he can't list it?

01:55:58.320 --> 01:55:59.040
There you go, there's a paradox.

01:56:00.320 --> 01:56:02.060
Monotheism throws up a lot of paradoxes

01:56:02.060 --> 01:56:04.180
and Kabbalah tries to answer them.

01:56:04.320 --> 01:56:06.000
Now, my personal opinion is as follows.

01:56:06.720 --> 01:56:09.300
Kabbalah is the wrong answer to all of these paradoxes.

01:56:10.720 --> 01:56:12.660
Kabbalah is against the Jewish religion.

01:56:13.360 --> 01:56:16.060
Kabbalah should be excised from Jewish religion.

01:56:16.160 --> 01:56:18.480
One reason I don't bother with noahidism and stuff,

01:56:19.560 --> 01:56:22.340
even though I really don't think they're doing a bad thing,

01:56:22.400 --> 01:56:23.880
I think they're doing a good thing as far as it goes,

01:56:24.480 --> 01:56:27.140
but I don't bother with it because I don't think

01:56:27.140 --> 01:56:28.840
the Jewish people are in a position

01:56:28.840 --> 01:56:32.500
to promote monotheism to the nations at large

01:56:32.500 --> 01:56:35.860
when we're not promoting monotheism among ourselves.

01:56:36.220 --> 01:56:38.980
I think that in trying to answer the paradoxes of monotheism,

01:56:41.080 --> 01:56:43.680
Kabbalah violates the basic tenets of monotheism.

01:56:44.780 --> 01:56:48.720
And in so doing, what happens, just as happens

01:56:49.420 --> 01:56:56.040
in other mystical traditions, it lets in things

01:56:56.040 --> 01:56:57.400
you could call a necromancy.

01:56:57.520 --> 01:56:59.640
Now, every single bad thing about Kabbalah,

01:57:00.080 --> 01:57:04.420
you can explain it away in a way that's okay.

01:57:05.220 --> 01:57:06.240
And I could do that.

01:57:06.240 --> 01:57:10.980
It's just my view on it basically is that

01:57:10.980 --> 01:57:13.740
if it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck,

01:57:13.740 --> 01:57:14.140
it's a duck.

01:57:14.700 --> 01:57:18.600
So I would say that some of the things that some Kabbalists do

01:57:19.080 --> 01:57:20.440
is tantamount to necromancy.

01:57:21.620 --> 01:57:26.940
And therefore our job as Jews is to get rid of Kabbalah.

01:57:27.160 --> 01:57:29.980
Now, according to a kind of a literal reading of the Torah,

01:57:30.360 --> 01:57:32.740
what I'm supposed to do, I'm supposed to go find a Kabbalist

01:57:32.740 --> 01:57:33.620
and kill him.

01:57:33.620 --> 01:57:34.220
And so to kill him.

01:57:34.480 --> 01:57:34.640
Yes.

01:57:34.700 --> 01:57:34.840
Yeah.

01:57:34.840 --> 01:57:35.960
Now, wait.

01:57:37.000 --> 01:57:38.660
Now you could say, I'm not going to do that.

01:57:39.280 --> 01:57:40.520
You say, oh, I'm just cosplaying.

01:57:40.720 --> 01:57:41.480
I'm just, it's just a fake.

01:57:41.680 --> 01:57:43.500
Okay. Well, I'm not going to do that.

01:57:43.640 --> 01:57:47.400
What I will do is I will tell a Kabbalist,

01:57:47.680 --> 01:57:51.040
you're wrong, you know, you are, you're violating our religion.

01:57:51.840 --> 01:57:55.120
You're, I believe, bringing divine displeasure on our people.

01:57:57.000 --> 01:58:00.360
Just in exactly the same way that if I think it's reasonable,

01:58:00.580 --> 01:58:02.540
I'm happy to tell a Hindu that he should start worshiping idols

01:58:02.540 --> 01:58:04.080
and I'm happy to tell a Christian that in my opinion,

01:58:05.060 --> 01:58:07.400
you should get rid of the Jesus part of your religion.

01:58:07.760 --> 01:58:07.820
Okay.

01:58:08.360 --> 01:58:08.600
Yeah.

01:58:08.760 --> 01:58:13.920
Now, for me, it's more important to deal with the Kabbalah side of things

01:58:13.920 --> 01:58:17.240
because A, I live in Israel, I don't really meet many Christians, etc.

01:58:18.500 --> 01:58:21.020
B, I think we should get our own house in order before we try

01:58:21.020 --> 01:58:22.180
and put other people's house in order.

01:58:23.400 --> 01:58:25.240
No, maybe there's no C.

01:58:25.400 --> 01:58:25.920
Okay, A and B.

01:58:26.200 --> 01:58:26.740
So that's my view.

01:58:26.800 --> 01:58:29.560
I can't defend Kabbalah because I think that Kabbalah is bad.

01:58:29.560 --> 01:58:35.040
But, you know, I can say that it does come from,

01:58:35.700 --> 01:58:40.020
it comes from an honest attempt in its earliest form,

01:58:40.100 --> 01:58:42.580
it comes from an honest attempt to answer what are real questions.

01:58:43.000 --> 01:58:45.880
And there are earlier forms of Kabbalah that are,

01:58:46.560 --> 01:58:49.460
if not necessarily good, they are much less bad.

01:58:49.800 --> 01:58:53.720
As in, one of the problems with mysticism is that

01:58:54.720 --> 01:58:58.780
it kind of, it opens the door for a lot of nonsense

01:58:58.780 --> 01:59:01.240
to fall for, you know, one moment you're just trying to say,

01:59:01.300 --> 01:59:04.280
okay, well maybe, okay, so there's God up there and there's earth here,

01:59:04.300 --> 01:59:05.820
so maybe there's a system of emanations.

01:59:06.040 --> 01:59:08.440
And it, you know, maybe I don't believe that either,

01:59:08.440 --> 01:59:10.580
but it's not crazy to believe such a thing,

01:59:10.580 --> 01:59:11.760
it's not wicked to believe such a thing.

01:59:12.100 --> 01:59:13.380
But after a few generations,

01:59:14.240 --> 01:59:16.680
once you've allowed yourself to just invent stuff,

01:59:18.020 --> 01:59:20.300
invent these kind of things, and even worse,

01:59:20.840 --> 01:59:23.180
to invent stuff while you're having some kind of mystical trance

01:59:23.180 --> 01:59:26.820
that you induced in yourself by meditating for 24 hours while fasting,

01:59:27.240 --> 01:59:28.760
a lot of nonsense seeks in.

01:59:29.000 --> 01:59:33.640
So Kabbalah has kind of degenerated from its earliest form,

01:59:33.700 --> 01:59:35.120
which was much less bad.

01:59:35.640 --> 01:59:36.600
With that said, there have been,

01:59:36.640 --> 01:59:39.040
there are people who try to interpret Kabbalah

01:59:39.040 --> 01:59:44.040
in a way that is more good, that is less superstitious,

01:59:44.220 --> 01:59:45.320
that is less necromantic.

01:59:46.220 --> 01:59:47.960
And I don't think that's a really right approach.

01:59:48.040 --> 01:59:49.620
I think we should just abolish Kabbalah.

01:59:49.820 --> 01:59:52.480
But again, they're not wicked,

01:59:52.740 --> 01:59:53.900
they're not evil because they're trying to do it,

01:59:54.020 --> 01:59:54.940
they're misled.

01:59:54.940 --> 01:59:58.880
Like, I think people should be nice.

01:59:59.240 --> 02:00:02.220
Well, I think we can agree on that.

02:00:02.840 --> 02:00:04.860
How big is, I mean, how many,

02:00:04.920 --> 02:00:08.140
what percentage of Jews do practice Kabbalah?

02:00:08.660 --> 02:00:09.700
What practice Kabbalah?

02:00:10.000 --> 02:00:11.800
Well, yeah, study it and...

02:00:11.800 --> 02:00:12.700
It's interesting, okay.

02:00:13.220 --> 02:00:17.180
Okay, what percentage of Jews practice Kabbalah?

02:00:17.280 --> 02:00:18.480
And they are Kabbalists,

02:00:19.080 --> 02:00:22.080
that they, you know, they study Kabbalistic literature

02:00:22.080 --> 02:00:24.840
in and they do Kabbalistic exercises

02:00:24.840 --> 02:00:26.780
and say Kabbalistic formulas and stuff.

02:00:27.660 --> 02:00:30.160
Maybe half a percent, something like that, probably less.

02:00:31.360 --> 02:00:33.320
What kind of, what kind of proportion of Jews

02:00:33.320 --> 02:00:36.680
are to some extent influenced in their practice by Kabbalah?

02:00:37.200 --> 02:00:39.500
Of among Orthodox Jews, probably about 80, 90 percent?

02:00:40.460 --> 02:00:42.160
What kind of proportion of Jews

02:00:42.160 --> 02:00:44.240
are heavily influenced by Kabbalah?

02:00:45.260 --> 02:00:47.080
20 percent, 30 percent?

02:00:47.260 --> 02:00:48.360
Again, it's quite long.

02:00:49.360 --> 02:00:51.000
So one of the things about Judaism,

02:00:51.000 --> 02:00:52.520
and the way it works is that

02:00:54.900 --> 02:00:59.160
it isn't really a religion that is doctrinally based,

02:00:59.340 --> 02:01:00.820
as it is very much based upon practice.

02:01:01.420 --> 02:01:02.720
It's a, it's a, it's a,

02:01:02.720 --> 02:01:04.620
an all-for-practic religion in many ways.

02:01:05.220 --> 02:01:08.660
So there is a kind of, if someone is observant

02:01:08.660 --> 02:01:10.080
and he keeps them at spot

02:01:10.080 --> 02:01:11.860
and he prays when he's supposed to

02:01:11.860 --> 02:01:13.340
and he builds a tabernacle when he's supposed to

02:01:13.340 --> 02:01:15.420
and he keeps the Sabbath as he's supposed to,

02:01:16.340 --> 02:01:19.320
Jews tend to be very, very tolerant about what he believes.

02:01:19.320 --> 02:01:21.200
They don't really care what he believes.

02:01:23.040 --> 02:01:24.960
And in some ways I think that's a good thing

02:01:24.960 --> 02:01:27.380
because it stops us having wars of religion,

02:01:27.700 --> 02:01:29.820
stops us having ISIS kind of groups

02:01:29.820 --> 02:01:31.380
saying cutting off your head

02:01:31.380 --> 02:01:33.240
because you didn't say the Shahada in the right way.

02:01:33.760 --> 02:01:35.260
But again, it has a failure mode

02:01:35.260 --> 02:01:36.920
and the failure mode is just kind of

02:01:36.920 --> 02:01:40.520
basically tolerating any kind of insane crazy beliefs

02:01:40.520 --> 02:01:43.140
as long as people are precise in their ritual observance.

02:01:46.060 --> 02:01:48.240
So if we're criticized for that,

02:01:48.240 --> 02:01:51.200
then I'm not going to defend things that I think are wrong.

02:01:53.240 --> 02:01:55.540
But I also think the truth is a violation of monotheism.

02:01:58.480 --> 02:02:03.620
Yeah. Can I ask you, under Jewish tradition,

02:02:04.680 --> 02:02:09.600
are you allowed to lie to me and trick me?

02:02:10.480 --> 02:02:12.360
You don't have to tell me the truth to you

02:02:12.360 --> 02:02:14.580
if it's in the interests of Judaism.

02:02:14.940 --> 02:02:16.640
Am I allowed to lie to you or trick to you?

02:02:17.720 --> 02:02:20.160
There's no doctrine if you want.

02:02:20.440 --> 02:02:22.840
Like, Shia Muslims have adoption of taqfeer.

02:02:23.260 --> 02:02:23.480
Yeah.

02:02:23.520 --> 02:02:24.320
No, it's not called taqfeer.

02:02:24.420 --> 02:02:24.740
Is it called taqfeer?

02:02:24.760 --> 02:02:27.000
Yeah, that's what I was asking you.

02:02:27.200 --> 02:02:28.760
Is the not a similar thing in Judaism?

02:02:29.220 --> 02:02:31.300
No, there's no organized option of thing.

02:02:31.580 --> 02:02:32.880
There's a principle which is I'm allowed

02:02:32.880 --> 02:02:34.800
to violate anything to save my life.

02:02:35.500 --> 02:02:36.180
So if you...

02:02:36.180 --> 02:02:37.200
I'm not going to kill you, Gabriel.

02:02:37.540 --> 02:02:39.640
So if you order me to eat pork

02:02:41.220 --> 02:02:42.860
or you'll kill me, I'm allowed to eat the pork.

02:02:43.120 --> 02:02:44.540
Similarly, if you're going to kill me

02:02:44.540 --> 02:02:47.000
but I'll be able to lie so you won't kill me,

02:02:47.000 --> 02:02:47.500
then I can lie.

02:02:47.640 --> 02:02:48.960
So that's an established principle.

02:02:49.900 --> 02:02:51.220
Apart from that, no, there's no...

02:02:51.920 --> 02:02:52.860
But then there's not...

02:02:53.380 --> 02:02:59.060
I mean, there's not a specific Torah offence to lie.

02:02:59.440 --> 02:03:01.000
Like, nowhere in the Torah does it say you can't lie.

02:03:01.180 --> 02:03:03.380
Like, it's unethical.

02:03:03.760 --> 02:03:05.500
So there's a wider theory of...

02:03:05.500 --> 02:03:11.040
The Talmud doesn't deal with kind of ethic questions so much.

02:03:11.380 --> 02:03:12.760
So for example, one of the things that

02:03:12.760 --> 02:03:15.960
actually is a specific offense in the Torah is gossip.

02:03:16.220 --> 02:03:18.240
You're not allowed to gossip about people.

02:03:19.680 --> 02:03:21.500
So the question is, well, what does it mean to gossip?

02:03:21.860 --> 02:03:25.040
Like, what if I think someone's a pedophile, right?

02:03:25.600 --> 02:03:26.660
And maybe I should gossip, you know?

02:03:27.060 --> 02:03:29.800
So in more recent times, there's been a large literature

02:03:29.800 --> 02:03:31.440
that's been written about the Jewish laws

02:03:31.440 --> 02:03:33.100
of what we call Lush and Hurrah, about gossip.

02:03:35.160 --> 02:03:36.780
And those kind of tend to fall into

02:03:36.780 --> 02:03:38.300
kind of this failure mode of legalism

02:03:38.300 --> 02:03:42.500
that you spend a whole week reading this thing,

02:03:42.660 --> 02:03:44.020
long book about when am I allowed to,

02:03:44.080 --> 02:03:46.220
when am I allowed to, when am I not allowed to, when am I allowed to.

02:03:46.460 --> 02:03:48.440
And then when you actually get to a practical situation,

02:03:49.660 --> 02:03:53.120
you just end up gossiping because it's too much.

02:03:53.360 --> 02:03:53.520
You can't...

02:03:55.380 --> 02:03:58.360
So with lying, lying kind of falls into that kind of thing, you know?

02:04:02.440 --> 02:04:04.360
Like, it's kind of thing, you just have to...

02:04:04.360 --> 02:04:05.900
It's not something you can really legalize.

02:04:06.060 --> 02:04:07.260
You just have to kind of...

02:04:07.260 --> 02:04:09.780
Because everyone agrees, look, Kent didn't agree.

02:04:10.520 --> 02:04:11.480
Kent said you're never allowed to lie.

02:04:11.820 --> 02:04:13.800
But everyone else who's not Kent says there are occasions

02:04:13.800 --> 02:04:14.620
when you're not allowed to lie.

02:04:14.680 --> 02:04:16.660
Okay, the Nazis come in, you've got some Jews under your staircase.

02:04:17.460 --> 02:04:18.400
They say, where are the Jews?

02:04:18.520 --> 02:04:20.020
They say, I don't know the Jews, and we'll end in the city.

02:04:20.380 --> 02:04:22.020
Everyone agrees there are cases when you're allowed to lie.

02:04:23.820 --> 02:04:25.520
So it's not kind of a thing you can legalize.

02:04:25.740 --> 02:04:26.960
Like, it's just...

02:04:26.960 --> 02:04:29.080
It's kind of a thing you have to cultivate

02:04:29.080 --> 02:04:32.700
a character trait of honesty through moral exaltation.

02:04:33.240 --> 02:04:35.520
But is there a law that says I'm allowed to lie to you

02:04:35.520 --> 02:04:37.480
because you're a Gentile and you'll feel better about me?

02:04:37.580 --> 02:04:38.700
If I lie, no, there's no such thing.

02:04:38.720 --> 02:04:39.460
I was thinking...

02:04:39.460 --> 02:04:41.200
Well, I think maybe I was stretching it.

02:04:41.220 --> 02:04:42.480
If I said law, I didn't mean that.

02:04:42.580 --> 02:04:45.360
I meant a kind of code tradition, a kind of...

02:04:46.120 --> 02:04:47.220
No, there's no such...

02:04:47.220 --> 02:04:48.060
There's no...

02:04:48.060 --> 02:04:51.460
Look, sheites have a specific doctrine of lying,

02:04:51.920 --> 02:04:53.400
which they developed mostly not...

02:04:53.400 --> 02:04:55.400
It's not about non-Muslims.

02:04:55.600 --> 02:04:57.860
It's mostly about Sunni Muslims persecuting them.

02:04:58.200 --> 02:04:58.620
Right, right.

02:04:58.920 --> 02:05:00.300
They say they develop this specific thing

02:05:00.300 --> 02:05:01.400
and they have a specific code.

02:05:01.560 --> 02:05:02.640
When are you allowed, when are you not...

02:05:02.640 --> 02:05:04.960
There's no such section of Jewish law that deals with it.

02:05:04.960 --> 02:05:06.220
Right, right.

02:05:06.660 --> 02:05:09.120
I was very sorry to hear you say, by the way,

02:05:09.200 --> 02:05:13.120
that in your kind of religious practice,

02:05:13.300 --> 02:05:14.900
you've never had a sort of...

02:05:15.980 --> 02:05:19.540
Do you not get intimations of God or anything like that?

02:05:19.560 --> 02:05:20.880
No, when I say I haven't received prophecy,

02:05:21.160 --> 02:05:22.140
I mean, I've never...

02:05:22.140 --> 02:05:22.840
I'm not a prophet.

02:05:23.340 --> 02:05:23.840
No, I have...

02:05:24.560 --> 02:05:25.460
What do you get?

02:05:26.760 --> 02:05:27.280
I don't...

02:05:27.280 --> 02:05:27.620
What do you get?

02:05:27.940 --> 02:05:28.880
Like, you know, have you...

02:05:28.880 --> 02:05:30.420
I've had moments of kind of serenity.

02:05:31.340 --> 02:05:32.560
I've had moments of serenity.

02:05:32.700 --> 02:05:34.300
I've had moments of kind of being overwhelmed.

02:05:34.960 --> 02:05:38.700
I've had moments of terror because of consciousness in my sins.

02:05:38.880 --> 02:05:39.680
Yeah, I've had emotional...

02:05:39.680 --> 02:05:41.740
Yeah, the fear of the Lord is a...

02:05:41.740 --> 02:05:43.740
Well, it's the beginning of wisdom, of course, but yes.

02:05:44.480 --> 02:05:45.200
No, I suppose...

02:05:46.520 --> 02:05:47.820
Yeah, that's good to hear.

02:05:48.740 --> 02:05:53.220
I suppose you get what I would call God treats,

02:05:54.200 --> 02:05:57.840
where occasionally he sends you these little signs

02:05:57.840 --> 02:06:02.360
that is there with you and he's got your back.

02:06:02.360 --> 02:06:05.080
And I'm presuming you get those as well.

02:06:05.720 --> 02:06:09.360
So look, I will say that Judaism is a kind of organized religion

02:06:10.220 --> 02:06:12.000
connected to being legalists.

02:06:12.100 --> 02:06:17.020
It's not built around cultivating those kind of religious emotions.

02:06:17.740 --> 02:06:19.640
And one of the things that Kabbalists...

02:06:21.180 --> 02:06:25.020
One of the reasons why Kabbalah kind of developed and became more popular

02:06:25.020 --> 02:06:26.400
is because actually there are more into that.

02:06:26.640 --> 02:06:28.080
Kabbalists are actually into meditation,

02:06:29.100 --> 02:06:31.600
they're into kind of quasi-profesical kind of things.

02:06:32.560 --> 02:06:38.440
Oh, look, in a sense, this kind of non-prophetic nature of legalistic Judaism,

02:06:39.280 --> 02:06:41.520
like all things, it has its plus size and its downsides.

02:06:41.980 --> 02:06:45.980
The plus side is that traditionally speaking, before Kabbalah at least,

02:06:46.120 --> 02:06:49.820
we were much less likely to be led astray by kind of charismatic figures and stuff.

02:06:52.120 --> 02:06:57.120
And also the kind of Christianity and also Islam as well,

02:06:57.260 --> 02:06:58.400
they don't talk about it so much nowadays,

02:06:58.400 --> 02:07:00.400
but they have had these antinomian movements.

02:07:02.380 --> 02:07:04.680
Which kind of say, oh, you know, because we're above the law,

02:07:04.740 --> 02:07:07.600
because we're beyond the law, well, it turns out I can do whatever I want.

02:07:07.740 --> 02:07:09.720
And what it turns out I want to do is adultery, right?

02:07:11.040 --> 02:07:14.940
Judaism until the 17th century and Sabateinism didn't have a single

02:07:14.940 --> 02:07:18.160
antinomian movement, as far as we know, for 1,300 years.

02:07:18.500 --> 02:07:23.420
So I think it's pretty good from the Talmudic period until Sabatizei.

02:07:23.660 --> 02:07:27.320
When Kabbalah came along, unfortunately, 200 years later,

02:07:27.740 --> 02:07:29.000
we did have an antinomian movement,

02:07:29.000 --> 02:07:33.460
which I think shows you why maybe rabbinic Judaism had a good point

02:07:33.460 --> 02:07:37.600
about not kind of cultivating this kind of more meditative form of spirituality.

02:07:38.180 --> 02:07:42.020
But I can also accept, if people want to say that Judaism seems a bit stale,

02:07:42.460 --> 02:07:44.900
seems a bit dry, I can buy that, that's fine.

02:07:45.300 --> 02:07:47.920
I don't think there's criticism that's being really leveled at it.

02:07:48.040 --> 02:07:52.120
It's more, I think people get freaked out by things like the rebel.

02:07:52.600 --> 02:07:52.800
What is it?

02:07:54.880 --> 02:07:56.860
Schneersen, what's that particular cult?

02:07:56.860 --> 02:07:58.880
No, Lubavitch. Look, Lubavitch is heresy.

02:07:59.040 --> 02:08:01.440
Exactly, Lubavitch. That's what I was...

02:08:01.440 --> 02:08:03.740
Is that... That is the same as Ben-Abraith, isn't it?

02:08:04.540 --> 02:08:07.240
No, not at all. Ben-Abraith is a... Ben-Abraith...

02:08:07.240 --> 02:08:08.820
I mean, what? I don't know how much I'm going to use this.

02:08:08.920 --> 02:08:14.040
Ben-Abraith was a Jewish kind of social...

02:08:14.220 --> 02:08:14.940
...a bit like the Freemasons.

02:08:15.320 --> 02:08:16.880
Sorry, okay. Sorry, I'm...

02:08:16.880 --> 02:08:17.900
It was like a...

02:08:17.900 --> 02:08:19.740
Yeah, I'm between the Lubavitches.

02:08:20.620 --> 02:08:22.640
No, Lubavitch is not connecting with Ben-Abraith at all.

02:08:22.640 --> 02:08:28.400
Ben-Abraith was like upscale liberal American Jews

02:08:28.400 --> 02:08:32.600
who wanted to hang out with other upscale liberal American Jews

02:08:32.600 --> 02:08:34.280
and discuss business and whatever.

02:08:34.800 --> 02:08:35.800
Lubavitch is a religious movement.

02:08:36.900 --> 02:08:39.680
Look, my view is, okay, there are...

02:08:40.820 --> 02:08:44.180
As a movement, I think Lubavitch goes against Judaism

02:08:44.180 --> 02:08:47.040
and they should be suppressed.

02:08:47.680 --> 02:08:49.040
Again, I don't believe in violence,

02:08:49.400 --> 02:08:51.640
so I haven't got any tools to suppress them, but...

02:08:51.640 --> 02:08:56.280
Trump loves them. Putin seems to be invading with them.

02:08:56.800 --> 02:08:58.720
What's his name? Jared Kushner.

02:08:58.940 --> 02:09:00.040
Absolutely is...

02:09:00.900 --> 02:09:03.500
They're right up him, or he's right up them.

02:09:04.280 --> 02:09:07.800
I mean, and these are people not uninfluential.

02:09:08.920 --> 02:09:14.300
And so, look, Lubavitch is a messianic movement.

02:09:14.460 --> 02:09:16.640
They believe that lately there was the Messiah,

02:09:17.080 --> 02:09:19.300
the vast majority of them, certainly.

02:09:21.840 --> 02:09:23.800
And that gives them a lot of motivation.

02:09:25.020 --> 02:09:26.660
One thing they're very smart about,

02:09:26.840 --> 02:09:28.560
they're very... they're politically agnostic.

02:09:29.260 --> 02:09:34.060
So, they're very big in, as you say, in Russia,

02:09:34.260 --> 02:09:35.660
they're closely associated with the Putin regime,

02:09:35.780 --> 02:09:36.520
but also in Ukraine.

02:09:37.540 --> 02:09:40.100
The Ukrainian branch of Lubavitch

02:09:40.100 --> 02:09:42.220
is very pro-Ukrainian nationalism.

02:09:42.500 --> 02:09:42.790
They're not...

02:09:44.520 --> 02:09:46.140
What they're interested in is promoting

02:09:46.140 --> 02:09:47.300
the messianic movement.

02:09:48.820 --> 02:09:53.420
And they're just not fussed

02:09:53.420 --> 02:09:55.740
about what kind of political options

02:09:55.740 --> 02:09:56.720
they have to espouse to do that.

02:09:57.440 --> 02:09:58.800
And look, they do a lot of stuff.

02:09:59.400 --> 02:09:59.980
They do a lot of...

02:09:59.980 --> 02:10:00.960
They run a lot of soup kitchens.

02:10:01.540 --> 02:10:03.160
They do a lot of charitable work.

02:10:03.360 --> 02:10:04.500
Like, there's probably...

02:10:04.500 --> 02:10:06.000
Yeah, but so do the Shriners.

02:10:06.540 --> 02:10:07.020
Wait a second.

02:10:08.040 --> 02:10:09.160
Jews of my persuasion,

02:10:09.360 --> 02:10:10.980
you might call broadly speaking rationalists

02:10:10.980 --> 02:10:12.720
or whatever you want to call Jews of my persuasion,

02:10:13.040 --> 02:10:14.200
probably could learn a lot from them

02:10:14.660 --> 02:10:15.720
how to grow their movement.

02:10:16.800 --> 02:10:19.160
But no, my view is that Lubavitch

02:10:19.160 --> 02:10:20.600
is basically heretical

02:10:21.100 --> 02:10:22.420
and that they should be suppressed.

02:10:22.920 --> 02:10:25.540
Like I say, I don't believe in violence,

02:10:25.680 --> 02:10:27.760
but in as much as you can suppress someone,

02:10:28.060 --> 02:10:28.700
they should be suppressed.

02:10:28.900 --> 02:10:29.180
That's my view.

02:10:30.580 --> 02:10:31.060
Yes.

02:10:32.180 --> 02:10:34.760
Yeah, again, it's a problem, isn't it?

02:10:34.900 --> 02:10:36.060
I mean, I'm trying to think,

02:10:37.120 --> 02:10:39.380
is there an equivalent of Lubavitch

02:10:39.380 --> 02:10:41.900
in the Christian world,

02:10:42.480 --> 02:10:43.820
which has that influence

02:10:43.820 --> 02:10:46.060
and that geopolitical reach

02:10:47.380 --> 02:10:51.220
and that sheer menace?

02:10:51.420 --> 02:10:52.480
I mean, do it...

02:10:52.480 --> 02:10:53.860
I mean, is it menace?

02:10:54.100 --> 02:10:56.380
Like, I mean, the thing about...

02:10:56.380 --> 02:10:58.620
Okay, one advantage of Christianity

02:10:58.620 --> 02:11:00.380
is because you believe the Messiah has already come,

02:11:01.180 --> 02:11:03.560
that kind of means you're less vulnerable

02:11:03.560 --> 02:11:04.860
to fake messianic movements.

02:11:05.320 --> 02:11:07.240
One would take a message to you, Jason, for sure.

02:11:08.280 --> 02:11:09.260
He was quite cool.

02:11:09.420 --> 02:11:10.000
You've got to admit...

02:11:10.000 --> 02:11:11.000
I mean, whatever you think about him,

02:11:11.120 --> 02:11:12.220
I mean, you think he wasn't the Messiah,

02:11:12.220 --> 02:11:15.600
but he had nice beard, long hair.

02:11:15.840 --> 02:11:17.100
He said some cool things.

02:11:17.560 --> 02:11:19.020
I'm looking at Rebbe Schneersen.

02:11:19.560 --> 02:11:20.880
I'm not thinking...

02:11:20.880 --> 02:11:22.740
I'm not thinking that it's a cause of what...

02:11:22.740 --> 02:11:24.060
I'm reading Isaiah at the moment.

02:11:24.140 --> 02:11:25.920
I think Isaiah was almost my favourite book

02:11:25.920 --> 02:11:26.500
of the Old Testament.

02:11:26.700 --> 02:11:27.080
It's fantastic.

02:11:28.300 --> 02:11:30.940
And nowhere am I coming up with passages

02:11:30.940 --> 02:11:34.980
which are called with Schneersen being the Messiah.

02:11:36.060 --> 02:11:38.360
No, I mean, it's all obviously absurd.

02:11:38.540 --> 02:11:41.500
I mean, the man obviously had a certain charisma

02:11:42.660 --> 02:11:45.460
and people say that he was very kind in his dealings with people.

02:11:45.680 --> 02:11:47.480
He was very upright and stuff,

02:11:47.740 --> 02:11:48.940
and I had no reason to doubt it.

02:11:49.060 --> 02:11:49.740
I didn't...

02:11:49.740 --> 02:11:51.340
You know, certain people have this kind of...

02:11:51.340 --> 02:11:51.980
They don't get angry.

02:11:52.800 --> 02:11:56.400
They have this kind of way of reading people's souls and giving...

02:11:56.400 --> 02:11:57.900
He was very known for giving people good advice.

02:11:58.000 --> 02:11:59.540
A lot of people credit him for...

02:11:59.540 --> 02:12:00.780
You know, people who were drug addicts.

02:12:00.820 --> 02:12:02.160
They credit him for getting them out of their hole.

02:12:02.280 --> 02:12:03.620
People who had problems with their marriage.

02:12:03.940 --> 02:12:04.620
He fixed their marriage.

02:12:05.300 --> 02:12:06.040
All of that kind of stuff.

02:12:06.120 --> 02:12:06.400
I don't...

02:12:06.400 --> 02:12:07.880
You know, in that set, obviously,

02:12:08.060 --> 02:12:11.480
I think he was bad because he was a fake messiah.

02:12:12.000 --> 02:12:15.840
But he had certain good things, as I imagine Jesus did.

02:12:16.020 --> 02:12:16.200
I mean...

02:12:17.540 --> 02:12:18.380
But you know he did.

02:12:18.580 --> 02:12:20.240
You know Jesus was good.

02:12:20.860 --> 02:12:21.600
Well, look, I don't...

02:12:21.600 --> 02:12:26.440
Look, I mean, I tend towards the view that the gospel...

02:12:26.440 --> 02:12:30.080
No, I tend towards the view that the gospels are somewhat unreliable.

02:12:30.540 --> 02:12:31.760
Look, again, I'm not a believing Christian.

02:12:32.000 --> 02:12:33.060
I know that I'm believing Christian.

02:12:33.340 --> 02:12:33.760
No, I'm sorry.

02:12:34.040 --> 02:12:34.840
I'm putting it on the spot.

02:12:34.920 --> 02:12:35.540
I'm teasing you.

02:12:35.600 --> 02:12:37.540
No, no, I tend towards the view that the gospel...

02:12:37.540 --> 02:12:39.160
No, the truth is I tend towards the view

02:12:39.160 --> 02:12:40.360
that the gospels are relatively unreliable.

02:12:40.360 --> 02:12:42.000
And therefore, I don't think we really know a lot about Jesus.

02:12:42.240 --> 02:12:44.000
So, I can't say that Jesus was like bad or good

02:12:44.000 --> 02:12:46.900
because I don't personally believe that we know nothing about Jesus.

02:12:47.160 --> 02:12:50.680
There's been lots of academic discussion about who Jesus was.

02:12:50.940 --> 02:12:54.180
As you know, there's a fringe theory that Jesus didn't even insist.

02:12:54.660 --> 02:12:55.640
I don't believe that.

02:12:55.940 --> 02:12:57.660
But my point is there's a big academic debate

02:12:57.660 --> 02:12:59.220
about what did Jesus really believe, et cetera.

02:12:59.360 --> 02:13:00.960
I don't have strong opinions about Jesus.

02:13:01.380 --> 02:13:05.520
I can accept that things like the Sermons at the Mount

02:13:05.520 --> 02:13:08.300
has a great kind of rhetorical and moral power to it.

02:13:08.520 --> 02:13:08.660
Fine.

02:13:09.460 --> 02:13:12.300
But I also think that there's things in the bovich

02:13:12.300 --> 02:13:15.020
that have a certain power.

02:13:15.240 --> 02:13:16.720
I also think there's things in the bovich

02:13:16.720 --> 02:13:18.240
that are a bit gross and disgusting.

02:13:19.380 --> 02:13:20.600
Yeah, it's a complicated world.

02:13:20.820 --> 02:13:23.960
I mean, in menace, but there's no real menace to the bovich

02:13:23.960 --> 02:13:27.100
because what they're trying to achieve is to get...

02:13:27.100 --> 02:13:28.840
They have the area of the preference of the United States

02:13:28.840 --> 02:13:29.720
apart from that.

02:13:30.020 --> 02:13:31.800
I mean, it's a powerful country in the world.

02:13:32.140 --> 02:13:33.960
What they're trying to achieve, fundamentally,

02:13:34.380 --> 02:13:36.920
is to get all Jews to recognize them as sign.

02:13:36.920 --> 02:13:39.400
Now, I think that is a disastrous thing

02:13:40.000 --> 02:13:41.140
because we're not allowed.

02:13:41.400 --> 02:13:42.120
It's against our religion.

02:13:44.340 --> 02:13:46.440
But let's say every Jew in the world said,

02:13:46.780 --> 02:13:50.160
we believe Menachem Mendel-Schneidersohn is the Messiah.

02:13:50.600 --> 02:13:51.900
Now, they believe at that point,

02:13:52.440 --> 02:13:54.280
everything will kick off metaphysically.

02:13:54.780 --> 02:13:55.800
But in fact, nothing would happen.

02:13:56.080 --> 02:13:56.260
Correct?

02:13:56.560 --> 02:13:57.020
Nothing would happen.

02:13:57.280 --> 02:13:58.840
So that's what they actually find the message

02:13:58.840 --> 02:13:59.280
trying to achieve.

02:13:59.600 --> 02:14:01.060
Now, are they involved in corruption

02:14:01.060 --> 02:14:02.940
to get there in Putin's Russia?

02:14:03.240 --> 02:14:03.460
Certainly.

02:14:04.020 --> 02:14:05.280
In Ukraine also, I would imagine

02:14:05.280 --> 02:14:06.180
that there has to be things.

02:14:06.380 --> 02:14:09.540
In Israel, their influence on the political process

02:14:09.540 --> 02:14:12.360
is also very negative.

02:14:12.660 --> 02:14:14.180
They're not above...

02:14:14.180 --> 02:14:15.660
It's not like in America,

02:14:15.940 --> 02:14:17.800
we exploit the political system because they're Gentiles,

02:14:17.940 --> 02:14:19.700
but in Israel, our hands are clean.

02:14:19.940 --> 02:14:22.980
No, they act the same way here as they act there.

02:14:24.220 --> 02:14:25.560
Actually, they get away with a lot more here

02:14:25.560 --> 02:14:28.520
because they're able to more exploit

02:14:28.520 --> 02:14:29.840
certain weaknesses in the system.

02:14:31.200 --> 02:14:33.240
Yeah, look, they behave badly in some ways.

02:14:34.460 --> 02:14:36.160
I think they're bad.

02:14:38.520 --> 02:14:40.100
Gabriel, we've gone on.

02:14:40.820 --> 02:14:42.540
This is one of my longer podcasts.

02:14:42.820 --> 02:14:45.300
I don't normally do longer than an hour and 30.

02:14:45.460 --> 02:14:47.980
So it shows how much I've enjoyed talking to you,

02:14:48.040 --> 02:14:51.580
and it shows what heroic stamina you've got.

02:14:51.800 --> 02:14:53.680
So thank you very much.

02:14:54.240 --> 02:14:56.460
Just one last thing.

02:14:56.740 --> 02:14:59.440
I am intrigued by the Golden Heights being like Dorset.

02:15:01.220 --> 02:15:03.600
Can you sort of wander around any bits

02:15:04.060 --> 02:15:07.200
and not see horrid concrete houses?

02:15:07.560 --> 02:15:09.500
I mean, is there anywhere on spoil?

02:15:09.960 --> 02:15:10.360
Yeah, yes.

02:15:11.560 --> 02:15:14.520
The Golden Heights is very unbuilt up

02:15:14.520 --> 02:15:17.180
because when it was originally conquered by Israel,

02:15:18.360 --> 02:15:19.680
there was a general consensus

02:15:19.680 --> 02:15:21.600
that they were going to give it back at some point.

02:15:23.940 --> 02:15:26.920
As in, we took the Sinai, we took the West Bank,

02:15:27.040 --> 02:15:28.220
we took Gaza, and we took the Golden Heights.

02:15:28.220 --> 02:15:31.520
And most people thought the Sinai is the most likely to go,

02:15:32.020 --> 02:15:33.360
and after that, the Golden Heights.

02:15:33.620 --> 02:15:36.480
Why? Because it has less religious significance,

02:15:36.720 --> 02:15:37.560
so we wanted it less.

02:15:38.060 --> 02:15:39.260
But also because at the time,

02:15:39.380 --> 02:15:42.500
Syria was the major Arab military power,

02:15:43.860 --> 02:15:47.240
and it was our, along with Egypt, was on our biggest threat.

02:15:47.840 --> 02:15:50.120
And the idea is that we'll give up the Golden Heights

02:15:50.120 --> 02:15:53.020
in exchange for a peace deal with Syria,

02:15:54.960 --> 02:15:56.420
just like you gave up the Sinai

02:15:56.420 --> 02:15:57.780
in exchange for a peace deal with Egypt.

02:15:58.220 --> 02:15:59.580
That was what everyone thought would happen.

02:16:00.380 --> 02:16:03.960
It didn't happen because the Syrian state refused the deal.

02:16:04.100 --> 02:16:05.880
We actually, we offered them the Golden Heights back,

02:16:05.980 --> 02:16:07.740
and they said, no, we want even more,

02:16:07.840 --> 02:16:09.580
whatever, it was a technical thing because,

02:16:10.040 --> 02:16:11.980
and then after that, the Syrian state collapsed.

02:16:12.980 --> 02:16:15.600
But what it meant was people didn't come to live here

02:16:16.100 --> 02:16:18.300
in the decades after the Yom Kippur War,

02:16:18.320 --> 02:16:20.040
because they thought, well, why am I going to live somewhere

02:16:20.040 --> 02:16:23.700
where I'm going to just have to leave in 10 years.

02:16:24.880 --> 02:16:27.720
So actually, it's quite, it's quite, you call it here.

02:16:28.660 --> 02:16:30.020
And it's also very safe because

02:16:30.860 --> 02:16:32.420
Syria is no longer a military threat.

02:16:32.900 --> 02:16:34.320
It's non-existence as a military threat.

02:16:36.080 --> 02:16:37.840
Hezbollah don't target the Golden Heights,

02:16:38.000 --> 02:16:39.340
even though they could logistically,

02:16:40.000 --> 02:16:41.220
because they don't consider it to be,

02:16:41.420 --> 02:16:43.280
they consider their job to be to conquer,

02:16:43.480 --> 02:16:44.980
ideally, northern Israel,

02:16:45.160 --> 02:16:46.460
but they consider it to be Syria's job

02:16:46.460 --> 02:16:47.380
to conquer the Golden Heights.

02:16:47.880 --> 02:16:48.780
They don't have a claim on it.

02:16:49.220 --> 02:16:50.360
There are no Palestinians here.

02:16:51.600 --> 02:16:54.540
There are Druze Arabs who are,

02:16:55.080 --> 02:16:56.120
they vary, but they're not

02:16:57.060 --> 02:16:58.220
militantly hostile to Israel.

02:16:58.940 --> 02:17:00.080
So there's no terrorism here.

02:17:00.340 --> 02:17:01.020
It's a very safe place.

02:17:01.160 --> 02:17:01.840
It's very nice.

02:17:02.400 --> 02:17:04.920
So I'm sort of itching to see with your camera

02:17:04.920 --> 02:17:06.720
what the view is out of your window.

02:17:07.340 --> 02:17:10.400
Is it rolling, rolling fields with sheep in it?

02:17:10.420 --> 02:17:10.760
Shall we try?

02:17:11.100 --> 02:17:11.820
Yeah, go on, try.

02:17:14.120 --> 02:17:16.600
So, no, I don't think we're gonna,

02:17:16.900 --> 02:17:17.980
no, we're not gonna do it.

02:17:18.020 --> 02:17:18.420
Can you see?

02:17:18.880 --> 02:17:19.980
No, I can see sky.

02:17:21.420 --> 02:17:23.700
But you can describe the, oh, I can.

02:17:23.840 --> 02:17:24.340
Yes, I can.

02:17:24.900 --> 02:17:25.400
Oh, right.

02:17:25.800 --> 02:17:26.420
It's green.

02:17:27.240 --> 02:17:27.860
It's green.

02:17:32.280 --> 02:17:32.680
Yeah.

02:17:38.660 --> 02:17:40.000
I've seen your keyboard now.

02:17:40.440 --> 02:17:40.840
Okay.

02:17:41.160 --> 02:17:41.860
Now I've got my headphones in.

02:17:41.960 --> 02:17:42.080
Sorry.

02:17:42.420 --> 02:17:43.260
So I don't know if you saw,

02:17:43.700 --> 02:17:44.040
I did.

02:17:44.640 --> 02:17:46.200
Across the road is actually quite an ugly house.

02:17:46.580 --> 02:17:46.740
Yeah.

02:17:48.280 --> 02:17:49.580
So it's a kind of a villa.

02:17:49.700 --> 02:17:50.820
Actually, it's an interesting guy.

02:17:50.980 --> 02:17:54.920
He's actually an Israeli Arab who became rich

02:17:55.720 --> 02:17:58.280
delivering those water cooler things that,

02:17:58.940 --> 02:18:02.200
and he came and so he was grew up in Arab

02:18:02.200 --> 02:18:03.360
Village, but he made, you know,

02:18:03.420 --> 02:18:04.060
he made good money.

02:18:04.160 --> 02:18:06.380
So he came to live in this town instead.

02:18:07.260 --> 02:18:08.680
Do you think things are very peaceful and

02:18:08.680 --> 02:18:09.600
calm and nicer?

02:18:09.920 --> 02:18:10.100
It's not.

02:18:10.400 --> 02:18:12.120
No, it looks, it looks really nice.

02:18:12.980 --> 02:18:15.100
In fact, Mount Hermon,

02:18:15.260 --> 02:18:17.340
which is the tallest mountain in Israel,

02:18:17.460 --> 02:18:18.620
half it's in Israel, half it's in Lebanon,

02:18:19.160 --> 02:18:21.720
is, the camera is not long enough.

02:18:21.840 --> 02:18:23.320
But if I go around the corner,

02:18:23.720 --> 02:18:24.880
if I poke my head out the window,

02:18:25.440 --> 02:18:26.620
I can see Mount Hermon.

02:18:27.220 --> 02:18:29.260
Life is the view of Mount Hermon,

02:18:29.480 --> 02:18:31.080
which fell upon the hill of Zion.

02:18:32.020 --> 02:18:33.400
There the Lord promised his blessing

02:18:33.400 --> 02:18:34.400
and life forevermore.

02:18:35.280 --> 02:18:35.500
Amen.

02:18:37.420 --> 02:18:38.880
So, thank you.

02:18:39.420 --> 02:18:41.880
Gabriel, tell us where we can find your,

02:18:42.460 --> 02:18:44.480
your sub-stack until it reminds us.

02:18:44.480 --> 02:18:45.460
Mountzyonism.com.

02:18:46.260 --> 02:18:53.380
I think most people have loved you and,

02:18:53.500 --> 02:18:54.720
and so thank you.

02:18:55.300 --> 02:18:55.860
I'm just guessing.

02:18:56.280 --> 02:18:57.460
Speaking for my audience here,

02:18:57.540 --> 02:18:59.180
I think you've been, you've been great

02:18:59.180 --> 02:19:01.800
and, you know, we've, we've had a bit of a,

02:19:02.400 --> 02:19:04.780
little bit of gentle rambling.

02:19:05.740 --> 02:19:08.940
Well, I, I hope our mutual rabbinical friends.

02:19:09.380 --> 02:19:10.500
Well, I hope so too.

02:19:10.740 --> 02:19:12.860
And I hope you, I hope you didn't hate the experience.

02:19:14.280 --> 02:19:14.960
No, no, no.

02:19:15.220 --> 02:19:18.040
Look, again, like I say, I'm open to, I just,

02:19:19.900 --> 02:19:22.160
I'm just, I'm a bit beyond, I guess I've been,

02:19:22.280 --> 02:19:23.700
I cycle through so many ideologies,

02:19:23.860 --> 02:19:25.780
I'm just a bit beyond being offended by things.

02:19:26.340 --> 02:19:28.880
I'm a bit beyond feeling defensive about things either.

02:19:30.300 --> 02:19:30.460
Excellent.

02:19:32.120 --> 02:19:32.740
Thank you.

02:19:33.480 --> 02:19:33.800
Everyone.

02:19:34.280 --> 02:19:35.520
Oh, you know, actually, I'll say something.

02:19:35.680 --> 02:19:36.180
I will say it.

02:19:36.260 --> 02:19:36.580
Why is not it saying?

02:19:36.580 --> 02:19:37.160
Just say it.

02:19:37.340 --> 02:19:38.960
In a, in a high-ethetical world

02:19:39.840 --> 02:19:42.160
where no one knew what, no one knew what was in the Talbot,

02:19:42.320 --> 02:19:42.500
right?

02:19:44.300 --> 02:19:44.840
Maybe I would lie.

02:19:44.980 --> 02:19:45.340
I don't know.

02:19:45.400 --> 02:19:46.680
I haven't thought about what I would do.

02:19:46.780 --> 02:19:48.900
It's not, not because there's a law that says I can lie,

02:19:49.300 --> 02:19:50.220
but because maybe I would,

02:19:50.360 --> 02:19:52.460
because there are occasions when it's valid to lie

02:19:52.460 --> 02:19:53.600
and maybe this would be an occasion.

02:19:53.600 --> 02:19:56.920
The truth is, you can go online now

02:19:56.920 --> 02:19:58.660
and you can read the entire Talbot in English.

02:19:59.280 --> 02:19:59.920
You want to do it?

02:20:00.100 --> 02:20:00.900
safaria.com.

02:20:01.060 --> 02:20:01.600
It's all there.

02:20:01.740 --> 02:20:02.320
It's all translated.

02:20:03.120 --> 02:20:03.920
It's got a commentary.

02:20:04.400 --> 02:20:05.000
There's a lot of it.

02:20:05.000 --> 02:20:07.380
It points, all of it, every single word,

02:20:07.580 --> 02:20:09.080
every single word of the Talbot is translated.

02:20:10.020 --> 02:20:11.620
And my point is, is there's just no,

02:20:11.740 --> 02:20:13.000
like, there's no point in lying.

02:20:13.400 --> 02:20:15.560
It's just, if there's any user that's listening to this,

02:20:15.940 --> 02:20:17.600
you might, you might as well be open

02:20:17.600 --> 02:20:19.020
because even if you think, you know,

02:20:19.080 --> 02:20:20.320
I'll just lie and then no lie anymore.

02:20:21.000 --> 02:20:21.680
It's a waste of time.

02:20:22.260 --> 02:20:23.320
The Talbot is what it is.

02:20:24.000 --> 02:20:25.580
Some people are not going to like parts of it.

02:20:26.100 --> 02:20:26.500
There's no point,

02:20:26.600 --> 02:20:28.300
there's no point not being open about it.

02:20:29.580 --> 02:20:30.120
Yeah, yeah.

02:20:30.300 --> 02:20:31.300
No, I, look, I agree.

02:20:31.520 --> 02:20:33.080
I, I'm, I'm totally in honesty

02:20:33.080 --> 02:20:34.980
as the best policy kind of guy.

02:20:36.060 --> 02:20:37.720
And it's good to meet a fellow,

02:20:37.980 --> 02:20:39.560
fellow spirit in that regard.

02:20:41.520 --> 02:20:42.920
Everyone, if you've enjoyed this podcast,

02:20:43.120 --> 02:20:44.180
it's obviously you have.

02:20:45.040 --> 02:20:46.600
Do, well, first of all,

02:20:46.660 --> 02:20:49.640
go to Gabriel's website and give them some support.

02:20:50.200 --> 02:20:52.140
Read just interesting articles.

02:20:52.980 --> 02:20:54.420
You've got a measure of the man now.

02:20:54.500 --> 02:20:55.620
I think you can see he's worth reading.

02:20:56.560 --> 02:20:58.760
And for me, yeah, look, do,

02:20:59.500 --> 02:21:03.400
do please continue sharing and liking and supporting me.

02:21:03.540 --> 02:21:04.220
Those of you who can,

02:21:04.320 --> 02:21:05.040
who can make the effort,

02:21:05.220 --> 02:21:07.680
the financial commitment, thank you.

02:21:07.760 --> 02:21:10.740
Become a paid subscriber on Substack or wherever.

02:21:11.000 --> 02:21:12.000
Or go to my website,

02:21:12.500 --> 02:21:15.860
jamesdellingpole.co.uk and support my sponsors.

02:21:16.120 --> 02:21:16.680
Yes, they're good.

02:21:17.180 --> 02:21:18.200
And what was the other thing?

02:21:18.380 --> 02:21:19.120
Oh, you can buy me a coffee.

02:21:19.240 --> 02:21:20.240
Yeah, why not buy me a coffee?

02:21:20.380 --> 02:21:21.020
Just do that.

02:21:21.280 --> 02:21:21.380
Yeah.

02:21:21.380 --> 02:21:22.460
Buy me a coffee.

02:21:22.680 --> 02:21:22.820
Yes.

02:21:23.220 --> 02:21:23.920
Thank you, Gabriel.

02:21:24.640 --> 02:21:25.080
That was great.

02:21:25.260 --> 02:21:25.510
Thank you.

02:21:29.180 --> 02:21:29.940
You are...