Welcome to The Dealing Pod, with me, James Dealing-Pol.
And I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest,
but before we meet him, let's have a word from one of our sponsors.
If you're down the rabbit hole, which you probably are,
otherwise you wouldn't be listening to this podcast,
you've probably gone through your medicine cabinets
and your bathroom cabinets
and chucked out all the big farmer evil, evil products,
and you've replaced them with natural products,
like the stuff that I've got in my cabinets,
which is from Brand Zero.
If you've been to many of my live events,
you may even have seen the Brand Zero stall
run by the lovely Sasha,
and it sells all manner of stuff that you actually want
in your home and to put on your skin.
Pain balm, arnica gel,
Dagmousse honey from Morocco.
Actually, that's more for eating than putting on your skin.
CBD hot chocolate, magnesium butter,
organic bee pollen, beeswax, balms, nice stuff.
There's a good story about how the company started.
It was during Vlandemic,
and all the people who were having to put on these horrible hand
sanitizers were getting their skin all cracked and dry and horrible.
And Sasha had this great idea of having a sort of fundraiser
for to provide local nurses near Stroud where she lives
with soothing beeswax balm.
So it was just a kind of altruistic gesture.
And over 1,000 nurses and carers across the Stroud area
ended up getting these soothing beeswax balms,
and this developed into a business of massage oils,
bath oils, shampoo bars, aromatherapy oils,
organic handmade soaps and so on.
All of it made with natural ingredients,
no nasties, no cruelty to animals.
And now Brand Zero Naturals is going great guns.
So you can find them at brandzeronatrals.co.uk.
That's brandzeronatrals.co.uk.
I love their stuff, and they're really popular as well.
Loads of people buy their stuff.
I think you'll like them if you don't use their stuff already.
brandzeronatrals.co.uk.
Welcome to the Delling Pod, Gavril.
What's your surname?
Martin Dome.
Gavril Martin.
I like Gavril.
I mean, it's obviously like Gabriel, yeah?
Yeah, so English people usually name me as Gavril.
Oh, yeah.
My English person says Gavril.
I want to explain to everyone how this podcast came about.
I think in the early days of my telegram channel,
when I was just starting to go down the rabbit hole
and realizing that the world was just way crazier than I thought,
one of the people who hung out on the channel was a rabbi in New York.
And I liked having him there,
because he could answer questions that one wanted to know
about Jews and Judaism and what they believe, or, I mean,
he was only one man, but...
And then he left, and he was always quite secretive,
because he likes to fly under the radar.
And you know his name, but you've also told me
there's no point telling his name,
because he obviously wants to keep it a secret.
I mean, I think he was...
I've read some articles that he's written
on things like how the schools in New York
have been in Jewish schools are incredibly Israeli-fied.
They're basically pushing Israeli propaganda.
They're not all about Judaism, per se.
They're about pushing Zionism.
But that's all I know about him.
Anyway, he said,
you should get my friend Gavril to talk about stuff.
He'd be happy to do it.
And all I know about you is you're a friend of the Mystery Rabbi
and you're called Gabriel,
and that you've got a sub-stack called non-Zionism.
So that's kind of your position, isn't it?
You're kind of not pro or anti.
You're just kind of...
You want to be out of that particular loop.
Yeah, that's the idea.
The idea is to see if it's possible, really.
Basically, events conspire to make it
so you feel as a Jew you have to have an opinion.
And I, well, I have opinions, shall we say, aside.
And the blog is, you know, a stab at what it might look like
to not have a side, and that does be...
And before we go on, what's your story?
You've got a very English accent,
so I'm presuming you were brought up in...
Because you're now in the Golden Heights, aren't you?
Right, so I was born on the South Coast of England, near Brighton.
I went to a normal English school.
I went to a normal English university,
where I met our mystery rabbi friend.
And I was brought up more at religious, you might say.
I became more religious at university.
And then I lived for a few years
in an ultra-Orthodox, anti-Zionist community.
And then, through various media,
I went to the other end of things.
I became a religious Zionist.
And based on my religious Zionist opinions, I moved to Israel.
I lived for six years in Jerusalem,
during which time my religious Zionist opinions crumbled.
And I moved to the Golden Heights for a quiet life, basically.
Golden Heights is a nice place.
It's the safest place in Israel, for various reasons.
It's a bit like living in Dorset or something.
The nature is as pretty as Dorset,
but the houses aren't as pretty as Dorset.
And that's why I live there. It's not a political statement.
It's the opposite of a political statement.
That's interesting. I'll probably never get to see the Golden Heights.
But I sort of, in my imagination, I imagined the name sounds like...
It sounds very forbidding.
I know that the Golden Heights were strategically important,
because if you control the Golden Heights,
you can shell Israel, can't you, from the Golden Heights,
which is why they wanted to capture it
in either Yom Kippur or the Six-Day War, I forget which.
Both.
Both. Right.
OK. So, you've covered both extremes.
You must have done time with the IDF.
No. When we moved to Israel, I was...
29, I think that's right, something like that.
And as a result, at the time, the general tendency of the IDF
was to move to a smaller army, what they call a quasi-professional army,
as opposed to a conscript army,
because they thought that the days of large-scale warfare were largely over.
And they actually never even... They never asked me.
They just said, oh, you're older than normal age of conscription.
You're already married, you already have a child.
And it never came up.
Some people who immigrate do have to join the army.
Some people do a kind of token bit of army.
Some people have to seek an exemption.
But for me, it literally just never came up.
It never asked me, and I never asked them.
So, you've really whetted my appetite now,
because I'm really interested in hearing both what it was like
in the ultra-Orthodox, anti-Zionist community
and your phase when you became massively pro-Zionist.
So, well, yeah, tell me about the anti-Zionist ones first,
because I mean, I've heard about this,
that there are ultra-Orthodox Jews
who don't believe in the state of Israel.
They think it's a bad thing.
I mean, they don't think it's... What's their line?
Okay, so the traditional view of Orthodox Judaism is against Zionism.
When Zionism started as a movement in the 1880s,
originally there was... At the very early stage,
there was some Orthodox interest.
But by the time of Herzl,
the overwhelming majority of European rabbis,
who at the time were the overwhelming majority of rabbis
before World War II,
were very, very much against.
And it wasn't really an ultra-Orthodox or Orthodox issue.
It was just Orthodox Judaism was against Zionism.
And the goodest Israel, which was the umbrella group
for Orthodox Judaism in Europe at the time,
until various splinter groups, to their right,
or more ultra-Orthodox groups, split off.
Their definition, they were defined by the opposition to Zionism.
So that's the traditional view.
And the traditional view is very...
It has three... There are three ways of putting it,
and they can go together, or you can emphasise one point or the other.
One is that the Zionist movement is secular.
It was always led by secular Jews.
Or the very most somewhat religious Jews.
But that was earlier on.
By the time of Herzl, it was really a secular movement.
And who are you to say that you are now the leaders of the Jews?
We've had our religion for 3,500 years, or whatever you want to say.
But certainly a long time. It's been this way.
We want to continue with the Judaism we know.
We're not interested in your new Zionist solution to the Jewish problem.
That's wonderful with Orthodox anti-Zionism.
Another one is the idea that it's forbidden for Jews to have a state.
Even if, hypothetically, the Zionist movement was religious, or pro-religious,
it would still be forbidden for the Jews to have a state.
Because we're in exile for our various sins.
We'll know when the exile is over, prophetically, or through miracles, or whatever.
This has not happened.
And therefore it's forbidden for us to have a state.
And there's a concept, which is Google-able, called the Three Oaths.
Which is based upon a Midrashic exegesis of some parts of the Song of Songs.
Which basically says there are three oaths.
And the Gentiles have an oath not to oppress us too much.
And we have an oath not to rebel against the Gentiles.
We're supposed to be subject to their rule for the time being,
until the time of the Messiah.
And then we won't be.
So that's another form of anti-Zionism that it represents a rebellion against divinely composed exile.
And the third form of orthodox anti-Zionism, which doesn't necessarily have to be orthodox,
but it can be orthodox, is that it's just a bad idea.
What do you mean?
You're going to travel all the way to Ottoman Palestine and fight the Nases.
What are you going to do?
You're going to rebel against the Ottoman Empire.
What are you talking about?
Where are your armies?
Where are your anything?
That was the mainstream anti-Zionist argument originally.
And orthodox people participated in that just as non-orthodox Jews participated in that.
So that's the basis of orthodox anti-Zionism.
And then what happened is that the success of the state of Israel in existing
and winning wars against its enemies.
And then the last of those arguments was no longer considered valid.
Okay, at the time, and Zionism might seem a bit of a wacky idea, but it worked.
So there's no real or at least it was fought.
There was no real reason to oppose Zionism on those grounds.
The idea that it's a rebellion against God
is difficult to maintain for many people because if it's a rebellion against God,
why did it work?
As in, if you believe that God runs the world and you don't want to go in for some kind of
dualist theology in which the devil has whatever evil entity has the ability to run rampage,
you would have to say that, okay, Zionism, it's a rebellion against God.
Well, we know what happens when people rebel against God.
They fail, they will be crushed, and that will be that.
And the fact is they were crushed, they were very successful.
So therefore maybe it wasn't a rebellion against God.
And the first form of anti-Zionism, the fact that it's just,
it's just, it's not religious or anti-religious has ebbed because the state of Israel is a lot
less secular than it used to be.
I don't think any reasonable person would say the state of Israel today is anti-religious
or persecutes religious people.
There are people who say that, but it's not a reasonable thing to say.
And therefore, most religious Jews have come around to one of two positions.
One is religious Zionism, which we can get to.
And one is something you might call quasi-non-Zionism,
not my personal form of non-Zionism, but ultra-Orphodox non-Zionism, which is just,
look, we don't really understand.
We were against this, but it seems to have worked.
It offers us certain concrete benefits, like the ability to live in a land of Israel,
which for most Orthodox Jews is considered at least desirable, shall we say.
And this just kind of worked for this thing.
And that is the mainstream Orthodox position today among non-religious Zionists, I mean,
the idea that basically, okay, it seems to have got some kind of divine validation.
Also, the Holocaust happened.
So that kind of seems, in some sense, a divine invalidation of just kind of being in exile
and hoping the Gentiles aren't too persecute you.
So we'll work with this thing.
And because there's this constant tension and worse intention with the Arabs around
and there's terrorist attacks, et cetera, that tends to lead to more of a,
just to instinctively see the state of Israel and the Israeli army as kind of defending you
as a Jew, which tends to make you more positively disposed towards it.
And so the mainstream Orthodox non-religious Zionist position has become,
they think, a very, very pro-Israel.
So it's non-Zionists, they won't say they're Zionists,
and they don't idolize Herzl or have any particularly, they don't think about Zionist history
or care about it, but they just like Israel.
They think Israel's good.
The IDF protects us.
You know, they like to go to the Western Wall in Jerusalem, et cetera.
So that would be the mainstream Orthodox position among non-religious Zionists.
There is a smaller group who adhere to, who maintain the strict anti-Zionist position.
It used to be the overwhelming majority of Orthodox Judaism.
And the largest group that do that are called Satmar Khasidim,
who were descendants of a Hungarian group who set themselves up in New York after World War II,
and there's a large Satmar community in London, in North London.
And basically what they say is, it's all a test.
That's what they say.
So it looks like the state of Israel has been very successful.
It looks like they've received some kind of divine validation,
but really it's just a test.
And you just wait and see because everything's going to turn out a big disaster.
But it's very hard to straddle that line without falling into kind of
Naturi Carter.
And I'm sure probably a lot of your viewers have heard of Naturi Carter
because they make a big song and dance about themselves.
They have a social media.
They have a YouTube account.
They go to demonstrations.
And they're the ones who you see who they walk around with Palestinian flags
and they denounce the state of Israel every time they can
on the world media, et cetera.
So they are a very small group.
And they consider themselves to be really the only authentic Jews today.
And they consider even mainstream Satmar Hasidim to be some kind of sell-out.
The Satmar Hasidic position is we oppose Zionism as a rebellion
against our divinely mandated exile,
but that doesn't mean that we support Palestinian nationalism.
We have no position on who should rule the Holy Land.
It could be the Ottoman Empire.
It could be the British Mandate.
It could be whoever.
But we have no interest in seeing the Palestinian Liberation Organization
take over Palestine.
Like it's not our concern.
And basically they keep it up with a certain amount of stress
by being very, very insular.
They've built this town in upstate New York called Curious Yol,
which is kind of Hasidic only.
They call it a village, but it's 60,000 people now.
Something like that.
And they just don't really think about the outside world very much.
And basically they're just waiting patiently
until what they believe will happen,
which is that the state of Israel will collapse
and they'll be vindicated all along.
That's anti-Zionism, religious anti-Zionism today.
Right. Okay.
And that was the sect that you were part of in the early days?
No, no, no.
So yes and no.
So in Stanford Hill in North London,
there's every single type of Orthodox Jewish group is represented.
Satmar are, they're not a majority, but they are the largest group.
There may be 20% of the community in Stanford Hill,
something like that.
And they exert a lot of dominance there.
So I'll give an example of something that happened
when I was living there.
The Israeli, there's a Jewish ambulance service called
Hatsala.
They raise money.
They have their own ambulance and they serve the local community
and they work with NHS, et cetera.
And they're a respectable charity
and they invited the Israeli ambassador,
what's her name, that woman, I don't recall,
to just do a normal photo shop, whatever.
And then they had to apologize to the community
because Satmar got very upset.
They made a big stone of dance about it.
So they had to take out an ad in all the local newspapers.
We're very sorry for offending you.
We, of course, we don't adore Zionism, whatever.
So that's how it goes in that community.
I, the strict anti-Zionists are not a majority,
but they kind of throw their weight around enough
to maintain some kind of distancing
from any kind of pro-Israel viewpoint.
And at times of stress,
which usually the main thing is the draft issue,
the idea of the ultra-Orthodox draft question, Israel,
they're able to kind of mobilize
larger parts of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community
get to be more assertively anti-Zionist
because they're able to portray it as a threat.
So the ultra-Orthodox community as a whole kind of,
they kind of waver.
So around about the time of October the 7th,
they were feeling a lot more pro-Israel
because there was this natural kind of solidarity
with other Jews.
The idea that they're all under threat,
we're all in this together.
When the draft issue comes up,
they switched to being in a more anti-Israel
position because they see it as more of a threat to their community.
I wasn't in Satmar itself,
but I was part of this broader community
which was heavily influenced by Satmar.
Right. I had a girlfriend who used to live in Stamford Hill.
I bet you'd know it.
I hope she wasn't a Satmar Khasid.
She wasn't.
Ravensdale Road?
Of course, yes.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay.
So obviously I used to see,
she used to call them Frommers.
Is that right?
Is that the name for the Frommers?
Yeah, yeah, that's a normal term.
Is she a Jewish girl?
No, she wasn't.
I suppose you can't live in Ravensdale Road
without becoming familiar with the culture.
I mean, it was quite interesting.
I used to like looking at the different hats,
and there were sort of broad brim, sort of fedora type hats.
And then there were the kind of
like woolly or like more Russian looking.
Tell me about the different hats.
Okay.
So there are people who wear normal fedora hats
who are called Lithuanian.
That's how they're known.
Lithuanian, non-Khasidic, another term is Yashivish,
which is one of the two main barges of Orthodox Judaism.
And basically they dress, they wear like a normal suit,
always black, usually without a tie,
and a normal hat, except it's not normal anymore
because people don't wear hats.
But their clothing is basically
what it was normal to wear in Lithuania
a hundred years ago if you were a smart person.
That's them.
And there are then the Khasidin,
which there are lots of different Khasidic sects,
who wear weirder clothes.
It's part of their, they're much more,
they're much more separatist in terms of their lifestyle.
So they speak Yiddish as a first language, as a rule,
whereas Lithuanians don't, they tend to speak English
or if they live in Israel, Hebrew as their first language.
So Khasidin speak Yiddish.
They obviously have this weird clothing
and they're just, they're much more segregated
from wider society, whether it's in Israel
or whether it's in a gentile country as a matter of policy.
And so yeah, they're the ones with weird hats.
So they have what's called a furry hat on the Sabbath
or on festivals.
They have a furry hat, which is called a strimal,
which is what the Polish lower nobility used to wear
hundreds of years ago.
And on other days, they have other types of hats,
a kind of weird, Jew-only hat, which it's very complicated.
You probably don't want to know what the details are.
It might not be worth it, but basically it depends,
which hat you wear depends on which Hasidic sect you are,
but also which wing of that Hasidic sect you are.
So some of them indicate you're,
if you're like more of a business-minded person,
you wear a particular type of hat,
but if you're a very pious person
who devotes more of your life to piety,
then there's a particular type of hat.
And it all kind of symbolizes things
and it's also a family thing and blah, blah, blah.
And it's extremely, extremely complicated.
I only understand 60s and 60s.
Just let the cat in because it's meowing too much.
No problem.
Yeah, come on in.
No, I like the idea that there are different hats,
depending on what how religious you are,
what rank you are, what...
It seems to me that the men get a much better deal
than the women.
The women seem to have to wear
slightly horrible blue,
like unnatural...
Dresses made of what look like unnatural fibers to me.
They don't look like cotton or silk or...
And then wear wigs.
Okay, so in Orthodox Jewish law,
a woman has to cover her hair when she's outside.
So there are different ways.
You can wear a hat, you can wear a scarf.
Wigs is considered the more moderate thing to do
as because women...
Sorry to offend 50% of the audience,
but women tend to be vain.
And many of them find it a burden to have to cover their hair
outside and most Orthodox Jews would say also inside the house.
And so therefore the idea of wearing a wig came up,
which is obviously a loophole.
And among certain groups,
Stamford Hill would be much less this way,
but other in Northwest London,
Hendon, Golders Green, et cetera,
women often wear very, very glamorous wigs
that make them look much more eye-catching,
we might say, than your average woman who's not wearing a wig.
And then there are different ones.
There are more extreme ones.
Stamford Hill is a very extreme place in general.
How long ago was it you were there?
This would have been in the...
This would have been in the 90s.
Okay, so if you go back now,
you might be surprised by how much...
Because the community is much larger than it was
and also much wealthier than it used to be.
You'll be surprised about this whole
Hasidic fashion industry among women has grown up.
And they're very...
One of the things my wife didn't like so much about living there
is actually there's a lot of pressure to dress smart
from the women internally among themselves.
They don't like to doll yourself up,
to always make sure you're whatever.
So again, there are women who are more pious
and therefore they'll just wear a cloth on their head
and kind of black clothes and not make up.
But I mean, a lot of ultra orthodox women
put a lot of time into their appearance,
at least as much, if not more than outside.
I was thinking probably, certainly when I was there,
the women in their wigs and dresses
probably didn't have much of a budget.
So they were probably buying not very good wigs
and not very quality clothes, do you think?
Okay, so again, I'd actually recommend going back
and having a little stroll around.
You know, don't worry, they won't bite.
I think you'd be surprised about how nice
some of the wigs are, the wigs that go
down for £5,000 or more.
It certainly would be a trip down memory lane.
And I would quite like to see the hat.
Did you wear a hat?
I wore like a normal fedora type of hat.
Do you not kind of covet those Russian ones?
No, no, I never, I was never like, I was never,
you said this is a kind of internal thing
about philosophy and observance.
I was never hastilically inclined myself.
I'm not pro-hastilic.
Right. Yeah, okay.
So this brings us to a much bigger question,
which is like, I certainly when I was at university
in the years afterwards, when I lived in London basically,
I would say a very high proportion of my friends,
higher than is represented in the population,
as a percentage of the population, were Jewish.
But they were generally very secular.
I mean, one knew they were Jewish because you just do,
you know, which of your friends are Jewish and which are not.
And you occasionally get nods to it.
But I think if you quizzed them
on what are the tenets of their religious belief,
they would not have had a clue.
Does that make sense to you?
I mean, there are certainly many Jews who are not very religious.
But the majority probably.
Where? Gloverly, worldwide?
Well, I suppose we're talking about in Britain,
which is what I know, but I would imagine America is similar,
I don't know.
But you tell me, I'm asking actually, I'm curious.
Okay, so traditionally, Britain is a bit unusual.
Britain had a model which is quite similar to Anglican Christianity,
in that the majority of Jews in 1990, but even more so in 1970,
were members of an Orthodox synagogue.
And they would go maybe once a month, maybe once a week,
if they were more into it, maybe twice a year,
if they were less into it.
But in their everyday lives, they were not very observant,
which is not the case in America.
Sorry, in America, the vast majority of Jews, until very recently,
were members of either the reform or what's called the conservative movement,
which is a bit of a misnomer because they're very, very liberal.
But in Britain, traditionally, most Jews,
the philosopher Isaiah Berlin once put it,
and something that is very recognizable concept in English Judaism,
he said, the synagogue I don't go to is Orthodox.
And that was the Judaism of most people.
And for example, I remember once, we were probably more religious
than the average English Jew, but certainly not very religious.
And I remember once, I was at school, there was this other girl,
and I had no idea what she was Jewish.
And then I found out, and she mentioned she'd had a bat mitzvah.
And she mentioned that her bat mitzvah
she'd been called up and she'd read from the Torah,
which is something you can't, in an Orthodox synagogue,
there's no such thing as a woman getting up to read from the Torah.
They sit in a separate part of the room, behind some small barrier, etc., like Muslims.
And I remember at the time, I was just like disgusted,
what are you talking about?
You're a girl and you can't go out to read from the Torah.
But I wasn't, you know, there were huge areas of Jewish law
that I didn't observe myself.
But in terms of the synagogue and the ritual side of it,
to the extent that we kept it, we kept it very much on an Orthodox Jewish model.
So back in 1990, I would imagine these guys, you knew,
if they ever went to a synagogue, most likely the synagogue they went to
was an Orthodox synagogue, where they would pray in Hebrew,
in the Reform synagogue often they pray in the vernacular language.
And where, you know, Orthodox Jewish law is followed
for the duration that you're in the synagogue and then outside it's not.
A very common thing that an English Jews do is they kind of they keep kosher a bit.
So the norm that I knew of really growing up was, you know, you eat wherever you want,
but you eat vegetarians.
So you don't eat non-kosher meat, but you're not worried.
You have no idea what's going on in the kitchen, what got mixed up with what.
So probably you're eating non-kosher, but, you know,
you do the minimum, you don't order a steak, you know.
Or the next level down is you would order a steak,
but you wouldn't order a pork shop.
These are the kind of, that's what English Jewry used to be.
Nowadays English Jewries are very different because basically what happened is that kind
of quasi-Anglican model collapsed.
A lot of people went one of different ways.
Either they just blended into the general population
and dropped Jewish observance altogether, or they moved to Israel,
which is something that's happened.
Yeah, it's quite common and it's becoming more common.
Or they joined the growing ultra-Orthodox movement,
which, even when I was a boy,
ultra-Orthodoxy was considered like a very, very fringe thing.
I remember also, I remember the first time I ever saw a Hasidic Jew,
we were in London, I looked to my mother,
what on earth is that? What have I just seen?
But nowadays the community has massively expanded,
to some extent because of people joining,
but also because of, they have a very high birth rate.
And something close to half of Jewish children today under the age of 10
are now ultra-Orthodox.
So the Jewish community of the future
is going to look totally, every Jewish stereotype that you know,
like very interested in secular, very interested in education,
that's the big Jewish stereotype, right?
Or vote Labour Party as a master, of course.
That used to be a Jewish stereotype until about 15 years.
Become lawyers or doctors or...
Yeah, all of those things is the exact opposite
of what the stereotype of a Jew in England will be
in 50 years time.
So Hasidim also are quite, they're quite money-minded,
all Jews, that's something that's common to a lot of Jews,
but they don't go for the professions,
they didn't become doctors and lawyers,
they're really into real estate.
The kind of, the dream of every Hasidic Jew,
except the really pious ones who just want to learn Torah all day,
but the dream of your average Hasidic Jew
is to own a row of properties and flip them and stuff.
And I think, for example, people don't notice
like Canary Wharf, for a long time,
was owned by a Hasidic Jew in Stafford Hill.
I think I did know that.
I can't remember why.
Yeah, okay.
So it's changing quite dramatically.
So, sorry, you said ultra-orthodox for the orthodox.
Is there an accepted definition of the two?
Okay, so one is just by dress.
As in, if you were all black as a man,
you're probably ultra-orthodox.
That's one difference.
One difference, it used to be a difference,
but it's kind of, it's kind of feigning a little bit.
It used to be the attitude to Zionism.
As in, after the state of Israel was formed,
the ones who maintained an anti-Zionist
or non-Zionist position, who, for example,
they don't mark Israel independence day.
That would be a key test.
Then there's no marking of Israel independence day.
That would mark you as ultra-orthodox,
whereas a normal orthodox synagogue
would in some way mark Israel independence day.
That was one difference.
And the other difference is just,
it's a gradient of how strict you are
about fulfilling Jewish law.
And in that one, it's quite hard to pick a
it's quite hard to pick the boundary.
Where does orthodox end?
Where does ultra-orthodox begin?
But you know, you know where the extremes are, so to speak.
Right, right, okay.
Oh, another one.
Sorry, and actually a very, very big one
is attitude to secular education.
So in orthodox Judaism, non-ultra-orthodox Judaism,
secular education is considered good.
You know, it's not the main thing in life maybe,
but it's fine, it's good, it's whatever.
Ultra-orthodox Jews are to some extent,
it depends which group,
but to some extent anti-secular education.
They might say it's allowed
because you need to get a job,
you need to get on in life,
or it's allowed because of government,
but they're in principle opposed
to the concept of secular education.
That's part of the definition of being ultra-orthodox.
Right, so do you think we should,
shall we do your Zionist phase of your life next?
So I want to ask you some
tricksy questions about what it is that Jews actually believe,
and I know it's not that simple,
but we're going to talk about that,
but shall we do, okay, you felt the lure,
you felt the call of Zion.
Is that, by the way, are you sort of,
you mentioned the Torah?
The Torah is what, is that the same as the Pentateuch?
The first, is it the first Bible?
Basically, the Torah can mean one of two things.
It can mean the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible,
or it can mean all of Jewish law.
Those are kind of,
if I say the word Torah in speech,
I might be referring to the first,
or I might be referring to the second.
Right, okay, that's complicated.
It's a bit like Europe and Europe.
You could be talking about the continent,
or you could be talking about the political entity.
Yeah, okay, so we'll come back to that one.
So you felt the lure.
What was it that?
Okay, so basically, for me it was like this.
So I grew up in the traditional English sub-Orthodox environment.
So the synagogue we went to was Orthodox.
The rabbi was Orthodox.
And I was aware that the rabbi kept Jewish law
much more strictly than we did.
But I guess in the same sense that maybe a typical
Roman Catholic looks at his priest
and he doesn't feel any need to be celibate
just because his priest is celibate,
I didn't feel any need to be strictly
observed into the Sabbath just because my rabbi was.
And then during and after university,
I became, first of all, Orthodox and then ultra-Orthodox.
And basically, for me, as a personal experience,
it was the idea that you could keep,
well, basically that was all wrong.
Basically, you keep Judaism 100%.
Whatever Judaism tells you to do,
whatever the Torah tells you to do,
that's what you do, no compromises.
And where I was, the community that I was,
the Oxford Orthodox community,
there's a very strong...
Global warming is a massive con.
There is no evidence whatsoever
that man-made climate change is a problem
that is going to kill us,
that we need to amend our lifestyle
in order to deal with it.
It's a non-existent problem.
But how do you explain this stuff
to your normie friends?
Well, I've just brought out the revised edition
of my 2012 classic book, Water Melons,
which captures the story of how
some really nasty people decided to invent
the global warming scare in order to fleece you,
to take away your freedoms,
to take away your land.
It's a shocking story.
I wrote it, as I say, in...
Well, 2011 actually, the first edition came out.
And it's a snapshot of a particular era
the era when the people behind the climate change scan
got caught red-handed, tinkering with the data,
torturing till it screamed,
in a scandal that I helped christen Climategate.
So I give you the background to the skull jugglery
that went on in these seats of learning,
where these supposed experts were informing us,
we've got to act now.
I rumbled their scan.
I then asked the question,
okay, if it is a scan, who's doing this?
And why?
It's a good story.
I've kept the original book pretty much as is,
but I've written two new chapters,
one at the beginning and one at the end,
explaining how it's even worse than we thought.
I think it's a good...
I think it still stands up.
I think it's a good read.
Obviously, I'm biased, but I'd recommend it.
You can buy it from jamesdellingpole.co.uk
forward slash shop.
But you'll probably find that,
just go to my website and look for it,
jamesdellingpole.co.uk.
And I hope it helps keep you informed
and gives you the material you need to bring around
all those people who are still persuaded that,
oh, it's a disaster.
We must amend our ways and appease the gods,
appease Mother Earth.
Merry day.
It's a scan.
Two days and tells you to do whatever the Torah tells you to do.
That's what you do.
No compromises.
And where I was, the community that I was,
the Oxford Office of Community,
there's a very strong ideology of,
we don't compromise with anything.
But then I start asking myself kind of questions like,
well, wait a second.
There's a whole aspect of the Torah we're not keeping,
right?
There's the temple.
Where's our temple?
There's the concept of just living in Israel,
which according to many people is itself a commandment.
And basically for me, becoming a religious Zionist was the next step.
It was keeping, Judaism with no compromises means going to Israel
and helping to form a state that will have a temple,
that will be a religious theocracy,
where Judaism will be the law of the country,
and it will be like it says it's supposed to be in the Torah,
in the Bible.
That was the ideology that brought me to Israel.
Right, okay.
And I mean, I can see that.
I can see, in the same way my brother's just,
he's converting to orthodoxy.
Oh yeah?
Which one?
Well, in Greek.
I can totally see why.
They observe their fasting more strictly.
Every other day is a fast day.
You have to stand up through their very, very long services and stuff.
It's more committed.
You feel like you're doing it right.
So I totally get the siren lure of that.
And you went out to Israel.
What was it?
Did it sort of, well, you're still living there,
so you can't have hated it, but did it, what your expectations
and how did Israel match them or fail to match them?
So it wasn't so much to failing to match.
I knew that Israel wasn't the country I wanted it to be.
I was coming here to build a temple.
I wasn't under the impression that there was already a temple or something.
I was involved in certain religious movements
that were trying to make certain changes to the way things are done.
And I was not very successful in any of these endeavors.
And I became demoralized with the whole thing.
And first of all,
once I came to the conclusion that my dreams were never going to happen,
then you open yourself up to seeing, well, wait a second, this country is kind of a dump.
Obviously, the nature here, what's left of it is very beautiful.
And there are beautiful places.
But when you look around, much like Britain,
everything that's nice was built before 1945, right?
But the difference is in Britain, there's still quite a lot of stuff that was built before 1945.
That's A, whereas here there wasn't.
I don't want to kind of come off as some silly Zionist who says,
this country was completely empty and we came and there was no one here.
But it was a very undeveloped backwater.
There's not a lot to some, but there's not a lot of stuff here from before.
It doesn't have a rich archipelago heritage.
But the main point is everything we, the state of Israel built,
it is bad. It's a really ugly country.
There's actually the early Zionists in the 1920s.
There are some old parts of Tel Aviv that they built that are really quite nice.
And theoretically they could have continued on that vein
and built a nice country, but they didn't.
So for me, just separate from everything else, I'm very,
you know, I'm a kind of, I was very into Roger Scruton and that kind of stuff
and the importance of urbanism.
And I realized that Israelis don't care about that stuff at all.
But it's more than that.
It's specifically the right wing of Israel, the group that I identified with.
They're the group who cares least of all, as in the ones who are most
in theory about, wow, this is the most beautiful, this is God's home on earth.
When you said, okay, so it's God's home on earth.
So maybe don't litter everywhere.
Or, you know, we may get to the issue with the Arabs.
You want to kick out all the Arabs because it's so important, right?
Well, maybe don't just build some like concrete monstrosity all over it.
Once you kick them out.
And I just got sick of kind of bumping my head into a brick wall.
And I just came to reject the whole thing.
And once I did, I can see, then I started reading more about the history
of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
And in a way, it's kind of a bit, it's silly to say it, but it's just true.
Obviously, it turns out when I read into it, it's a bit more complicated
than I thought at first, having only heard one side of the story.
I would say that when I first started, my opinion of the Israeli side was like a 10,
10 out of 10, whereas my opinion of the Palestinians was like 3 out of 10.
After reading about the conflict, my opinion of the Israelis went down to like a 4.
And my opinion of the Palestinians went down to a 0.
So I didn't become more pro-Palestinian as a result.
But I did realize that it was a lot more complicated than that.
And I live here because since one of our children was born in England,
but the other one, he grew up here basically, and our other children were born here.
We live in a Golan Heights and life is fine as far as it goes.
Also England is like, you know, England is falling apart.
It's probably like the worst, it's not the worst country in Europe,
but it's the most hopeless.
Would you agree with that?
England, yeah.
It's hard to say because I don't travel everywhere as I'd like to, but I would say
certainly if you were to judge, for example, by use the state of our roads as a metric.
When I went overland through Africa in 1984, I encountered roads like this.
I never imagined that this would become the norm in England in the future.
The roads are so bad.
Even A roads now have huge potholes in them, which don't get fixed.
And if it's night or if it's raining, you don't see them.
So the amount of damage that is being done for everyone's cars,
and nothing's being done about it, and nobody's really complaining enough about it.
So that, yeah, that kind of thing, I think you're right.
So my other option is to move back to England.
That would be the obvious.
I've got no real reason to do that right here.
So what do I want for this country?
Well, I would like it to be as good as country as possible.
I would like for it not to be always at war with its neighbors, if possible.
And look, the blog, I mean, the blog is only part of my life, you know.
Most of my life is either working or, you know, holding the baby or whatever.
You know, I run this blog.
I devote maybe a day, half a day, depending on the week to it.
And I just try and promote the idea that, look, we are where we are.
We got to where we are, in most cases, by having some rather unrealistic ideas.
One of those unrealistic ideas is really designism,
but there's a whole lot of other unrealistic ideas.
It could be a lot better.
It could be a lot worse.
Let's try and make it as good as possible.
And let's, my message to Jews is, you know, try and like, chill out a bit.
Try and be a bit less intense.
You're putting a lot of people off to some degree.
Some of that's justified.
Some of it's not justified, but even in a sense, it's not justified.
The way you're handling it is not working.
So I write an article.
I write articles.
Most of my articles are, whatever, it's just really what's on my mind.
And the theme is basically like, Jews should manage their affairs better
for our benefit and everyone else's benefit.
I was really interested in what you were saying about the architectural ugliness.
And I was thinking that, presumably, was a kind of ideological decision that was made.
It's like, yeah, we're about the future.
And we're militaristic.
We don't care about Ponzi aesthetics.
We're going to build a country for the...
Was that a sort of tied in with the sort of brutalism in architecture generally
and sort of the modern...
So there definitely was, in the first few decades of the state of Israel,
it was dominated by socialists and they had typical socialist ideas about everything.
And definitely one of those ideas was this idea that ornament is unnecessary.
Maybe it's even harmful in some way.
And they built a lot of bad stuff.
And when I came over, I knew a lot about a lot of problems with Israel.
And what I was thinking at the time and what a lot of people I know and still
figure is, yes, fine, there's a lot of problems with Israel.
But those problems come from the old Israel that was run by the socialists.
That Israel is collapsing.
There is a new Israel that's much more religious, much more traditional.
And therefore, things are going to get better, which would be amazing if it was true.
The problem is, it's getting worse.
As in, the left are not in power in this country.
It's not a thing.
They haven't run a government since the 1990s.
You know, there's some kind of deep state like there is everywhere,
which is a bit more leftist, maybe an elected government, but not really.
The fact is, the right in this country is very chuddy to use a word that your
younger viewers might know.
It's a chud right.
And they care even less about aesthetics than the old left did because they're driven
by the most kind of pro aspects of society.
And some people just have kind of ugly spirits.
And so they manifest ugliness.
What's really bad about this country is it's not just when they build something cheap
and it looks chubby.
It's when they actually have some money to throw a project.
It's even worse.
What, I mean, it's also tacky and bling or what?
Yes.
One thing that is, yes, we have this kind of middle east, quasi middle eastern
aesthetic, which was introduced by the middle eastern Jews who came here,
which is very much like a kind of Pakistani vape shop kind of vibe,
to put it in English terms.
So that's one thing.
That's a vape shop.
And then, and then there's this, and then on top of that, there's this kind of
more religious Zionist vibe, which is it's based upon this view that kind of
we have to have our own Jewish style of architecture.
Anything that looks like anything like French architecture or Islamic architecture,
that would be the worst thing in the world for these people, that's bad.
So they have to come up with some new style of architecture.
It's just the problem is that all the good styles of architecture have already been taken.
They're just there aren't, human beings have been around for a while.
There isn't anything.
So and the synagogues that these people build are so bizarrely and preposterously
bad that it's almost like they're trying to make it ugly.
And so for me, this is, not everyone has to have architecture as a pet issue.
But for me, architecture is my pet issue.
And so for me, it was personally a thing that really turned me against Israel and said,
yes, Israel is moving to the right.
In some ways, I'm on board with that, you know, family values wise, et cetera, whatever.
But it's not leading to a kind of Roger Scruzan-esque future at all.
It's a kind of, it's a very chuddy thing.
And it's based upon this crude militarism, which I can understand where the militarism
comes from given our situation.
But what I really object to is the fusing of militarism with Judaism.
What I like Israel to do, you want to be militarists, that's fine.
You can be militarists.
But just like don't, don't bring Hanukkah into it.
Like, you know, you want to, you want to, you want to go and blow up Gaza
because you think you've got no choice.
Okay, maybe you don't have a choice.
I don't know.
But don't build, don't bring a big like menorah and like light it
and sing Jewish songs while you're doing it because it's gross.
It looks really bad to the outside world, that's for sure.
And so for me, what one of the things I write about on my blog is
that what's going on with the rise of the right in Israel is a big disaster for,
for Judaism because it's associating it with
Groyperism basically.
Like, look, if I was a Catholic, I would look at Groyperism and I would say,
okay, in some senses, this is a good thing.
It's good to persuade young men not to look at eagles.
Okay, it's good to persuade people to get married, whatever.
But it's not good to associate my religion with just kind of,
you know, crude racial hatred and trolling and misogyny.
Okay, so I look at the Israeli right in the same way.
Fine, some of the things are good.
But it's, I think that's actually a good comparison.
The ascendant trend in Israel was a kind of Jewish Groyperism.
And for the same reason I don't like non-Jewish Groyperism,
I don't like Jewish Groyperism.
Yeah, I think you, you're unfortunate in having the legacy of King David,
who, who, who, if the better or worse was a warrior,
blessed be the Lord, my strength, which teaches my hands to war and my fingers to fight.
You know, I'm sure, I'm sure you know your Psalms, Psalm 144.
So there's that kind of, yeah, we can be like, we can be like we were in David's day
when, when Israel was truly great.
So look, that's definitely a big, that's definitely a big part of it.
There's a big part of ascendant Israeli writing, ideology is this idea.
Okay, we were in exile and we were just, we were scholars,
we were money lenders, we were whatever.
And now that's all over, thank God.
And now we can go back to the true Judaism, which is fighting and stuff.
Look, I'm not immune to the argument, but
look, for a, it was 3,500 years ago.
Okay, you know, some, some things have changed.
All right.
But B, look, if you want to be a Jewish warrior and you want to go out with your sword
and you want to fight a Palestinian with a sword,
okay, go for it.
But you don't get to kind of be this like, I'm a Bronze Age warrior
in an F-15 blowing up a tower block.
Yeah, yeah.
If you want to fight, if you want to, if you want to fight with modern weapons,
you have to fight a modern war like in a modern way.
In this sense, I guess I'm just a bit of a lib.
As in, it's true that international law probably goes a bit too far in kind of
tying the hands of militaries.
And it's open to abuse by kind of bad paramilitary actors who hide themselves among civilians.
All that is true.
But it's also true that, you know, things like here on Israeli right,
and it's not rare here almost every day,
which is just you can just blow up anyone you want.
It's fine.
There's no such thing as international law.
That's wrong.
It's like, it's wrong.
I understand that's how people feel when they've been in a conflict for 70 years.
I do get it.
But I also think that responsible people in a society should resist that.
And I also think the most important thing for me,
maybe it's a bit of a feat that I think this,
but the most important thing for me is to not mix Judaism as a religion in with that.
So let's say, for example, England Dresden.
I don't know where you stand on the Dresden question.
I think it was a terrible war crime.
I think Churchill was committed a terrible satanic blood sacrifice that day.
I think Churchill was basically a wrong one.
I think it was really evil.
Evil.
Okay.
But one thing that is good is that the Archbishop of Canterbury condemned it at the time.
As in, I can understand where England was coming from under the situation,
but even if you kind of, even if you can come up with a defense Dresden,
I think I'm more moderate on the issue myself,
it's good that the church as an institution was the one saying,
whoa, put it back and, you know, dial it down a notch.
Okay.
I think that's the proper role of religion in a society.
It shouldn't, the religion shouldn't be there.
It shouldn't be the religious part of society saying, kill them all, right?
As, you know, there was a particularly egregious example of what you describe in the First World War
when the Bishop of London, I think he was, was called Winnington Ingram.
And he was a fanatical war monger.
He was like, you know, kill more Germans, bend at them.
And you're right.
This is not where, this is not where men of the cloth
of any variety should be.
It's, it's just no.
So the traditional Jewish perspective is that cruelty war is bad.
Okay.
And we want peace.
And if you look in the early Zionist movement,
the religious Zionist movement, which was a distinct minority of the movement,
it was a very, there's a small minority both within Zionism and also a small minority within
Orthodox Judaism, but it did exist.
So people like Rabbi Abraham Cook or Rabbi Jacob Amiel, if you read their writings,
they're very clear on this, that, you know, we may or may not need to have a military
to establish a state we want to establish, but that the spirits of militarism is completely
alien to us as Jews.
Okay.
They write this at great length.
And what's kind of, so this is not the, oh, this is not the anti Zionist religious Jews,
who of course were kind of, in a sense, kind of principled pacifists.
Their whole point was we're not supposed to have a state.
So of course we're not supposed to have armed because we're not supposed to have a state in the
first place.
Even though I thought we should have a state, they were, they were very utopian in that,
you know, we're with our state, we're going to show the world what it is to kind of
be the most moral state in the world.
And what's happened over the last 70 years, what's, what's scary is how quickly it's
happened is that religious Zionism has become this super crazed militarist thing.
And again, you can understand why it's happened because the arrows have been very unreasonable
in many ways, but also the whole Palestinian tactic of terrorist attacks,
it doesn't really achieve any strategic goals of Palestinians.
But one thing it does really just do is it just really makes Israelis hate Palestinians.
And I've never been in a terrorist attack.
And I don't, I never had a friend die in a terrorist attack.
And I never had a family member die in a terrorist attack.
I do know people who know, who have had friends who've died in terrorist attacks.
And I think the ISU will know one person at least who's had a family member die in a terrorist attack.
So I don't personally judge people who've been through that
and it produces these feelings of bitterness in them.
By the way, I also don't judge a Palestinian who his family was killed in an Israeli airstrike
and he also has those feelings of bitterness.
All I want to say is yes, but A, the fact that you have these things of bitterness
and their legitimate innocence as feelings doesn't mean that they get to determine government policy.
But also B, the role of religious people is not to kind of fire you up
and tell you that because you feel this way, it's legitimate for you to do the same to the
other side or worse or 100 times worse.
Yeah.
And religious Zionism has just become this crazy militarist extremist thing
and Jews have, I think Jews have a responsibility to
try and turn this crazy machine off, whatever way they can.
Yeah, I think well, loads of people are going to be watching this and agreeing with you.
So I want to cut to the chase here now and ask you the tough questions, which is what
do Jews actually believe? I mean, it's hard to generalise because we've got the completely
secular ones who haven't a clue and you've got the Orthodox and you've got every shade in between.
But, for example, to mature, I'm a Goy, right? I'm Goyim. I'm one of the Goyim.
What does that mean?
It means you're not Jewish.
Yeah, but doesn't it mean, but literally what? Goyim means cattle?
What?
I think Goyim is also a word used for cattle, isn't it?
No.
Goyim is not a word used for cattle, no.
Right, but there's a disparaging undertone.
If I say the word Goy, can it have a disparaging undertone?
Yes. Does it always have a disparaging undertone?
Yeah. I mean, I'm not holding you responsible.
No, no, no, first of all, first of all you can hold me responsible.
Gabriel, struggle session.
No, first of all you can hold me responsible.
No, but I don't get many people who know about Judaism on this podcast.
And I'm just interested because I remember going back, you know how when you're at school
and you have these, you must have done the scripture classes or divinity classes, whatever,
and there will come a time in about the second year at your secondary school
where your class will be given a project and you'll all have to choose a religion and
do a sort of poster about it or do a specialist study.
And people, some people chose Islam because it's, you know, like not Christianity,
which was their religion and was probably quite boring.
And some people chose the Eastern religions.
Very, I think I may have chosen Judaism, looked into it and just thought,
sod this, this is just too difficult.
There are very few resources on what Jews believe.
And I think it's partly to do with the kind of secrecy
among Jews about jealously guarding the terms of their religion
and really not saying what they actually believe.
So if you ask the 70 million counten, Zionist Christians in America
who've been schooled in the Scofield Bible and they've imbibed all this kind of
Zionist propaganda, if you ask them what Jews believe, it's basically
they're the Old Testament, but not the New Testament.
They're basically, they're God's chosen people.
This land is theirs, yada, yada, yada, and Moses and Ten Commandments
and Joseph and his mates protect the kind of dream code and they're great,
they're lovely and they gave us our religion because they provided us with Jesus.
But when you look into it completely broad, open-minded and think,
well, hang on a second, what's all this about?
Anyone who's done even a modicum of research into Judaism
realizes it's not, it's not just the Old Testament.
In fact, it's not even the Old Testament in a lot of cases.
It's mainly about Talmudic traditions, which seem to date back to the Middle Ages.
I mean, a lot of this, I correct me if I'm wrong, but the religion of Israel is Talmudic Judaism.
The religion of the state of Israel?
Yeah.
I mean, Judaism is Talmudic Judaism.
There were non-Talmudic forms of Judaism
and there are still carried Judaism.
There's maybe 10,000 of them today.
But all Judaism today is Talmudic Judaism.
It just might be more or less religious.
Where does it all come from?
Okay.
Is it just the Old Testament, is it?
Okay.
So fundamental to Judaism is the idea that there's the written law and the oral law.
So the written law is specifically the five books of Moses.
The rest of the Old Testament is less important in Judaism.
So Psalms is extremely important.
So if you're on Israel, especially if you go introduce them and you just ride around on a bus,
if you do it for 20 minutes, you're probably seeing four or five women with a little book just going
and what they're doing is they're saying Psalms.
So that kind of psalmic devotion is very, very common.
As part of the prayer service, I every single day say 15 Psalms, something like that on the Sabbath more.
So Psalms are big.
But then Psalms aren't a source of authority.
You don't, they're just prayers, right?
They're not telling what to do.
Well, they're sort of like, up to a point, I'd say they're quite,
they're condensed versions of lots of bits of the Old Testament.
Okay.
But I mean,
But I agree.
You say them.
They're not like Leviticus.
They're not.
They inspire you, but they don't give you a map.
They don't tell you what your country's supposed to look like.
So Psalms are very big.
I mean, other parts of the Bible, they're kind of, I won't lie.
In religious Zionism, they're quite big into starting historical books,
judges, Samuel, Kings, etc.
Because they're all about kind of reconnecting with this history and stuff.
But the other prophets, I personally think they should be more studied.
The objective truth is they're not very extensively studied.
They're written by, when people say the written law, what they mean is the first five books
of the, which are called the Torah, which Orthodox Judaism believes
is, was given by God to Moses on Mount Sinai.
Now, what exactly that means?
You mean every single word?
That would be the strict Orthodox position.
Yes, every single word.
Obviously, you might ask some obvious questions on that.
Well, what about the bit that happens after Moses dies, etc.
But that's, you know, simple down.
The idea is the first five books of Moses, that's the source of all authority.
And that's the written law.
But the oral law, which is what the Talmud contains, starts with a basic question.
So for example, the written law says that I have to,
in the Feast of Tabernacles, I have to live in a tabernacle for seven days.
Okay.
Well, what's a tabernacle?
So the oral law provides me with lots of definitions of what a tabernacle is.
It has to be at least 10 hand widths high.
It can be a maximum of 20 qubits high.
It has to be covered with stuff that grew out of the ground
that hasn't been worked into like a vessel.
So basically, bits of branches of old tree, leaves, whatever.
And then there's weed mats.
And then there's lots of definitions about what kind of weed mat you can use.
What can the walls be made of?
What has to be holding it up?
It can't be underneath a tree.
It can't be inside the house.
Also, what does it mean to live in?
What does it mean to live?
Do I have to sleep in it?
Do I have to eat in it?
Does that mean I have to, if I have a glass of,
if I have to eat in it, does it mean I have to have a glass of water?
Do I have to, can I eat a glass of water?
There are, I mean literally, I'm not exaggerating,
there are literally thousands of rules about what it means
to live in a tabernacle for seven days.
So the Torah, sorry, the written law, the Torah, what we call the Torah,
has five verses maybe that tell you you have to live in a circle for seven days.
And the Talmud contains thousands of laws on what it means to live in
the circle for seven days.
Now, let's say how investing you reject the Talmud.
You say all of this stuff is made up, it's just rabbis saying it.
You'd still have to have some kind of alternative version of the Talmud.
I, if I say, okay, I reject the whole Talmud,
the Talmud tells me what a tabernacle looks like,
what size it has to be, what shape it has to be, etc.
I reject all that.
I'm now going to follow just the written law
and I'm going to be living my tabernacle for seven days.
Okay, well, what does your tabernacle look like?
You know, so there were groups that tried, that have rejected this.
So the largest group is called Karaites.
And like I say, there's still about 10,000 and something like that today.
They used to live a lot of them in Crimea.
I think now most of them are either in America or in Israel.
And they reject the Talmud, but they have their,
they still have a source of version of the oral law
because in practice, even better example actually would be
the Torah says, and the written law says on many occasions,
you have to keep Sabbath.
You can't work on Sabbath.
Well, what's work?
Okay, can I cook on the Sabbath?
Can I grind flour on the Sabbath?
Can I weave on Sabbath?
I don't know, but the written law literally doesn't tell me.
So again, the Talmud is divided up, well, the Mishnah,
and we can get into the difference,
the Mishnah is divided up into 63 tractates, as they're called.
Sections, one of those sections is on,
the first thing I talked about, the tabernacle.
What do you do on this feast of tabernacles?
Another section, which is one of the largest ones,
is called Sabbath.
What do you do on the Sabbath?
What is allowed?
What is not allowed?
What rituals are you supposed to do on the Sabbath
to make it holy, et cetera?
And again, you've got five or, no, it's more,
in the case of the Sabbath, I don't know,
20 verses in the Torah, and also a little bit of stuff
in the prophets.
And you know a few things here and there.
So you know there was a person who was stoned to death
for picking up sticks on the Sabbath.
So you know you're not allowed to pick up sticks.
It also says you're not allowed to light a fire on the Sabbath.
You know you're not allowed to light a fire.
In the book of Jeremiah, it says you're not allowed
to carry a load on the Sabbath, so you also know that.
So you could piece together something very, very, very basic
from the written law and the prophets,
but it wouldn't really tell you what to do.
So the oral law is telling you, in practice,
what you're supposed to do.
So among Christians, there's an enormous spectrum of practice
of what you're supposed to do on the Sunday.
There are Christians who keep this on Saturdays,
but for most Christians it's Sunday.
So you know for a tradition, you know, an Anglican,
you go to church in the morning and you go to the pub,
right, and you have a Sunday dinner.
But there are Presbyterians.
You know, you hear some really crazy stories.
There was a Presbyterian who he would walk,
because he lived up on some hill,
and he would walk all the way to the pension office
to collect his pension, but he wouldn't do the walking
on the Sabbath, because that would be work on the Sabbath.
So he'd have to set out, you know,
so the spectrum of opinion among Christians
of how he's supposed to keep the Sabbath is very, very wide.
The spectrum of opinion among Jews is very, very small.
Why? Because it's all based on the Talmud.
There are Jews who are more religious and Jews who are less religious,
but Jewish law, how you're supposed to keep the Sabbath,
is actually very, very specific.
And the only way to make it specific is to have
what we call the oral law.
The oral tradition. I get that.
And I don't think anyone's particularly bothered
by what the regulatory requirements are
on the erection of a tabernacle and the usage thereof.
But I think, okay, so we know that there are
some very difficult bits of the Talmud.
For example, the scene that describes Jesus
either being bawled either in excrement or semen,
I forget which, or maybe it depends on the translation.
No, it's the letter.
Okay.
Oh, by the way, it doesn't say Jesus.
I'm not going to lie, I think it probably does mean Jesus,
but it doesn't actually say Jesus.
Okay. And that was a line
inserted by a rabbi, one of the more notorious ones,
but quite an influential one, in the Middle Ages, wasn't it?
I mean, we're not talking ancient tradition.
We're talking, well.
Well, it depends on what you mean by the Middle Ages.
The Talmud, when people say the Talmud,
they mean the Babylonian.
Well, obviously post Jesus.
Yeah. So the Talmud, people mean the Babylonian Talmud.
That's what most Jews study as the Babylonian Talmud.
That was, well, it's an ongoing academic debate
exactly when it was collated,
but it's sometime between 450 AD and 700 AD.
So, okay, you can call it out in the Middle Ages if you want.
I don't want to get caught.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
Well, yeah. Then.
So you've got that.
And you've got, I mean, I have to say,
I read Mymonides's Wikipedia entry the other day.
And to read it, you think,
yeah, this is a great guy.
He's a scholar and he's wonderful.
You see, you read some of this.
Mymonides was, certainly if you're not Jewish,
not a good person to listen to.
Do you mean?
What do you mean?
Well, it seems to me to be a kind of
a supremacist religious approach
which looks down on people of other religions.
And I mean, he looks down on Jews who are not religious.
I mean, Mymonides was just very...
Well, that's that.
I mean, he looked down on Jews who were religious,
who had the wrong kind of
philosophical beliefs about God.
I suppose what I'm saying here is you've sensibly made the point that
the Talmud is a way of interpreting the Torah
and it's necessary for the reasons you've given.
But how is the average Jew to distinguish between
which bits they should take seriously
and which bits they should reject?
I mean, I imagine there's quite a lot of Jews
who think that Jesus is boiling in semen
and this is a jolly good thing.
And the stuff about when...
There are definitely passages which say
that you can have sex with a goy under any circumstances,
you know, even when they're three years old
because they're just goy and they're just trash,
they're not like us.
You know of these passages.
Well, I know the one you're referring to.
The cattle thing, I have no idea what you're talking about,
but I know the one you're referring to
and I'll get to in a second.
So look, first thing, I just want to make a point
about the Talmud.
And it is important to understand,
like if I sit down and I read the Talmud all day,
I probably won't see the word goy.
As in, I really think that
some people got the idea from the internet
that the Talmud is fundamentally a book about Jews.
Like, I just hate goyim.
I hate goyim so much.
I would say probably the attitude,
the attitude which you might find offensive
for a different reason,
but the attitude of the...
towards goyim in the Talmud
is really one of like very...
Like, unconcerned.
As in, Talmudic Judaism is very inward censored.
Basically, it's a kind of scholar religion
for people in...
It's not really that even concerned
about the lives of ordinary Jews.
They're obsessing about very minute details of law.
Sometimes, Gentiles might come into this.
So, like, most of the time,
the word...
If the word goy does come up in it,
it's to do with, you know, let's say,
I'm not allowed to sow my field
with two different types, with wheat and barley.
That's an offense according to the...
Or the written law.
Again, a classic example.
One verse, don't sow your field with mixed things.
Okay?
Again, thousands of laws
telling me what's mixed.
What is...
Okay, if my field is sowed with mixed things,
I have to pull it out.
Well, what if a Gentile came along
and sowed my field for me?
Do they and I?
Can I pay a Gentile to do it for me?
Most of the times that a Gentile comes up in a Talmud
is to do with questions like this.
You know, I'm not allowed to do this,
but can I pay a Gentile to do it?
I'm not allowed to do this, but a Gentile did it.
Can I benefit from it?
These are the kind of things.
The Talmud is really, really big,
and these lists of offensive quotes is...
What is it?
20 quotes?
I don't know.
Like, it's not like...
Well, okay, I see most of this is...
Are they being denounced and rejected?
I mean, why aren't they being...
I mean, prescribed, anathematized,
because having sex with a kind of three or whatever...
Okay, no, no, okay.
I need to correct this.
This is just not true, okay?
Like, okay.
There's, first of all, the thing about the three-year-old
is not talking about Gentiles or not Gentiles.
It's actually talking...
It's a general thing as this.
If I have sex with my sister, for example,
according to the Torah, I have to be...
This is one thing the Torah is clear.
The original is clear about.
I have to be executed, okay?
So again, what kind of questions does a Talmud ask?
What is sex?
It has to ask these questions.
What is sex?
What if, God forbid, my sister...
I don't know, whatever,
perform some non-vaginal sex acts on me or her, whatever.
Do I have to be executed for that?
So it has to define all these things.
So one of the things is,
sex with a girl under three is not considered sex.
So therefore, if I do it with my two-year-old sister,
God forbid, I can't be executed for it.
That doesn't mean it's permitted to do it.
It means that the capital offence in the Torah of sex
doesn't apply to someone below the age of three.
It's not sex.
Okay?
Now, you might say the opposite.
Well, why is it sex to a four-year-old?
I want you to...
Oh, maybe you're a bunch of paedophiles
for the opposite reason now.
The law says...
The oral law tells you...
This is all basically theoretical,
because you don't have Jewish courts
to impose any of this stuff.
If someone's brought to court,
you have sex with your sister.
Okay, you're going to be executed now.
Okay, how old was she?
She was two.
Okay, well, we can't execute you for her.
You're not going to be executed.
You're going to prison,
because you're a disgusting person.
But we're not going to execute you for her,
because at least we're not going to execute you
according to the Torah's law,
because you didn't violate the Torah's law.
That's what it says.
It's not talking about...
It's got nothing to do with Gentiles.
It's got...
It's a general...
What is sex?
Right.
Now, wait a second.
Wait, wait, wait.
Okay.
You said we're allowed to have sex with Gentiles.
The opposite.
It's completely forbidden to have sex with Gentiles.
It's a banqu yet prohibition in Jewish law.
Well, that's more...
Okay, so you're...
And now I'm offended...
I used to be offended because he told me it was okay.
Now I'm offended because he told me it's not okay.
Okay, I mean...
But at least be offended for the right thing.
It's completely forbidden in Jewish law to have sex with Gentiles.
Yeah, okay.
So, I think...
Certainly where I am now...
I think if I would suddenly discover that I was Jewish
and this were my religion,
I'd be having crimes about this stuff.
And while we're on this some tricksy territory,
I mentioned to you that I was going to talk to you
about the Noahide Laws.
So, wait a second.
What would you have crimes about?
The Noahide Laws.
No, no, no, no, forget the...
Go off the Noahide Laws.
You find out you're Jewish.
Okay.
You've got crimes about what?
Which bit do you have a crime about?
Well, if I consulted my holy books...
So, I'm sorry.
Yeah, yeah, the Talmudic teachings.
And I discovered that actually having sex with a child
below the age of three is considered insufficient
for capital punishment,
but is okay for being imprisonment.
I'd be thinking, well, this is just weird.
No, wait a second.
Wait a second.
Embarrassing.
Wait a second.
Okay.
What did I say?
I said, the law prescribes that there are capital punishment
for having sex with your sister,
having sex with another man's wife,
having sex with your mother,
having sex with your aunt, etc., etc.
There's a list.
It's there in the book of Leviticus.
The question is, what meets the legal definitions
of these foods?
If a government wants to make it a crime
to commit pedophilia,
the Talmud doesn't say you're not allowed to do that.
It's defining what the boundaries of Jewish law are.
It's just telling you what sex is.
Like, it's not saying...
It's not telling you what a government policy should be.
It's not like...
No, but that...
Like, in itself, I find it weird just...
De facto that there's a distinction
is made between a three-year-old and a pre-three-year-old.
It's just...
It just seems to be symptomatic of a kind of
a very odd mindset, which I do not find to be...
No, the mindset it's symptomatic of is legalism.
So, if you're a Christian,
then I would presume you agree with Paul
that legalism is bad,
that it kind of leads to, like,
deadness of the spirit.
Yeah.
And that's fine.
Like, I'm not going to...
I think Paul was wrong,
but I'm not going to come and tell you
you have to think Paul was wrong.
Okay, so you think Paul was right.
But, like, my point is,
if you think legalism is bad,
okay, fine, think legalism is bad.
But don't kind of pick out specific bits of legalism
and say, oh, you know,
trying to make some sort of big song and dance about it.
Like, the thing about the three-year-old
has no relevance to any kind of aspect of Jewish life.
Let's say, you know,
a rabbi was discovered to be a pedophile tomorrow, okay?
Now, as in any other kind of Jewish community,
people may react well to that,
they may react badly.
They may say, oh,
he must be innocent because he's such a holy rabbi,
or people might try to cover it up.
All sorts of bad things might happen
as, you know, I don't need to go into detail
about the Catholic Church, whatever.
But no one's going to say,
wait a second, was she free or was she for?
That's just not a conversation that's going to come up.
It's not like...
It just has no...
The specific laws that you're finding very offensive
have no relevance to kind of Jewish life.
You might say that the general mentality of legalism
leads to this kind of loophole mentality.
Now, I will tell you,
that's kind of obviously true in a sense,
and every religion has a failure mode,
or probably multiple failure modes.
I will say a classic failure mode of Judaism
is missing the forest for the trees.
I'll omit openly,
because we'll read a part in not omitting it.
Many Jews, they get caught up
in this kind of legalistic mindset,
and they kind of miss big overarching ethical principles.
And this is a point that's been made by many Jews many times,
and there's a whole Jewish ethical literature
trying to make you not think that.
But it happens because that's a failure mode of legalism.
But my point is that, okay, you can be pro-legalism,
you can be anti-legalism.
That's kind of what the fundamental debate
between Judaism and Christianity.
Okay, but, like, kind of focus on the...
You know, focus on that as an issue.
You know, fine.
Okay, you think it's weird to kind of argue about these things.
Okay, maybe it's weird to argue about these things,
but it doesn't have any relevance to life.
It just...
Well, you see, I think it sort of does,
because I think it's symptomatic of a mindset.
That's the problem.
It's not the legalism per se,
but what it says about the mindset
that values legalism as opposed to anything else,
it seems to me almost...
Almost amoral.
Yeah, okay.
So, look, there's one school of Jewish philosophy
that actually is kind of explicitly amoral.
Basically, it says,
morality is what God dictates,
and reason doesn't come into it.
Okay, now, by the way,
there are also schools of Christianity
that are like that.
I would disagree with such an interpretation.
I can see how you might...
For Jews, this is how we look at it.
You know, I'm not going to say every single Jew
looks at it this way.
I'm going to say this is how I look at it,
and this is how I think this is what I honestly
believe to be the authentic Jewish tradition.
God has never spoken to me.
I... Probably God will never speak to me.
So, the only thing I have from God
is the Torah that he gave...
The law that he gave to Jewish people.
And the way that I submit myself to God
is by fulfilling the details of that,
but also by learning the details of that.
So, most of the Torah is never going...
It's never going to be relevant in my life.
And that's not only the bits like a temple and stuff
because we can't do it.
We want to do it, we can't.
But like, you know, the Torah has all sorts of details
about implementing capital punishment.
Well, I hope I never have to execute someone, okay?
Yeah.
But the point is what we believe is that
by delving into the details of this law,
we're kind of connecting with that covenant that we have,
which is the only connection that we really have to God.
Now, I understand, I'm not offended that a Christian would say,
no, that's wrong.
You've got it all wrong.
You've got mixed up.
That's fine.
But okay, that's what we think.
And it's true that someone who only studies Talmud
and never thinks about ethics, et cetera,
probably will get a bit of a warped mindset.
And that's a criticism that I'm happy to make
within kind of Jewish debates.
And to be fair, you would not be the only Jew
that's made this point.
I wish I could remember the next...
Problems I read so much that I forget the names of...
There was a Jewish writer who wrote a book
explaining his problems with Israel.
And I think he wrote in the introductory chapter
about how, for example, on a Sabbath day,
if on the Sabbath, if a tourist,
a Goy tourist has a heart attack in the street,
it is religiously permissible for an observant Jew
to just kind of walk past him,
because he's not...
It's the Sabbath and it's not their problem.
That kind of thing.
Okay, so yeah, so this is actually...
Okay, he's called Israel Shahak.
So look, Israel Shahak, I haven't actually...
One of the things I want to do for my dog
is properly sit down and read his book
and write a review of it.
So I haven't done that.
I have flicked through it.
Look, he's kind of like a Reddit atheist.
He's like Dawkins or Sam Harris, okay?
Now, I can...
No, that's what he is.
Like, that's fine.
I can be antagonistic
and I can go through the church fathers
and I can find crazy stuff and I can put it...
I'll do it for you.
So, Tertullian says that one of the pleasures
of the Christians in afterlife
is that they'll be able to see the damned.
So they'll be in heaven enjoying eternal bliss.
But part of the eternal bliss, okay,
is that they'll be able to look down
and they'll be able to see people suffering
in hellfire for them, okay?
Augustine says that the damned
are predestined to be damned.
It's predestined from the beginning of time.
It's not your choice.
Some people are predestined.
Now, there's double predestination,
a single predestination
and different people have...
What exactly means?
But definitely he believes that the damned
are destined to be damned, okay?
And Origen castrated himself
because to be...
Now, I could say...
Now, a rough comparison of the Talmud
is that the Talmud is like the church fathers.
It's not how Protestants look at the church fathers,
but it's like how Greek Orthodox people
look at the church fathers.
So I could turn to a Greek Orthodox
like your brother and I say,
look, you believe in a religion
where you think that when you die,
you're going to be sitting there
laughing at people, enjoying the fact
that people are burning for eternity
because they were predestined to burn for eternity
because they refuse to castrate themselves like Origen.
What a sicko.
And that's in the Psalms, isn't it?
Now, here's the thing, it's like...
It's in both our religions.
I just don't think it's productive.
I know enough to know
that if you'd read Augustine in full context,
the doctrine of predestination makes a lot more sense
than I just did it.
And the same with Tertullian and the same with Origen.
Well, to be honest, I'm not sure
you can justify Origen castrate yourself.
Maybe that one is a bit off.
But the point is that you can do the same...
There are anti-Christian writers
who've done this in Christianity
and Israel shall hack his life then with Judaism.
You can definitely take a bunch of stuff in Judaism
and make it look really bad.
That's for sure.
You can take a bunch of stuff in Judaism
and make it look really good.
The correct thing to do,
which is much harder than I've read these things,
is to actually look at it in the round
and say, what is it really?
Israel shall have...
Again, it's a book I haven't read.
I have read enough to know
he does make some just flat mistakes.
But I think that he's describing...
What he's describing is a failure mode in Judaism,
which is that basically this kind of amoral,
ethnic narcissist legalism.
I think that's something...
I think that's a failure mode of Judaism
that real Jews who actually exist
now in the past, no doubt in the future,
have entered that failure mode.
I think that Jews should not enter that failure mode.
I also think Christianity has failure modes.
I think Islam has failure modes.
A lot of them are very prominent.
Look, the thing about not saving a Gentile on the Sabbath,
so there's two ways of doing this.
I understand that this is...
Look, I understand that's offensive.
So make clear what we're talking about.
The idea is this.
If I can save...
The specific case given here is
there's someone who's trapped under a pile of rocks
and you're lifting up the rocks to try and get them out.
They're underneath of it.
If you know for certain that they're a Gentile,
you can't do it.
Why?
Because as follows,
you're not allowed to pick up rocks on the Sabbath.
It's work.
Oh, you are allowed to save a life,
but you're only allowed to do it to save a Gentile's life.
Why?
The Talmud says,
because the only reason you're allowed to save the Jews' life
is because he will go on to keep the Sabbath in the future.
So you're breaking the Sabbath for the purpose of saving the Sabbath.
So, first of all, there are a few things here.
It's not just a Gentile.
A non-religious Jew,
I'm equally...
The law applies equally to him.
If I know for sure he's a non-religious Jew,
I'm sorry, there's nothing I can do to help you.
That's one thing.
On a practical level,
the normative Orthodox Jewish teaching is as follows.
If you don't save him,
if you don't save the Gentile,
then someone might find out about it,
and then they might get very angry,
justifiably, from their perspective, certainly,
and they might do a pogrom or whatever.
So, therefore, you should save.
That normative Jewish law that you'll be instructed to do,
not what's written in the Talmud,
but normative Jewish law that you're instructed to do,
is that you should save the Gentile's life.
Now, you might say,
you're kind of using legalism to get round to legalism.
So, you came up with this weird legalism
that tells you you're not allowed to save the Gentile's life from the Sabbath.
Yeah.
And then you come up with some other legalism to say,
to get you to do the right thing.
And really, what you should just do
is go back and challenge the assumption from the off.
Okay, maybe you're right.
And, you know, there is a kind of...
There is an inherent problem in moral standards change over time.
The Talmud was written when it was written for various reasons,
and it was written at a time of, at least in the early period of the Talmud,
of quite extreme animosity between Gentile and Jewish populations,
because following the Jewish revolt against Rome.
By the way, Jesus expresses the same views.
You know, that's what he says pearls before swine, right?
He refers to Gentiles as swine.
Okay, there's a case to be made that to some extent,
the Talmud should be revisited in the light of evolving moral standards.
The problem with that is what is a generic problem,
which is that within any religion, things get canonized
and it's very hard to go back and change something.
And the specific problem is, okay, so I go back and change the Talmud
to take out all the things that are kind of,
they're not nice about Gentiles, okay?
But then someone else comes up and says,
well, I want you to take out all the things that are not nice about homosexuals.
And then someone else comes and says,
I want you to take out the things that are not nice about trans.
As in, it's very, very hard, it's very, very hard in practice
to kind of fix a religious text without it all spiraling out of control
and just becoming like liberal Protestant uniseries.
Yeah.
Okay, I think that, look, what does this practically mean?
Okay, you're not thinking about conversive Judaism,
so it's not a relevant issue.
You have it discovered you're Jewish, so it's not a relevant issue.
How should this affect Jewish-Gentile relations?
I think Jews should appreciate that Gentiles legitimately feel offended by this stuff.
And I also think the Gentiles shouldn't kind of get too worked up about
like 10 lines out of a book of 20, like a million lines.
By the way, Gabriel, I just want to say to you,
I'm really grateful to you for putting yourself through this,
because I'm feeling, I'm very happy that you came on this pod,
and I feel it's really unfair of me to hold you to account for your entire religion,
which is not fair.
It's a bit like I've been out with a net, with my special Jew-catching net,
and I pulled you in, and I'm forcing you to go through this ordeal.
So I hope you're not feeling too got at, because it's not my...
There's a reason why our mutual friends suggested me.
First, I thought about these issues a lot,
probably more than most people for various reasons,
and also on the Big Five personality traits, I'm high in openness,
and also high in disagreeableness.
So it's fine, I don't mind.
Oh, which one are you?
Because I think I'm definitely the high in openness one, and...
You're pretty similar.
I think I'm the one that likes an argument, and will carry on,
but there's no kind of ranker.
Right, that's what I try to be, mostly.
Yeah, maybe we are the same entjet or whatever.
Anyway, so I just want to make that clear.
I totally agree with your point about,
you don't want to go mucking about with canonical texts,
and I totally agree with you that Christianity,
or at least the Church Fathers are not beyond criticism.
I get all that.
I suppose the difference is that Christianity does not have a Christian state,
and it does not have an organisation,
which I doubt you have much sympathy with,
it doesn't have an organisation like the Anti-Defamation League,
the ADL, pushing this very, very hardcore agenda.
And I'm thinking, I mentioned them earlier on, the Noahide laws,
the Noahide laws, which cannot be enforced at the moment,
because the world is not kind of run by rabbinical courts,
but should that time ever come,
and nobody I've heard of in Israel is repudiating this,
under the Noahide laws, and I did a podcast with this,
with a Jewish couple who were so appalled,
they kind of, they cease to be Zionists,
under the Noahide laws, as a Christian,
I am eligible for execution because by worshiping Jesus,
according to the Noahide, according to the rabbidical definition of idolatry,
I am an idolater, and therefore liable for the chop.
And I'd be fine with that if this was just some bollocks from the Middle Ages,
which had long since been repudiated by all Jews,
but it ain't.
You've got Noahide training schools in Israel,
you've got it being pushed by Ben-i-Brit,
these are not negligible organisations, and I'm thinking,
well, I don't like this, I think it's really offensive.
I don't know, actually I don't care, it's not the offensive part,
I find it threatening.
Okay, so remember what we were saying before,
you're offended by the implication that Judaism permits sex with someone who's less than three,
and I say, well, it's not saying that at all, what it's saying, it's not sex,
it's only sex after three.
I said, well, now you're offended by the implication that sex before we rolled a sex.
So this is kind of similar, people are often offended by this idea that Jews kind of,
it's just an ethnic religion, and we're not really interested in what anyone else
does, and we don't care if you're saved or not, and we're just very inward and stuff.
And so some Jews said, okay, fine, we got a message for humanity.
Our message for humanity is as follows, you're not allowed to worship idols,
you're not allowed to steal, you're not allowed to murder.
The weird one is always, you know, not allowed to eat the limb of a living animal,
which probably most people agree, you shouldn't eat the limb of a living animal, right?
But it's a bit weird to have that in your seven fundamental principles.
It's harsh on the mass side.
The mass side, well, they don't eat the limbs off, but they do drink the blood of
a living animal, which may disqualify them.
So the point is, the Talmud, one of the things that Talmud discusses,
because it discusses everything, really, is what laws are uncommon on a Gentile.
So it scours through the Torah, the written law, and it finds that we find hints at the idea that
Gentiles forbidden from forbidden sexual relations.
We find that they're forbidden to steal.
We find they're forbidden to kill.
We find, because it's in the book, the story of them.
Well, it's how we interpret the story of Noah, I should say,
that they're forbidden to tear the limb off a living animal,
and they have to set up a court system, et cetera.
So some Jews said, okay, look,
you've criticised us.
We're too ethnocentric.
We're not offering anything to anyone else.
Here's our message to mankind.
Keep the Noahide laws.
And then you say, well, what do you...
This is a Jewish supremacist call.
You want to...
Now, you're saying the reason why is because the punishment for the...
This is what the Talmud says.
What's the punishment for the Noahide?
In Jewish law, there's a range of punishments.
There's, well, there's lashes, and there's various types of execution.
They didn't have prison back in those days.
It wasn't like a normal form of punishment.
Now, obviously these are quite brutal punishments,
and any reasonable person will ask, wait a second,
you're not seriously suggesting having a legal code in the year 2025,
in which your only punishments are lashes,
and stoning, and strangulation, whatever.
And I would agree that that's an issue
for anyone who seriously wants to set up a Jewish bureaucracy.
Now, I would consider myself tough on crime,
compared to the average liberal,
but I'm not that tough on crime.
Fine.
Now, the Noahide laws did what the Talmud says,
is the punishment for all of them is exactly the same.
It's execution.
If a Gentile steals, execute.
If a Gentile commits adultery, he's executed.
If a Gentile does idolatry, he's executed.
Now, that doesn't sound like a very
practical way of setting up a justice system.
I'll agree with that.
And the truth is, it's not the Talmud just says it,
and then it moves on.
Again, the Talmud is not very interested in Gentiles.
It just is interested in very minute details
about how your Tabernacle should look.
It's just not very interested in Gentiles.
It doesn't find him interesting.
And then it moves on.
In the modern age, some people have come up with this idea
that we should be more ecumenical,
and we should tell, okay, well, Gentiles,
here's our message, keep the Noahide laws.
People who say that, they're not saying you should set up a court
and just start executing everyone who steals
a Mars bar from a shop.
That's not a thing.
What we're saying, I'm not involved in pro-Noahide activities.
What they're saying is, okay, this is what we think you should do.
You don't have to convert to Judaism.
You want to convert to Judaism, that's fine.
You don't want to convert Judaism.
Here's what we think you should do.
You should be a Noahide.
Here's the laws you should keep.
Don't steal.
Don't do idolatry.
Don't worship Jesus.
Wait a second.
You agree that Gentiles shouldn't worship idols, correct?
You just don't think Jesus is an idol, yes?
Well, he's not.
No, no, fine.
But you do agree with the principle.
You just don't agree with the specific application of the principle.
I wouldn't be executing people for idol worship.
Well, again, no one's executing.
It's not yet.
It's kind of hard to explain.
Like, when I read, look, it comes up a lot in Jewish legal discussion.
If I drive a car on the Sabbath,
I'm supposed to be executing one is Jewish law,
but it's not a thing that happens.
We don't have Jewish courts.
As a matter of fact, we don't have Jewish courts
have the legal authority to execute them.
We don't really have an execute anyone.
We don't really have a mechanism to create circles.
It's all very abstract.
We don't think about it as a kind of thing
that could actually happen.
It just, when we say something is a death penalty offense
or something is a lashing offense,
what we're talking about is the severity of the offense.
We're just saying this is a less severe offense.
You would only get lashes for it, hypothetically.
This is a more severe offense.
You would be executed by a professor.
We're not, but we're not talking about
what you would actually do.
And when we tell someone to become a Noahite,
we're not saying, ideally, we set up a court system.
We're just saying, these are the things you can't do.
Now, but just back to the thing,
because I think this is important,
and it's important for Jewish-Christian relations
such as they are.
Jews and Christians agree that idolatry is bad,
and not just bad, it's the worst thing you can do,
because God created the universe,
and you're bowing down to a statue.
How dare you?
Okay?
What we disagree about
is a specific application of is worshiping Jesus idolatry.
Now, you also agree, if Jesus wasn't the Son of God,
you agree it would be idolatry to worship Him, correct?
If I worshiped you,
and because I thought you were the Son of God,
that would be idolatry.
Even if I was very sincere.
This is the legalistic mindset, which I'll be.
No, no, no. It's all legalistic mindset.
I feel like I'm being taken to a standard legal procedure.
Which I would approach it another way.
I mean, you're in a way saying,
yeah, but come on, it's kind of like it makes sense,
because I'm saying, and by the way,
we're talking about
that Noah Hyde is now embedded in the US legal system.
George H.W. Bush actually introduced it
under the umbrella of some kind of
children's education act or something like that.
Noah Hyde is now part of the US legal,
it's not legally enforceable,
because there are others in Noah Hyde courts,
but it's there on the books.
It's a bit like saying,
oh, if you haven't committed a crime,
you've got nothing to fear,
which is why it's perfectly okay to have
closed circuit television everywhere,
and this and that, the surveillance state,
it's there for your, for your, for your sisha height.
You know, as, as they say,
the problem is that when you get these, these,
you've got Noah Hyde being pushed and,
and indeed sold to evangelical Christians
by organizations like, like the ADL,
by, by Brith, you have Noah Hyde training schools in,
in, in Israel.
If all this is just purely ceremonial,
of course, it's never going to mean anything.
Well, these people are just wasting their time,
aren't they?
Do you think they're,
they think they're wasting their time?
No, it is not ceremonial.
It's not ceremonial.
We're saying, what should your religion be?
Your religion should be, no, it isn't,
i.e., you should pray to God.
You should believe there's one God who created the universe.
You should not, you should have ethics.
That's what we, that's what we believe Gentiles should do.
Look, look, take, forget this.
Imagine I'm talking to a Hindu.
What do I tell a Hindu?
I say, you need, this is, this is an urgent thing.
You've got your little statue,
your elephant on your six hands.
You need to break it.
And you need to worship the one God.
If you want me to say,
if you want me to say what I think a Christian should do,
sorry, you believe Chris Christ was the son of God.
I understand you're sincere.
I sincerely believe he was not the son of God.
Therefore, I sincerely believe
you're committing an offense by doing.
It's not, we're not.
Our goal is not to set up a legal system.
Or our goal is to say, what should you do?
My view is, all Jews view is,
every single human being on earth
should be a monotheist.
You should be Dutch.
You should be proud of your culture, your country,
your cuisine, your whatever blah blah.
But you should be a monotheist.
And I'm afraid to say Christianity
is not monotheistic from my perspective.
I understand that you sincerely believe it's monotheistic.
I don't think you're lying by saying that,
but I am not lying by saying I don't.
Now, here's the point.
I think that from a right-wing perspective,
you can quite easily look at nohidism
as actually something much more positive.
Because we're not saying you have to give up
your national culture.
It's not our globalizing faith.
It's not like, say, Islam,
which says you have to start reading
the Koran in Arabic or something.
And you have to start wearing our dress.
The message of nohidism is this.
You are French.
Be French.
Be proud to be French.
Preserve your traditions.
Preserve your way of life, et cetera.
But you should be monotheists.
That's it.
I do respect you, Gabriel.
There's quite a ballsy position
to be saying, yeah, the nohide laws,
but they're OK.
And I totally...
No, no, I just...
No, I really like...
Sorry, look, I'm not trying to move,
but I really think you've just got your kind of nickers
in a twist about a literal nun issue.
First of all, nohidism is not a big thing.
I know some nohides.
Oh, actually, look, not really.
I know some people whose parents are nohides
and they converted to Judaism.
And that's what nohideism in practice really is.
It's kind of like a kind of stepping stone to do.
It's people who they decide they want to be Jewish
but for whatever reason, it's not going to work
because it's too much of a life-changing thing.
So they become nohides
and then in practice their children usually become Jews.
Now, that's not the idea behind the project.
And it tends to be something like very, very cringe.
Nohidism is very cringe.
It's for people who are not very socially well-adapted,
people who have problems with their parents, et cetera.
It's not a successful movement.
I'd like it to be more a successful movement
because I think everyone should be a monotheist.
But it's not a very successful movement.
On that point.
It's not about executing people.
There's not what anyone involved is thinking.
Oh, when can we finally execute people?
It's just saying we think everyone should be a monotheist.
On that point, on monotheism, because I...
Yeah, you're right.
I do think of myself as a monotheist
and I think because of the nature of the Trinity and stuff,
I don't think that I'm worshiping idols.
I think that's unfair.
But wait a second.
What are you? Church of England?
Yeah.
Okay. I don't know what you think personally.
The opinion of the Church of England
until recently was that Catholics worship idols.
They are idol worshipers.
That what they do at the, you know,
now a day every restaurant...
I don't want to burn them.
I don't want to burn anyone.
Yeah, but you wouldn't be...
Gabriel, it wouldn't be you doing it.
It'd be the rabbinical call.
No, no, no.
Wouldn't be a nice guy like you.
Honestly, I promise.
I promise.
Okay.
I'm not here to defend everything in Judaism.
I promise you the guys who are promoting no-hidism,
they're not thinking about executing people.
That's not what...
It's not on their minds.
Because nowadays we don't have courts to execute people
and then in the Messianic days,
you won't need to execute everyone
because everything will be fine.
It's a legal category.
It's something that comes from legalism,
but you're the one obsessing about it.
They just read it.
It says on the page,
oh, death penalty and then they move on.
They don't think about it
because it doesn't have any relevance to life.
One is going to be slightly...
I think obsessed is too strong a word for it.
One is going to be slightly rumpled, let's say,
when one discovers that there is this kind of legal code
which enjoins one to be executed
for the crime of being a Christian.
It's a pretty big deal.
Okay, so look.
Within...
I love Netanyahu to be crawling on...
Crawling it through the snow
on his knees to beg forgiveness
for this appalling thing
which, of course, has a legacy of the medieval period
which has no relevance to modern times,
but I don't see it happening any time soon
because what I'm seeing is
Noah High School's in Israel.
Don't forget because the point of Noah High School
is not to train people to execute someone.
The point of Noah High School is to say,
this is, in our opinion, how...
Yeah, we have an idea that our role is to promote
monotheism among the nations.
The truth is we haven't really done very much about it
because we mostly just keep to ourselves.
Okay, so we're trying to do our role
of promoting monotheism in the nations.
This is how you're supposed to be monotheistic.
We give Bible lessons and stuff.
Like, it's just...
The idea of killing people doesn't come into it.
We're just trying to tell you, be monotheists.
Okay, it's hard because we don't have a lot for you.
We don't...
The truth is, Noah Buddhism is a big flop
because it doesn't really give you a life structure.
It doesn't give you a community.
It doesn't give you a liturgy.
It doesn't give you any of the things
that people want from religion.
So, actually, it's just a big flop.
Maybe we should put a lot more effort into it.
We don't because we're actually very self-obsessed.
But the fact that we're trying to at least
be a bit less self-success...
Oh, even that's bad.
Okay, you know, like...
You know, a Christian...
I don't know what you believe.
Traditional Christianity,
both Protestant and Catholic and Orthodox and everything,
believes that anyone, including myself,
who doesn't accept Jesus Christ
as their personal savior,
is going and also in most of the branches,
is inducted into Churchary Baptism, etc.,
is going to spend eternity of hell.
Okay, I can get very offended.
No, okay, you're not going to do anything to me personally,
but you do think I'm going to go to hell for life.
I can get very offended by that.
Okay, but I'm not going to get offended by that
because it's not productive.
It doesn't need anybody.
You're saying you're going to get offended
because, in theory...
No, I think you might execute you.
I personally, I don't get offended by stuff.
I get...
I suppose the difference is that,
if you're going to go burning in hell, Gabriel,
that's going to be God's decision.
It's nothing to do with me.
I mean, it really isn't.
God can judge you.
And he may find you're fantastic
and there are all sorts of get-out clauses for you.
There wouldn't be any get-out clauses
for me in a rabbinical court.
Do you see, this is...
There's no court, it's not happening.
This is men.
There's no...
No, no.
But were these courts to exist,
which clearly...
This stuff is meaningless
unless potentially it has legal weight.
Otherwise, these people are just cosplaying, aren't they?
Are they cosplaying?
That's just where you're completely wrong
because, again, in Jewish law,
we have...
There's only seven no-high laws.
There's 613 Jewish laws, Torah laws.
All of them, none of the punishments apply.
None of them have been implemented for 2,000 years.
And yet we devote our lives
to keeping a Sabbath in the right way,
to building a tabernacle in the right way,
all of these things, complying with this law.
Even though no one has been punished
and no one can be punished,
as far as we know, indefinitely.
So for us, it's not...
I don't keep the Sabbath
because one day I might be punished.
It's got nothing to do with why I keep the Sabbath.
It's not nothing to do with why I educate my children
to keep the Sabbath.
It's nothing to do with...
It's just so completely irrelevant
to why I keep the Sabbath.
It's the fact that breaking a Sabbath,
certain violations would incur inferior death
and certain violations would incur inferior lashes
kind of tells me about the importance of it.
But I don't keep the Sabbath
because I'm awaiting some time
where people can ask me if I can help.
I get that.
So when people say keep the no-high laws,
we're saying keep the no-high laws
because we think that's what you should do,
not because one day you'll be executed
and we're just kind of practicing
for when you're going,
no, we just think you should keep the no-high laws.
Well, you were okay anyway.
Fortunately, all the six,
apart from that one, you think are fine, right?
If I go out to you and say,
you shouldn't kill people,
you're okay with that, right?
No, I think it's weird.
I say I feel sorry for the masses.
I think they have a very healthy lifestyle
drinking the blood of their cattle
and I wouldn't want them to be troubled by...
Okay, I mean, you can say the same thing,
that Hinduism have a very beautiful religion.
But we say, okay,
Judaism makes certain offensive claims
that worshipping idols is wrong.
Most human civilizations have worshipped idols,
so I guess in that sense,
what we're saying is offensive.
But we believe that there's one God
and he's only here to be worshipped.
Can I ask you about the Kabbalah,
which from where I'm sitting seems
not to put two final points on it,
dodgy as.
I mean, we've got people like Madonna
going to wearing their funny little bracelet,
the red bracelet thing.
This seems to me to be sort of a mixture of,
well, it's the occult, it's necromancy.
This is stuff that you lot have inherited
from the Babylonian exile.
When you spent too long in Babylon
and you were sort of mucking around
with these rubbing shoulders
with these dark magicians
and you've incorporated a lot of this
heavy-duty dark stuff into your religion.
Over to you.
Okay, so I'm not sure the history is correct.
So there's an ongoing debate in scholarship,
not among Jews, I'm talking universities,
but when Kabbalah starts,
it seems to be in the 11th or 12th century AD
either in Provence or Spain.
It's more recent.
Now, Kabbalah, the roots of Kabbalah
is trying to answer certain kind of questions
that any monotheist has to deal with at some level.
So if God is completely transcendent,
how does God interact with the universe?
Like, where's the connection?
If God is completely omnipotent
and he's completely good, where does evil come from?
If God knows everything already,
why do I bother praying?
Like, he knows I'm going to pray,
so why am I trying to change?
We're like, oh, please, God who knows everything,
change what your plan is because I asked you.
Like, what am I even doing when I'm praying?
So Kabbalah is based upon trying to answer
a lot of these real questions
that any monotheist has to face, these paradoxes.
Can God make a rock so big he can't list it?
There you go, there's a paradox.
Monotheism throws up a lot of paradoxes
and Kabbalah tries to answer them.
Now, my personal opinion is as follows.
Kabbalah is the wrong answer to all of these paradoxes.
Kabbalah is against the Jewish religion.
Kabbalah should be excised from Jewish religion.
One reason I don't bother with noahidism and stuff,
even though I really don't think they're doing a bad thing,
I think they're doing a good thing as far as it goes,
but I don't bother with it because I don't think
the Jewish people are in a position
to promote monotheism to the nations at large
when we're not promoting monotheism among ourselves.
I think that in trying to answer the paradoxes of monotheism,
Kabbalah violates the basic tenets of monotheism.
And in so doing, what happens, just as happens
in other mystical traditions, it lets in things
you could call a necromancy.
Now, every single bad thing about Kabbalah,
you can explain it away in a way that's okay.
And I could do that.
It's just my view on it basically is that
if it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck,
it's a duck.
So I would say that some of the things that some Kabbalists do
is tantamount to necromancy.
And therefore our job as Jews is to get rid of Kabbalah.
Now, according to a kind of a literal reading of the Torah,
what I'm supposed to do, I'm supposed to go find a Kabbalist
and kill him.
And so to kill him.
Yes.
Yeah.
Now, wait.
Now you could say, I'm not going to do that.
You say, oh, I'm just cosplaying.
I'm just, it's just a fake.
Okay. Well, I'm not going to do that.
What I will do is I will tell a Kabbalist,
you're wrong, you know, you are, you're violating our religion.
You're, I believe, bringing divine displeasure on our people.
Just in exactly the same way that if I think it's reasonable,
I'm happy to tell a Hindu that he should start worshiping idols
and I'm happy to tell a Christian that in my opinion,
you should get rid of the Jesus part of your religion.
Okay.
Yeah.
Now, for me, it's more important to deal with the Kabbalah side of things
because A, I live in Israel, I don't really meet many Christians, etc.
B, I think we should get our own house in order before we try
and put other people's house in order.
No, maybe there's no C.
Okay, A and B.
So that's my view.
I can't defend Kabbalah because I think that Kabbalah is bad.
But, you know, I can say that it does come from,
it comes from an honest attempt in its earliest form,
it comes from an honest attempt to answer what are real questions.
And there are earlier forms of Kabbalah that are,
if not necessarily good, they are much less bad.
As in, one of the problems with mysticism is that
it kind of, it opens the door for a lot of nonsense
to fall for, you know, one moment you're just trying to say,
okay, well maybe, okay, so there's God up there and there's earth here,
so maybe there's a system of emanations.
And it, you know, maybe I don't believe that either,
but it's not crazy to believe such a thing,
it's not wicked to believe such a thing.
But after a few generations,
once you've allowed yourself to just invent stuff,
invent these kind of things, and even worse,
to invent stuff while you're having some kind of mystical trance
that you induced in yourself by meditating for 24 hours while fasting,
a lot of nonsense seeks in.
So Kabbalah has kind of degenerated from its earliest form,
which was much less bad.
With that said, there have been,
there are people who try to interpret Kabbalah
in a way that is more good, that is less superstitious,
that is less necromantic.
And I don't think that's a really right approach.
I think we should just abolish Kabbalah.
But again, they're not wicked,
they're not evil because they're trying to do it,
they're misled.
Like, I think people should be nice.
Well, I think we can agree on that.
How big is, I mean, how many,
what percentage of Jews do practice Kabbalah?
What practice Kabbalah?
Well, yeah, study it and...
It's interesting, okay.
Okay, what percentage of Jews practice Kabbalah?
And they are Kabbalists,
that they, you know, they study Kabbalistic literature
in and they do Kabbalistic exercises
and say Kabbalistic formulas and stuff.
Maybe half a percent, something like that, probably less.
What kind of, what kind of proportion of Jews
are to some extent influenced in their practice by Kabbalah?
Of among Orthodox Jews, probably about 80, 90 percent?
What kind of proportion of Jews
are heavily influenced by Kabbalah?
20 percent, 30 percent?
Again, it's quite long.
So one of the things about Judaism,
and the way it works is that
it isn't really a religion that is doctrinally based,
as it is very much based upon practice.
It's a, it's a, it's a,
an all-for-practic religion in many ways.
So there is a kind of, if someone is observant
and he keeps them at spot
and he prays when he's supposed to
and he builds a tabernacle when he's supposed to
and he keeps the Sabbath as he's supposed to,
Jews tend to be very, very tolerant about what he believes.
They don't really care what he believes.
And in some ways I think that's a good thing
because it stops us having wars of religion,
stops us having ISIS kind of groups
saying cutting off your head
because you didn't say the Shahada in the right way.
But again, it has a failure mode
and the failure mode is just kind of
basically tolerating any kind of insane crazy beliefs
as long as people are precise in their ritual observance.
So if we're criticized for that,
then I'm not going to defend things that I think are wrong.
But I also think the truth is a violation of monotheism.
Yeah. Can I ask you, under Jewish tradition,
are you allowed to lie to me and trick me?
You don't have to tell me the truth to you
if it's in the interests of Judaism.
Am I allowed to lie to you or trick to you?
There's no doctrine if you want.
Like, Shia Muslims have adoption of taqfeer.
Yeah.
No, it's not called taqfeer.
Is it called taqfeer?
Yeah, that's what I was asking you.
Is the not a similar thing in Judaism?
No, there's no organized option of thing.
There's a principle which is I'm allowed
to violate anything to save my life.
So if you...
I'm not going to kill you, Gabriel.
So if you order me to eat pork
or you'll kill me, I'm allowed to eat the pork.
Similarly, if you're going to kill me
but I'll be able to lie so you won't kill me,
then I can lie.
So that's an established principle.
Apart from that, no, there's no...
But then there's not...
I mean, there's not a specific Torah offence to lie.
Like, nowhere in the Torah does it say you can't lie.
Like, it's unethical.
So there's a wider theory of...
The Talmud doesn't deal with kind of ethic questions so much.
So for example, one of the things that
actually is a specific offense in the Torah is gossip.
You're not allowed to gossip about people.
So the question is, well, what does it mean to gossip?
Like, what if I think someone's a pedophile, right?
And maybe I should gossip, you know?
So in more recent times, there's been a large literature
that's been written about the Jewish laws
of what we call Lush and Hurrah, about gossip.
And those kind of tend to fall into
kind of this failure mode of legalism
that you spend a whole week reading this thing,
long book about when am I allowed to,
when am I allowed to, when am I not allowed to, when am I allowed to.
And then when you actually get to a practical situation,
you just end up gossiping because it's too much.
You can't...
So with lying, lying kind of falls into that kind of thing, you know?
Like, it's kind of thing, you just have to...
It's not something you can really legalize.
You just have to kind of...
Because everyone agrees, look, Kent didn't agree.
Kent said you're never allowed to lie.
But everyone else who's not Kent says there are occasions
when you're not allowed to lie.
Okay, the Nazis come in, you've got some Jews under your staircase.
They say, where are the Jews?
They say, I don't know the Jews, and we'll end in the city.
Everyone agrees there are cases when you're allowed to lie.
So it's not kind of a thing you can legalize.
Like, it's just...
It's kind of a thing you have to cultivate
a character trait of honesty through moral exaltation.
But is there a law that says I'm allowed to lie to you
because you're a Gentile and you'll feel better about me?
If I lie, no, there's no such thing.
I was thinking...
Well, I think maybe I was stretching it.
If I said law, I didn't mean that.
I meant a kind of code tradition, a kind of...
No, there's no such...
There's no...
Look, sheites have a specific doctrine of lying,
which they developed mostly not...
It's not about non-Muslims.
It's mostly about Sunni Muslims persecuting them.
Right, right.
They say they develop this specific thing
and they have a specific code.
When are you allowed, when are you not...
There's no such section of Jewish law that deals with it.
Right, right.
I was very sorry to hear you say, by the way,
that in your kind of religious practice,
you've never had a sort of...
Do you not get intimations of God or anything like that?
No, when I say I haven't received prophecy,
I mean, I've never...
I'm not a prophet.
No, I have...
What do you get?
I don't...
What do you get?
Like, you know, have you...
I've had moments of kind of serenity.
I've had moments of serenity.
I've had moments of kind of being overwhelmed.
I've had moments of terror because of consciousness in my sins.
Yeah, I've had emotional...
Yeah, the fear of the Lord is a...
Well, it's the beginning of wisdom, of course, but yes.
No, I suppose...
Yeah, that's good to hear.
I suppose you get what I would call God treats,
where occasionally he sends you these little signs
that is there with you and he's got your back.
And I'm presuming you get those as well.
So look, I will say that Judaism is a kind of organized religion
connected to being legalists.
It's not built around cultivating those kind of religious emotions.
And one of the things that Kabbalists...
One of the reasons why Kabbalah kind of developed and became more popular
is because actually there are more into that.
Kabbalists are actually into meditation,
they're into kind of quasi-profesical kind of things.
Oh, look, in a sense, this kind of non-prophetic nature of legalistic Judaism,
like all things, it has its plus size and its downsides.
The plus side is that traditionally speaking, before Kabbalah at least,
we were much less likely to be led astray by kind of charismatic figures and stuff.
And also the kind of Christianity and also Islam as well,
they don't talk about it so much nowadays,
but they have had these antinomian movements.
Which kind of say, oh, you know, because we're above the law,
because we're beyond the law, well, it turns out I can do whatever I want.
And what it turns out I want to do is adultery, right?
Judaism until the 17th century and Sabateinism didn't have a single
antinomian movement, as far as we know, for 1,300 years.
So I think it's pretty good from the Talmudic period until Sabatizei.
When Kabbalah came along, unfortunately, 200 years later,
we did have an antinomian movement,
which I think shows you why maybe rabbinic Judaism had a good point
about not kind of cultivating this kind of more meditative form of spirituality.
But I can also accept, if people want to say that Judaism seems a bit stale,
seems a bit dry, I can buy that, that's fine.
I don't think there's criticism that's being really leveled at it.
It's more, I think people get freaked out by things like the rebel.
What is it?
Schneersen, what's that particular cult?
No, Lubavitch. Look, Lubavitch is heresy.
Exactly, Lubavitch. That's what I was...
Is that... That is the same as Ben-Abraith, isn't it?
No, not at all. Ben-Abraith is a... Ben-Abraith...
I mean, what? I don't know how much I'm going to use this.
Ben-Abraith was a Jewish kind of social...
...a bit like the Freemasons.
Sorry, okay. Sorry, I'm...
It was like a...
Yeah, I'm between the Lubavitches.
No, Lubavitch is not connecting with Ben-Abraith at all.
Ben-Abraith was like upscale liberal American Jews
who wanted to hang out with other upscale liberal American Jews
and discuss business and whatever.
Lubavitch is a religious movement.
Look, my view is, okay, there are...
As a movement, I think Lubavitch goes against Judaism
and they should be suppressed.
Again, I don't believe in violence,
so I haven't got any tools to suppress them, but...
Trump loves them. Putin seems to be invading with them.
What's his name? Jared Kushner.
Absolutely is...
They're right up him, or he's right up them.
I mean, and these are people not uninfluential.
And so, look, Lubavitch is a messianic movement.
They believe that lately there was the Messiah,
the vast majority of them, certainly.
And that gives them a lot of motivation.
One thing they're very smart about,
they're very... they're politically agnostic.
So, they're very big in, as you say, in Russia,
they're closely associated with the Putin regime,
but also in Ukraine.
The Ukrainian branch of Lubavitch
is very pro-Ukrainian nationalism.
They're not...
What they're interested in is promoting
the messianic movement.
And they're just not fussed
about what kind of political options
they have to espouse to do that.
And look, they do a lot of stuff.
They do a lot of...
They run a lot of soup kitchens.
They do a lot of charitable work.
Like, there's probably...
Yeah, but so do the Shriners.
Wait a second.
Jews of my persuasion,
you might call broadly speaking rationalists
or whatever you want to call Jews of my persuasion,
probably could learn a lot from them
how to grow their movement.
But no, my view is that Lubavitch
is basically heretical
and that they should be suppressed.
Like I say, I don't believe in violence,
but in as much as you can suppress someone,
they should be suppressed.
That's my view.
Yes.
Yeah, again, it's a problem, isn't it?
I mean, I'm trying to think,
is there an equivalent of Lubavitch
in the Christian world,
which has that influence
and that geopolitical reach
and that sheer menace?
I mean, do it...
I mean, is it menace?
Like, I mean, the thing about...
Okay, one advantage of Christianity
is because you believe the Messiah has already come,
that kind of means you're less vulnerable
to fake messianic movements.
One would take a message to you, Jason, for sure.
He was quite cool.
You've got to admit...
I mean, whatever you think about him,
I mean, you think he wasn't the Messiah,
but he had nice beard, long hair.
He said some cool things.
I'm looking at Rebbe Schneersen.
I'm not thinking...
I'm not thinking that it's a cause of what...
I'm reading Isaiah at the moment.
I think Isaiah was almost my favourite book
of the Old Testament.
It's fantastic.
And nowhere am I coming up with passages
which are called with Schneersen being the Messiah.
No, I mean, it's all obviously absurd.
I mean, the man obviously had a certain charisma
and people say that he was very kind in his dealings with people.
He was very upright and stuff,
and I had no reason to doubt it.
I didn't...
You know, certain people have this kind of...
They don't get angry.
They have this kind of way of reading people's souls and giving...
He was very known for giving people good advice.
A lot of people credit him for...
You know, people who were drug addicts.
They credit him for getting them out of their hole.
People who had problems with their marriage.
He fixed their marriage.
All of that kind of stuff.
I don't...
You know, in that set, obviously,
I think he was bad because he was a fake messiah.
But he had certain good things, as I imagine Jesus did.
I mean...
But you know he did.
You know Jesus was good.
Well, look, I don't...
Look, I mean, I tend towards the view that the gospel...
No, I tend towards the view that the gospels are somewhat unreliable.
Look, again, I'm not a believing Christian.
I know that I'm believing Christian.
No, I'm sorry.
I'm putting it on the spot.
I'm teasing you.
No, no, I tend towards the view that the gospel...
No, the truth is I tend towards the view
that the gospels are relatively unreliable.
And therefore, I don't think we really know a lot about Jesus.
So, I can't say that Jesus was like bad or good
because I don't personally believe that we know nothing about Jesus.
There's been lots of academic discussion about who Jesus was.
As you know, there's a fringe theory that Jesus didn't even insist.
I don't believe that.
But my point is there's a big academic debate
about what did Jesus really believe, et cetera.
I don't have strong opinions about Jesus.
I can accept that things like the Sermons at the Mount
has a great kind of rhetorical and moral power to it.
Fine.
But I also think that there's things in the bovich
that have a certain power.
I also think there's things in the bovich
that are a bit gross and disgusting.
Yeah, it's a complicated world.
I mean, in menace, but there's no real menace to the bovich
because what they're trying to achieve is to get...
They have the area of the preference of the United States
apart from that.
I mean, it's a powerful country in the world.
What they're trying to achieve, fundamentally,
is to get all Jews to recognize them as sign.
Now, I think that is a disastrous thing
because we're not allowed.
It's against our religion.
But let's say every Jew in the world said,
we believe Menachem Mendel-Schneidersohn is the Messiah.
Now, they believe at that point,
everything will kick off metaphysically.
But in fact, nothing would happen.
Correct?
Nothing would happen.
So that's what they actually find the message
trying to achieve.
Now, are they involved in corruption
to get there in Putin's Russia?
Certainly.
In Ukraine also, I would imagine
that there has to be things.
In Israel, their influence on the political process
is also very negative.
They're not above...
It's not like in America,
we exploit the political system because they're Gentiles,
but in Israel, our hands are clean.
No, they act the same way here as they act there.
Actually, they get away with a lot more here
because they're able to more exploit
certain weaknesses in the system.
Yeah, look, they behave badly in some ways.
I think they're bad.
Gabriel, we've gone on.
This is one of my longer podcasts.
I don't normally do longer than an hour and 30.
So it shows how much I've enjoyed talking to you,
and it shows what heroic stamina you've got.
So thank you very much.
Just one last thing.
I am intrigued by the Golden Heights being like Dorset.
Can you sort of wander around any bits
and not see horrid concrete houses?
I mean, is there anywhere on spoil?
Yeah, yes.
The Golden Heights is very unbuilt up
because when it was originally conquered by Israel,
there was a general consensus
that they were going to give it back at some point.
As in, we took the Sinai, we took the West Bank,
we took Gaza, and we took the Golden Heights.
And most people thought the Sinai is the most likely to go,
and after that, the Golden Heights.
Why? Because it has less religious significance,
so we wanted it less.
But also because at the time,
Syria was the major Arab military power,
and it was our, along with Egypt, was on our biggest threat.
And the idea is that we'll give up the Golden Heights
in exchange for a peace deal with Syria,
just like you gave up the Sinai
in exchange for a peace deal with Egypt.
That was what everyone thought would happen.
It didn't happen because the Syrian state refused the deal.
We actually, we offered them the Golden Heights back,
and they said, no, we want even more,
whatever, it was a technical thing because,
and then after that, the Syrian state collapsed.
But what it meant was people didn't come to live here
in the decades after the Yom Kippur War,
because they thought, well, why am I going to live somewhere
where I'm going to just have to leave in 10 years.
So actually, it's quite, it's quite, you call it here.
And it's also very safe because
Syria is no longer a military threat.
It's non-existence as a military threat.
Hezbollah don't target the Golden Heights,
even though they could logistically,
because they don't consider it to be,
they consider their job to be to conquer,
ideally, northern Israel,
but they consider it to be Syria's job
to conquer the Golden Heights.
They don't have a claim on it.
There are no Palestinians here.
There are Druze Arabs who are,
they vary, but they're not
militantly hostile to Israel.
So there's no terrorism here.
It's a very safe place.
It's very nice.
So I'm sort of itching to see with your camera
what the view is out of your window.
Is it rolling, rolling fields with sheep in it?
Shall we try?
Yeah, go on, try.
So, no, I don't think we're gonna,
no, we're not gonna do it.
Can you see?
No, I can see sky.
But you can describe the, oh, I can.
Yes, I can.
Oh, right.
It's green.
Yeah.
I've seen your keyboard now.
Okay.
Now I've got my headphones in.
Sorry.
So I don't know if you saw,
I did.
Across the road is actually quite an ugly house.
Yeah.
So it's a kind of a villa.
Actually, it's an interesting guy.
He's actually an Israeli Arab who became rich
delivering those water cooler things that,
and he came and so he was grew up in Arab
Village, but he made, you know,
he made good money.
So he came to live in this town instead.
Do you think things are very peaceful and
calm and nicer?
It's not.
No, it looks, it looks really nice.
In fact, Mount Hermon,
which is the tallest mountain in Israel,
half it's in Israel, half it's in Lebanon,
is, the camera is not long enough.
But if I go around the corner,
if I poke my head out the window,
I can see Mount Hermon.
Life is the view of Mount Hermon,
which fell upon the hill of Zion.
There the Lord promised his blessing
and life forevermore.
Amen.
So, thank you.
Gabriel, tell us where we can find your,
your sub-stack until it reminds us.
Mountzyonism.com.
I think most people have loved you and,
and so thank you.
I'm just guessing.
Speaking for my audience here,
I think you've been, you've been great
and, you know, we've, we've had a bit of a,
little bit of gentle rambling.
Well, I, I hope our mutual rabbinical friends.
Well, I hope so too.
And I hope you, I hope you didn't hate the experience.
No, no, no.
Look, again, like I say, I'm open to, I just,
I'm just, I'm a bit beyond, I guess I've been,
I cycle through so many ideologies,
I'm just a bit beyond being offended by things.
I'm a bit beyond feeling defensive about things either.
Excellent.
Thank you.
Everyone.
Oh, you know, actually, I'll say something.
I will say it.
Why is not it saying?
Just say it.
In a, in a high-ethetical world
where no one knew what, no one knew what was in the Talbot,
right?
Maybe I would lie.
I don't know.
I haven't thought about what I would do.
It's not, not because there's a law that says I can lie,
but because maybe I would,
because there are occasions when it's valid to lie
and maybe this would be an occasion.
The truth is, you can go online now
and you can read the entire Talbot in English.
You want to do it?
safaria.com.
It's all there.
It's all translated.
It's got a commentary.
There's a lot of it.
It points, all of it, every single word,
every single word of the Talbot is translated.
And my point is, is there's just no,
like, there's no point in lying.
It's just, if there's any user that's listening to this,
you might, you might as well be open
because even if you think, you know,
I'll just lie and then no lie anymore.
It's a waste of time.
The Talbot is what it is.
Some people are not going to like parts of it.
There's no point,
there's no point not being open about it.
Yeah, yeah.
No, I, look, I agree.
I, I'm, I'm totally in honesty
as the best policy kind of guy.
And it's good to meet a fellow,
fellow spirit in that regard.
Everyone, if you've enjoyed this podcast,
it's obviously you have.
Do, well, first of all,
go to Gabriel's website and give them some support.
Read just interesting articles.
You've got a measure of the man now.
I think you can see he's worth reading.
And for me, yeah, look, do,
do please continue sharing and liking and supporting me.
Those of you who can,
who can make the effort,
the financial commitment, thank you.
Become a paid subscriber on Substack or wherever.
Or go to my website,
jamesdellingpole.co.uk and support my sponsors.
Yes, they're good.
And what was the other thing?
Oh, you can buy me a coffee.
Yeah, why not buy me a coffee?
Just do that.
Yeah.
Buy me a coffee.
Yes.
Thank you, Gabriel.
That was great.
Thank you.
You are...