Latest / REALLY JEWISH with Oliver Joseph / REALLY JEWISH S1:E15 - Certainty and doubt
Transcript
- Oliver Joseph: Welcome to the Really Jewish Podcast. is wonderful to be back again. If you are welcome, joining us. Welcome back to the Really Jewish Podcast. If you are here for the first time, Bruchim Ha'Bai'im if you're coming back, welcome. Lovely to have you again. This is a conversation about what it is to be Really Jewish. We are. Alternating week on week off with guests and my regular co-host Yair Eldan. Yair and I met last week in Jerusalem. Catch up on that podcast if you haven't listened to it. And this week I'm welcoming also from Jerusalem Rabbi Joel Levy, second time guest on the podcast, something that must have gone right last time. And we are talking about certainty and doubt this week, which is a big topic in these somewhat tumultuous times. but it's exciting to journey into this topic with my ⁓ longtime friend and colleague Rabbi Joel. Join us for this next leg of Really Jewish. So nice to be back Joel, nice to welcome you. I'm erm... Joel: Nice to be here. Oliver Joseph: Listen, I was in Israel last week for the first time in a while, had a wedding. We had a really actually lovely time with family and with friends and the kids having a bit of time on the beach and in the pool. It was lovely. An interesting feature of last week is I went to synagogue where we staying and listened to the Parshat, Shelach Lecha. And this week again, a quirk of the Jewish calendar is the way that the festival of Shavuot fell in the UK and the diaspora means that we were delayed by one week in our Torah reading and Israel steamed ahead because they only have one day of festival in Israel. And... Oh, microphone. Just do that one second again. This is going to be annoying. Yeah. So Israel steamed ahead and read the Parshat last week, Shelach Lecha, and this week in the UK we will read the Parshat again. So I will hear this one Parshat twice. An aspect of the Parshat is... description of the Jews inside the desert. They are venturing forth in their journey and a part of their journey is specifically towards the promised land, towards Israel, and they send spies to scout out the land. And it occurred to me that somewhere in the essence of the Parshat, don't normally do Parshat learning on this podcast but strikes me as important. Someone in the essence of the Parshat is this aspect of certainty of doubt. It takes great energy to even envisage the possibility that the Israelites might have some kind of... some kind of resting place, the journey might come to an end and come to a close and they will enter this land and make home in this land. And then specifically at the core of the story is this aspect of doubt because the spies return after 40 days. scouting out the land, have collected some of its fruit to kind of demonstrate the beauty and wonder of the land, the land of Chalav U'dvash of milk and honey as described in the Parshat and by the spies. And they say we see ourselves as grasshoppers in front of these giants in the land and there's this kind of core and key moment of doubt, of hesitation. Joel: Thanks. Oliver Joseph: And it occurs to me both of that's very human, but that's also very kind of Jewish. That's Really Jewish to be able to sit with both of those. And one of questions that I, you're one of my rabbis, haven't even introduced you today, Rabbi Joel Levy from London, head of the Conservative Reshiva, Bitfutzberg as well. It really occurs to me, Joel is one of my rabbis, that that's a big question. Joel: Hmm. I'm not from London. I'd never say I was from London. I occasionally visit the big smoke, but I grew up in a little wee village in, I grew up in a little village in South Wales and then Cheshire. But I always feel like a little boy when I come to London, like in the big city. I never know where I'm going to come out of the tube. I'm not from London. I visit there occasionally. And it is the... Oliver Joseph: ⁓ from the north from Manchester. from Manchester. Go on. Joel: is the devil's city as well, so you have to keep away from London. Anyway, what was the question? About faith and doubt. Yeah, well, let me say something. I'll say something like, know, going in, like the spies bring back a report that says, ⁓ you know, it's amazing, but if we go in, we're gonna lose. Like we're gonna lose. The project is not gonna be, we're not gonna win that project. So. Oliver Joseph: Yeah. Joel: Their faith, their doubt is about the doubt of whether the project is. is completable, like whether external forces will impinge upon the project. That's a reasonable thing to have those fears. They have the fear that the project is not doable. And then they say, so let's not go in. And then immediately after that, it's like, well, let's go back to Egypt or somewhere. We're not gonna succeed in this project. ⁓ Which I guess is connected to the idea that that God won't, that there isn't an inevitability about the success of the project. And maybe even worse, that it's inevitable the project will fail. It's inevitable the project will fail. So then they say, well, let's not, that we shouldn't go into the land. So as you say, that's a reasonable fear. It's not, is it rational? Is it irrational? There's an honest ⁓ acknowledgement on the part of the spies of how they felt when they went into the land. They said, we felt like grasshoppers. We felt like grasshoppers in the face of the people we encountered there. But then there's another piece, they jump and they say that in the eyes of the people there, we were like grasshoppers, is another, that's a leap. Oliver Joseph: Hmm. Joel: into an understanding of what was going on in the minds of the people who were living there, that they were looking at us like we were grasshoppers. Actually, we agreed. Our experience and their experience aligned, and that's why we're going to lose, because not only do we feel like grasshoppers, but they looked at us like grasshoppers, and we looked at ourselves like grasshoppers. We had internalized the notion of being a grasshopper. Oliver Joseph: Okay. Joel: We'd internalized our own impotence. And once we'd done that, it was game over. Because we thought that we were impotent in the world and not potent in the world. We couldn't actually shape the reality in any way. That we were just going to be victims of the encounter with the indigenous population there. So at that point, it's game over for the spies. After they've said that and they've experienced that, they can't. build up the courage to enter the land. won't enter the land. It's right that they shouldn't go in because they've undermined themselves in some way. They don't think the project's going to succeed. Oliver Joseph: But that take on... sense of self, if we just take it to the self for a moment, suggests that any doubt or hesitation that you might encounter in your own life is is a kind of automatic write-off. know, return to base, like cancel the show, don't get up on the stage, don't do the project. I can speak for myself that I... Joel: Yeah. Yeah. Oliver Joseph: I take it to my work life, a freelance rabbi of five years, never choose to be a freelance rabbi, it's a crazy thing to do. But you know, five years in, feel like. reach some kind of stability in my own life, but the striving in that project of creating work and creating projects and developing ideas and working with different communities. ⁓ through all of those different parts, I experience a lot of self doubt at many stages of the operation in the morning, in the evening, in the afternoon, halfway through elevens ⁓ at each stage. And part of the PUMEN project is working through those moments of doubt and hesitation. And in the case of the last few years, it's finding also strength and also in the same moment kind of interacting with the doubt and the hesitation to learn from it. Joel: Yep, but the but the but as you say you have to at each instant Move through that and get to the point where you're acting from a place of faith Each you know, getting up in the morning and committing to doing the things that we do Is faithful It's faithful to something Faith is like the thing that gets you up in the everyone requires the faith of thinking that there's There's a purpose to the project. It means something when I commit to the things I commit to. There's values that I'm committing to that make sense and that will lead to something which is good in the world as opposed to something bad in the world. ⁓ There's like with your work, like if I keep committing to this, it will come out okay. I'll find stasis. I'll find a place which is a good place for me and my family and the people I work with and I can bring something into the world by doing that. Those are all. acts of faith and the doubt touches you but you find a way each morning of getting up in the morning like there's a faithfulness in your action like if you internalized in a radical way the idea the project was pointless and that you were going to fail and then you wouldn't get up in the morning and you wouldn't be able to do the things that you do. So in that sense, is the underpinning of leading a coherent life. And it's always without knowledge. It's always without knowledge. It's always a momentous over-commitment to something which you don't know empirically. you get married, getting married is a tremendous act of faith because you never know enough about the person and about yourself to know whether you're going to make it work. ⁓ and so you take a leap into something and someone ⁓ and that leap is always not based on empirical knowledge. And yet, and yet that might be the most momentous, significant decision that you take and that you keep, you know, sometimes presumably you get up in the morning and think, ⁓ bugger, this is, this, that was a bad idea. Like, why the hell did I, why did I do that? Why did I commit to that person? And, ⁓ and, and those moments of doubt are a real part of being, a real part of being married, but. But one's commitment to the project, the big faith leap is there, it has moments of tremendous clarity and moments of doubt, but that doesn't stop you being committed to the project. Oliver Joseph: So the part I'm interested in is whether the doubt and the hesitation has purpose. the take that I... The takeaway that I have from what you said so far is that the... The moments of doubt are sideshow, are a detraction from the ultimate act of faith which is continuation, persistence, overcoming. And I think in my own life... that the possibility of experiencing moments of doubts gives us moments to refine and clarify our approach. That's the interesting part. ⁓ Right. Joel: And maybe to what am I actually committed to? What are like the doubt is like, has to, cause you have to, I think. It's important to be committed to the right things. Oliver Joseph: Right. Joel: So there should be some... There should be doubts. Because as I say, because the things that we commit to are never done on the basis of empirical knowledge. So, ⁓ so we always over committing and there's a doubt is a part of is going to be a genuine, it's always got to be a part of that. And, but the, but the, but the act of moving through doubt into recommit recommitting is part of the, you know, until we decide that we, you know, like people get divorced. I mean, I haven't done that yet. Oliver Joseph: Right. Hmm. Joel: Sorry, I haven't done that. But presumably there's a certain point where you think, it's not right, it's not right. I can't keep committing to this thing. It's not healthy for the other person, it's not healthy for me, it's not healthy for my children, it's not healthy for the world. I'm not bringing blessing into the world. I think that must be absolutely devastating and throwing yourself into something which has required commitment over it. Oliver Joseph: Right. Joel: thousands and thousands and thousands of times at certain points say I can't keep moving through the doubt into commitment again on that question. ⁓ Oliver Joseph: So if we take that to a national scale, because that feels kind of pertinent. Joel: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep. Oliver Joseph: Today, listen, ⁓ we have this inextricable link between the Jewish people and the land of Israel and we, not exceptionally, but in a very kind of connected way in the Parshat we're reading about entering the land and specifically fighting with the people who are in the land as we enter the land in our ancient story. there specifically in relation to that venture, in relation to that battle, in relation to that journey, there is this quality of certainty and doubt. It takes great strength to consider a national project on the scale of the Jewish people or the Israelites conceived of in the ancient fable story of B'midbar of the wandering in the desert. And it takes great strength and wild imagination to consider that in a post Holocaust world for the past 70 years plus that the Jewish people might go on that project again. And I wonder in terms of the national projects, you know, with inspiration and guidance or wisdom from the Torah story, how some of that rationale. relates to today, you my own imagination, we need that chutzpah, that wild strength to even conceive that we might have our own individualized national project for this tiny people in the land of Israel. But then in these moments of fighting and of struggle and of Israel seemingly flailing often on the international stage, that doubt certainly creeps in about the viability and the possibility of the project itself. Joel: ain't that true. Yeah. I think... Oliver Joseph: Ain't that true? Joel: I'd say for me the main reason I live in Israel is that Israel has been, you know, the major project of the Jewish people in the 20th century and it was brought about by all sorts of historical circumstances that made diaspora untenable. But it's a risky venture because all those, you know, 2000 years of fantasizing about how terrible it is to live under the authority of other nations, which it has been at times truly terrible, and how much of a better job we'd do if we were in charge because wouldn't it be great if we had our own country? Because, we wouldn't be like that. We would be great because we would create this wonderful society. So to actually have the courage to put that to the test and see whether we can create a decent society is like it's a high risk venture. and it could fail in a variety of different ways. It could fail because we're destroyed by our enemies, or it could fail because we create the same kind of disgusting, oppressive, racist, non-democratic society that we've suffered from over 2,000 years. We could end up creating a monster. And ⁓ it's a high, so in many ways the easier option would be to say, let's not risk it. But at a certain point, not risking it became, after the show, I would say for the vast majority of the Jewish people, it became not really a tenable option. Like the possibility of living equitably and peaceably amongst the non-Jews and relying on their virtue for our safety became. an untenable position. And we decided as a nation, there's a few strange Jews who are not part of that. I would say they're really the tiny minority ⁓ who decided to stick with the certainties of powerlessness. and not putting our moral fantasies to the test. ⁓ But as I say, we could fail in that project. Israel could become a place that was a nightmare and not a dream. A nightmare for our minorities, a nightmare for the people around us, a nightmare for ourselves. could become a, you know. So in that sense, it's a task that could fail. So, know, when, what's the faith that's required is a faith in the project. Like it looks like a mountain that's insurmountable. idea that you could, given that the Jews spread out for the last 2000 years all over the world and developed really amazing diversity of cultures and given that we solved a lot of our problems in the diaspora by not talking to each other and not engaging with each other. And that's still the modus operandi of... major argument in the Jewish world is just not to talk to each other. There's no significant dialogue taking place between the different bits of the Jewish world in diaspora. And given that that model won't work in Israel because we're actually going to have to learn to talk to each other in Israel, we haven't even started that yet. We have not even begun the process of talking to each other in Israel. We haven't even begun the process of working out. how we're really going to treat minorities in our country and the radical inclusion of minorities. We haven't even started that project. In many ways, what happens in Israel is that all those major projects, which could completely tear us apart, are kind of deferred because we're just too busy defending ourselves. And so all the major discussions have been put on hold. about what the state should look like and what the image, what the fantasy is of what we're actually trying to build. But my commitment to being in Israel is not a commitment to what is, it's a commitment to what could be. It's a commitment to the vision of the project. Like what is a vision of a state where Jews can actually have a degree of power and feel safe and create a society which is which is along the lines of a prophetic vision of a truly peaceful space. And look, clearly we're not there yet because we live in a miserable situation of war and we're too busy oppressing ourselves, each other. We can't listen to each other. We won't give each other space. The contradictory visions of what the state, of what Israel is about, seem so profoundly contradictory I can't even hear the other position of the other side. not prepared to open up to that and have a dialogue. They're not prepared to hear me, I'm not prepared to hear them. ⁓ There's so much work to do that it seems like I'm a grasshopper in the face of that task. But if I internalize my grasshopper-ness, then I would run away. And that's exactly what happens with the spies. They say, we're not up to the difficulty of the task. We don't have the strength. of the task because we are grasshoppers and a grasshopper isn't up to the task of defeating the anakim, the giantness, the the immenseness of the problems that we encounter. And so the doubt is real, like the doubt, do I sometimes doubt that we'll make it totally, totally, you know, I totally doubt that. Oliver Joseph: So there's a story which I came across, one of these Jewish stories you hear and learn in passing, I opened up about the Rabi Nathan, which is a drush on the book of Mishnah Avot, and he's talking about the time when Rabbi Akiva ⁓ his Jewish journey, and the fable of Rabbi Akiva is that he... Joel: And yeah. Oliver Joseph: started studying at the age of 40, which is always very redeeming people who come to Jewish life late or feel like they're on the back foot in their Jewish learning in some way or another, or their spiritual journey. But the image that kind of introduces Rabbi Akiva is this one where Rabbi Akiva is gazing at a rock. and he notices that the rock is being imprinted by this drip of water, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, And he says, if it's possible for this soft water to impact on this hard rock, kal v'chomer, like all the more so the tough and durable words of Torah, can impact on my soft heart. And... It feels like a mixing of the images in terms of certainty and doubt somewhere or another because for me the rock is like certainty, is the possibility of continuity and endurance and the water which is kind of like drip, drip, drip, drip, drip is that. Joel: Hmm. Oliver Joseph: is something else, but there's something else impacts on this great, on this great tough rock. And it occurs to me in the context of the story that somehow Rabbi Akiva creates a picture Joel: Hmm. Hmm. Oliver Joseph: of certainty, of religious vision and religious possibility by way of gazing on a rock. ⁓ Joel: Yeah. Oliver Joseph: But both seem to be in the story, the aspect of ponderance and the aspect of kind of dreaming and the aspect of permanence. And ⁓ I just to take it back for a second to kind of the Israel project. I think it feels dangerous, but it also feels incredibly normal and maybe in the fall to this podcast kind of safe to have real moments of doubt about. our own religious journey, our own... faith journey, a national journey at this time. The message of Really Jewish that I'm trying to create is like something of the inside conversation that you and I might have around the kitchen table and sharing that a little bit with people who are out there. And it's with a lot of sadness that the kind of, the feels like... The Jewish project is on the rocks at the moment. And I really want to be Rabbi Kiva who kind of gazes at this image of continuity, of permanence and of softness. And really, really kind of in the ways that you describe, really dream of the possibility and see certainty somehow in that image. Joel: Mm. So he sees the rock is the enemy here. Well, because the rock seems immutable. You'd have thought the rock was immutable, but he sees the drip, drip, drip. He realizes that actually it's not immutable. You can change what looks like it's unchangeable. But the way you have to do that is by sustained faith and commitment to practice over, in his case, 40 years, like the Midrash. Oliver Joseph: Gone. Joel: The agada says he didn't learn for 40 years and then he learned for 40 years and then he paid back to the Jewish people for 40 years. he like, but what does it mean to learn for 40 years? It means that he, he, he, he, he could break down what seemed like the impossible task of wearing away that rock into drops. If he just turned it into drops, individual actions. then he had the faith that those individual actions would wear away the rock. That was the intuition that he had. the story in Avot de'Rabi Nathan carries on and says like, so when he had that insight that ⁓ he had to do to study Torah was to ⁓ study each and every day in a sustained way with intensity and seriousness. So every time, Keyan She'amar lo Every time he learned a little piece of halacha, Every time he learned a piece of halacha, he'd go and sit on his own, he'd really think about it. And he'd say, why was this stated? Why is this written the way it's written? Why is it said the way it's said? He broke everything down into tiny pieces and he did it every single day, over and over a thousand thousand times. And so he broke down the process of learning Torah into things that were bite-sized, little drops of water. And each time he asked the right question, which is like, what's going on here? The meaning question, the moral question, the underpinning question. chazar v'she'alan he went back to his teachers and argued with them and talked to them and asked them questions. And thereby he kind of set up the whole system. So he had, think in our lives, we probably tend to overestimate what we can achieve every single day and underestimate what we can achieve in a year or 10 years or 30 years or 40 years. Because what really matters in our lives is the persistence and the faith. So if we think every day, like know, Oliver Joseph: Thank Joel: Susanna has this thing, she gets to almost at the end of almost every day and says, ⁓ I did nothing. I did nothing. Like I look at this project, this academic project I'm involved in or something like, I just did the most tiny bit of it. Or if I'm writing a paper, then I only wrote 20 words today or a hundred words or 200 words. But like, of course each day looks like nothing. But over the course ⁓ of a month or a year or 10 years, or in the case of Rabbi Akiva, 40 years, that persistence wears a hole in the rock. So that which is soft can erode that which is hard. But it's about having the kind of, the faith is like, as you said, getting up in the morning. Like, of course they have doubts. I'm sure Rabbi Akiva got up in the morning and said, ⁓ bugger it. But what he's constantly finding the strength to recommit to is his vision that if he persists patiently and faithfully, that he can have an impact on the world. He can have an impact first on himself. He can shape himself. He can soften his own heart. He can impact his own heart and then he can have an impact on the world. And he did. That's true. That is in fact what happened. He changes Judaism completely. Rabbi Akiva is a total revolutionary in terms of his understanding of Judaism, a radical re-interpreter of the tradition. And say again. Oliver Joseph: And you're a religious fundamentalist. This is, and you are a religious fundamentalist. You are kind of, I'm saying it to evoke a response, but you're describing a project where our faith, where we're led by our faith. I want to take us back before we start to close to kind of the national project again, like the project of the Jewish people, because what differs from your faith when you're saying, Rabbi Kiever is led by faith, we can be led by faith, we can break down that which is hard, in order to make progress in a kind of, in a visionary way over not one or two, but 10 or 20 years or 50 years. it feels quite fundamentalist. In my moments of doubt again, I often will ask the question about what differs between my religious fundamentalism and belief and the belief of the religious fundamentalism and extremism that I oppose. Joel: What are you committed to? Like, yeah, no, I think that's the question. The question is what am I actually committed to? So in Israel, the challenge, I think the challenge or part of the challenge at least is moving away from religious fundamentalism. I actually think that's the challenge of the world at the moment. The challenge of the world at the moment is moving away from religious fundamentalism. Oliver Joseph: Well, I might give it to you. Joel: and it looks like an insurmountable mountain to climb to move the world away from religious fundamentalism. The idea that religious people could move out of the realm of fundamentalism and I'm saying this is true for Judaism, Islam and Christianity. ⁓ The idea that we could move away from religious fundamentalism ⁓ seems like the impossible. That seems like the impossible mountain. That sounds like the place where I look at that and I think, ⁓ God, I'm just a grasshopper because there are, you know, 100,000 yeshiva students in fundamentalist yeshiva and there are, you know, how many in the liberal Jewish world? A couple of hundred, I don't know, something like that. So seems like I'm a grasshopper. And that's when I think, oh, can't be bothered to get out of bed in the morning. But I do get out of bed in the morning because I have a vision of the world that I'd like to live in. I'd like to have a vision, I'd like to live in a world where the more religious you got, the less likely you were to murder someone. The more religious you got, the more likely you were to be committed to tel-am-il-him in all human beings and to democratic values. The more religious you got, the more sensitive you were to the plight of minorities as opposed to less sensitive to the plight of minorities. But in order to do that, you actually have to shift the way you think about religion. You have to understand that no religion is sui generis, no religion is unique, that religious people engage in a project. and that that project looks very, very similar in some ways in different religious traditions. And you have to understand religion as an anthropological phenomenon and a historical phenomenon. And you have to understand that different religions are part of history, which means moving beyond any simplistic notions of revelation, for example. You have to really move into something much more historically rooted. And Jews have to understand where their tradition came from and why and how. And so do Muslims and Christians. if they... In that sense, I'm a kind ⁓ of scientific fundamentalist. I think that is too dangerous to be allowed to exist within its own ecosystem without... Oliver Joseph: you Joel: without a broader academic understanding of the world. ⁓ And there's so much work to do before religion can be made safe. It's like it's so toxic at the moment. So toxic. if Muslims could start to see that some of their tradition is a reworking of rabbinic midrash. And Judaism can start to see that some of its teachings are re-workings of Mesopotamian law, and that we can place ourselves within some historical context which is not fundamentalist. and then we can start to have a little bit of an understanding of each other in a more profound way and stop trying to define ourselves in opposition. Oliver Joseph: Hmm. Hmm. Joel: And, but that, mountain is enormously high. The mountain is enormously high because religion kind of at this stage functions to blink a people from truth. It functions to blink a people from truth as opposed to opening a people up to truth. And that's very dangerous. It's very dangerous. So, you know. Oliver Joseph: Hmm. Joel: Do I have moments of doubt when I think about the non-fundamentalist religious project? I surely do, I do have moments of doubt, but I manage to get out of bed in the morning. I do manage to get out of bed in the morning. I manage to commit to the things that I commit to with faith. Sometimes that's the... the drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, believe that if you keep committing to the things you keep committing to, in the end it will have an effect. Oliver Joseph: We learnt first of all what, in a couple of places, and on this podcast as well, we spoke about the mountain inverted above the Jewish people, and the Jewish people being forced to take the Torah. That was an interesting conversation in itself, but I think the Maoridom... Joel: Yeah. Yeah. Oliver Joseph: the Me'or Eynaiim says that the mountain is actually the people, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the forefathers and foremothers. It just occurred to me there that what you're describing is not just Jewish interrelationship with our ancestors. Jewish interrelationship with our ancestors in general and that reframing the possibility that Judaism can sit in a historic context, a context with a cross millennia both interrelationship with the Jews who came before us, the Israelites who came before us but also the people who came before us is an interesting reframing. I just wonder in terms of summing up, what's the personal part? When you think about this question of certainty and doubt, we've skirted across some of what it means as a national project for the state of Israel, for the people of Israel, for maybe Jewish people at this time. But what does it mean personally? I think I can say for myself that, you where I started really, that moments of doubt are opportunities for reframing, moments of doubt in my own life are opportunities to Yeah, really re-prioritise and refocus on what I'm doing. But also acknowledge in my own life of lots of bumps and moments of struggle in my own 40 plus years that I've been on this planet. It also enables, those moments of doubt also enable me to clarify and clean up like the important parts of my life that have shaped me. And if I can kind of harness the context of the doubt, then probably I come out much stronger in order to, like you say, wake up in the morning and carry the journey forward. But I'm interested just in terms of a few moments of closing, just to hear where that doubt and that certainty leaves you personally, Joel. Joel: Hmm. Hmm. I appreciate that in terms of the content of the doubt. But I think it's about big picture and small picture probably. Because with Rabbi Akiva going back to that image, that beautiful image that you brought. ⁓ The leap that takes place in Rabbi Akiva is when he realizes that if he keeps committing on the micro level, then he can achieve something on the macro level. I think that's what he said. So it's like, it's that the hard thing is getting yourself going through every interaction. It's not like any part of that process was easy. He had to learn Torah from scratch. I look at the students who come to the conservative yeshiva and they're learning, they're starting to learn from scratch and how brutal that process is of like, realizing that you've been raised as a Jew, but you're functionally illiterate. That's like devastating. That's what we do to our kids. It's terrible. You're raised as a Jew, but you're functionally illiterate in the primary sources of Judaism. That's devastating for some people. When you realize how devastating it is, then you have to come and study. So Rabbi Akiva, ⁓ God, he realizes he's functionally illiterate. He has to learn the aleph bet. He has to learn the aleph bet. There are students who come to the Yeshiva who don't know the aleph bet. like sort of get stuck on that and never quite make it through. There's kids who I know who've gone through the entire segregated Jewish education system in the UK. who don't really know the al-Affpah properly. They've been to segregated Jewish education, which has cost millions of pounds to set up, and they're functionally illiterate in Judaism in the most profound way. It's the most devastating indictment of the Jewish education system in the UK. Or maybe it was set up to be like that. Maybe people actually set it up so that it would create functionally illiterate Jews. on purpose so that we could recreate the next generation exactly like the previous generation. Maybe that was like the goal was to actually create an education system that would teach children nothing. Maybe that was the maybe someone designed it like that. But these kids who've gone through 13 years of segregated Jewish education who come out not knowing Hebrew, say, so they can't access the most basic books of the tradition. Like, what would it take? They're Rabbi Akiva. What would it take for them to say, oh my God, I need to I need to change this? Well, it requires patiently doing what Rabbi Akiva did, which is learning and reviewing and thinking and asking questions and then coming back and doing it again the next day and the next day and the next day and the next day and just keeping on doing that forever. But the micro-level frustration that that involves is huge. The patience, and that requires a deep, deep, deep faith in something that you can never know. It requires a deep faith in something you can never know, which is that if I do this, it will pay off a million, million fold in terms of the richness that will bring into my life, saying that I'll be able to bring then something into the world that's profound. the commitments that we make will never be based on knowledge. They'll always be based on a leap, some huge leap of what the world could be and not what is. And that's what Rabbi Akiva Soi said, if I persist in this, I'll be able to wear away the rock of my own heart. And that is always, it's always an overcommitment. Like there's always some overfaithfulness to something that could be. And I think the same plays out on a personal level. If I keep persisting with this marriage, if I keep going to therapy, if I keep talking and talking, and if I keep talking, I can make this better. If I keep communicating, I can make this better. If I keep... Learning I can make this better and the state of Israel if I keep engaging and committing to the things I commit to then then then I can make it better and we can make it better so that's about that's about faith and It's about having a vision of what you're wanting to aim at and then keeping on persisting and Saying that this might take one year or ten years off or or 20 years, but we you know We've only just started this project. We're not the ground floor I just hope and pray that Israel survives long enough to be able to redeem itself and to arrive at something a little bit redemptive. And for that we have to start listening to each other in a much more profound way. We haven't even started yet. We haven't even started. We haven't even begun the journey. Oliver Joseph: Hmm. Mmm. It's lovely to learn with you a little bit and have this conversation. It feels like a beginning but a good start. Thank you to Rabbi Joel Levi. Thanks for listening to Really Jewish. We hope you got something out of this today. I just wanted to do a couple of thank yous. Thank you for Oi Va Voi for our musical intro and outro. You can listen to their single. back to my roots on streaming platforms. They've got gigs coming up and we're gonna hopefully announce them here as well. We are building this ride from the wheels up. If you wanna support our podcast, please share and like clips on Instagram, TikTok and Facebook. And if you would like to support us on Patreon, please find the links in our show notes and online. Thank you for joining us. on Really Jewish for this week. will be back again next week with more from Really Jewish with Yair Eldan down at Oliver Joseph and thank you to Rabbi Joel Levy for joining us today. Just before you go am just going to do one proper intro for you and then I will close it. you can... just stay there for three seconds. We are joined with Rabbi Joel Levy who is... Joel: Cheers mate. Oliver Joseph: the director of the Conservative Yeshiva Bet Fuchsberg in Jerusalem very long time friend and colleague of mine Rabbi in London of ⁓ Kol Nefesh ⁓ Masorti ⁓ and we are delighted to have him on the podcast welcome Joel Joel: Thank you, nice to be here. Thank you. That's good. It was okay. Oliver Joseph: Yeah, yeah, was, that was great. just gonna stop recording here one second.