Latest / REALLY JEWISH with Oliver Joseph / REALLY JEWISH SE1:E27 - telling stories

Transcript

REALLY JEWISH SE1:E27 - telling stories · REALLY JEWISH with Oliver Joseph

• speaker-1: So Zionism has become a loaded word. and one that I also have a complicated relationship towards, mainly because I think that different people mean very different things when they use the word Zionism. But the reason that I bring that up is that my grandparents were British Jews. They were both born in London in nineteen fourteen. And in the early thirties they met at a debate because my grandfather was the head of the Zionist Student Union at Oxford and my grandma was the head of the anti Zionist student union at LSE. And they debated and I The reason my grandmother was a was an anti-Zionist was not because she had any particular problem with the idea of Jewish nationalism, but because much like many progressive Jews in the years between the wars, she didn't believe in the notion of nation states. and she was a universalist and she believed more than anything in human beings. speaker-0: a heart openness of the possibility that we can somehow be changed and transformed by the people that we meet. And we, just in my own words, like if we can surrender like that hardness of needing to maintain the position, the political position or even the physical position that we're in. and kind of just surrender that even momentarily and listen to the story of the person in front of us, the person we walk by, then maybe something happened, maybe something changes and maybe we're changed by those stories. speaker-1: people are somehow able to take their own identity and sort of check it at the door and say, like, okay, I am who I am, but I'm coming in here and I'm devoting myself to listening to the experience of someone else who has a different lifestyle, different belief system and I think we enjoy that experience of being able to sort of see see the world through someone else's eyes, even if it's just for a brief moment and then we go back to our own eyes and our own glasses. we all love and we're all jealous and we're all angry and we're all frustrated and we're all feel awe and wonder and so when you hear somebody's story inevitably you can recognize in it parts of yourself. you don't necessarily have to agree, you don't necessarily have to feel that you would have made the same decisions or anything like that but there's something about our ability to listen to other people that sort of we play this game in our mind and we say like okay I can put myself in their shoes for a second. I'm able to there's this suspension of reality which also happens when we go into a film. speaker-0: Welcome to Really Jewish. Welcome to our conversation about what is to be Really Jewish. If you're here for another listen, welcome back. If you're here the first time, Bruchim Ha'Bai'im It's a great episode to join us for. We're here with Mishy Harman from Israel Story. He's telling us a little bit about how the podcast started. It's a big podcast. If you've never heard of it before, you should go listen. It's one that actually started me on my podcast journey, I think, because... You know, podcasts were new and it was one that was interesting and innovative and intriguing story about a diversity of stories from across Israel. Two words about our podcast. We are Really Jewish. Our story is trying to examine and understand in 2026, going into a new year just before Rosh Hashanah, what it is to be religious, what is what the essence of Judaism is. in a modern moment. are here in Nomi Studios in Jerusalem. I'm visiting from the UK. I just recorded one episode with Yair, which you can also catch, Yair Eldan, and now here on Really Jewish for the next leg of our podcast with Mishy Harman Welcome. speaker-1: Thanks so much. It's wonderful to to be here. speaker-0: Yeah, it's exciting in your own home. A tabela bite. You're the you're in charge of this play. speaker-1: Today you're a bala bite, so I'm your guest. speaker-0: Okay, thank you. So, Mishy, it's really fun to hear you. You have a quite distinctive voice. So I've heard your voice lots of times on the podcast, introducing stories, introducing like interesting narratives, like deliberate preparation for the podcast, just catching up on a couple of episodes. And the reason why I have drawn close to the Israel Story and the podcast is because I think not dissimilar from the ambition of religious is just telling stories about Israeli life, which are, you know, in the dark recesses of all of the corners of Israeli society, which otherwise not heard, particularly important at this time, and which are human, which are... at the very core of them human. So thank you first of all for the work that you've done in this podcast world and I think in the broad sense for the Jewish people. But tell us a little bit about your story and how you got here today. speaker-1: Sure. well, first of all it's wonderful to be here and and I think there's something about storytelling which is Really Jewish, in its essence. after all the sort of most fundamental experience of being Jewish is gathering once a week and listening to a story and telling that story again and again and again. I have a five and a half year old daughter, so I know that there's something inherently human about liking to hear the same story again and again. And I think that in some very fundamental way the centrality of the story that we tell has been what has kept the Jewish people together. as a group for thousands of years. So I think that there's something very, very Jewish there's also something very universal of course about about storytelling. But so I'm from Jerusalem. I was born here and have lived here basically all my life with a few short periods abroad for school and university and I grew up much like you in Noam, which is the Masoti youth movement, which was really very much all my life growing up. first as a Chanich and then as a Madrich and in summer camps and in eleventh grade I even became the national chairman of Noam with the Wonderful political slogan, el takhishi at ohevet et Mishy Don't deny that you love Mishi, but in Hebrew, of course, it's a rhyme. So and I after high school, like many Jewish Israelis went to the army for three years, which was a very formative period for me. in which my A lot of my political and national sensibilities were shaped. And after that I went to the States for my undergrad. I studied history and then got some scholarship to come to England actually and do a master's in archaeology. And then in an attempt to convince an old ex-girlfriend to get back together. I moved back to back to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and taught for a couple of years. and at that point I found myself after quite a long period abroad not really knowing I was maybe 27 years old or something at this point, and I really didn't know what the next step was going to be. I was one of these kids who was very interested and curious about many different things. So I sort of simultaneously applied for a job to be a soccer coach in Northern Ireland in a group of Protestants and Catholics, even though my soccer skills are like basically mediocre. and I applied to be part of some research project with red collabus monkeys in uganda and I applied to be a Mossad agent. I was all over the map and sort of not not not focused at all. And I spoke I spoke to my beloved father who sadly passed away three years ago was a wonderfully wise man and a professor of education and I said well what do you think I should do? And and he said, Well, sometimes when you don't really know what, you know, the next step should be, it's not such a bad idea to continue on the path that you're already on. And for me that path was the academic world I had spent at that point many years in universities. So I decided that I would enroll in a PhD program and didn't know whether I wanted to do it in the States or in Israel. And I really missed Jerusalem and I missed my friends and I miss my family and I miss the city. And I thought to myself, Well, you know, doctorates in the States can be a lengthy affair. They can be five or six or seven years sometimes and if I now start a whole new six year chapter in my life, who knows where that will lead me to and who I'll meet and where I'll settle down. So I decided to come back to Jerusalem and do a PhD, which I ultimately did. I wrote a dissertation about Jerusalem in the nineteenth century and about a Protestant missionary who was the first missionary to work in Ethiopia. I mean, as random and esoteric as doctorates can be. But before I came back to Israel, I decided that I was gonna mark the end of this chapter in life being abroad in a more meaningful way than just boarding a plane at Logan Airport and landing eleven hours later in Ben Gurion Airport. So I bought a Ford Focus 2000 station wagon and I packed all of my belongings, including my dog Nomi, who is the namesake of these studios, in onto the car, into the car. And I went out on a massive, massive road trip, something like a twenty thousand kilometer ma road trip throughout America, through I think forty five states or something like that. And and just and it was an amazing experience. and I got to know a very, very different America than anything that I had encountered on, you know, these sort of liberal enclaves of East Coast universities. And you know, this was all in 2010, so six years later when when Trump won the elections, and you know speaker-0: You saw it coming. speaker-1: everyone I knew was totally shocked because they literally didn't know anyone who voted for Trump. It didn't really surprise me because I had seen a very, very different America. But in any event, my best friend Roy Had said to me, Listen, you're gonna spend a lot of time in the car. Why don't I download to your newly purchased iPhone 1 something called a podcast? And I said, okay, sure. And he downloaded many episodes of a podcast, which in my mind birthed this whole podcast movement that we or experience call experiencing called This American Life. And I promptly forgot about it. And instead I listened to books on tape and I listened to music and I listened to at some point I hit the Bible belt and started listening to these evangelical Christian talk radio shows which were really, really fascinating to me. and then at some point in Mississippi I remember that Roy had had downloaded these podcasts to my phone and I started listening And even though I wasn't aware of the extent of it, it was clear to me almost immediately that this was some sort of watershed moment in my life, that this was there was gonna be sort of a up until this moment and from this moment kind of dynamic. And really it set my life on a completely new trajectory. and the reason was that even though I was just listening to voices coming out of my earphones, I was magically being transported in the most intimate way to the lives of Americans that I wouldn't otherwise meet. And all I could think about was, I have to do something like this in Israel, which lacked such an opportunity to meet the other tremendously. So I came back home at the end of that this very long road trip and invited three of my closest childhood friends, all of which are all of whom are from Noam. and I said, Listen, I'm gonna do something pretty weird. I'm gonna invite you to sit on the couch. I'm gonna turn off the lights, I'm gonna play you an hour-long radio show. And if you're as excited as I am, at the end, let's talk. And I played them an episode of This American Life in there, and then we decided that we were gonna create an Israeli version of this American life. And the reason that we did it, other than it being a fun, creative, excuse for us to meet up frequently and and do something fun together, was that Israel's a an extremely compartmentalized society and there's different Israels living side by side. And if you take Jerusalem, we're sitting in Jerusalem and I'm a Jerusalemite, and if you take Jerusalem as an example, it's a city of a million residents, and you know, forty percent of them are Palestinians who live primarily in the Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, and a third of them are ultra Orthodox Jews who live primarily in ultra Orthodox neighborhoods. And even though I grew up in a very open-minded family, I never really had opportunities to listen to the stories of people who weren't like me. In fact, who weren't very much like me, because, you know, it's sort of human nature that we surround ourselves with people whose parents have similar jobs and go to the same synagogues and have attended the same schools and so on and so forth. And we thought that And I'm saying this being aware of the fact that this is being videoed, but we thought that if you extract the visual element of it. So what what happens usually? You walk down the street. you know, Jerusalem, despite being a a very diverse place, is also a small place. So you see peop members of other groups all the time. And you walk down the street and you see someone and you immediately take in what they have or don't have on their head or what colored skin they have or what clothes they're wearing and you say, okay, I know Oliver belongs to, you know, group X. And I know a lot of things about Group X. I know who you vote for and what papers you read and how many kids you have and what you did or didn't do in the army and what you think about the gay pride parade and what you no no no. and before before I know I I've constructed this entire narrative about who you are and what you are without actually ever exchanging a single word. And it almost it's so convincing, these narratives that we construct, that they obviate the need to actually ask and talk. And we thought that if you take the visual element out of the picture, we would give our listeners a rare opportunity to practice or train their muscles of empathy and to actually listen to the story of you know Kharedi woman from Tsvat or a Bedouin teenager from Hura or a you know Russian with a PhD in astrophysics who works as a night watchman in a parking lot or whatever it is. And and that was basically what compelled us to go out on this version on this journey. And we've been in many, many different ways and a lot of different evolutions on this journey ever since, and it's been a fifteen year long journey. during which we also at some point moved most of our operation to English, primarily because we felt that the Israel that existed out there in the world, and this is long before the moment that we're in now, which is largely shaped by October seventh and its aftermath, but even long before that we felt that the stories that were being told about Israel were these unidimensional flat narratives. Israel as a political actor, you know, ranging from BDS to Israeli Hasbarah or Israel as a, you know, religious actor or a nationalistic actor. And we said the vibrancy of life here is so dramatic that if we can give people a taste of that, they can talk about Israel which is more similar to the one that we experience. It's Israel isn't about or isn't only about, you know, Bibi and the Israeli Palestinian conflict. it's also about the tremendous, tremendous human tapestry of people who live here. Right. Sorry, that was a really long answer. speaker-0: But it's a description of the story. So there are different parts of my story and yours which overlap. I also did a road trip across the states. tell me. speaker-1: About it. speaker-0: No, it was a shorter period of time, but I remember crossing the Mississippi River and staying in this campsite in the middle of nowhere with nobody to be seen. And then like two trucks of like armed armed Americans showing up. sure they were armed at the time, definitely thought about when they least in your mind they were. In the middle of nowhere, in this beautiful capstone, everything was fine. had a wonderful night there. But I just picture kind of the vastness of the states that you describe. Were you driving? I was driving, yeah. So when I finished my studies in the States, I landed in New York, saw friends, bought a car, and then drove to LA. So I did a of road trip over distance and saw a lot of the states and it was a great trip, if not slightly shorter than I would have desired, but that's maybe the nature of travel, you never have quite enough time. speaker-1: And did you listen to anything while you were driving? speaker-0: No, I'm not sure if I maybe I listened to his story. It's possible. It's very possible. I definitely listened to this American life. So I also have the experience of of that kind of speaker-1: Nothing like Israel story to accompany a road trip across America. speaker-0: Exactly. Perhaps this American life is more appropriate than what I actually listen to. But I think I was already into podcasts then. What year was this? This was 2013, it would have been, yeah, after I left Israel. So listen, it's a fascinating story. mean, the aspects of our motivation overlap, I think, in terms of the Really Jewish podcast. I also, you know, the religious podcast comes in a post-October 7th world. because we've only been going for six months. And my experience is I work as a chaplain. One of my jobs is working as a chaplain in Canary Wharf in a big business district in the centre of London. And I'm working with two Muslim chaplains and two Church of England chaplains and one Catholic chaplain. And so I kind of hear a variety of voices. But my primary job is listening to Jewish people, both in my rabbinic work in North London and Europe and in my work in Canary Wharf. listen to Jewish people and I hear so many different stories, the stories of people and of the complexity of religious life right now, the complexity of being Jewish and identifying with Jewish and having a connection with Israel, having relatives in Israel and weddings in Israel and all the different things which are aspects of what it is to be Jewish in the 21st century. And wanted to share some of that, had like deep, deep conversations with friends who are rabbis and teachers and people on the street. And similarly, noticing that the unidimensional, the one-dimensional version of how Israel is framed and how the Jewish people in many ways are framed in the world outside just isn't complex enough, isn't diverse enough, isn't multicolored enough. And part of my desire to... to do this podcast is to share a little snapshot of some of that with the outside world. I said, and say on the podcast often, like as if you're a fly on the wall listening to two Jews yadering about whatever is today, Mishy's story that you should be able to invite it in on that. I don't know, or I don't think it necessarily transforms the world, but there's something important about sharing the genuine story. And, you know, having lived here for... I've lived here for five years in Jerusalem and wandering the streets of Jerusalem. I said this on the podcast with you here just before. I always walked around almost with a camera lens in my mind of like, that's a snapshot of Israel. That's a snapshot of the Jewish people. That's a microcosm of the world that we're living in. All of these images of, like you say, diversity and diverse experience of living in this place. If somehow we could share that with the world, that would change someone's impression of, I don't know. possibility of peace or the nature of the Jew or the nature of the Muslim or the Palestinian or whatever it is like to share these diverse images is seems to be powerful. speaker-1: Course look when you don't consider people as people, right, it's much easier to start applying all kinds of negative emotions to them. You can be angry, you can be violent. when you hear somebody's story it will inevitably because the range of human emotions is ultimately very similar and for everyone, right? I mean we all love and we're all jealous and we're all angry and we're all frustrated and we're all feel awe and wonder and so when you hear somebody's story inevitably you can recognize in it parts of yourself. you don't necessarily have to agree, you don't necessarily have to feel that you would have made the same decisions or anything like that but there's something about our ability to listen to other people that sort of we play this game in our mind and we say like okay I can put myself in their shoes for a second. I'm able to there's this suspension of reality which also happens when we go into a film. we sort of forget for a second who we are and who we were when we came into the film and we're totally immersed in some other world and a good story can do that as well. and then suddenly when you emerge from that and you get out and you see someone and you say like, I now can see that person in a more complicated way than I would have beforehand. Maybe that person is more than the sum of the stereotypes that I have, And I think all in all that's a net positive. speaker-0: Yeah, I have a strong image of one of my kids like covering their ears up when I'm talking and there's something like the opposite of that is what you're describing is when you hear something in your ears as we do when we like plug our headphones in to listen to these stories, to listen to Israel's story or to a podcast. There's something quite intimate about that. where we kind of let down some of our boundaries. I'm very drawn by the image of you and your friends of the like at the very beginning sitting on the couch in where it was listening in the dark in Nachla’ot listening in the dark there's something very intimate about that experience and in a moment in a place where we pull down our kind of Obstacles to the world are our shutters. speaker-1: A hundred percent. It's also you know, a lot of people who listen to podcasts will probably recognize this feeling that it's often we also remember like where we were when we when we heard something. 'cause you're you're sort of there's some sort of heightened awareness when you're listening to a story and you but I'll say something that's interesting that we've discovered in the last, let's say, five years that we ventured also, Israel Story has developed in all kinds of directions as an organization and one of the big moves that we made was to also to try to replicate that magic not only in an experience that you have with yourself when you're listening to a podcast in your earphones, but also to see whether that magic can work in the real world. So we've basically been inspired by an amazing cultural movement in the States called the Moth. we as you can tell we very, very much believe in not not coming up with any original idea ourselves. speaker-0: Why do the work when somebody else? speaker-1: But original ideas are overrated. but basically we started producing these live storytelling events which have really blown up and become one of the sort of hottest cultural cornerstones of Jerusalem. and what we try to so basically there are six storytellers who get up and tell short stories on stage around a certain topic and we try to make sure that you know every such event is showcases a wide variety of Jerusalemites. So you know, Muslims and Jews and Christians and foreign workers and Israelis and Palestinians and right wingers and left wingers and ultra Orthodox and religious and secular and men and women and old and young and so on and so forth. and each one because the events are so focused on the storytellers who are the event, they bring their own community. So suddenly you'll look out at the from the stage into the audience and these they happen in lar thankfully the community has been growing and growing, so they happen in the in sort of the largest auditoriums in town. And you look out and suddenly you see, you know, a man with a Kaffiyya sitting next to some you know art student with with tattoos, sitting next to a, you know, A Gur Hassid or whatever it is, right? And what I think we've discovered has works in that setting as well, which is resonates with and reminds me of what you were talking about, is that people are somehow able to take their own identity and sort of check it at the door and say, like, okay, I am who I am, but I'm coming in here and I'm devoting myself to listening to the experience of someone else who has a different lifestyle, different belief system and I think we enjoy that experience of being able to sort of see see the world through someone else's eyes, even if it's just for a brief moment and then we go back to our own eyes and our own glasses. speaker-0: It sounds so crucial. It sounds Really Jewish. I prepare often for these sessions and we were just studying the story of Moshe and Rabbi Akiva's Beit Midrash. And it occurs to me just on a very basic level that when we're reading the stories of our tradition, and in this context is the stories of our people or the stories of... our adjacent people, people in Jerusalem and further afield, that we, when you read those stories, when we get into those stories, we just reflect back something of our, of ourselves, something, a way of seeing our own lives that wasn't apparent before by way of reading or hearing somebody's story. speaker-1: Can you tell me the story of Moshe and Rabbi Akiva speaker-0: Yeah, so he is al-regla hadith. He's on one foot. He's Moshe dies goes up to heaven sees God putting tags the kind of crowns on each of the letters and says God what are you doing in this bit madrash putting decorations on these letters and God says there's going to be a guy in a few generations time Rabbi Akiva Akiva ben Yosef and he's going to Drash… he's going to offer drashot on each of these letters, he's gonna find innovation inside every crown on every letter in the Torah. And then Moshe's transported to Rabbi Akiva's Beit Midrash He doesn't understand anything, but somebody, Rabbi Akiva ultimately says in the Beit Midrash don't worry, this comes from Moshe at Sinai. And Moshe's like, okay, everything's fine. Everything's okay now because it comes from the tradition. But I wanna ask you- It's an amazing story. It's a bonker story. We'll learn it together again properly. I want to ask you something it's the yardside of my late sister today. Betsy Joseph, a beautiful sister of mine. It occurs to me something in what you said, something in what you said, which is that's people who perhaps a question. Something of storytelling is also that we have our own story to tell. Is there a part of Israel's story where you're transmitting something core and essential about yourself through the stories you tell? Because I can say for myself that I often walk around exactly like you describe, I often walk around the world with a really sometimes a heavy story. Like big things to say to the world. And there's something about my interest in this medium, which is that all of us are able to tell our stories in some kind of greater clarity, maybe. Maybe, maybe, maybe we have, we build a better world around us, I don't know. Is there something burning inside of you that is answered in your telling of these stories? speaker-1: Yes, So Zionism has become a loaded word. and one that I also have a complicated relationship towards, mainly because I think that different people mean very different things when they use the word Zionism. But the reason that I bring that up is that my grandparents were British Jews. They were both born in London in nineteen fourteen. And in the early thirties they met at a debate because my grandfather was the head of the Zionist Student Union at Oxford and my grandma was the head of the anti Zionist student union at LSE. And they debated and I The reason my grandmother was a was an anti-Zionist was not because she had any particular problem with the idea of Jewish nationalism, but because much like many progressive Jews in the years between the wars, she didn't believe in the notion of nation states. and she was a universalist and she believed more than anything in human beings. And though I don't know who sort of formally won that debate, suffice to say that my grandfather ultimately prevailed since they moved to Jerusalem and arriving here in nineteen forty and then were part of a small group of people who founded the state basically and its various institutions and Then both of them in different directions and in different ways and devoted their lives to the service of the state, as diplomats, as politicians, as heads of universities and so on and so forth. and My grandmother lived to be nearly a hundred years old, so she passed away, and she lived across the street from us, so she she passed away when I was already 30 almost. and she was a major force and influence in my life. And and don't worry, I haven't forgotten the question. and One day, one day in two thousand and six we were watching television together and listeners and viewers who are old enough to remember will know that there was that summer a war with Lebanon and we were in her house watching television and she said, you know, look what they're saying on television. they're saying that when, you know, multi coin home from in Kiryat Shmoneh or something is hit by a Katyusha and his life is upended. We need to be deeply sad because he's one of ours. And when the same thing happens to from Binjbil, on the Lebanese side we don't need to be as not that we have to be happy because that's not our sort of ethos, but we can care less because he's not one of ours. And she says it's so weird because I mean after all, there's mountains to the north of us and there's vegetation on those mountains and wildlife and we humans have drawn a line in the middle of those mountains and we call one of those mountains one of those one side of that line Lebanon and the other side Israel. and she said, You know, I don't know Motti Cohen and I don't know Ahmad Salman, but I'm equally sad for both of them because a person is a person is a person no matter what, and pain is pain is pain. And that really stayed with me, in some fundamental way. And I think that if you ask why what story I want to tell with all of this, it's that story. It's a story that is a deeply optimistic story about this place that we live that recognizes that we're all here, no one's no one's going anywhere, you know. The Israelis are not gonna are not gonna beat out the Palestinians, the Palestinians are not gonna beat out the Israelis. That's we're all just here. This is the home of many, many different people. And I think that being able to show the humanity, the deep humanity in the people who live here. and it goes in all directions. I mean, you know, there's no category of people whose story I'm not interested in telling, including people I disagree with politically, including people who the world, you know, views in a very flattened manner and so on and so forth. Because I think that that will ultimately spread a sense of togetherness and a sense of shared destiny. And I think that if there's one motivation for this whole operation, which we've been doing now for fifteen years, it's that. It's just to remind ourselves again and again and again of this simple truth that a person is a person is a person, no matter what. speaker-0: Yeah, thank you. It's an inspiring message and a message that I share also from my days walking the streets of Jerusalem and living here. there's a bravery there, not like a heroic bravery of a fighter or a warrior, but of a bravery of which we're exactly talking about in the studio in the episode before of just an openness. a Petichat Lev like an openness, a heart openness of the possibility that we can somehow be changed and transformed by the people that we meet. And we, just in my own words, like if we can surrender like that hardness of needing to maintain the position, the political position or even the physical position that we're in. and kind of just surrender that even momentarily and listen to the story of the person in front of us, the person we walk by, then maybe something happened, maybe something changes and maybe we're changed by those stories. speaker-1: that's the deep advantage that stories have over arguments, right? Arguments are something that you can refute. I mean, you know, Yuda Michai said that from the place that we're right or the land is too hard and flowers won't grow in the spring. And there it's very difficult to disagree with a story. Right. can disagree with, you know, opinions, you can disagree but stories there's some you know, it can move you, it can not move you, it can interest you, it can not interest you, but you can't really like just dismiss it as being wrong. speaker-0: And personal stories are personal. The intimacy of our own experience and the hurt and the pain and the struggle and the joy and happiness are our own and telling the story not telling the story. Those will always be kind of the intimate nuts and bolts flesh and bone of who we are. speaker-1: Absolutely. So because stories are so personal and if you don't mind, and since we are marking your sister's yardside, can you tell me a story about her? speaker-0: Yeah, I can tell you one story and then we're going to wrap up. Betsy was... No, speaker-1: Yeah, I hope you don't mind. Do you mind? speaker-0: I love it. Why not? I love it. Betsy was a really fun and joyful person. I think it was one of her birthdays. She was born October 23rd and I used to have this favorite place in Leeds in the Yorkshire Dales. Yorkshire Dales is like low key, like lower Galilee, like rolling hills. of England and I used to live in Leeds. used to cycle out there and walk out there and I used to have a very small bed in Backfords which I think had one bedroom in it that I used to go to occasionally. And I took a thereby became quite friends with the people who ran the place and we I made a surprise for I said we're going for a hike and we went for a hike and except at the end of the hike it wasn't just the train back again or a ride back again. We went into this person's bed and breakfast and they was like, I didn't know what it was gonna be, because I just rang her up and I said, can you sort us out a lunch? And she'd laid this like full table with like salads and sandwiches and I couldn't even believe how much food she'd put out for two people. And that was like a kind of birthday surprise. And it was a whole day of just being together and peace and choir and walking in like really rainy dales, like little hills. And then surprise at the end, which she had no idea about. Let's just knock on this door and see if they can offer us some lunch. And that was her name, Anne opened up the door and fed us this delicious lunch. It's nice to remember like joyful moments with Betsy Joseph, my little sister. Thank you. So wrap us up. We're closing out this series, episode one of Really Jewish and Really fun and delightful to hear your own story. It's just before Rosh Hashanah now when this when this episode comes out, you tell us one thing that inspires you to wrap us up. speaker-1: Of course. there's something meaningful about the idea of beginning a new year and having sort of a new start and with it comes new hopes and new possibilities and also happens to coincide with the fact that we're entering an election period here in Israel, which also is sort of dramatic moment without you know getting in into all of that. It's just a big moment in which our direction will be determined and I think that what my wish for the new year is comes from something that has inspired me very much recently, which is that I went I went last week to a concert of a youth chorus here in Jerusalem, which is a joint Jewish Arab Israeli-Palestinian youth chorus, which was started by a friend of mine, many years ago and has since grown and developed. And all the kids are you know, they're high school kids. They're 15, 16, 17, 18. And I was looking at them singing, other than the fact that they were really wonderful. performers and talented singers. There was something very hopeful about that, which I hope is something that we see more and more of in the the next year to come. And that is that again, I mean it sounds so cliche and it sounds so simple and it sounds like something that's on some sort of, you know, hallmark card or something. But There's just a world in which we can be people and we can and by the way, I think there's something extremely Jewish about this you know, everyone finds in Judaism what they want to see in Judaism, but there's something extremely Jewish in the way I perceive Judaism to be about this desire to just see people as people and to understand them with their faults and their challenges and their pains and their triumphs. And my what was so inspiring to me about that concert and l seeing that group and what I hope will be replicated in many different ways is in the year to come, is that I I think that there's a world in which we're not the sum of our identifiers and we are just able to see each other and yeah that's my wish for myself also and for for all of us in this upcoming year. speaker-0: Amen. Mishy, amen, amen. Thank you so much for being on Really Jewish and being people like sharing a little bit of your humanity and a little bit of your story and also inspiration for the year ahead, which we can take away. Thank you. Really an honor. Thank you for listening to Really Jewish. I hope you learned something today. I definitely did. Thank you to Nomi Studios for hosting us, for ZEV for staying in the background with patience and getting our tech sorted. Thank you to Oi Va Voi for our musical intro and outro for this podcast. listen, like Simchat Torah, we are finishing one season and starting again immediately because the project is just too good. Because you're Really Jewish. We're carrying on so listen to our next episode the beginning of season two coming up and share this with grandpa grandma friends relatives share this episode along and like our podcasts and join us for our next season of really Jewish with Yair Eldan a Oliver Joseph and thank you again to Michy Harman for joining us.