Latest / REALLY JEWISH with Oliver Joseph / REALLY JEWISH SE2:E7 - 'Pick a Lane' - What is Masorti?
Transcript
- Joel Levy: I think that's what one ought to do as a religious person. I don't think in Judaism, we think that Judaism, that the religious journey is the lonely crying out of the one to the one, like Plotinus said, like the individual crying out to the one. I don't think we think of the religious journey like that. It's communal. It's profoundly communal. You have to root yourself in community. You have to find the people who you share stuff with. Oliver Joseph: the Torah was given to Moses at Sinai and somehow that everything was contained within that Torah and a version by which human intellect and specifically the learning and wisdom and interpretation of the rabbis is necessarily the kind of path of Jewish life that we should tune into, listen to and adhere to. Joel Levy: Judaism is this incredible combination of the fixed and the fluid. Like we're not allowed to change a single letter of the written Torah. And on the back of a fixed text, we've created a vast teeming creative culture with fluidity and creativity and intellectual freedom and a quest, a real quest for meaning and purpose, which is contemporaneous in every Oliver Joseph: Welcome to the Really Jewish Podcast. Welcome to our conversation about what it is to be Jewish. If you're back for another listen, welcome back for you here for the first time, Bruchim Ha'Bai'im We're back here today with Rabbi Joel Levy. This is really Jewish and friends. Rabbi Joel is an old friend of mine. We worked together in Noam, a Masorti youth movement. He's the Rosh Yeshiva at the Conservatives of Yeshiva, and he's rabbi at the Kol Nefesh Masorti community in London. He travels between Jerusalem and London for part of his work. He is a great teacher and somebody who's very steeped in words of Torah. Today we are talking about Masorti, Masorti Judaism and the movement known in the UK, Europe and Israel as Masorti in America and North America as the conservative movement. We're starting a new series called Pick a Lane, which is examining some of the... strengths and weaknesses of the different movements that we have inside the Jewish tradition. It's really Jewish. It's a project where we talk about some of the big topics that shaping the Jewish world. And perhaps on election day in Israel when we're recording, perhaps for Judaism, there is no greater topic than which of the movements and streams of Judaism represent the real Judaism represents what is really Jewish in the world. So welcome to back to our podcast. examine some of the big topics of the day, and a personal examination of what it is to be Really Jewish. Welcome to the next leg of the podcast Really Jewish. Okay, so if you're listening along this week to my conversation with Rabbi Joel, just want to welcome everybody to the podcast, share it with friends and family. We're interested in spreading the Really Jewish love, spread the message of this podcast. If you caught one of my clips on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, please share it and like it and above and beyond. Share with us a little bit of feedback on the podcast. We'd love to hear your thoughts. We'd love to have your questions and we'd love to hear any other topics you'd like us to discuss or raise on Really Jewish. Welcome Rabbi Joel to the Really Jewish Podcast. I haven't recorded one of these in a while and it is wonderful to have you back. You're back just a couple of weeks after our last episode together. Thanks for joining us. Joel Levy: Pleasure, nice to be here. Oliver Joseph: So what better teacher to welcome and kick off a new series which will be dotted over the next few weeks. We're kind of doing a few things at the same time as we often are on this podcast. But this is new series called Pick a Lane where we're going to be interviewing some of the great and the good of some of the various movements in Hebrew Zramim the different streams that you might find in the Jewish world. And this week we're picking a stream, picking a lane and talking a little bit about what is Masorti or why be Masorti. So it's the movement that both of us have worked in for lots of years, yours, you slightly longer than me. But let's start with perhaps a Masorti take on what is Judaism. What's Judaism, what's Jewish to kind of scaffold and set up this conversation right by Joel. Joel Levy: That is a big question, isn't it? It's a big question. So I have an excellent, interesting, very clever Christian student in my class at the moment. which is great. She's super very interesting. She's in the process of converting to Catholicism, but she's sitting in Yeshiva and learning a lot of hours a week, putting everyone to shame. So she asked, we were looking at some particularly weird rabbinic interpretations of things and we're comparing them to the church fathers and and looking at the way the Bible was being interpreted in these in different ways, some of them literal and some of them metaphorical and some of them allegorical. And she asked a great question, which is like, how do I know? How do I know whether I'm supposed to understand the Bible literally or metaphorically or allegorically? And the answer to some questions around some of those things sort of in some ways, ends up working out whether you're a Christian or a Jew. Like Brit Milah Mila circumcision. Like is that a metaphor or is that or is that an allegory or is that or is supposed to take that literally? Are you supposed to actually cut bits off your body? Or to fill in? You know, bind them on your on your arm. Well, we take that incredibly literally. in weird way, in a weird way. Like, you know, we take something that could be a metaphor, like bind the Torah to yourself and we actually take it super duper literally or kriyashma. Like, you should repeat these words to your children when you wake up and when you go to bed, when you get up, when you lie down and when you rise up. I think the simple meaning of the Bible is that's... thinking very broadly about words of Torah, but we take it super literally and we say, no, the words are the Shema. We say the Shema twice a day. And so that's reading against, probably against the simple meaning of the Bible. So there's no, so the cluster of readings of the Bible that go to make up Judaism are very idiosyncratic. They're very weird. Like, so we're this little group of people who inherited a textual tradition, canonized the Bible, started to read it in super weird ways, stayed committed to that process of interpretation and reinterpretation, and it evolved as a religious civilization over thousands of years. And some of the decisions that were taken about how to interpret the text and the rules of interpretation determine the ending up in this very, very strange club. In this very mediated relationship with the Bible and very mediated relationship with God. And it's an evolving civilization because that process of interpretation, reinterpretation never changes and it makes demands on us because there's a as a legal element, it makes demands on how we lead our lives and our basic commitments. But it's very idiosyncratic. It's very, very strange and magnificent and magnificent. Judaism is a very strange beast. I think I'm constantly wonder at it and perplexed by it and amazed by its beauty. and it's the matrix within which my meanings of my life work themselves out. But it's not easy to understand why it is that we're committed to those, the things that we're committed to, let's see. Oliver Joseph: And then if we if we then so I want to come I want to pick some of things you said but if we then translate that across to the Really Jewish podcast and this question of picking a lane. How does this kind of bizarreness that you articulate which is reading the Bible very literally literally I just got. recap on a couple of things he said, Shochbecha u'v'Kumecha when you rise up and you wake, when you go to bed, Shochbecha when you lie down and you wake up, that you read the words of the shema, that seems to be, like you say, a very literal understanding of Torah, binding them upon your arm and placing them as a sign between your forehead your forehead, that tefillin, that seems like a very literal reading. We have these physical phylacteries tefillin which you... bind on your arm for observing people every morning during the week when you wake up. What then becomes a Masorti Judaism in relation to those kind of literal readings of Torah? Joel Levy: Masorti claims to be the continuation of the classical rabbinic tradition, which tried to say two almost impossible things to hold together, which is that the way that we interpret those traditions is binding on us and that it evolves over time. which we can see in the covenant that we have with God is that the Torah is given to us, the process of interpreting that Torah is handed to human beings to delve into and interpret the rabbis. So to hold to both of those things, think that is the Judaism that we see on every page of the Talmud. this constantly evolving creative process of delving into the Bible and interpreting it in magnificent creative ways and being committed to those ways. That's the crazy thing to be really committed to the interpretations that the community feels are the right path for it. And Masorti is a continuation of that path, a genuine belief in process and a genuine belief in commitment. Holding those two together is very, very difficult. Holding those two together is very difficult. Oliver Joseph: So there's a, to just flesh that out little bit, there seems to be a natural conflict between a totalitarian or extremist view that the Torah was given to Moses at Sinai and somehow that everything was contained within that Torah and a version by which human intellect and specifically the learning and wisdom and interpretation of the rabbis is necessarily the kind of path of Jewish life that we should tune into, listen to and adhere to. And those are two massively, well, massively contradictory poles in Jewish life. The wisdom of the rabbis as guiding the instruction and practice of the people and the... mysticism and the mystique and the divine intellect God's place in the world as they're somehow framed against that. What would your framing be of those two poles? Joel Levy: So in the discussion about the resurrection of the dead in Masachet Sanhedrin, the Mishnah says that you have to believe in the Techiyat Ha'Metim in the Torah. Jews, in order to receive a Olam Ha'Bah in order to be resurrected, have to believe in the resurrection of dead from the Torah. And the Bible actually hasn't got a lot about resurrection at all. The Bible is distinctly uninterested in the resurrection of dead. So what follows after the mission states that you have to say that there's resurrection of dead from the Torah is a whole slew of different midrashim, one more unlikely than the other. trying to prove that there is a resurrection of the dead from the Torah. yashi' Moshe uv'ne Yisrael, the beginning of Shirat HaYam. Then will sing Moses and the children of Israel. they say, doesn't say he sang it, it says he will sing it. From that we can know there is such a thing as resurrection of the dead. That is weak beyond weak in terms of the simple meaning of the text of the Bible. And each midrash that they bring is less credible than the one before. So then you're then then you left thinking, well, what does it mean that I have to believe in the resurrection of the dead from the Torah? And then Rashi on that Rashi on that mid Mishnah says you have to believe in midrash itself. If you don't believe in midrash, you can't believe in the resurrection of dead from the Torah. You have to believe in the process of midrash itself. If you don't believe in midrash, you're stuffed. That's true in general. Like if you don't believe in midrash, if you don't believe in the process of interpretation and reinterpretation, if you don't believe in midrash, then you're stuck in the Bible. And that would be a terrible place to be. Because the Bible is... a snapshot of an encounter between a people and God within a particular historical context. And we want a living relationship with God, not stuck within one historical context, but eternal. The eternality of the Jewish people is predicated on our capacity to drosh, to take a magnificent text from a particular moment in history, like... the best text that we could have, we could come up with a particular moment in history and then make it eternal through constant interpretation and reinterpretation. And those methods of interpretation, reinterpretation are not themselves built into the Bible. They're not biblical. The rabbis invented the rules of the game as they went along and invented new rules to the game, many of them influenced by Greek ways of thinking. But so... Judaism is this incredible combination of the fixed and the fluid. Like we're not allowed to change a single letter of the written Torah. And the record of the written Torah that we have is astonishingly consistent. There's so few variants in all the written versions of the Torah that we have at our disposal. And on the back of a fixed text, we've created a vast teeming creative culture with fluidity and creativity and intellectual freedom and a quest, a real quest for meaning and purpose, which is contemporaneous in every generation. But that's predicated on the notion of that covenant continues, the covenant continues like we're supposed to if we're performing the will of God. We're not learning the Torah by rote and learning the interpretations by rote. We are struggling in each generation to work out what it means. It's against the halacha to ask a dead rabbi what the halacha is. You're not allowed to ask dead rabbis what the halacha is. You have to go to a living rabbi and Oliver Joseph: So, yeah. Joel Levy: ask what the halacha is. So anyone who says, well, I know the halacha because Rabbi X said such and such a hundred years ago. is breaking the halakha. You're not allowed to do that. You have to be in a living relationship with a person who's trying to get their head around in the 21st century what it means to be in this living covenant. And that evolves. Oliver Joseph: So there's a real tension then between in our movement, which I think we both know between some kind of stationary, static appreciation of the tradition and appreciation of where we come from as the classical tradition of Fiddler and the Roof stacked against the modern world. And the modern world is think for a grown-up people a pretty scary place out there. I guess the question that comes to mind in terms of the criticism of our movement and I guess the broader progressive Judaism in general is that anything goes and what's the backstop against a kind of progress for its own sake rather than of adhering to perhaps the critical voice which says stop there you've gone too far like what's the protection against simply allowing modernity to take over? Joel Levy: I don't know, hard for me to answer that because I spent all my time reading the tradition. that's what we want, that's what rabbis are supposed to do. the answers to questions have to come from within, they can't come without. Like, you can be touched by the outside world. Like, you have to use whatever knowledge you have at your disposal from the outside world. It's not like, you don't get brownie points for ignoring what humans know about reality and... burying your head in the sand and saying, I'm going to interpret the tradition in light of the way it's been interpreted in the past. You don't get brownie points for talking nonsense in your interpretation of the tradition. We use whatever tools we have at our disposal and we come up with the best take possible of the tradition. you don't turn your back on new information. When... so, modernity, the Enlightenment has changed the way that Jews of all stripes read the tradition. It's changed because we have so much more information at our disposal. There's texts that were not available to us until the 16th century that were held by Christians, held in other traditions, the Apocrypha, Josephus. phyllo. Jews weren't reading those texts until the 16th century. So when those texts became available, Jews, all Jews, started interpreting those texts into translating them into Hebrew. Like, it was amazing. It's like when the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. What an amazing opportunity to enrich our understanding of the evolution of our tradition. because we now have more information at our disposal. So when the Geniza, when the Cairo Geniza was discovered by Solomon Schechter, like new information coming to disposal about the evolution of Jewish sources and how they change over time and different opinions and different versions of the text. like it's just the explosion of like, how great is that? Like you don't turn your back on that and say, no, we're not interested. science itself. For me, my understanding of religion has been infinitely deepened by reading anthropology of religion, trying to understand what religion actually means and where it comes from and how it functions. That information is new. Humans weren't thinking about those things in structured ways until very recently. So, we don't turn our backs on knowledge. And so, you know, it's not that we're trying to force the tradition to change, it's that who we are, the information that we have at our disposal is shifting, it shifts. And as that shifts then, it will naturally be the case that texts come to be interpreted in new and different ways. We're not looking for change for change's sake, we're looking for change because we're... There's never been a generation of rabbis who hasn't interpreted the tradition in such a way that it comes out demanding that we behave in a moral manner. There's never been a generation of rabbis who said, yeah, it's immoral, but God wants us to do it anyway. That's not what we're asking. We're asking a much more complicated question, which is we want rabbis to take the entirety of the tradition with all the information we have at our disposal and find ways of understanding it which are actually true to the original text and true to what we know about reality. Oliver Joseph: So that all sounds good and I buy your account up until this point. I think in the world out there, you're kind of Mistovev if you're going from community to community, there's often both internal to the communities that we traverse and in the wider Jewish world, I think there's lots of misunderstanding between what the communities are, what they represent. So a reformed Jew might not know very much about reform Judaism and a Masorti Jew might not similarly know very much about their movement and orthodoxy. Similarly, I think people walk around with lots of different misconceptions which are largely based on where they do or don't go to synagogue or if they go to synagogue at all. If you're in a Masorti, bare bones, if you're in a Masorti community, what things might you see or not see in the community you're in? against the nearest competitor. What makes Masorti uniquely it? Joel Levy: You're pointing to the thinness of Jewish life everywhere, I think, not just like it. Judaism was never practiced deeply by all Jews. Like it was it was only ever a minority pursuit. Like if you read the accounts of like we have a fantasy from Fiddler of the Roof that all Jews were from. Jews weren't from, Jews were never from. if you read accounts of Jewish travellers in the Middle Ages going from place to place, they saw how not from everyone, they wrote about it, they wrote about how not from everyone was that they met. So we actually have accounts of how from people are and how not from, most Jews through most of history were not that from and not that into it. They sort of kept it because there was a community and they kept it but... We're not in a, in that sense, we're not in such a crazily different situation. It's very, very hard to inculturate young people into Judaism or into other religions now. The groups of Jews that are doing really well are the same as the groups of Muslims who are doing very well, and the groups of Christians who are doing very well. It's the hard core people who are fundamentalists and rejectionists and have a notion of superiority. Some of those groups are doing, you I hear the davening is great in Hamas. I have no doubt that the davening is great in Hamas. I'm sure it's very compelling to be part of a fundamentalist religious community taking the word of... God seriously and under subject to difficult situations, et cetera. I'm sure that, but all around the world, liberal religious people are struggling with the overwhelming power of modernity and with the difficulty of inculturating young people into religious tradition in a way that's like profound and serious and not fundamentalist. So it's not just us who are on the back foot, everyone's on the back And it's just like, know, Judaism is a kind of literary tradition. It's a beautiful, beautiful, it's really about language in so many ways, about the beauty of this evolving linguistic tradition. And we in England, we send off kids to segregated, many kids to segregated Jewish education for 12, 13 years. And the majority them come out functionally illiterate in the culture. not being able to read and to do the thing to the text that actually makes you realise that it's cool. Like most of the kids coming out of those schools that we've justifiably just invested huge amounts of money and energy and effort into, but the kids aren't coming out being able to do the thing. It's like sending off kids to a music school for 13 years and they come out not being able to play the violin. Well, the cool bit of playing the violin is because you can play in the band and you can do interesting things and you can play music and then it's vital and alive. So what degree of competence do you need in the modern world with Judaism in order to find it vital and live, in order to find Jewish prayer compelling and beautiful? Like we're not hitting the target. But then most people in the Orthodox world in the UK are not hitting that target either in terms of literacy. And when we look at the communities that are succeeding, they tend to be the most rejectionist and the most superior. They have a sense of, you know, an in-basis ideology of superiority, which is problematic in all sorts of other ways. we're in a, religion is in a quandary. Like we haven't squared that circle and we don't know how to do that. So the thinness The thinness of the experience in the Masulati movement, the Achilles heel is the depth of the aspiration and the thinness of the experience. Like the aspiration is for deep, thick, compelling, profound religious experience, literary knowledge, spiritual experience. That's the aspiration and the lived experience is sometimes very, very, very thin. So that's... that golf is excruciatingly painful. I would say that can be an excruciatingly painful golf. Oliver Joseph: Thanks for listening to Really Jewish. Just do not forget to offer a like or share this post with a friend or family. And now back to our interview with Rabbi Joel Levy. So if we physically walk into it to answer a little bit of the question which I asked on top of what you said, if you walk into a Masorti Shul, some of the things that you might see are like a greater and heavier role for women in the pulpit and leading services and reading from the Torah as examples, not exclusively in Masorti communities, but often see women rabbis in positions of responsibility and leadership. and I think more broadly a clear and defined welcome for people from LGBTQ communities. The question about thinness though becomes pronounced again because part of the risk I think of Masorti communities might get on some of the weaknesses of Joel Levy: Yeah. Oliver Joseph: what Masorti Judaism or Masorti kind conservative movement as it's known in the states might represent is that we lean on those aspects too heavily. And by virtue of being very committed to, know, a feminist Judaism will be very committed to a proud Judaism for LGBTQ communities. We lose some of the thickness that you describe of what it actually to be in love with the tradition, actually in love with the kind of core tenants, which are music. Tfilah, limud, learning, prayer, reading of Torah, Torah itself, all the different aspects and tenets of Jewish life that can easily be lost when you are leaning on your progressive sense rather than a sense of, like you say, like I want to be in the Beit Midrash. learning the text and learning the Torah before I dabble and try and understand the Jewish world, try and understand the broader world outside. But there's a tension there because Joel Levy: There is. Oliver Joseph: I get to say one more sentence which is that often the people we attract are somehow Joel Levy: Yeah. Oliver Joseph: rejected or reject the more orthodox worlds or sometimes the more progressive worlds. But by virtue of coming on that journey, the bit that they value most about the Masorti movement or the more progressive movements is the progressiveness itself. And that's a really complicated terrain to negotiate and to do right. What's your sense of the weakness of that terrain? or the disadvantages of that terrain. Joel Levy: No, I can hear you. I can hear you. Rabbi Chaim Weiner, who is one of our colleagues, who's someone I encountered when I first started taking Judaism seriously in the 90s, 80s and 90s. At a certain point, gave me some very rough... criticism or some rough feedback said that I was very, good at convincing young people to have an identity that was connected to Noam. But I wasn't that good at actually convincing young people to have a connection to Judaism. that I was playing the kind of what you were saying, I think I was playing the like progressive identity piece, but hadn't got my head around what it actually meant to take young people on a journey towards Judaism itself. That stung, that was a very, very good piece of criticism. That was very, very good piece of feedback for me. so, you know, after working at Noam for three years, I then came to Israel in the mid-90s and learned for a number of years. And then ended up at the Conservative Yeshiva, the mission of which was definitely to square that circle. institutionally to square that circle, to say that our commitment to openness and to any question being on the table and to a deep historical understanding of the Jewish people doesn't have to compromise in any way on religious intensity and halakhic focus and religious seriousness. So that criticism took me on a certain trajectory. So, you know, it's, you know, but it's, the truth is it's not, I don't see that as a criticism of Masorti itself. I see it as one of the, like everyone is finding it hard to transmit this thing. It's very, very hard to transmit. it's even harder to transmit without fundamentalism and without making a boundary between you and the world. The reason why the Khureidim are resisting incorporation into Israeli society the ultra-orthodox Jews, is because they know that if they're incorporated into the fundamental principle, perhaps the fundamental principle of ultra-orthodox society, is that the degrees of commitment that they're engendering are predicated on separation, on boundaries, on not knowing science, on not learning about the Enlightenment, on not knowing about egalitarianism. so that's a choice, so, know, they're right in some way, they're right to resist incorporation into the body politic, into the people of Israel in that sense. They're wrong because we have so many stories in the tradition about why the fact that Judaism is not about segregation. It's if you segregate in order to preserve, in order to become hyper-focused. We have cautionary tales against doing that in the tradition about how bad that is. That's the story of Rashbi in the cave. We have cautionary tales about rabbis who cut themselves off and learned Torah 24 hours a day, and then that backfires. Because Judaism was never meant to be in isolation from reality. But living Judaism in reality is for all of us very, very hard. But that's not just Judaism. That's any religious tradition. Modernity is... very very compelling. So can we square that circle? The real question is can we get and this is a challenge for the world let's say, it's not just a challenge for Judaism, it's like can we find a way of taking religion seriously without the sense that our religious tradition is sui generis, is unique and different and superior to other religious traditions and without cutting ourselves off from from the rest of humanity and seeing ourselves as in some way segregated and special? And can we do that and still preserve a really deep, ferociously creative religious culture? I don't know. That's a question. We don't know if that's possible. Humanity doesn't know if that's possible. Being religious was easy 500 years ago because Christians never met anyone else who wasn't Christian. They just never met anyone who wasn't Christian. if you grew up in Wakefield, you never met anyone who wasn't like from 30 miles from Wakefield. So like, you know, I remember, I lived in Wakefield for a little while. I was in the pub once and someone said to me in the pub, have you ever been into the city? And I thought he meant London. So I said, yeah, I've been there. And he didn't. meant Leeds. He's like, have you ever been to the city? So that was like medieval times. 10 miles, 20 miles. Most people didn't travel. So now we know a lot. People travel, people meet amazing people from different religious traditions and know traditions. And we go all over the world. it's like, how do you have that openness and still? stay committed to the things that we're committed to. so, Oliver Joseph: This one. Joel Levy: it possible to see ourselves as humans in the broadest sense part of the struggles of what it means to be a human being, to know Christians and Muslims and Hindus and secular people and to be integrated into the questions of the world and... to be engaged in science and still to take our religious traditions seriously and not to hate people of other faiths. We don't know how to do that yet. We're working on it, know, that's the challenge. So it's like, know, in Israel, statistically, the more religious you are, the more likely you are to vote extremely right wing. and to hold hostile views towards other religious traditions. I'm sure that's also true in Islam. Oliver Joseph: So the, I mean, it brings up all sorts of questions. The aspect of switching off the world, like as a father of young children, I'd like nothing more right now to switch off the internet, to switch off the TV we've been talking about in the last couple of days in our house, to put the dam up against the floodwaters of AI which are about to... subsume much of what certainly I knew in my childhood and adulthood in the world. that desire to protect and exclude and live outside I think is very prevalent. I don't think that's just a Jewish problem right now. I want to switch a little bit just to the personal to kind of sum up, well not sum up, to kind of wrap up this reflection on what is Masorti kind of. picking a stream and being Masorti, what keeps you in this movement and what kind of attracted you to this place? Because you studied first and foremost with Rabbi David Hartman and dabbled in certainly in parts of the progressive Orthodox world and beyond. What makes you a Masorti Rabbi in the most personal way that you're willing to share? Why does this movement keep you and hold you? Joel Levy: So I'm not afraid of religious movements because I like organisations, because I think people should organise. So I think that movements are just organisations of like-minded people. And when people say, well, I'm post-denominational... It freaks me out a little bit actually. Maybe I'm showing my age here. I'm not interested in people who don't locate themselves, root themselves. Religious life is kind of topsy-turvy because to be a member of religious community, it's not like going to the gym where you work out how good the gym is about how much it meets your needs. To belong to religious community means finding a space where you get to meet other people's needs. A lot of the time your involvement is predicated on giving, not receiving, on contributing, on meeting your obligations within a certain space. So if you're just flipping around and saying, I'll do this and then I flip to here and I do that and I take from here and I take from there, then in a way, the problem with that is that lack of rootedness means that there's never a place where you're accountable. So the real question is where do you want to locate yourself? And that's a real question. there are reasons that no, , organization meets our goals, meets who we are exactly. so why did I end up in this organization and not in another organization? There a few different reasons. One is, couldn't be in a religious space where people told me that that's not the right question. I just couldn't. I tried. I really tried. I mean, was in so many places where I would ask a question and then at a certain point there'd be a hand on my shoulder that said, you asked the wrong question. And I grew up in a space where every question was on the table. And I just believe, I do believe in that. I believe that every question is on the table. So I believe. I believe that humanity's capacity to understand the world through the natural sciences is a massive dignity. And to turn our back on the natural sciences is an indignity and a craziness. I can't be in religious space which turns its back on the best take that we have using critical methods of study and critical methods of understanding what religion is and critical methods of understanding. what revelation is. I just think we have to use whatever tools we have at our disposal. So I can't be in a place which isn't thoroughly rooted in academia and where every question is really on the table. And I also had the good fortune of having daughters as opposed to sons. We made a principle decision that we were never going to expose our girls to a situation where someone was going to turn around to them and say, you can't do that because you're a girl. So that's, and we don't play, we don't do that with half measures really. We sort of, won't, we won't like, you we don't, wouldn't tolerate being part of a community which said that, you know, black people can't have aliyah. you know, or and so we don't, we won't be part of a community where women can't be full members of the community. And that was the, that was a defining principle for us in terms of where we decided to locate ourselves religiously. And you, and then you, you know, you pay your money, you find a place where you can, which, which meets certain parts of what you want. And then there are frustrations in other areas as well because of that. Like, so, you know, I would get together for a beer with my friends who I'd learnt within Yeshiva and they'd gone off, some of them to become Orthodox rabbis and I had taken a path towards a more liberal version of Judaism and we would, you know, have a beer and commiserate with each other about the things that were the bad parts of our lives because, you know, choosing to root your life within Orthodoxy, it ain't so easy either. It's like, that's also very strange, difficult, restrictive. place to find yourself and it's got huge downsides and huge advantages but I couldn't locate myself in any place other than Masorti in the end. There wasn't really a choice for me. If it was only me I'd still be there. If I was the last person locking up and turning off the lights then I'd be the last person turning off the lights because I have to locate myself within a space which meets my sort of basic bottom line understanding of morality. and intellectually provides me the kind of place that I need to be and where I can be the kind of religious Jew that I want to be. So I don't really have a lot of choices and I'm not so in that sense, I'm kind of pro-organization. I like finding the people to surround myself with and to be a part of who share some of those basic values and with whom I can struggle. and go on that journey together. And I think that's what one ought to do as a religious person. I don't think in Judaism, we think that Judaism, that the religious journey is the lonely crying out of the one to the one, like Plotinus said, like the individual crying out to the one. I don't think we think of the religious journey like that. It's communal. It's profoundly communal. You have to root yourself in community. You have to find the people who you share stuff with. And then you have to organize around that and then that's what we call denominations. So it's not like a, it's not like a trick or it's not like some kind of terrible thing to, to break the Jewish world. It's just, there are different ways of doing Judaism and you have to find out if you're to take Judaism as seriously as you possibly can and grow within it. Then you have to, you have to find the place where you can best route yourself to do, to go on that journey. And for me, that was masorti but you know, for people I love that journey to themselves took them in different directions and I totally respect their crazy choices as they I hope respect my crazy choice. Oliver Joseph: I respect your crazy choices Rabbi Joel. Thank you for being on Really Jewish and telling us a little bit about the Masulty world on this new series that we're calling Pick a Lane. It's wonderful to have you on the podcast again and we look forward to having you again soon. Today is Election Day in Israel, so not a small day for you to have taken some time out to be with us and thank you so much. Joel Levy: So one last thing, can I say one last thing, because of the elections. Oliver Joseph: Please. Joel Levy: Going along and voting in Israel, it always had a of chagigi, a kind of festive air to it in every time I voted, many times here. And I didn't feel that this time, I have to say. I felt when you roll up to the stations, there's people representing each of the different parties who are there. shouting their wares, it's like a little bit of a marketplace. And I was just so aware of the lanes, what you call the lanes. I was so aware that there were people there who I shared so little in common that I couldn't even share words with those people. My vision of what Israel should be is so different from them, so different from them. So, and that's really painful, I guess the downside of what you call lanes is that we end up being in a place that we can't talk to each other. And that maybe is tolerable in diaspora, maybe, but in Israel it's intolerable. And in Israel, the Hora'at Sha'ah the demand of the hour is that the Jewish people learns to communicate with itself, learns to talk to each other. And that is, we're not doing it. We haven't even started the journey of really listening to each other and learning who the other is and learning what it means to be in your lane and to take that lane seriously and to not to agree with each other, but just to listen it through and not to shout over each other and not to cut each other off. And so, you know, today of all days, I was just left thinking, you know, like shalom al-Isra'el, we should be at peace with each other and listen to each other and care for each other. And I believe in the lanes, but I also believe that the lane shouldn't stop us from talking to the people we need to talk to. Chas V'shalom that our lane should be a burden to us that prevents us from actually having the Jewish people talk to itself. Oliver Joseph: No better words to finish with. By the time this podcast comes out, some of the initial results of the elections will be out. But, God willing, hopefully we are towards better times where, like you say, the freedom to express and the freedom to practice Judaism in diverse and myriad ways continues to be protected in Israel and hopefully protected with more integrity than... perhaps over the last few years. Rabbi Joel, thank you again. Thanks for listening to Really Joel Levy: Thank you, thank you, nice to see you. Oliver Joseph: Jewish. Thank you. Thanks for listening to Really Jewish. We hope you got something out of this and for our conversation this week with Rabbi Joel Levy. I'm drawn to one of the kind of a suger in the Talmud which rattles in my head here and there that I think Rabbi Joel was alluding to. It's from Menuchot and it talks about Moses going up to heaven. and then being transported by God to the Midrash of Rabbi Akiva. And Rabbi Akiva gets really kind of upset. Like what's the Torah that, sorry, Moses gets really upset. What's the Torah that's being taught in this Beit Midrash of Rabbi Akiva there? Rabbi Akiva and Moses are hundreds of years apart. And at some point or other, one of the students of Rabbi Akiva says, where is this halacha from? And Rabbi Keeva says, Halachah le Moshe mi Sinai. This is Halachah from Moses at Sinai. And it says, Nityashva Da'atoh that Moses is somehow like relaxed, relaxed, relaxes by way of this understanding that the words of Torah originally come from Moses at Mount Sinai. It's like a, you know, a confusing tale which places Moses in the contemporary Beit Midrash of Rabbi Akiva, but it articulates something of the complexity of what it is to be Jewish, that we exist in all sorts of different generations at the moments that Judaism is taught. And we try to keep the validity of the tradition and the integrity of the tradition, even though Judaism has existed and will continue to exist in lots of different generations. and lots of contemporary worlds. And the world of AI, the world of growing and ever-growing technology, the rumble of war in lots of different parts of the world, including in Israel, and the utter transformation of this generation really challenges to its greatest degree Judaism, morality, ethics, other religions as well. And this is a really fascinating conversation with Rabbi Joel about how Masorti Judaism, how the conservatives, how this stream of stands up to some of the challenges of the world that we face and stands up today. I think, the bit that I most profoundly connect with and relate to as a Masorti Rabbi, because we started in the place where I feel most comfortable, I guess. is the question of questions. I want to be in a Beit Midrash where I can ask any question. I want to be in a community. I want to have rabbis to whom I can ask any question. What do I do if I don't believe in God? What do I do if I love a man and I'm a man? What do I do if I don't understand the value of Jewish law? Any of these kind of questions that might in past generation or in some parts of the Jewish world I felt beyond the pale or beyond the realm of acceptability. I want to live in a tradition where I can ask any question. And that was a little bit of what Rabbi Joel presented. And that's the reason why I identify and find my home in the Masorti movement. But that's not to evade or kind of shy away from the also intense challenges of what it is to be a part of the progressive movement. So thank you so much for listening to Really Jewish this week. It was a great conversation with Rabbi Joel on election day in Israel. So like a seminal moment for the future of the Jewish world today. We don't know the results, but probably by the time you're listening to this podcast, we'll have at least some idea of what the results of that election were. Thanks for listening to Really Jewish. Thank you to Sophia Kogan who... producers of the social media clips for this podcast and edited this podcast. Thank you to Oi Va voi for intro and outro music. You can listen to their single Back to My Roots available on streaming platforms. We're building this podcast on wheels up. So like share clips from this podcast. If you want to contribute financially to the sustenance and sustaining of this podcast, please be in contact. have a Patreon account for you to donate to. and you for listening to Really Jewish with Oliver Joseph and friends. Wishing you well.