Noam: Hey everyone, welcome to Wondering Jews with Mijal and Noam.
Mijal: I’m Mijal.
Noam: And I’m Noam and this podcast is our way of trying to figure out the Jewish world. We don’t have it all figured out, but we’re gonna try to figure out some big items together. That’s what we do.
Mijal: As we always say, we really do love to hear from you. So please email us at wonderingjews@jewishunpacked.com and call us at 833-WON-Jews. Today we have a really exciting guest. I’m very excited to have Rabbi Yehuda Sarna here. Rabbi Sarna, I think I know you for about 12 or 13 years at this point. I met you when I was an undergraduate and it’s been really very special for me to not just meet you, but get to work with you and learn from you.
Rabbi Sarna has many hats and a lot of different leadership appointments. So I’ll just mention a few of them. Rabbi Sarna is the executive director of the Bronfman Center for Jewish student life at NYU. He is the Hannah and Ed Lowe professor of community engaged scholarship at the NYU Center for the Study of Antisemitism. And he’s the senior religious advisor of the Moses Ben Maimon Synagogue at the Abrahamic Family House in Abu Dhabi. And it’s really exciting to have you here, Rabbi Sarna, welcome.
Yehuda Sarna: Thank you, it’s really such an honor to be here.
Noam: Awesome to have you here. And before we get into some of our, you have by the way, really cool titles. You’ve done really cool things. The Moses Ben-Maimon Synagogue. I love the title of that. It’s not Rambam Synagogue, it’s Moses Ben-Maimon. That’s pretty cool. It’s a cool name.
Yehuda Sarna: You know, the Rambam plays a very important role in the story of Muslim-Jewish coexistence and flourishing. What the United Arab Emirates really represents is at the forefront of is promoting a vision of Islam, which recognizes that, first of all, the connection, that Judaism and Christianity are people of the book and that they share a lot, and that there’s something missing about Islam when Jews are not close. We are missing our neighbors, we’re missing our cousins or brothers and sisters. And so the idea of the Abrahamic family house was to create a symbol, an emblem, a monument to that very idea. And so the way it’s built is that there’s three separate compounds, mosque, church, synagogue, but the sanctuaries in each are all the same size, same dimensions. Each one of them has something, some kind of water feature. In the mosque, there’s an ablution room. In the church, a baptismal. In the synagogue, mikvah, actually two mikvah.
There’s also an education center, which is right at the middle, at the hub of these three spokes, which hold them all together. And so it’s this design, which is now very much part of the landscape of the city of Abu Dhabi, the capital city, which unabashedly is promoting this idea, the dignity of difference with the three Abrahamic religions, and also the interconnection.
Noam: That sounds messianic. You know, Mijal, know I was thinking as Rabbi Sarna was talking?
Mijal: That we should go visit.
Noam: That we should do a live podcast there. How cool would that be?
Mijal: I was gonna say that I’m very excited for you to arrange it.
Yehuda Sarna: I listened to the DC podcast. That was great.
Noam: Thank you, thank you.
Mijal: Thank you.
Noam: You know what? We should do it in the UAE. But okay, here’s the deal. I’m going to ask a listener question. Rabbi Sarna, just so you know, this is something that we do before we get into the meat, to the substance we ask a question from a listener. So here’s this question. I saw it right before this episode. I like it. It’s a great shout out to Mijal.
So the question goes like this. Hi Mijal, Noam, and guest if you have one. I know Mijal prefers more intense questions, in quotes, “intense.” So I’m leaning into that. So here’s my question. From listening to the podcast it’s clear you are leaders who care about making an impact on the Jewish world and the world at large. (That’s so nice. Thank you.) I hope you both live until 120 years. (That’s also really nice.) And I get to continue contributing and impacting the world. Love it.
My question is, what is the one thing you feel like you want to accomplish more than anything that when you get to 120, you’ll be able to die with peace knowing that you did this one thing? This is a listener question. It’s not like, what’s your favorite Drake’s cake? It says, is, this is very different. All right, let’s do it. Lean in.
Mijal: That’s, this is like an intro question. I love that it’s like the vibe that I gave to ask you this question.
Noam: I want to make as much money as I possibly can.
Mijal: You’re in the wrong field.
Noam: Okay, fine, that’s not the right answer. By the way, I’m being so kind right now that I’m just giving the two of you time to think about this as I bluff my way through an answer. But on one foot, my answer to this question is I want my kids and grandkids to have said they have had a great experience, just with me and my wife as their parents and grandparents. That’s it. The ultimate blessing will be for them to be around us and to say we had an unbelievable experience being raised by you, learning from you. And you know, we’re gonna do great things for the world as a result of this. That’s it.
Mijal: Beautiful.
Yehuda Sarna: You know, over the past few years, I’ve done a few funerals for people who live until their mid-90s. And what was amazing for me about doing those funerals was realizing that each of these people, having lived almost a century, had really lived multiple lives within their same life. Really, I mean, completely different chapters sometimes on different continents, sometimes a period of their life with tremendous suffering and other parts of their life with, with bliss and serenity. What I hope is that I have the strength to live my best lives, you know, and to recognize the way that, you know, tides are turning or opportunities are reshaping themselves. As opposed to envisioning my life as, as linear and one kind of straight line to recognize that it’s natural and normal for there to be seams and hinges along the way and to appreciate that and to lean into that.
Mijal: I guess for me, I want to feel good about my relationship with God. It’s a weird thing to say, cause I feel like we’re always supposed to yearn for more and aspire for more. And that’s built into what’s supposed to have a good relationship. But I always felt like, yeah, like before I died, I would want to feel like I accomplished something there. I don’t know if that makes sense, but that’s where I am right now. Yeah. Yeah.
Noam: That makes perfect sense. I like it. We live for such a short amount of time. What a crazy thing. Like we’re nothing.
Mijal: I was going to say it’s a very long time, different perspectives.
Noam: Okay, what? It’s a long time? Okay, fine.
Mijal: But I want to go through, Rabbi Sarna, so you started answering about how life isn’t linear. So let’s just start by understanding a little bit your own path. You really started off your career at a university, at NYU, and then you emerged there as an interfaith leader in addition to a university chaplain like religious leader and then kind of like went into interfaith work in a global scale in your involvement in the UAE. Could you tell us a little bit how that, you know, a little bit how that happened that you, it’s not a normal career path for most Jewish leaders who start out at a university to end up doing interfaith work at this level and end up, you know, at the Moses Ben Maimon synagogue in Abu Dhabi.
Yehuda Sarna: Let me just say that when I was in high school, in yeshiva, in college, in semicha, when I was studying to be a rabbi, I really envisioned my life work to be with the Jewish people, with the Jewish community. I started at NYU in 2002 and really trying to inspire Jewish students and build community, and, that was really my focus.
In 2006, there was an event that was planned at NYU by a student organization, and Muslim students had their perception of this event was that it was Islamophobic.
And I just felt like it was wrong for this other student organization to be planning this event, which intentionally marginalized and sought to alienate Muslim students. They didn’t give them a seat at the table. They didn’t allow them to be on the panel. I just thought it was wrong. And so I helped them organize the response. They asked me to speak at the kind of counter event, which I did.
And that was really the beginning of my involvement in interfaith, but it came from a place of feeling like what was happening was just wasn’t right, was running counter to Jewish values. I felt like, as a member of the American Jewish community, we knew what it was like to be in a minority that was discriminated against. And here I saw something in front of my eyes and it felt like it was the right thing to stand up.
And Muslim students were coming over to me saying, we’ve never met a rabbi before. We never thought a rabbi would stand up for us.
From that point, there were really three paths that opened which I stepped into. One was building this interfaith model at NYU. I developed a strong relationship with the imam, Khaled Latif, and we and the other religious leaders at NYU went on to an institute and we offered a minor in multi-faith leadership and in time there was a multi-faith space, 20,000 square feet built as part of an NYU building right on Washington Square Park.
And then secondly, I was invited in 2009 to come to the United Arab Emirates, which I’d never been to before, barely even heard of before, to be a part of the founding of NYU’s campus there. And in 2010, I was brought along with the Imam to Abu Dhabi, we were part of the admissions team.
Part of the message was, you know, if you’re coming to NYU, you’re going to get the full diversity, including Jewish community, including people wearing kippah and tzitzit like I was when I went. And so that was the second path, which was the opening to the UAE.
And then the third path was the American landscape of the interfaith movement, which in the shadow of 9-11, took on, began taking on a different kind of complexion. There was a, there had been an assumption which had animated much of the interfaith movement since Nostra Aetate, since the kind of revision in the Catholic Church, the reckoning with its attitude towards Jews, which is that the…
Noam: Can you say more about that? I don’t think a lot of people know what that is. And by a lot of people, I’m just asking for a friend, you know.
Yehuda Sarna: You know, I got it. The Catholic Church had to reckon with the fact that the Holocaust and Nazism and the silence of the church, the Catholic Church, I mean, that there was a certain degree of complicity which had to be addressed. And so it was critical for the Catholic church to do some introspection.
It was brave also. I mean, plenty of people like to sweep their dark histories under the rug. But to the credit of the Pope and the Catholic Church, they decided to look inward. They engaged with rabbis, they had many conversations, and they revised doctrine. The assumption was that the way interfaith was conducted is to get senior religious figures on a podium. Get them together for a conference, have them discuss, debate, and end the conference with some kind of proclamation of change in doctrine, assertion of principles. Here’s what we believe.
Now with the decentralization of religious practice, spiritual practice, the weakening of the Catholic Church, the weakening, frankly, of many religious hierarchies, that mode began falling out of fashion. And the premise of much of the interfaith activity that followed 9-11 moved this locus of activity away from senior religious leaders and towards people, face to face. I hate you because they don’t know you. If we want to catalyze understanding, interfaith coexistence, what we need to do is introduce as many people to as many people.
Sociologists like Mijal know of an effect called the Social Contact Theory, is sometimes it’s also called colloquially My Pal Al, the My Pal Al effect, which is that if I know one person who’s a member of another group, if I’m friends with that one person, I will have a more positive perception of that entire group. So if I have a pal named Al, then everyone who’s of the ilk of Al, I’ll look to as a friend.
But it happened after the wake of 9-11, surge of Islamophobia, antisemitic conspiracies, rise of the far right. There was this feeling of like, well, the reason we hate each other is because we don’t know each other. And so I became a part of that movement. I joined the Muslim Jewish Advisory Council, which was started by AJC and ISNA, the Islamic Society of North America, you know, was involved in many other ways. So those were the three, those were the three paths that I began stepping on.
Mijal: So it’s so interesting, Rabbi Sarna, I think if we were having this conversation a year and a half ago, it would be a very different conversation from where I’m sitting. Each of this path, at least as an outsider to some of them, seems to have in many ways imploded or taken a swerve, let’s say in the wake of October 7th. And I think we want to understand that a little bit better. So maybe we’ll start, we’ll start by just asking you about the UAE, if that’s okay. For many of us, the UAE has been in the news, as a symbol of what can be. Very often we speak about the Abraham Accords, dreaming of Israel having a treaty with Saudi Arabia and things like that. It’s also been in the news because very tragically Rabbi Tzvi Kogan, a Chabad emissary there was kidnapped and murdered. And I just wonder if you can just tell us a little bit about, know, walk us through what it’s like to have been a Jewish leader in the UAE. As a Jew in the UAE, what does the culture feel like to you?
Yehuda Sarna: There are three things to know about the UAE before I talk the unique Jewish experience. Number one is that the country is about 88 % non-Emirati, so people who are there to work on work visas, and about 12 % of the people who are Emirati and who are citizens of that country.
And that line is not easily crossed. If you stay there and work your whole life, know, 10 years or five years, there’s no pathway to citizenship. And so what’s being created there is a different kind of country than one from a Western perspective that we are used to. That’s the first thing.
The second thing is that the UAE really prides itself on this kind of Bedouin culture which welcomes in the stranger.The mentality very much is the more guests that I have, the more at home I feel. And so there’s this real pride about having people from 200 different nationalities and creating this mosaic.
And then the third is that the UAE really prides itself on being a safe place among what feels like and sometimes feel like an ocean of chaos. Okay, it’s right across the Arabian Sea from Iran. Syria’s not too far away, Jordan, etc. Middle East is a tough neighborhood. Nevertheless, within that space, they’ve been able to create a place which is relatively safe.
Mijal: That’s fascinating. Rabbi Sarna, from that 88%, how many Jews live in the UAE?
Yehuda Sarna: At this point, a few thousand, hard to know, but somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000. Many of the people have moved there, I would say, going down the list of priorities, different for everybody.
Number one, because it’s a safe place and that has been true going back about 10 or 15 years. When they would come to shul, they didn’t need to show their passport. They didn’t have concerns about this, what would happen on the street, getting roughed up, kids in school, being bullied. They did not need to worry about those things. That’s number one.
Number two is economic prosperity. It’s a place where people are invited to bring their talent, and to come and build.
Then number three, for some people, they feel like they are a part of something that’s historic. The reestablishment of a Jewish community, a new Jewish community in an Arab country for the first time in I don’t know how many decades or centuries. I mean, they feel like it’s something special.
Noam: Certainly pre-48. And I just pulled up a map. UAE is right next to, it’s next door to Saudi Arabia, next door to Oman. It’s very close to Qatar, which is where Hamas headquarters have been for a while. And it seems like not too far of a swim to Iran. Pretty darn close.
Yehuda Sarna: Noam, exactly what you just did is what I did the day before my plane left on my first trip to the UAE. I’m like, where is this country anyway? And I saw it on a map, and this was going to be my first time in an Arab country, or as Palestinian friends of mine would say, my second time.
Noam: I see what you did there. See what you did there.
Yehuda Sarna: Okay. But I was scared. I couldn’t eat. And I have to tell you that the story I would tell for the first, really up until a week and a half ago when the very tragic murder of Zvi Kogan occurred, the story that I would tell people about my first trip to the UAE is that I was concerned and scared and vigilant. And at one point I went to a Carrefour supermarket. Carrefour is a French chain. And I went with the imam from NYU who was with me on this trip. And I said, maybe there’s something kosher there I can find. And we were walking through the aisles and I stopped in front of the cheese section. And at that point Khaled said to me, I’m going to go to a different aisle. And I felt like I was left alone in an Arab country. And a surge of fear came over me. This is 2010. And that fear made me feel like being alone, I was gonna die. And I, you know, as soon as this overtook me, I froze. And I thought to myself that kind of the strangest thought I’m like I can’t believe this is where it’s all gonna end me looking for a hechsher, a kosher symbol on Philadelphia cream cheese in a Carrefour, I thought there was an absurdity to that.
Noam: And you were wearing a kippah, you were wearing a yarmulke? Yeah.
Yehuda Sarna: I was wearing a kippah, was wearing my tzitzit. And for years I would tell this story and people would laugh. Right. I told it as kind of is a funny moment, and the lesson that I took from it is that even someone like me who had been engaged in interfaith and at that point had met many Muslims, how deeply set Arabphobia is, even for somebody who was engaged in interfaith work like me. And then Khalid came back from the other aisle. As soon as the fear, just as quickly as the fear had overtaken me, fear left me.
Now I’m living in the irony of having told that story so many times. Because what happened to Zvi Kogan? Zvi was literally abducted from a kosher supermarket.
Mijal: How well did you know Zvi Kogan?
Yehuda Sarna: So I met Zvi shortly after the Abrahamic Accords. He’s related through marriage to Rabbi Levi Dochman, who’s the head Chabad shaliach. And he and his brother came to help Levi as soon as the Abrahamic Accords were signed.
Noam: One second, before you answer, a shaliach is an emissary, it’s an emissary of the Chabad movement, and let me just give a little bit of history here, throughout when Hasidut was created by the Baal Shem Tov in the early 18th century, Chabad emerged out of, from the disciples of the Baal Shem Tov, and when Chabad came to America in the mid-20th century, specifically, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, known as the Rebbe in 1950 really created this thing called his father, the Friedrich Rebbe, had some emissaries, but his father, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson in 1950 really started this major process from the U.S. to make sure that Jews around the world had somebody to connect them, someone to help them do mitzvah, someone to help make the Jewish experience positive, help make sure that they love Judaism wherever they are, no matter who they were.
And then actually after the Rebbe’s passing in 1994, there’s been more emissaries since then than even existed during the Rebbe’s days. So what you’ll find is you’ll find shlichim, emissaries, who have a real mission in life, which is to bring Judaism and love of Judaism and the beauty of Judaism out to the world, wherever you are, literally wherever you are, whether it’s Alabama, New York, Thailand, India, Sydney, Melbourne, doesn’t matter. So that’s the context of who Rabbi Kogan was, and the mission that he was trying to create.
Sorry, that’s my interlude about the concept of emissaries. Back to you, Rabbi Sarna.
Yehuda Sarna: Yeah. So, well done. Well done. So I met Zvi shortly thereafter. And in the beginning, those, you know, 2020, 21, he was working very closely with Rabbi Dochman. And I really, got to know him.
Like my first, like heart-to-heart conversation happened when we were on a plane together, coming from New York to Abu Dhabi. We talked for hours. And I was so struck by his openness, sharing his life story. He grew up Haredi in Israel and journeyed, decided to do the army. I believe when he was in the army, he met a Chabad rabbi and became interested in Chabad Judaism, he grew out his beard as Chabad adherents do. And I was struck by his openness and how easy it was to connect. The images that have been circulating of him with this smile, his infectious smile, that was him always.
And I cannot even tell you how many people, whether they live in the UAE, whether they’re tourists who found their way to Zev and Rivky’s shabbat table, they’re a magnificent couple. I mean, it is a tragedy which is beyond words. And I remember once I came to NYU Abu Dhabi to teach and I landed late at night and And Zvi and Rivky had heard that I was coming in and they sent over food for me for dinner, just packaged and not expecting to hear any. mean, beyond, beyond gracious, hospitable, kind, open-hearted. It’s real tragedy.
Noam: So Rabbi, I’m going to be the skeptic in the room right now, okay? At the end of the day, isn’t there a tremendous amount of antisemitism in the Islamic world? Isn’t it really naive of you to think that you can go out there in a Muslim Arab country and have your kippah and sit out and be in the aisle looking for cream cheese to hope it has a hechsher? Like, Rabbi, you’re being so naive and maybe even cute that you think that there can be peace between the Muslims and the Jews when there’s a tremendous amount of hatred towards the Jewish people in the Muslim world. What would you respond to that?
Yehuda Sarna: You can be skeptical of anything. I mean, think about the project of building American Jewry in the United States of America. You think Christians have always been friendly to Jewish people? Right. You don’t think there’s a tremendous history of oppression and persecution of Jewish people by Christians of many different stripes?
And also, don’t you think that it was in part the result of a very brilliant and powerful optimism on the part of American Jewish leaders that said, hey, we are going to make space for ourselves here. We are going to figure this out.
You know, look, the way I see it, we all have mental maps of the world, okay? For Jewish people, there are places that we would consider to be green zones, places that we could go freely and we feel at home there. There are also red zones, places that we would not feel comfortable at all being there and certainly not identifying as Jewish people. And then there are the yellow zones, somewhere in between.
Now, this is true not just of countries, places in the nation. It’s also true of cultural spaces, right? And so, I believe that we need as Jewish people, we need to move as many red stones to yellow and as many yellow to green.
Now, this is not often, is not accomplished through hard power of military might. There’s a social and cultural process that we need to understand. That has been the core of my work.
Noam: Amazing. Amazing.
Mijal: It’s funny, I actually feel, Noam, your question speaks to me more in the American context than the UAE context. But in the UAE, there’s been a powerful response by the government and leaders after the murder of Rabbi Kogan really expressing how unacceptable it’s been bringing the perpetrators to justice, and just generally saying this is not who we are. I’m curious how much of that is the leadership, how much of that is the people? Because I think part of the concern that’s been sometimes in terms of peace efforts across the Middle East and Arab world is that you can have a treaty with Egypt, but you can have Egyptian streets that are still incredibly antisemitic.
Yehuda Sarna: Sure, sure.
Mijal: Same thing with Morocco or other countries. And there’s a certain fragility to that kind of piece when it’s mediated at the highest of levels. So I’m curious, Rabbi Sarna, what does it feel like from your perspective in the UAE? How much of this is this like a leadership thing? And how much of this is it like a window to a real sea change in terms of, you know, regular people having my pal Al right in the UAE and really being able to see us just differently.
Yehuda Sarna: Well, let’s talk politically for a second, OK? Politically, the peace with Egypt was a cold peace. It was a military-to-military, in a way, because it was so deeply unpopular among the people. There was a tradeoff that the Egyptian leadership issued, which is, we will go ahead and cooperate militarily with Israel. However, in our state media, we will make it clear how much we hate them. It’s almost like the antisemitism through state media got augmented as a result of the Camp David Accords.
Now, in the UAE, you have a very different process. Before the Abraham Accords—and this is not because the Abraham Accords was the desired result, Jewish people are not always the main actors in everything, right? The UAE went about a very deliberate process from the mid-2000s to really highlight the part of their culture that focused on what they would call tolerance, a Western context we would call pluralism, the idea that there is room under the Arab tent for many, many different kinds of people.
And this came through changes in curriculum. This came through massive building projects. This came through social media campaigns, media campaigns. This came through establishing a ministry of tolerance. This came through in 2019, the first time any Pope in history ever visited the Arabian Peninsula was to the UAE in 2019 to drive this home before the Abraham Accords. We are open. That was the message.
So the political arrangement with Israel, political normalization, and normalization of trade came on top of this, not on the top of pan-Arabism or Arab nationalism or an Islamism. And this agreement was just some kind of side deal that they had to cut for a certain interest. This was a manifestation, this was seen and interpreted by the people as a manifestation of UAE values.
Now, this has been complicated by October 7th and the Israeli response. Social media throughout the Arab world, not UAE specific, but throughout the Arab world, the images of, nonstop images of Palestinians suffering, especially women and children at the hands of the Israelis has unfortunately rolled back a lot of the trust and goodwill that had been established as a result of the Abraham Accords over those three years. It’s devastating. It really is devastating.
Noam: Is there anything that could have been done about that? Like I remember right after the week after the 7th of October, Micha Goodman said this line that stayed with me ever since, Israeli philosopher.
Mijal: Yep. Great line.
Yehuda Sarna: I know exactly what you’re talking about because I heard Micah and I thought that was so smart and also wrong. So wrong.
Noam: Rabbi Sarna, say what I was gonna say and then why he’s wrong.
Yehuda Sarna: Micah said something like that Israel needs to be feared in the East and loved by the West. And the very things that Israel will need to do in order to be feared in the East are the things that will make it lose the love of the West. Does that sound right?
Noam: Love of the West. Mijal, did you know that?
Mijal: Yeah, yeah, I’m also a nerd.
Noam: Three for three. Guys, we should all hang out with each other. But why is he wrong?
Yehuda Sarna: Okay, no, no, but let me tell you. He’s wrong, he’s wrong, he’s wrong. And I know that he has since kind of modified the way he said it, but here was, and I felt this as soon as I heard it, it was so smart. It was so smart, and you can be smart and wrong. The premise was that Israel will be feared because of its brutality and that it needs to be seen as brutal and cruel and a little meshugana, a little crazy, in order to reestablish deterrence. What I think Micah did not fully appreciate, and he’s a brilliant man, is that for many parts of the Arab world, people will fear something more than death and being brutalized. They will fear being shamed. And the Israeli deterrence came from the fact that Israelis are acted smarter than anybody else in the region and made other people look, other countries, other armies, other ministers just look stupid. That’s the core of Israeli deterrence. And yeah.
Mijal: I want to just clarify. You’re saying that what really gives you power of deterrence in the Middle East, which is not a friendly neighborhood, is not to appear brutal, but to appear smarter than your enemies in a way that humiliates them and shames them.
Yehuda Sarna: That’s exactly right.
Noam: Well, let me me read to you a quote from Nelson Mandela that I mean, I’m just I’m I’m really moved right now. He said there’s nobody more dangerous than one who has been humiliated, even when you humiliate him rightly.
Yehuda Sarna: Well, so you think about those main things. You think about Israel wiping out the Jordanian Air Force before they got off the ground, right? You think about— OK, so here is the key thing. I don’t believe Israel needed to be more brutal. I think Israel needed to be smart. And the reason why October 7th was so dangerous is because Israel looked so stupid. Okay, it was a massive, colossal intelligence failure. One of the most sophisticated political establishments, political leaders in the countries, in any country, frankly, duped by a second grade militia, no port, that had no airport, that had no this. I mean, in order for Israel to reestablish deterrence, it needed to do something smart. Unfortunately, it took about 10 months until the beeper operation. Well, let me say there were a few really smart things that Israel did. Whether Israel did it or not, I don’t know, but killing Haniyeh in that room in Tehran on the day of the New Yorker just at the hotel. How did they do that? And the Shaldaq attack in Syria, the which the beeper thing overtook, the beepers, and that is what is reestablishing Israeli deterrence. No one wants to be shamed in that culture, and Israel just made them look so…
Mijal: I want to think about this more. It’s interesting because in a different lecture, Micha Goodman speaks about the kind of cycle between Jews in Israel being afraid and Palestinians in Israel feeling humiliated and how that drives the whole conflict. I want to think about this more, but I actually do before we finish, I do want to ask some questions about the US interfaith scene.
Noam: Rabbi, I hope I was okay that I asked those questions.
Yehuda Sarna: Of course. I thought you had a hardball. Your only hardball was like, I’m skeptical. I mean, I’m built as an optimist, so I’m used to other people being more skeptical with it. And I’m very comfortable playing that role.
Mijal: Let me ask then a pessimist question. It’s interesting. So I have seen after October 7th, without naming names, like a lot of different efforts that had been going for years, completely implode and collapse. And a lot of progressive Jewish leaders who’ve said very openly, we had been there, we’d done the work, we knew each other, we broke bread together. You know what I mean? Like we did everything right, we marched together, and when we’re literally just asking them to let us mourn our dead, not even taking like a political stance, but just say terrorism is bad, you shouldn’t kidnap people. The failure, the utter failure of so many people, so many leaders to live up to this.
And again, I’m not asking for any Muslim leader to be pro-Israel or to like, you know, hold up the Israeli flag. I’m literally asking them just to, you know, the worst antisemitic attack against Jews after the Holocaust to support us mourning our dead and to say kidnap children should come back home. I am nervous about the future of, not nervous, but I don’t know yet what to think about the future of interfaith work in some parts of the American community.
Yehuda Sarna: You should be, you could be pessimistic. You could say I’m pessimistic about the future of interfaith work.
Mijal: I’m pessimistic because it seemed to me that it was contingent on Jews not being victims. It’s like this works. It works if you just come in and decide to speak about your privilege. But you know what I mean? The second the Jews are like, one second we’re bleeding here and there’s real bad people out there, then a lot of that collapsed.
Yehuda Sarna: It was one directional. So let me take your question and put it onto a national scale, because this was not a local issue. Every single interfaith entity that I was a part of has struggled. Many have gone on pause or have fallen apart. And it’s only now, really, with a year in change, that we can look back and try to make sense of it.
Let me tell you for me what some key things that I’ve learned. Number one is I start from the perspective of acceptance. Someone said something, didn’t say something. I accept it. I might be disappointed. I might be let down. I might be enraged. I might shrug my shoulders. But I need to start from the point of I accept it.
Then I need to be curious about it. Why is it, really why is it that this person did or did not do the thing that I’d hoped that they do, even though I accept the fact that they did or didn’t do that thing. But why is it?
And then a third component is, I curious enough that I can see the pain that they’re also experiencing?
Let me go back to the underlying premise of the interfaith movement from the past generation, which is that I hate you because I don’t know you. If I know you, I will like you and your group. October 7th changed that because for many people, it’s not just that they didn’t see an expression of sympathy, it’s that in the conversations of what do you really think, there was a, when those conversations would happen, there wasn’t, my God moment, the more I know you, actually, the less I want to have to do with you. I would prefer if our relationship remained on the surface. We have some very fundamental and frankly, scary disagreements that we’re not going to be able to get past. And so if you’re asking me on a national level, what’s needed is we need to find the new premise. for the next generation of interfaith movement, because the old one simply is, with October, has died on October 7th. It’s.
Mijal: But might be new premise and also new partners. I feel like at this point for me, it’s clear for me there’s some leaders that are just like not the right, if to be in relationship with you means that I have to, I’m gonna say it in my own words, not the other, you’re kinder and more generous and more optimistic than me. But if it means that I have to put up with a certain level of antisemitism, then for me that’s like a non-starter. And I would be, know, like that cannot be the work.
Yehuda Sarna: I hear you, and I start from a different point of departure. My point of departure is in a pluralistic society or in a diverse society, many different people living in the same territory, we have to find a way to live together. That’s in everyone’s self-interest. Then the question is, how do we go about building it? It’s not a question of whether or not to engage. The question is how. That’s my viewpoint. Because ultimately, that will make our group safer, every group safer. And so we don’t have a choice. There’s maybe 15, 16 million people, Jews, Jewish people in the world. There are a hundred times that number or more than a hundred times that.
Noam: 2 billion, right? 2 billion Muslims, right?
Yehuda Sarna: Okay, Muslim in the world. So we are fooling ourselves if we think we can just exist in the pocket of kind of the Christian world of the West and we’ll be fine, you know, for the next millennia. I believe we need to have some, we need to find ways of engagement. And every group will also have its own litmus test for entry, its own Shibboleth, right? And maybe they would say, we don’t accept that, you know, we won’t sit down with anybody who exhibits, expresses anti-Palestinian racism or Islamophobia according to XYZ person and then where have we come?
Let me lay out for you what I think is the building blocks, not the full premise, but the building blocks of a premise which can take us forward. What we need to do as a point departure and this is what I’ve seen, the most forward-looking groups that I’m a part of have started from the place of seeing each other’s pain. Start there. Start there. Can we just listen while we go around the table and people can express what has been painful for them? Because if I’m not prepared to see your pain, if you’re not prepared to see my pain, then you don’t even know who I am.
You don’t even know who I am. You don’t know what I’m going through. And so I could sit here, we could talk about something else. We could talk about theology. We could talk about American politics. We could talk about our congregations. We could talk about anything. But if you don’t see my pain, then we’re not really at the same table. And so it’s not performative, like what I described, like what was happening with the sages on the stage, religious leaders top of the hierarchies, negotiating declarations. No, it’s the opposite of performative.
But what’s different than the My Pal Al, you know, the social contact theory, is that social contact theory assumed that we would become friends. And social contact theory works only in the condition when we are not in fear. But when we are in fear and experiencing pain, then we need a different model. Can we start with seeing each other’s pain, even if no one else knows about that? Even if, then there’s no expectation that we are going to be able to ease each other’s pain. There’s no expectation that my pain is going to be considered greater than your pain. That I think is an important point, an important building block for whatever premise takes us forward. We know we need to get forward. We are living in the same country. We might pretend that we’re not because we can each self-segregate into our neighborhoods and into our work patterns and et cetera, and like pretend the other doesn’t exist. I don’t think that that is a viable pathway forward for the American Jewish community.
Noam: Well, there’s so much more to talk about Rabbi Sarna. I just want to say I learned a lot. I learned about red zones to yellow zones, yellow zones to green zones. I learned about my pal Al, social contact theory. We didn’t get into talking about your favorite Omer Adam song, DXB to TLV, which is my guess of what your favorite Omar Adam song is.
Yehuda Sarna: No, no, no, no, no, that song is too much. I am an Omar Adam fan, not,
Noam: Okay, I won’t tell Omar Adam you said that, but the last thing I’ll say is just on a very personal level, you have a tremendous amount of accolades. But I say this slightly as a joke, but also as a very real statement.
I saw you one Saturday night in Jerusalem as I was walking on my way to dinner and you were just a guy taking out the recycling for his family and just throwing it out and just being a normal guy just like the rest of us. No, I’m just serious. I think it’s important to know that.
Mijal: Actually going above and beyond how many people really recycle now. Yeah, come on. Come on here.
Noam: Okay, finally, good point, ut I’m just saying, know, people have their stages and people have their platforms and whatever, but like, I don’t know, I like bumping into you, throwing away the recycling. So may that happen many more times.
Yehuda Sarna: Amen.
Mijal: And I’ll also just say, we actually work together pretty much weekly at the Downtown minyan. So it’s funny, I don’t usually get to speak with you about like your interfaith work because we are engaged very much in building community for young Jews, which is a lot of fun and a big privilege. So this has been fun, know, just learning about a different facet of your leadership.
Yehuda Sarna: It’s been a real honor. I mean, love listening to the episodes of The Wandering Jews that have come out so far. I don’t know if I need to listen to this one, but certainly looking forward to ones in the future.
Mijal: Thank you so much.
Noam: Thanks for joining us, Rabbi. Take care.