Mijal: Hi everyone. So just a couple of weeks ago, I think what many of us were talking about was the presidential debate and Noam and I were messaging each other and saying, you know, we should really talk about partisanship and politics and this moment in America. And we had no idea that very soon after the debate and very soon after we recorded this podcast, there would be the horrible attempted assassination of former President Trump. think all of us, I I opened up my phone right after Shabbat, was in absolute, absolute shock. And just thinking right now that those conversations that Noam and I, the conversations that Noam and I had about the dangers of polarization, the dangers of partisanship, how much more relevant it is right now.
Now, we still don’t know all the facts as a nation. We’re still learning exactly what happened. But I think all of us can agree that this has been a very, very dark week for our people and that we are seeing anew the dangers of dehumanizing people who disagree with us politically.
I just want, before we jump into this episode, I wanna just share two quotes that stood out to me. One is by President Biden, who tweeted out the following after the attempted assassination of former President Trump. He tweeted out, I have been briefed on the shooting at Donald Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania. I’m grateful to hear that he’s safe and doing well. I’m praying for him and his family and for all those who were at the rally as we await further information. Jill and I are grateful to the Secret Service for getting him to safety. There is no place for this kind of violence in America. We must unite as one nation to condemn it.
I know that I was grateful to see Biden share this and to hear him insist that even as we might disagree, even as we might even fight each other’s parties at the ballot box, that political violence should have no place in what we consider to be ways to interact with each other.
I also want to part of a powerful letter by former first lady, Melania Trump. And I’ll read here just one short passage. She wrote the following. Let us not forget that differing opinions, policy, and political games are inferior to love. Political concepts are simple when compared to us human beings. Love, compassion, kindness, or empathy are necessities. And let us remember that when the time comes to look beyond the left and the right, beyond the red and the blue, we all come from families with the passion to fight for a better life together while we are here in this earthly realm. Let us reunite now.
Part of the thing that Noam and I speak about is how we can hold really strong political opinions. We can fight at the ballot box. We can organize. We can have a vision for America and we can claim that other Americans are actually threatening that vision. But we do so even as we have compassion for each other and even as we resist dehumanization. I hope we can all keep this in in the days and weeks ahead.
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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. We really don’t. But we try and we’re going to try to figure out some big items together.
Mijal: As we always say, we really love and enjoy hearing from you, so please email us at wonderingjews@jewishunpacked.com and call us at 833-WON-JEWS.
Noam: Okay, you ready, Mijal? Because we have a very specific question from a listener, Michael, Michael, I like this question. Which is harder, being a kid or being an adult?
Mijal: You think it’s a real question?
Noam: Yeah, which is harder?
Mijal: Like, I mean, like, like it’s not obvious. I think.
Noam: What’s the way to tell me that the obvious thing is what?
Mijal: For me, it’s like 100% harder being an adult. What about you? What about you, Noam?
Noam: Who’s it? George Bernard Shaw or something who said, like, youth is wasted on children something like that, on the young.
Mijal: on the young. Youth is wasted on the young.
Noam: Yeah, you yeah youth is wasted on the young so, you know, sometimes I think about that and
Mijal: How does that answer the question?
Noam: It’s just like maybe children don’t appreciate and we’re all children at some point and we all maybe have dispositions as we get older that want to recall our youthfulness and we should never get rid of our youthfulness. But it’s like when you’re a child, maybe children don’t even realize that they have this context, this sandbox that is so much fun to just be and, and, but maybe no one actually feels that maybe even as children, people don’t actually feel that freedom, that liberty, that, that lack of sense of like dealing with your taxes.
Mijal: Yeah, I don’t know. I feel like as a kid, I felt very like I felt the real difference. It was it was I enjoyed. You know what I’m saying? It was like fun. It was really fun.
Noam: When did you stop feeling like a kid?
Mijal: okay, you’re getting deep here right now. Probably in high school at some point. Yeah.
Noam: In high school. What made you stop feeling like a kid in high school?
Mijal: I think you begin to have a real sense that you’re shaping your future and that your choices matter and there are stakes in them. So that’s probably it for me. How about you?
Noam: Yeah. Yeah. I just think, just to think back about childhood, I remember the challenges, the anxieties that I felt were probably felt as real as my adult anxieties, whether that’s like socializing and who to socialize with or is that person going to pay attention to me or they’re not going to pay attention to me. And I think that those anxieties are just felt as adults also.
That’s all. So I’m sorry, Michael, that I didn’t answer your question. I never really answer these questions. I like to wonder aloud and explore them. But yeah, bigger people, bigger problems. That’s life.
Mijal: So, so now let’s talk about some big people and big problems.
Noam: Ooh.
Mijal: Okay. So we, we both live in America. We’re both citizens of this country. Noam, did you watch the debate?
Noam: I did, I watched the debate, I watched it by myself. My wife left the room, she said she couldn’t handle it, so it was just me.
Mijal: She couldn’t handle it. Did you watch the whole thing?
Noam: Well, actually, now that I think about it, I watched it with my son as well, and he’s 11 years old. So it’s lovely, it’s where he learned about the term pornography. He had no idea what pornography was.
Mijal: How do you – my gosh, that’s a bit awkward. You had to explain that during the debate.
Noam: It was a strange moment, did not think that the place I would be teaching my son about pornography was listening to two presidential candidates.
Mijal: Right. So this debate happened, between former president Trump and current president Biden. And let me ask you another question, Noam. How much did this debate dominate any of the conversations you were having afterwards with friends and family?
Noam: A lot. I mean, people on the right were sending me text messages of like, see, see, see, see, see. And then people, I think on the center left that I was in touch with were reaching out and just in conversation about like, this is rough. A little defensiveness at times maybe, a little defensiveness, but broadly speaking, just this is bad, this is bad. Tough moment. That was kind of the way my conversations went. What about you?
Mijal: Yeah, 100%. I’m spending some time right now in Jersey for the summer. And I would say that I’m spending a lot of time with a lot of people that would identify on the political right. And there was, this was the only topic of conversation, I would say, for most of the days following it.
Noam: What were they saying on the political right that you’re surrounded by? By the way, I live in the great state of Florida, so what do you think I’m surrounded by?
Mijal: I think a lot similar to what you were saying, kind of like, you know, we told you so, like, you know, to whoever they imagine their opponents are. Some discussion about what might be, feeling vindicated, things like that. But Noam, what I want to try to have is as follows. OK, and I need a little bit of help to have this conversation, to ask some questions.
I make a distinction usually between politics and partisanship. So let me give you an example what I mean by this. I give sermons in synagogue. And I always make it clear that I think it’s okay for me, maybe even good for me, to be political, but that it’s not okay for me or like I at least don’t want, that’s my line, to be partisan.
So what do I mean by this? To be political means that I’m going to talk about things that have to do with politics, with how a society should run, with what it means to be a citizen. So I could talk about what it means to think about, let’s say like, what it means to be an American and what it means to have people who come in. Or I can talk about the obligation that we have towards those who are more vulnerable. Those are for me political topics and they also reflect a deep sense that the Torah is a political document. You know, that it talks about these kinds of questions. It’s not only about quote unquote like God and spirituality. It is about what it means to create a society.
At the same time, to me, there’s a distinction between that and between being partisan. Partisan would mean that I would advocate for a particular candidate or a particular party or a particular policy. So I know that I’ve tried really hard, at least like in a synagogue context, to speak in a way that I would say like my deal is that people won’t actually know if I support a particular candidate or a particular policy, but that we can actually have conversations, right, with each other about really important political topics without assuming that there’s something rigid and hard about us having very specific commitments towards one place or another.
So I know to me that’s like a distinction that I’ve been having. And I want to hear your reaction to that distinction, but also Noam, I guess part of the question that I’ve been thinking about is I feel like this debate, like, you know, what we just described is a little bit of like a shallow, not shallow, but like a shallow description of like initial reactions that people had.
But I also feel like the debate has felt like a really important thing because it’s bringing up huge questions for people. I don’t mean questions about a particular candidate. I think it’s questions also about what it means to be a citizen and what it means to do politics. And I want to see if I want to see if you can help me figure out if we can have this conversation without being partisan. Do you get what I’m saying with that?
Noam: I do, but let’s define partisan because that’s a part…
Mijal: I think I thought I just did.
Noam: Well, okay, partisan is to be part of a team, right? And so I like your distinction a lot. I think it’s really hard. What you’re talking about is really hard. I think, I mean, I don’t know if you disagree, but I think it’s really hard to speak about politics without being partisan. Politics is essentially the intermingling or combining different people together in order to form a society. That’s politics and so much of the Torah is very much so that. Perhaps in order to achieve a service of God and dignity of oneself and the community, but that’s what politics is meant to be. And so the Torah is going to be speaking to that and so therefore spiritual leaders are going to be speaking about that.
Mijal: Yeah, just to clarify, I don’t want to pretend like I’m never partisan. I think there’s a space for partisanship. For me, it’s important to know there’s some places where I don’t think you should be a partisan.
Noam: What? What? What? What?
Mijal: But well, the example that I gave was for me when I speak from the pulpit.
Noam: But are there topics? Because there are topics you want to be partisan about, right? Or no? Yeah, from the pulpit.
Mijal: From the pulpit? I do know one of the parties that are from the pulpit, personally.
Noam: Well, sorry. I’ll tell you what I mean then. I mean, partisan, like, I don’t know, Israel.
Mijal: I think you can speak about Israel without being partisan, without being political. In fact, I was actually, I’ll show off for a second if it’s okay, a couple of months ago.
Noam: Please, if you can’t show off in front of me, you can’t show off in front of anyone.
Mijal: Okay. Just you. A couple of months ago, or maybe some weeks ago, I remember I had a conversation after shul, with somebody from our community and they asked me some questions and I revealed some of my own positions, like, you know what I mean in terms of like candidates or things like that. And they were totally, they were like, what? I would never have guessed any of that from the way you speak. And I’m like, there’s no contradiction. You know, I can speak in a way that is not trying to show you, you know, and I actually think communities are stronger if we assume that people might have different parties and positions and they can still be together. Yeah.
There’s always going to be like edge cases. We can always find cases that are going to complicate things. Like let’s say, what if you have like a candidate that’s like an antisemite? Can you speak about them. So we’re going to find edge cases and we are going to kind of like, I am not, I’m willing to admit, no, but actually I want to agree with the opposite, Noam. I think that right now in America, we are in a crisis of too much partisanship. You know what I mean? The problem is not that we’re not partisan enough. The problem is that we are too partisan. Like that’s something that I feel, I don’t know how you feel about this. I feel–
Noam: I’m nauseated by it. That’s how I feel.
Mijal: What are you nauseated about?
Noam: I think that, and I don’t know if we’re gonna say similar or different things, I have no idea what you’re gonna say. What drives me nuts is the inability to have conversation across differences because of the deep, deep polarization and partisanship that exists, because it feels at times like if I were to listen to someone else, and by the way, sorry for getting passionate.
There’s so much BS out there of people saying like, yeah, let’s talk across differences. We as adults, speaking about children, by the way, children versus adults, we stink. We stink at having conversations across political differences. We like talking about our ability to do it. But my Lord, in the context I’m in, and I’ll show off now, I’m in some fancy fellowships, we stink at it.
Mijal: Do you have any interlocutors that are politically in a very different place than you that you can have good conversations with?
Noam: I do on an individual level. I think the problem becomes at the group level.
Mijal: What do you mean by that?
Noam: I think people are so often so wed to their views and it becomes part of our identities so that we become defensive in a group setting where we feel like there’s like this spotlight effect on us and we start thinking that, wait, if I change my mind, what does this mean? And it’s very hard. It’s very hard. Once we’re adults, once we’re fixed, to have a fixed mindset, we’ve made a decision about something, we maybe even raise our children in a certain way based on something, it becomes very difficult to then change our opinions.
I want to strengthen this point with a statistic that I read from Scott Galloway, the business guru. He pointed out that we’ve reached a point where half of Democrats and a third of Republicans aren’t comfortable with their children marrying someone of the opposite party. And in 1960, those numbers were around 5% for both. So yeah, people don’t want to offer their opinions because it actually has an impact on whether or not their children are marriage worthy or not. Like that’s crazy.
Mijal: Yeah, it’s funny. I recall maybe it was like seven, eight years ago. I just remember this conversation with a friend of mine that I went to camp with. And we were talking about dating. And I remember then that I asked her, so give me some of your criteria. And I think the first or the second one was that they had to be the same political party. And I remember then feeling shocked because I never heard that before and being completely like, like, wow, I thought she was crazy.
I felt back then it was crazy. But I think that today I’m saying like descriptively, I’m not saying it’s what I would advocate for, but I am saying I understand today much more why it would be that people will feel this way. And I’ll say, by the way, I don’t think it’s wrong at all to look at our political system and our parties and say, I feel like one of them is really helping our country and one of them is like a threat to the republic.
And I’ll tell you what drives me crazy. What drives me insane, and I think it’s why the debate just felt so, the aftermath like, felt so indicative of things is like… we have this human nature. You spoke before about partisanship as being tied to like my team or your team. So what scares me when I think so, I think partisanship can be healthy to fight, for your political party and for your beliefs. Where I think it can go off the rails is number one, what you said, like you begin to see your fellow citizen as an enemy, even when they’re not. And the other thing that’s very hard for me is when you, you refuse to contend with facts or values that don’t work for your team.
That’s what I think to me was a lot of the quote unquote discourse about the debate afterwards was from the kind of like, was either Republicans accusing Democrats of refusing to see reality, or it was Democrats themselves, some of them, kind of like looking inwardly at saying like, guys, what happened here? Why is it that we have not allowed ourselves to see certain things, right, that are reality or that are important for us to contend with? Have we been blinded by partisanship.
And I think a lot of people kind of like, to me, it’s a little bit of like an additional signal that we need a wake-up call, that we cannot allow our sense of reality or truth or what is right or wrong to be completely subservient to the expedient needs of our political party. That’s what makes me nervous about partisanship.
Noam: I need an example.
Mijal: I’m going to try my best, Noam, to give you an example about a hard political topic without giving you a sense of where I stand in it. Okay. I’m going to try.
Noam: You’re my favorite co-host ever. And I was about to say to you, Mijal, can you please give an example, can we watch, live, an example of you teaching about politics without being partisan?
Mijal: Yeah, but I actually wanted to give a previous example about the dangers of partisanship with a political example. Can I do that? Okay. So the abortion debate. Politically, it’s tearing different parts of this country apart. All right. I think the place where I might point and say, problem with partisanship is when number one, if we have an inability to articulate the reason why someone might disagree with our position.
Okay. That’s number one, because I actually think that, I’m going to, I’m going to give like shallow binaries, pro-choice and pro-life. Okay. Let’s take a very shallow cheap binary. It’s much more complex, of course, but I think, we should be able to articulate decent positions as to why somebody might identify broadly as one of this. So that, that to me is like an issue with partisanship.
The other issue might be that both sides have both what’s it called, like moderate positions and extreme positions. So you can be a pro-lifer with like a moderate position and then you can be a pro-lifer that has, let’s give an example of an extreme position, an extreme position that even with rape and incest, you cannot have an abortion. Okay, you can be somebody who’s pro-choice that can have like a moderate position and you can also have an extreme position that says even, you know, up to birth, even with medical advice of like a mental health professional, you can have an abortion. Okay? So you can take extreme and moderate positions in both. And the reason I’m saying this is that sometimes people will pretend like the extreme positions don’t live in their political
Noam: Camp. Yeah. Yeah.
Mijal: camp as a way to argue. And I’m like, that’s not that, that to me is part of what I’m saying. When you take facts and reality and you make them subservient to your team winning. Was that helpful at all?
Noam: It is helpful. Yeah. Yeah.
Mijal: By the way, can I say something from a Jewish perspective? I have taught about abortion and the way that I teach about abortion is as follows. I start off by saying in America, we speak about abortion through the categories of pro-choice and pro-life. And these are American categories and we are going to explore Jewish sources. And from the beginning, we are going to admit the fact that if we explore our sources in a way that is trying to go deep, then they are not likely to fit in perfectly in any modern category. They’re gonna demand that you think about it differently.
Noam: If we put religion into the categories of political constructs, which is what people want to do, then we expect religion to be malleable and to fit into the political construct that we see the world through. But that is, I think, an idolatrous approach to religion. The utilizing religion to fit into your political perspective is, I think it’s literally idolatry. It’s the utilization of religion for personal means.
Mijal: Interesting. Give me an example.
Noam: Well, if you were to say, with abortion, it’s amazing all the time that religion says the exact same thing as the Democratic party or the Republican party. Isn’t that amazing how somehow religion does that?
And I think what people struggle with is cognitive dissonance. What I struggle with is cognitive dissonance. If I have a religious worldview, how do I map my religious worldview onto the politics that I support when it doesn’t support everything necessarily? And so people don’t want to deal with that tension.
Mijal: Mm. Wait, can we stay with that, Noam. Wait, but let’s stay with that for a second. So let’s say you support Z politics and then–
Noam: And there’s no way that God is a Republican or that God is a Democrat. I just don’t believe it.
Mijal: Okay. Okay. So the options there are either you pretend like God is a Republican or a Democrat or what are the other options?
Noam: The other option is, I don’t know, this is rough, but like, is to basically, just like there’s religion and science, and you say there’s like multiple magisteria, I think that’s like a worldview, like isn’t that like a religious concept, like twin magisteria, meaning there’s religion and there’s science, and never shall the two collide, and they live in two separate realms, and science, let’s say, will answer the what questions and religion will answer the why questions and the problem is when you try to marry them and say, no, no, they’re saying the same thing or like, look, it’s an integrationist perspective, let’s say.
But with politics, can you do that? That’s the thing that I struggle with.
Mijal: I don’t think I understand that, but can you say that again?
Noam: So like with me, okay. How do I deal with the collision of religion and politics? I probably say the following. I want to serve one thing and one thing only, and that’s God. Right? I only serve God. I don’t serve the Democratic party. I don’t serve the Republican party.
And if the Democratic Party or the Republican Party says something that is at odds with my conception of religion, then I don’t want to say to myself that, that’s what my religion is saying. I probably say, my religion is saying something else or my understanding of religion is saying something else. And politically, I will either support or not support this thing, but not suggest that my religion is saying that I should or shouldn’t.
Mijal: So are you, are you an independent?
Noam: Am I an independent? I’m independently minded. like you know what I am. I’m Chris Rock. That’s what I am politically. I’m Chris Rock.
Mijal: I have no idea what that means. I do not understand what that means.
Noam: So Chris Rock said, if you decide the issue Before you see it because you’re a Democrat or you’re a Republican then you’re an idiot. You have to decide the issue as you see it. That was not a good imitation of Chris Rock. I bet you a lot of Americans are like me. They’re like, how do I decide which president? Well, on these 30 issues, I see it this way. On these 30 issues, I see it that way. And now I’m forced into this binary. It’s like this either-or. Like, I’m not an either-or person, Mijal. I’m not.
Mijal: Yeah. Yeah. I think part of what to me is important is, and I feel like I don’t have the best language here, but I think part of what bothers me is not being honest. Instead of saying like that other team is evil and we are completely right. You can say like, you know, that other position is like really dangerous. And my position is not that great, by the way, I have XYZ problems, but it’s still better than the other one. So like, like to me, there’s something there that’s like lacking in our, in our, in our political discourse, which is like, let’s be honest, let’s not pretend like we are perfect. And the other side is like evil.
Noam: Right, exactly. Yes. That would be amazing. I love that. Perfect.
Mijal: It’s lack of honesty. That to me is like–
Noam: But it’s lack of honesty in order to win.
Mijal: Yeah, by the way, I think that aspirationally, being a religious person can serve as a moderating force on the toxic partisanship that we see right now all around us. Now, I’m not saying this happens everywhere. Sometimes religiosity can take your partisanship and can, you know what I mean, make it even worse.
Noam: Could turn into a caricature, they could exaggerate it.
Mijal: But in many ways, yeah, but using your language before about who do I serve right now, if we serve God, and I would add here part of what serving God is commitment to truth and to seeing reality in front of us. If we serve God and we have principles and values and relationships as part of that service, then when our team does something that isn’t great, our religiosity will help moderate us.
And it would help make sure that we don’t become like so, that we don’t, we’re not becoming like blind to our own flaws or just intoxicated with our own sense of self-righteousness. That to me is like the ideal of what it means to be a religious person with like, at a time of rising partisanship. Part of what it means.
Noam: Right. I agree with that. And I think that just thinking about Jewish wisdom at this time, I’m reminded of another point in Jewish history in which there were two parties, right? Right now we have the Democratic Party, the Republican Party. In Judaism, there were two parties that went at each other. And it’s the model for how we deal with civil discourse and debate, which is
Mijal: Are you gonna say Hillel and Shammai?
Noam: I’m going to say the House of Hillel and the House of Shammai.
Mijal: Who was the house of Hillel and Shammai?
Noam: So the House of Hillel and the House of Shammai were from a couple thousand years ago, and they were two different ways of formulating Jewish law. And they were the two biggest academies, and sometimes they conflicted with each other.
Hillel and Shammai didn’t disagree on too much. But the House of Hillel and the House of Shammai disagreed on a lot. But when I think about the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, when I think about that stat that I read earlier on a third or 50% unwilling to marry each other, I want to read to you this one line from the Mishnah in Yevamot, the fourth Mishnah of the first chapter. And this is what it says.
This is amazing. Prohibit a specific law. I won’t get into it about what’s called rival wives, so the brothers and Beit Shammai permit them. And although these disqualify these women and those deem them fit, listen to this. The house of Shammai did not refrain from marrying from the house of Hillel, nor did the house of Hillel refrain from marrying from the house of Shammai. That’s amazing. It’s very simple.
And this is 2000 years ago, they had the ability to look past their very strong religious perspectives and say, we can marry each other. It’s OK. And I guess the question, Mijal, I’m pushing to you is I’m pushing on you right now is why? What is it about the House of Hillel and the House of Shammai that they were willing to look past their very strong differences? They weren’t minor. They were even fundamental. Why could they look past each other’s differences to marry each other and Republicans and Democrats right now are struggling with that. What is the difference?
Mijal: So two things. First of all, I think we should do an episode on pluralism and Hillel and Shammai because they had to use really complicated mechanisms to marry each other.
Noam: I know. Correct.
Mijal: So I think that reveals the challenges and the opportunities. But when I’ve taught this, what I say, the most important thing is that they wanted to marry each other.
Noam: That’s it. That’s excellent. It’s spot on. But why? But why? Why did they want to and
Mijal: if you wanna marry each other. Because if you wanna continue having a shared sense of we, you will make it work.
Noam: That’s it. Nailed it. That’s what it is. And if the United States of America and if France, and if any other fractured society, if you want to have a future sense of we, then you figure it out.
Mijal: The UK just had elections. Israel.
Mijal: Yeah, although what it means to figure it out, that’s a really big question.
Noam: Fine, but you but but let’s all commit to figuring it out. How about that?
Mijal: Yeah, I think I agree with that. I think it’s a sacred task to increase our sense of we-ness with each other. Noam, thanks for having this.Noam: Yeah, our listeners will tell us if we are being partisan.
Mijal: There’s nothing wrong with being partisan.
Noam: That’s true. That’s fair. Fair enough. Agreed. All right, Mijal, see you next week. Bye bye.
Mijal: We’re just like trying, you know, I think there’s healthy partisanship and you know, the one that goes to the extreme. But yeah, yeah. Okay. Thanks, Noam.